Less-Wrong (Meta)Physics

Basic, thematic-level understandings of modern physics and comparative metaphysics provide keys to unlock better understanding of each other and the patterns of everyday life. In less than ten minutes with this blog post, you can level up on all three about as efficiently and painlessly as possible. Hear me out:

Advances in physics can help illuminate the two generally opposing directions of understanding how things fundamentally work: substance ontologies or map-metaphysics on the one hand, emphasizing pinned-down separateness and essentialism, and process-relational terrain on the other, emphasizing dynamic interdependence. As illustrated in previous posts, those two directions have tremendous impacts on how we think and live. That basic comparative metaphysics awareness, in turn, proves helpful in understanding advances in modern physics. Broadly speaking, map-metaphysics frameworks have similarities to the Newtonian physics, smooth calculus, and regular Euclidean/Cartesian geometry (space as three dimensional container) with which they’re historically and conceptually intertwined. They’re simplified models involving generalizing abstractions. They certainly have their uses, but they hit limits on how much reality they can describe. Much like how physicists have overcome a lot of those limits in the past 120 years, the rest of us can overcome map-metaphysics' limits too. And we should.

On the larger scale of physics, Einstein’s scientific theory of special relativity shook up map-metaphysics assumptions upon its publication in 1905, showing that there is no universally privileged or "objective" perspective from which to precisely determine spatial and temporal properties. The classic example is speed, like a coffee cup staying still from the perspective of the train rider holding it, and traveling from the equally valid perspective of someone on the station platform. Einstein’s insight was basically to interpret the constant speed of light through this perspective-relativity to conclude that simultaneity and the actual passage of time must likewise be relative—i.e., determined in relation to context, or situated reference frames. With general relativity a decade later, Einstein expanded these relational insights into the inseparable interweaving of spacetime with gravity and matter, obliterating yet more classical ontological divisions in the process. Since then, relativity has proven incredibly accurate. We couldn't have things like GPS without it: satellite distances from Earth are enough to introduce time variations that have to be accounted for. Physicists also now have tools like paraconsistent logic and math, advanced topological and fractal math, chaos theory, and category theory to help them work with the dynamic, contextual complexities of our macro-scale physical reality beyond basic Newtonian/classical models. 

It’s the very smallest physical scales, though, that most vividly point to processes and relations as more fundamental to existence than stasis and separateness. Quantum mechanics is the most accurate predictive theory we have, and it strongly suggests that relationality goes all the way down.

Bonus fun fact for fellow solar nerds: Einstein’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded “especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect” that’s as fundamental to solar cells as it is to quantum physics and wave-particle duality. Relativity wasn’t mentioned.

While an anti-metaphysical “shut up and calculate” approach predominated after WWII, quantum physics has been “meta” from its earliest days. We can illustrate with Einstein’s famous "God does not play dice" statement. It was made in the context of a long, friendly ontological dispute with Niels Bohr—the one played by Kenneth Branaugh in Oppenheimer. The baseline is that quantum mechanics is probabilistic. It doesn’t, and can’t, predict beyond probabilities where or how any particle will be before it’s clocked by some observation. Einstein and colleagues argued that quantum theory thus couldn't be a complete description of physical reality. They started from quantum entanglement: when particles have interacted in such a way that their attributes (like "spin") become correlated, such that you can know one as soon as you measure the other even when they're far apart. Because one entangled particle can't "communicate" faster than light to instantly tell the other how to be (the "locality" condition), Einstein argued they had to have determinate attributes prior to measurement or observation (the so-called "reality" condition). That is, physical reality should be reducible to separate entities that can, at least in principle, be isolated, with context-independent properties that each carries around at all times, local to them and merely unknowable to humans underneath quantum probabilities: "hidden variables." Erwin Schrödinger famously gave a macro-scale illustration of the apparent absurdity of a particle being indeterminately this-and/or-that prior to measurement, a cloud of unrealized or superpositioned possibilities rather than determinate properties, by hypothesizing a cat that’s both alive and dead inside a closed box with a quantum-probabilistic trigger. 

Bohr disagreed with their framing. His retort: "stop telling God what to do." He argued that things really could be indeterminate with respect to their properties prior to observation. Particle or wave? Spin? Position? There is no single, determinate fact of the matter until or outside the context of "observation"—which, crucially, can take many forms of relation, not just human awareness.* The probabilities and superpositions described by quantum mechanics are indeed the complete description of the pre-observation physical reality. Notoriously weird, at least to dominant Euro-Western thinking.** Yet billions of dollars’ worth of quantum research later, with quantum entanglement well established, all the experimental evidence is inconsistent with "hidden variables" theories. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three physicists who empirically confirmed actual indeterminacy, or at least some kind of overthrowing of classical assumptions about “local reality” of things, at the quantum foundations of existence. This experimental (meta)physics was based on the work of Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, whose theorem established that "hidden variables" assumptions would play out with different statistical limitations than indeterminacy assumptions. Tests consistently violate the "hidden variables" limitations. That's now at the heart of quantum computing.

