ABSTRACT:

Raman raises the basic issue that concerns us all, the nature of reality. It hardly makes a difference what his starting point is; it is likely to lead us on a merry and fruitful dialogue. He partitions reality into three levels. Now philosophers these days have to earn their place by criticizing the latest philosophic offering as being too logocentric, and not wishing to buck that trend, I would wonder if Raman's, possibly arbitrary tripartition may not fall into that Platonic-Laplacian tendency. While there may be some interaction between these levels to satisfy his static closed-system style equation relating them, there is little to indicate the nature of this interaction. If we view any partition of reality into domains that possess some aspects of autonomy and individual nature, we must also recognize their interactive and dynamic aspect. Systems theory suggests that interactive domains share information, and thus their own grasp of reality. They must constitute an evolutionary mutually interdependent system, a creative, open system. Quantum probabilities and mental chaos intrude upon each other and ordinary reality. When we admit a non-logocentric nature to this reality, we also recognize that our views of reality are interactive not only with external reality, but also our motives for trying to understand reality. Reality evolves as does our knowledge, and hermenteutically/rhetorically, knowledge and 'reality' co-creates themselves in unity, in a shared attractor. Such discourse does not guarantee avoiding some of the pitfalls of inquiry that is driven by the desire to predict and control a logocentric world, but it does facilitate our ability to generate a just world. (Biggest debts to Poster and Crusius.)



<1>
The problem with being caught in an interdisciplinary dialogue is inadequate knowledge in many of the required domains of discourse. I am out of my element in quantum physics, consciousness, and perhaps even chaos theory. However, these inadequacies do not keep me from having some opinions, no matter how poorly informed.

I must also preface with a reminder concerning my admiration for Raman's writings; when I may differ with him, it is done so respectfully.

<2>
Let me start with some minor differences, mainly in point of view, stemming from my own approach to science and reality.

<3>
With respect to his first point that the phenomena of classical physics are precisely predictable, I personally prefer not to focus on predictability as much as satisfying our curiosity about the nature of reality. Thus I would simply have said that these phenomena obeyed precise mathematical relationships or properties. This seems like such a trivial nit-pick, but it has some more profound implications beyond the fact that we live in a mathematical universe, that god is a mathematician. The more profound aspect is that it relates to our concepts of reality and the motivations for trying to understand reality. Horkheimer and Adorno, in their classic essay, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972), make a point about a similarity in the motivations of both the traditions of myth and the enlightenment. Usually these are contrasted as different rather than similar, as a distinction between mystical versus rational/scientific explanations of reality, but Horkheimer and Adorno indite both domains as being driven by fear and the need to dominate and control nature. One could do a Jungian analysis of the archetypal driving of such fear. Poster (Critical Theory and Poststructuralism, 1989), recapitulates Horkheimer and Adorno by noting, 'In the dark days of the 1940s the forces of science and reason appeared to promote, not to dissipate, domination.' (pp 21-22). Jaspers, as the leading German existentialist, relieved of his duties by the Nazi regime during WWII, would well appreciated this claim. I have previously commented that existential joy and angst interact to produce a creative approach to understanding and creating reality. I am just noting that a concern with prediction may tend to tip the scale of our investigations to overvaluing the angst/control parameter in our equations of emancipation.

<4>
The (his) second issue I might discuss deals with quantum events as probabilistic or deterministic, and Raman's observation that, 'The probabilistic evolutions are INTRINSIC to quantum systems.' This issue came up recently on a listserver (Chaopsyc) on which I am fairly active, and recognizing that I was no physicist, I contacted David Peat, for I know him to have views on this and on the incomplete state of opinion and knowledge with this issue among quantum physicists. His reply is more instructive than anything I could say, though his ideas resonated with my own less explicit notions on the matter. So here is his reply:

<5>
Fri, 24 Oct 1997 14:09:29

'Fred,

'Nice to hear from you. All of Italy seems to be collapsing around us, yet we haven't felt a thing!! . . .

