Science Beside Itself
We live in a peculiar time. At once, the world is infused with the technoproducts of a vast system of production and exchange that depends on highly mechanistic theories and mechanized experimental apparatus; and a kind of apocalyptic imagination, seething with demons and haunted by angels, mines the world's many wisdoms for infusions of grace, faith, and hope as much as it jacks horror into our amygdala, $10 a pop.
Perhaps this is no great surprise.
Morris Berman wrote of the re-enchantment of the world over 30 years ago, now. Post-modernism has come and gone, and in its wake we are cynical of irony, enough to consider the fashion of faith.
Still, as the "culture wars" in politics as much as academia have shown us, these are immiscible currents, oil and water. It is extraordinary how little they seem to say to each other.
Often, I think, these ways of seeing -- or modes of existence -- coexist in us, we bifocal individuals. This is how many religious people are scientists: assigning to each regime its proper place, dividing time and theory into realms of fairplay.
I am speaking to the parts of us that cannot believe in magic.
I say magic, not God.
Who is God? There are so many Gods, even among monotheists. We will talk more of that again. But for many of us, God has been compatible with science by being some kind of great force that starts everything (as Creator) and intervenes now and then (as miracles) but largely lets the world evolve according to its devices. Devices amenable to science.
This is the God of the gaps, or the distant Deity. This is the amorphous, flexible Supreme Being that does not threaten (or affect) us much.
I say magic, because what I say affects us. Very much.
Do you believe in magic? Do you believe that it's possible for someone to know what you're thinking from some great distance, to send you comfort, for you to feel it? For people to be healed by prayer, or by spell, from great and mortal illness? For dances to call the rain? For dreams to foretell death, and fortune? For mediums to talk for the dead, and astrologers for the stars?
This is not some mystical awareness of the oneness of all being; this is superstition. This is what the Enlightenment freed us from, and as urbanely cosmopolitan postpostmoderns we may never pooh-pooh any //indigenous// spirituality that believes such things, but for myself, or my aunt Blanche, surely it's rather too much.
I'm speaking to people like that, like me, for whom rationalist assumptions are the formative stuff of our worldview. Disbelief is such a deep belief that we can't even properly imagine not disbelieving in magic.
I'm going to write about science discovering magic.
I should begin by acknowledging that it is slightly awkward, uncomfortable, to discuss this out loud. It is the pride (and honest glory, I think) of science that it is open to having its most sentimental certainties torn asunder; and yet, it is beyond all decorum to talk of magic.
When people do, they are decried as popularizers. Some certainly are: the briefest glance at a holistic bookstore will find numerous titles proclaiming quantum magic, quantum love, quantum vibrations. Most of these dwell hardly at all on the science and its nuances, its details or peculiarities; the quantum in the title is quite unabashedly a source of authority. //Scientists are now discovering what ancient wisdom has always taught, that you make the world with your thought.//
Some writers speak with more detail, and more recognizably scientific authority, about realms beyond the strictly material: Fritjof Capra, for example. Roger Penrose. Even Heisenberg and Bohm themselves.
But these are outliers, and treated that way. Their provocative work is not at the heart of any field, does not develop a program, does not change the paradigm.
Much has been written about the formation of science, how its core paradigmatic frames (that reductionism and mathematization work, that reproducibility is an appropriate criterion, that the world is mechanistic and predictable by laws) are not proven, not empirical, not even axioms, but articles of faith. Much has been written (and well) about how science made space for greater and greater perturbations of this function of faith: fields and forces, relativity, quantum, chaos, systems theory.
Perturbations, not ruptures. Sometimes, eventually, perturbations exceed their domain, overwhelm the primary equations, cause a break.
Perhaps we're nearly there.
The difference between a perturbation and a rupture is stark. For a very long time, some researchers have toiled to "scientifically" explore magic -- bearing the badge of that difference, suspected infidels. A kind of order militant of skeptics and critics has posted guard on every move of the field of parapsychology, the study of psi.
