I appreciate Fred Abrahams taking the time to present his valuable comments and critiques of my thesis on Levels of Reality. Coming as they do from a thoughtful, perceptive, and sharp mind, they carry even more weight. Much of what I had written certainly needs to be expanded, analyzed, and improved upon (if possible). I am well aware that eventually they will suffer the same fate as of all (really or seemingly) original perspectives: rejected by some (or many) and accepted by many (or some), and ultimately forgotten. I will attempt to explain (if not fully answer) the questions/comments raised by Fred:

<1>
On predictability:
Not being a psychologist or psychoanalyst, I have little to say about the motivations (overt or covert) for physicists discovering/recognizing/formulating mathematical laws (that seem to be) governing the physical world on the basis of which (thanks to linear differential equations) one can find the state of a system at time t if one knows its state (and the related parameters) at time t. All that I was trying to say is that there is such a level of reality. Let me call this PR-1. In the context of what Fred has said let me make it clear that I have no respect/sympathy/admiration for psychopathic dictators and misguided social philosophers persecuting people/thinkers ruthlessly. But post-modernist historical analysis notwithstanding, expressions of such madness have occurred even in societies where interest in rationalistic prediction-possible explanations had not arisen. So I am not as inclined to associate Nazi madness with the rise of Newtonian physics. This is not to say that there may not be other reasons why one ought to be wary of obsessions with "scientific explanation" based on physics and biochemistry for every aspect of the human experience. In any case, the fact remains that there is a whole body of "perceived reality" (the only kind of reality, Im afraid, we are capable of being aware of qua embodied Homo sapiens) which is amenable to mathematical predictability.

<2>
I am very familiar with Bohms "quantum potential", if only because I was working with Louis de Broglie, Jean Pierre Vigier, and David Bohm as a graduate student at the University of Paris when (where) these ideas were developed, and even published a couple of papers in the Comptes Rendus de lAcadmie des Sciences related to the questions way back when. Unfortunately, as David Peat points out, these efforts to reinstate classical physics through "hidden variables" have not borne much fruit, and it is generally agreed by mainstream quantum physicists that the precise prediction of which nucleus will decay next is impossible even in principle, exactly as that the Department of Commerce cannot predict which particular automobile(s) will be involved in accidents during the next holidays, even though one can say with some certainty how many will be involved. This is what I refer to as the quantum level of reality or PR-2. This aspect of reality (at the quantum level) has intrigued/confused/irritated many physicists, as (at one time) it did to me also. But now I do not see this to be any stranger than the fact that the social laws or mores of some societies are very different from the one(s) to which I am accustomed. There is absolutely no a priori reason why the laws governing the microcosm should be precisely the same as those at our level, especially after we have experimental evidence to that effect. This is not to say that the levels of reality are unrelated. Looking at a printed page we get one vision (view) of the page. Reading it line by line exposes us to an entirely different vision (view): meaning and all. This does not mean that the two are unrelated.

<3>
I do not contend, "if quantum, then probabilistic or vice versa." I agree fully with the comment that "nature has more uniqueness at each level" And that is precisely the thesis I was trying to put forward: That we need to recognize multiplicity in the World of Reality too, as we are beginning to do in the world of race, religion, and culture.

<4>
I will admit that I used the term "chaos" rather loosely, in a non-technical sense. Conventional chaos may of course be treated as a branch of classical physics: nothing mysterious or radical about it, though fascinating and fruitful. I was using the term in the sense of "utterly unpredictable intersection of causal lines."

Here is a metaphor: We may consider the physical world in terms of an imaginary space made up of a labyrinth of countless causal lines into which entities keep falling at various points, suffering the consequences (effects). In the realm of classical physics (PR-1), the entities move from point to point in this imaginary space in a smooth manner. In the quantum world (PR-2), the entities can occasionally jump to causal lines in the vicinity. Now in the world of PR-3 (complexity), the jumps occur to significantly distant points in this space. This is the realm of reality in which you meet a total stranger during a trip, fall in love, marry, raise a family, etc.: all of which would not have occurred if your scheduled plane had not been canceled, and you had to take a different flight. Finally, there is the level of hypercomplexity (PR-4) in which, as Fred perceptively points out, time is absent. This is the level where thought and meaning, value and aesthetics arise. These are not governed by simple causal laws, nor does time as a parameter has relevance here. Thoughts come and go, meanings and experiences emerge: their significance is immediate.

The symbolic relation (in the form of an equation) I wrote was not meant to describe the evolution of a system (in which case time would have to explicit there), but rather to emphasize that different aspects (predictability, probability, complexity) dominate at different levels. The formula also reminds us that the various levels of reality are interconnected.

V. V. Raman
3 January 1998