'On to quantum theory. Yes, I think I can answer this one because of Bohm's hidden variable, causal or ontological version of quantum theory. In Bohm's theory the electron's motion is causal - i.e. totally deterministic at every moment - and determined by his 'quantum potential' which carries information about the electron's environment. This potential is non-local - in that it's effect does not depend upon the size of the potential but only on its form. It's very sensitive so that any change in quantum apparatus disrupts the potential in an 'unpredictable' way - unpredictable in the sense of chaos theory, i.e., deterministic but too complicated to calculate.

<6>
'So far so good. Now the question arises as to what happens if you make two quantum measurements very close together. Conventional quantum theory dictates that the two results are absolutely uncorrelated. No correlation exists between them. They are related by pure, absolute chance. Bohm's theory - and here there are a number of versions - predicts that following one measurement the quantum potential will readjust. (In some versions of his theory Bohm postulates a sub-quantum medium, a sort of ether. Events can propagate fast, even faster than the speed of light, but not instantaneously). So what this amounts to is that if the measurements were made fast enough then there would be a slight correlation between two adjacent measurements. They would not be absolutely probabilistic.

<7>
'Now so far, Bohm's is only a postulate, which many physicists don't buy. The point of relevance to your question is that some experimentalists have proposed putting Bohm's version to the test and seeing if indeed two measurements, taken very fast, will show some correlation, or are absolutely uncorrelated. No one has done the experiment because order of magnitude calculations show that, at the presnt level of experimental possibilities, the effects would be simply too fast to measure. No one is able to conduct a measurement fast enough that Bohm's predicted effects would be seen. For all practical reasons Bohm and conventional quantum theory must give the same answer.

<8>
'So this means, as regards your question, that all experiments, so far, indicate that repeated quantum measurements are totally probabilistic in nature. Other events, such as the decay of a nucleus, etc. also appear as totally chance processes and nothing anyone can do can change the probability of such an event taking place.

<9>
'I know that Eccles was always on about chance quantum events in the brain and the possibility that they could be changed by consciousness. I've always felt that if any level is to work then it must be that of non-locality. I.e., that consciousness has a global quality and must have something to do with the global nature of quantum processes.

'Hope this is of some help,

'David'

<10>
My point here is that we cannot be certain that subatomic processes are necessarily probabilistic. We can also see that there is a sense of importance about this issue, as the finite limits of our abilities to measure nature are at the center of our probabilistic features surrounding sensitivity to initial conditions when you have deterministic equations In dynamics.

<11>
Point 3. This is curious. Raman's statement is a bit brief to follow this logic, and it might be instructive to have him inform us further on this issue. The macroscopic- microscopic distinction he has raised, a familiar one of the levels of scale of observation of natural phenomena, and the relationship between them is clear, but here we have levels of reality, not just levels of observation or scale. I presume levels of reality relate to extrapolation from the scales of observation to a more fundamental nature of reality at these different levels of observation, and that different laws apply at different levels. Certainly each level of observation we enter has its own empirical mathematical relationships, and its own theories, and just as clearly, none of these levels is independent of each other. There is as much interaction between levels (and across fairly distant ones, such as the influences between mind and the neuroimmune system and even the subatomic process within that system). So we immediately establish that these levels are not independent, and the properties within each much reflect the properties within all.

<12>
But the most difficult part of the logic possibly implied here, is that the intrinsic probabilistic nature at the quantum level separates these great two levels of reality. Somehow this gives the flavor of asserting the consequent. If quantum, then probabilistic; probabilistic therefore quantum level of reality. I would have to elaborate more, but this gives the direction of my query. If the quantum level is a different reality, does its difference depend only on its being probabilistic? That is, if nature has more uniqueness at each level of reality, it seems to me, as a non-physicist, that their differences would stand on more than simply their probabilistic features.

These are minor points; his theme is well-established independent of my inquiries. The next issue is more in my area of familiarity, chaos.