This is no place for a detailed history of that lonely march on the frontiers of "true science". The essential point is this: there are many positive results in parapsychological research. Over time, research protocols have developed to increasingly exclude various potential biases and contaminations of the statistical outcomes. There are also many negative results, experiments that do not find a significant divergence from chance.
Skeptical scientists tend to find negative results. Neutral or "believer" scientists tend to find positive ones. Sometimes in the same experiment. [ref?]
In this very tangible sense, the results are only inconsistently reproducible.
And yet -- any one of the positive studies, certainly the metanalysis of all the studies, positive and negative -- these would easily pass muster in any other field. The results are usually small, and clearly depend greatly, rather mysteriously on experimental setup; and yet they would be incontrovertible if the normal rules of evidence applied.
They do not. This is science beyond the pale. The watchword: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
The paper above refers not to psi, but to "non-local perception" -- self-avowedly to draw from the authority of the incontrovertible, intractable quantum mystery. "The possibility that quantum-like properties may be observed not only in physics but even in biology and psychology has not only been studied theoretically (Khrennikov, 2010; Walach and von Stillfried, 2011) but even experimentally (see Gutierrez et al., 2010 for biology and Aerts, 2009 for psychology)."
A call to authority, from beyond the gates to the hallowed halls.
Yet these books and papers do not certify the passage from impossible to possible that is asked of them. They look at quantum-based modeling of biomolecular behaviors, or quantum-style probabalistics in social and psychological contexts. They are analogies to or incremental extensions of the long-established central quantum armistice: spooky action at a distance, all right, but only in its microscopic place.
But now, the center cannot hold.
Why Quantum is Weird.
A brief byway for those who may have missed the undergrad lecture on quantum mechanics. A century ago, and more, the very reliable equations and theoretical tools of classical dynamics were having problems describing atomic structure. In short: it was impossible. A few ad hoc rules got things working again, and then these rules were conformed into a rather elegant mathematical structure, or rather two equivalent structures: Schrodinger's probability wave approach and Dirac's bra-kets. These worked, exceptionally well, and as they've been elaborated and developed, continue to be the most successful fundamental theory physics has known.
But they imply that the world is profoundly different than the classical imagining, in which different bits of stuff are the way they are independently of other bits of stuff, and have well-defined characteristics that stay put until they're changed through interactions with other independent bits of stuff in predictable ways. All that appears to be, well, wrong.
Instead, the default behavior for a quantum system is for the eigenvectors of the probability wave function (which determine what you would measure if you measured something) to be in superposition, in a matrix with various probability-determining elements more and more of which become nonzero as it evolves. Indeed, these eigenvectors can interact with each other (the old double-slit, where a single photon creates an interference pattern), can be linked (entanglement, where if Alice is spin up, Bob is spin down, or vice versa, even separated halfway across the galaxy), condition each other's certainty (Heisenberg's principle that you can know where it is pretty well, or how momentous, but not both at the same time), and in general evolve in a way which, until it's measured, is coherent (cannot be reduced into parts without losing essential information).
That measurement bit is a challenge. When you measure some aspect of the system, then of course you know it exactly: Schrodinger's poor kitty is dead, or not. The superposition of eigenvectors collapses just to one. For a long time this has been very confusing, and the consensus was: "Shut up and calculate." These days, though, a rough picture seems widespread, in which what's happening is that the "measurement" is a process of connecting different systems together (the observing aparatus being the link between the lab, say, and the photon) such that now the entire thing is entangled: the whole lab is Alice, the photon is Bob, and Bob's up-eigenvector is correlated with the lab's up-eigenvector-measuring-eigenvector.
So that's all right then.
This all is obviously quite disruptive of basic scientific assumptions about reality. This was recognized from the beginning, with Einstein quite famously deriding its "spooky action at a distance" and working hard to demonstrate that quantum was logically impossible. For a long time, hidden variable contortions and other attempts to outmaneuver quantum "impossibilities" were a strong theoretical debate.
