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No one knows the exact relationship of the human imagination to the physical universe. In science, the nearest thing to exactness on this problem is the complementarity principle of Neils Bohr's quantum physics. In the 1930s Bohr took the empirical findings of quantum experiments to mean that no experiment happens independently of the observer or the observing system. The impossible situation, for example, of light behaving simultaneously as a wave and a particle is due at least in part to the choices of the observer of the light. In other words, an experiment consists of the object of the experiment, the equipment of the experiment, and the observer of the experiment, and all three together act indivisibly. The act of watching an experiment changes its outcome.* Not being a physicist or even an astronomer by profession, I do not pretend to understand what this means in a technical sense. I do understand that it is a spooky idea, however. If it's true, it suggests that every action, every thought, every attitude influences the events and shape of the universe. In the plainest moral terms, it means that every human mind is responsible for an element of the goings-on in reality. Then the question becomes: How much responsibility does each of us bear for the condition of the universe at any particular moment? This is difficult because no one knows exactly what the universe is or does or means. Some philosophies argue, for example, that no one knows for a certainty that the physical universe exists at all. For Hindus the whole material world is maya, an illusion. This idea squares fairly precisely with the idea that E = mc2, which describes physical matter as merely a configuration of energy. Of course, Hindus do not mean that at all. They mean that the material world is of no more significance than a few stray marks on a piece of paper. All the rest of reality is beyond those marks. Einstein, so far as I can tell, never meant that. Somehow though there is the sense that, however illusory the physical universe is, either in a scientific or a religious sense, it is nonetheless real to us. The pain that comes to us from a bee sting or a broken leg or an emotional separation or the death of a loved one is real pain. The pleasures of sex or supper or laughter or love are as real as anything. And it seems clear that some of the pain and pleasure comes to us from outside ourselves, and some of it comes from inside ourselves. Each human being is a living quantum experiment: the object of the experiment, the observer of the experiment, and the equipment of the experiment simultaneously. If this is true then changing your view of yourself, as object, must mean changing the various outcomes of your experiment, or experience, as the case may be. You might for example stop imagining yourself as a material entity and begin imagining yourself as a spiritual entity. With this perspective, you might cease to think of your body as "containing" your spirit or soul or consciousness, and begin to think of your soul as encompassing your physical body; your soul being prior to your body, it would naturally give rise to or contain your body, rather than the other way around. This observational shift would change the experiment from Einstein's proposition that E = mc2, all matter being a reservoir of stupendous energy, to the proposition that your body is an illusion, all energy or (to change terms as well as perspective) soul being a stupendous reservoir of matter. They are the same experiment, but they describe different kinds of reality. Believing your soul to be real, and your body illusory, you would have much less care for your supper than you would believing your body real and your soul illusory. Reality in this sense inheres in an act of creation. If you can successfully and authentically change your perspective on reality, and if you indeed complementarily change the outcome of events, and if there is indeed some sort of reality outside our own bodies and minds, then the three propositions together strongly suggest that a human being is at least partially the maker of reality. |
Algol by Dana Wilde |
I say "partially" because the reality outside our own bodies seems also to have been generated. But not, obviously, by human beings. The anthropic principle of physics posits that the universe is the way it is because we are here to see it, implying that all the numbers and "laws" of physics are here by design, but not human design. It is difficult to see, given our understanding of time and our place in it, how a human mind could have generated the Big Bang. If the universe did originate some 10 to 20 billion Earth-years ago in an ineffably enormous explosion, a human mind did not engender that explosion because there was nowhere for a human mind to stand prior to or apart from the explosion. Human beings could not observe the creation of the universe. The human mind is not the maker, let's say, but a maker, one creative power among many: among whatever intelligences encode genetic material in DNA, or spin up stars in nebulae of gas and dust, or cumulate galaxies from ripples in the cosmic radiation. The entire universe, including its genesis, begins to look like a colossal act of imagination, the cosmic counterpart of the human imagination. If the imagination of the universe is capable of engendering itself, then is the human imagination, equally, capable of self-creation? Does the human imagination, as part of the living quantum experiment of object, observer, and equipment, shape its own life? It seems so. We speak in literary studies, for example, of autobiographers who "make" their lives by writing them down in journals, poems, memoirs, fictions. Wallace Stevens and Annie Dillard come to mind as examples of powerfully imaginative people whose view of their own experience uniquely shaped their lives, Stevens as a poet among insurance men, and Dillard as a mystic among naturalists. They've both constructed bodies of writing which convey a sense of the reality of their own lives, generated by their views of the world. Their own lives are altered, spun up from the dust of the physical, social and intellectual worlds by their imaginations. |
Newly formed stars in the Carina Nebula/NASA |
Of course, their stories and poems, though real enough, are not their lives. Different webs of words do not, strictly speaking, create a reality we can grasp because words, powerful as they can sometimes be, still only approximate reality, whatever reality they take for point of reference. Words are like the mc2 in E = mc2, or like the physical body in the idea of maya. They refer to some reality, or, to say it more accurately, a writer has some |
reality in mind when writing. It cumulates partly from the concrete reality we're all mutually familiar with, and partly from that perspective of the writer which has changed the outcome of what might have been otherwise. The words are the writer's attempt to convey some sense - even (as a last resort) some vague hint - of the life, or experience, or reality, he or she has generated. Stevens says: It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade. These are the words of it, but what is the reality of it? The human mind appears to seize on certain realities and generate real things from them. What it generates, exactly, is a matter of some concern. * * * |
* Bohr warns, however, that an interpretation framed in language as simple as I've used here is not to be applied too literally. He says, for example: "the use of phrases like 'disturbance of phenomena by observation' or 'creation of physical attributes of objects by measurements' is hardly compatible with common language and definition." In other words, saying "the act of watching an experiment changes its outcome" should not imply that the object of an experiment is physically changed, but that the observer is a participant in the whole process, and therefore inevitably involved in the outcome, particularly regarding the description of the outcome. Bohr emphasizes the word "wholeness" in his essay. |