<13>
In point 4, he defines chaos not by its main characteristics, but by one of its well-known and highly overrated properties, sensitivity to initial conditions, which I mentioned above. Chaos is defined by certain statistical properties of an observed empirical phenomena (by techniques that are inexact, somewhat subjective, and still embryonic in their development as research tools), or by certain properties of the model (equations) used to represent the process presumed to generate the data. The nature of these chaotic attractors is caused by a combination of both forces toward and away from the attractor along each of the dimensions (along each variable of the process) of its state space. If some of the equations are non-linear, then you may get chaotic attractors and bifurcations; without nonlinearity you do not get either. The properties these attractors display are invariant, that is all possible trajectories are obeying the same set of forces, the vector field. Thus all trajectories look pretty much alike within the attractor. Because of that, I (and a few others, such as Abarbanel) have used the term insensitivty to initial conditions.

<14>
Now one of the invariant properties is the divergence of nearby trajectories in the near term future (which is what the phrase 'sensitivity to initial conditions' refers). We could just as well note the convergence of trajectories not starting from neighboring initial points. And we could note that any trajectory, and all trajectories, will eventuallly pierce any arbitrarily small volume within the attractor an infinite number of times (if run for an infinite length of time). Thus the highly touted sensitivity to initial conditions is very limited and only of concern when interested in very precisely timed predictions (back to our old friend, predictability). Conditional probability statements highlight limits to the trajectory; the trajectory stays in the attractor, stays in a small region of the potential state space. You have to add noise, fractal boundaries, change or noise in a control parameter, or chance events, to get phenomena of truly unpredictable results. Raman's example of the appearance of a cosmic particle into a system is such an example, not an example of dynamical behavior. The invariant properties and the smoothness of the vectorfield of forces in the state space are the major features of interest, including characterizing the rates of divergence and convergence throughout the attractor. The criteria for saying when you do and don't have a chaotic attractor, or transitory chaos, are in great agreement, and methods of definition and measurement are well acknowledged as likely to occupy our attention for some time.

<15>
Moving on to his fifth point, hypercomplexity, this seems ok, though perhaps somewhat arbitrary to add a third level of reality, and thus tripartitioning reality into quantum, ordinary physics and biology, and mental levels. Ok, we can buy into that even if we could imagine partitioning differently. That's his prerogative, and not too an unusual one. But the next claim is that chaos is more evident at this level because of chance. I have already remarked to the effect that chaos does not depend on chance. Deterministic equations that produce chaos theoretically without the inclusion of a noise factor are one of the hallmarks of dynamical systems exhibiting chaos. Definitions of chaos are independent of the notion of chance and probability. So we can only talk of the complexity of different levels in terms of the dimensionality of the phenomena and the attractors, the number of the variables interacting in a deterministic way, and the complexity of the patterns over time that they exhibit. Which brings us to his final point, the absence of time in point six; time being the penultimate concern of dynamical representation of the function of systems.

<16>
And so we come to the final point six. What I would do here is a process I call unfolding the triangle. Gardner Murphy has a triangular dynamical interplay between three areas of reality in creativity, the individual, the discipline, and society. Carlos Torre similarly has a triangular dynamical interplay in academic learning and creativity. I have suggested that each of their three interacting arenas of reality could be considered dimensions of a state space, with the resulting attractors therein representing reality. (Actually this would be much higher dimensional than three, with many differential equations, with a matrix representation partitioned into the three domains of the variables, the three domains of the different levels of reality in Raman's case.) Saying this in vector calculus or as a need for an autonomous set of differential equations is probably a bit obscure, so let me rephrase this. What we need are equations that tell how things change over time and how things interact over time. We need to know the rules that create chaotic or any trajectories.

<17>
While Raman talks about the evolution of his system, his equation is not only static rather than dynamic, but the terms are not adequately defined. In all fairness, I suspect that his work was seriously shortened, and may have been too complex for a target article in the forum. While I have been rather critical of the sophistication of the presentation, it raises interesting issues that Dialogue could help evolve to a more meaningful explication of a system relating various aspects or levels of reality. I look forward to such dialogue.

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Fred Abraham, 24 and 31 December 1997

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[Fred Abraham, Silliman University, Philippines,
and the Blueberry Brain Institute, USA
email:
<abraham@mozcom.com> (until mid March 1998)
<abraham@sover.net> (after mid March 1998)
url domain: www.blueberry-brain.org]