In the last few decades, however, improved instruments and innovative setups turned these thought experiments into practical ones, always confirming Bell's inequalities, rapidly turning the breakdown of "local realism" into shiny new technologies and industries.
How has this impacted our basic worldviews? Remarkably little. For almost a century, quantum disruption was barred from entering (our ideas of) everyday life by the article of faith that any noise, any thermal bath, any "warm, wet" environment would almost immediately decohere nonclassical behaviors.
Warm, and wet, like living things. Quantum life? Impossible! But now...
Science quite understandably has rules on what it is, and isn't. There's the heart of it all, the pages of the top journals, the research programs of the elite institutions. There's the pseudo-scientists, ruled entirely out of bounds by subject matter or reputation or both. And there's the shadowy lands at the bounds, which editors and funders keep a wary eye on in the knowledge that though disruptive, reputation-making innovations may come from them, it's mostly awkward silences and averted glances.
For years, such borderland scientists have reported unexplained, perplexing potential quantum behaviors in biological systems. Biophotons are a prime example: low-level, coherent emissions from all living cells, with hypothesized functions ranging from electromagnetic signalling through DNA to the maintenance of organism-level quantum coherence. [Cifra, Michal; Fields, Jeremy Z.; Farhadi, Ashkan (2011). "Electromagnetic cellular interactions". Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 105 (3): 22346. doi:10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2010.07.003. PMID 20674588.] [A Theoretical Mechanism of Szilard Engine Function in Nucleic Acids and the Implications for Quantum Coherence in Biological Systems, F. Matthew Mihelic, (Submitted on 13 Aug 2012) http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5729]
These are still suspect, still more so because a small industry markets biophotonic therapies reputed to cure all the ills of technodystopia!
But quantum biology, over the last few years since 2007 or so, has snuck right through the gates and into the pages of Nature and Science! Most prominently in the context of electron excitation transfer between chromophores in photosynthesis, but also in the context of magnetoreception in birds, and olfaction -- smell -- in mammals.
From a hint to an established fact with a booming trade in biomimetic engineering spinoffs, this process has followed a much more standard scientific trajectory for a field with unexpected but robust results.
Why?
And what does it mean?
--
Quantum biology is having its day for a confluence of reasons, no doubt. Perhaps the greatest is that the experimental work of the last several decades has forced theoretical tools to become far better developed and nuanced. In particular, recent work in quantum informatics and Bell's theorem research called into question the assumption that the environmental thermal bath necessarily results in decoherence. In fact, as quantum biology developed it became increasingly clear that non-Markovian, path dependant forms of noise could (counterintuitively) reinforce coherence over time.
So alongside the observations of close-to-unity-efficiency energy transfer, and apace, come the revisions and theoretical perturbations that allow for mesoscopic biological coherence. Then, experimental apparatus developed for solid state research, optics, and other fields of engineering can be pivoted to explore the pathways, the patterns, the "mechanisms" of the quantum anomaly,
In an important, disciplinary and techno-economic sense, the inner sanctum cannot observe such things, cannot see them unless the theoretical and engineering machinery is adequately in place to "explain" them.
But what is immediately obvious is that this is because the explanation is zoomed in. It is tight focus. There is excitement, there are private conversations; but the public discourse is of only incremental improvements in understanding, and exciting commercial applications.
But this changes everything!
The quantum quarantine is predicated on the presumption that warm and wet means no way! If the barrier is lifted, if quantum effects are present in some biological systems, why not others? The watchword ("Extraordinary claims...") is revoked; the hordes rush in!
Perhaps the best exemplar, yet: "Can we advance macroscopic quantum systems outside the framework of complex decoherence theory?"
This provides not only an extended argument for why a complex systems approach to quantum coherence of macroscopic systems (eg. cells, even organisms!) is necessary, and why reductionistic approaches have masked the mechanisms for and evidence of such dynamics; not just that, but a suggested protocol for selecting likely experimental systems that might demonstrate such coherence.
And an example.
And not just any example, but an example that appears to demonstrate nonlocally correlated apoptosis (programmed death) between leukemic cells in ways that strongly suggest cell-level entanglement.
And look like magic.
Brezinski's paper is not in the canon, not quite to the mainstream. But it's getting close. This demonstrates the depths of the challenge to the existing scientific order. If leukemic cells can communicate nonlocally -- why not psych 101 sophomores?
This means something profound. For a long time, scientists and the philosophers that paid attention have known that nothing about the Newtonian, Cartesian worldview was consistent with our most fundamental scientific theories of reality. But as long as the quantum quarantine held, it was possible to ignore it; it was possible to presume that we as humans live inside an effectively classical world. If humans as such, and the living organisms around us, are participating in quantum processes, are perhaps capable of (or always already engaged in) "paranormal" interactions with the complex systems we inhabit and perceive -- if so, then everything changes.
Some changes are obvious. Some less so. For example: why do we see a classical world?
This is a familiar scientific question, though not satisfyingly answered. After all, the quantum description does not obviously result in any classical observables -- the measurement problem above. And if measurement is itself a form of entanglement; if decoherence is entanglement; if "classicality" is just what it looks like when we force ourselves into particular eigenvector regimes, while everything not measured remains superposed, then why do we see such a classical world? Shouldn't bits of quantum dynamics be all over the place?
Why? Quantum philosophers have often resorted to hand-waving evolutionary arguments. "Life can only exist" in a classical frame, for various rather airy reasons; thus by the anthropic principle, the world mus be classical.
But if actually life is not classical -- or rather, not only classical, but a complex interweaving of classical and quantum components -- then the question returns: why do we see a classical world?
There are two answers. One is that science is designed to see classical things. Reductionism. Replicability. Separation of variables, separation of systems.
The other, far more dangerous: science sees a classical world because it makes a classical world. After all, the great theoretico-socio-technical apparatus of experimental practice is a huge (classical) machine for establishing well-defined, unambiguous observations and then making them the foundation for social being. For making observations. For collapsing wavefunctions. For killing coherence.
Indeed, this is not just science, but the entire metabolism of the empire. No? Setting out into the mysterious, wild world, mapping it, flattening it, and turning it into the substrate and raw material for symbolized articulation within a quantified, operationalized regime of control.
Isn't that what we do?
Once, I thought that Zarathustra wondering at the naivete of the hermit -- "Has he not yet heard that God is dead?" -- was smug with some kind of horror or delight. But no -- it's guilt! It's not that we thought God was alive, and were wrong -- "God is dead, and we killed him"!
No, of course not: we didn't. God's bigger than that. We just killed the spirit-stuff that lets God speak to us, that makes our souls receptive to the sacred, that makes mystery potent.
No, not that either. It keeps coming back, keeps re-arising. Demons and angels. Are the hairs rising on your neck?
These are materialist spirits that are dying; this is a materialist incommensurability-unto-death between narrative worlds (or modes of existence). Materialist not in an idealist sense -- not because the spirits are ideas about physical things, or ways of talking about material objects. Materialist in a materialist sense: because this is a way of engaging with things that emerges from the actually-existing process of techno-economic scientific production.
Abstractly, in the sense of being excised from context, these spirits behave spiritually -- as properties of systems that may or may not be mapped to sensually accessible regimes, but have dynamics and behaviors that are necessarily emergent, not predictable by the operations of constituent parts. They inhabit a different register than forces and particles. God-talk and scientific method are oil and water.
But in context, scientists are talking about magic without admitting it. More, much more than that: we see now that they are and have been killing magic from the outset. (Like a jealous God who first demands pre-eminence, but soon requires the death and oblivion of all other spirits before him.) These are different stakes than who wins an argument: the Inquisition killed the witches, but the Enlightenment killed the witches' magic.
We have imagined these debates as arguments about epistemology, and then more recently ontology.
But they contest being, and the stuff of being itself.
I haven't proven anything. That's important.
Consider: if entanglement is what allows quantum behaviors to propagate in living systems, and entanglement is a property that can be maintained through complex interweavings of mutually-reinforcing non-Markovian path-dependent relationships, then when we isolate parts from wholes, when we amplify signals that are reproducible, when we reduce chaos into order, we dissipate the mechanism of magic.
It's not just that we lose sight of it, or that we don't notice it, or can't speak of it: the actual process of experiment, indeed the whole artifice of industrial life, destroys it.
This is why the gods and their holy women could not stop the blood-dimm'd tide of Rome.
I'm making declarative statements without demonstrative deduction. Just so we're on the same page.
To be sure, it does not require quantum entanglement to touch this point. Complex systems theory and its sister ecologies already notice that self-regulating wholes are disrupted by being broken into parts. Is this not the difference between machine and life: that machines are made of parts that are engineered with care to be regular and predictable, whereas irregularities and errors (within bounds) are the vitality of growth?
It is amazing how much work we give to finding and honing the parts of our world amenable to deterministic classicality -- amenable to being turned into substrates for classical information, for simulating independent variables and history-less prediction. Metal and plastic: melted into formlessness, then we shape them and they stay, "forever", in the imprint of our brand. Like people.
This is not life.
(I admit it: I'm angry. Is that the word for the knotted rage in my belly as the acrid smoke of witches lodges, still lodges in my nostrils?
Will scientists, discovering magic, discovering the mysterious interconnections that animate matter, remain in service to an organizationally instrumental momentum of domination? To turn magic in service of empire, John Dee's ancient apostasy, is this the objective future of our priesthood in white?
But I also love science. I don't forget the childlike wonder of the great sky, the curious journey, the collegial passion for insight.
And the willingness to change.)
Change. It's the questions that keep bubbling to the surface. What do we do now?
A few suggestions.
Let's take seriously the challenge to the scientistic worldview formed by the quantum biological breach of the border wall. We should re-evaluate our assumptions about which sorts of questions are worthy, and bring out from under the stern reproving gaze of the marcher guards those exploring potential examples of macroscopic nonclassicalities.
Let's consider that the divide between what science is set up to study, and what "the humanities" or "religion" or "everything else" retains as its proper field, is not "subjective vs. objective", or "what's in your head" vs. "everything else in the world".
Rather, science is designed to find, to amplify, and to quantify certain kinds of patterns in the world: those that can be reproduced deterministically, or at least with consistent statistics. The world is full of other things than those, it appears; very full. Science can adjust to see them better; but it can also consider that other disciplines, other cultures and worldviews, have been setting up human apparatus to explore those other, less classical, more coherent beings.
Perhaps we can be a bit more respectful, possibly humble, in coordinating with them. Perhaps anthropologists aren't mumbling mumbo jumbo, or not only; perhaps prayers aren't always only wish fulfillment.
- Finally, let's take seriously the reality that science has not been only observing the world, "measuring it", but changing it. Science's link to technology, thus to industry and capitalism and empire, is rather obvious and well described. Despite our self-motivations as scientists, for beauty and the thrill of understanding, we are materially the agents of a vast process that is not only heating the planet, but eating it, and shitting out trash.
But we don't have to be just that. We all know how malignant the cancer of corporate scientific overlords are; we know the impacts on good research; we know the distortions and debasement. Our struggles against the process so far have been rather futile; but perhaps we've not been seeking allies in the right places.
Perhaps politics, the kinds of politics we need, is found less in the halls of Congress and more in the streets, and the barricades. Perhaps the ideas and alliances we find there will more ably help us change the role Big Science plays. Perhaps we need to find, to found, a science of the people, and of the earth!