These experimental results still leave multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics viable. Carlo Rovelli is a leading theoretical physicist and proponent of the relational quantum mechanics (RQM) interpretation. In his wonderful book Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, Rovelli explains for non-physicist readers how the properties of particles or other things can be real with respect to one object or observer, like Schrödinger’s cat, and not with respect to another frame of reference, like the human experimenter before opening the box. This relational reality, he notes, “should not overly surprise us,” given what we know about the relativity of properties like up/down directionality on our spherical planet, speed and simultaneity, and even color which is registered differently by different people, tools, and species. “The discovery of quantum theory is only slightly more radical,” he writes: “it is the discovery that all the properties (variables) of all objects are relational, just as in the case of speed. Physical variables do not describe things: they describe the way in which things manifest themselves to each other. There is no sense in attributing a value to them if it is not in the course of an interaction.” It is the web of relational events that constitute reality, “not the heavy objects charged with absolute properties that [dominant Western substance] philosophy posited in support of these events.”

I should also mention particle-physicist-turned-philosopher Karen Barad here, who further elaborates a whole game-changing framework they call agential realism out of Bohr's writings and later quantum discoveries. In their 2007 book Meeting the Universe Halfway (free here), Barad introduced the term “intra-action” to describe relational events within phenomena that enact or perform thing-defining lines like particle/wave or subject/object without presupposing the already-separate things implied by the term interaction. Agential realism has been operationalized as a methodology in thousands of research papers across many practical domains including climate education and organization management.

Other interpretations vary widely. Some physicists, maybe fearing that losing locally determinate "hidden variables" inhering in discrete objects means losing "reality," try to find loopholes to preserve them. However, those loopholes tend to invoke other, even more seemingly extreme weirdness like infinitely multiplying parallel universes, superdeterminism, or the future causing the past. Even then, they still undermine many classical map-metaphysics simplifications.

Now this part's important. Notice what I'm not saying. I'm not offering any new information about existence at non-quantum scales. I'm not proposing quantum entangled neurons, or non-metaphorically resonant vibrations between consciousnesses, or any other speculations of the sort that new age quacks like to run wild with. I'm not even getting into debates among the various viable quantum mechanics interpretations, though I plainly have teams I'm rooting for. (And against: I've seen too many examples where popular (mis)understandings of superdeterminism and multiple universe theories are corrosive to ethics and politics.) Any of that would be getting far ahead of my skis.

I'm simply asking: once you get the gist of what the Nobel Prize-winning experiments on Bell's Theorem were testing, and how those experiments all came out against properties being contained within separate particles themselves, then, between the two major directions of metaphysis that have already been debated for millennia... is the map-metaphysics direction of particle-like entities with self-contained and determinate defining properties and strict binary non-contradiction still a—let alone the—rational or sensible choice? Once science has gone down to the quantum foundations of reality looking for its building blocks or predictable billiard balls, only to disprove those models and circle back to pre-Socratic Heraclitus's "everything flows,"** is it reasonable to think process and relations return to being secondary to separate absolutes at higher levels of scale and complexity?*** Especially once life is involved, a phenomenon that is self-evidently processual and relational? And all that's before even getting to the fact that physics' paradigm leaps forward towards process-relationality have been repeated over and over again in aligned paradigm leaps forward in dozens of other domains, with more in progress. Experimental metaphysics could possibly stand on its own to justify a rethink of our dominant culture's assumptions about what matters, but it doesn't have to.

Dynamicity, indeterminacy, situated relationality, non-competition, and interdependence aren't secondary or ignorable, let alone less rational, considerations. They're fundamental to existence and our understanding of it, all the way up and all the way down. Period. And that knowledge should bolster our ongoing fight against complexity-erasing ideologies and systems based on wrong-direction separateness, essentialism, and zero-sum binary logic.

Please comment below if this brief flight through modern physics has been helpful for you, or not!

*Lots of popular and even academic writing about quantum physics mischaracterizes "observation," due mainly to the anthropocentrism central to Euro-Western map-metaphysics and its insistence that "reality" means "independent of human observation." It is indeed silly to question whether an apple is still red or the moon still exists when "no one is looking," as one unfortunate Scientific American article put it. But "conscious human observation creates reality" (idealism or anti-realism) is not the only or best alternative to "determinate properties of theoretically isolatable entities create reality" (which often gets labeled "realism" in an obnoxious bit of question-begging). This is evident from the zoomed-out perspective of basic comparative metaphysics that engages with the slew of process-relational alternatives. Apples, the moon, and particles are embedded in much larger meshes of contextual relations than just with humans.

**I cite Heraclitus a lot because he's part of Euro-Western heritage, and represents what that culture's early consolidators of substance metaphysics and binary logic (e.g. Plato and Aristotle) were reacting to. However, it's important to note that Buddhism and other Asian frameworks, ubuntu and other African frameworks, and most Indigenous worldview frameworks worldwide have comparable process-relational core concepts, as do some heterodox Euro-Western frameworks like dialectical materialism. It's crucial that those should lead our collective thinking and action about the future, but they're not front-loaded on this blog for the simple reason that I and my audience are primarily within dominant Euro-Western culture, and I want to build a base of process-relational understanding there before bridging from that. Again, order of operations is not order of importance. I think it's very worth noting here, though, that quantum physics is less "weird" in those cultures. See, for example, this fascinating report by Dan Moonhawk Alford on a 1992 conference between leading physicists including David Bohm (who died a few months after the conference and prior to the report), Native American intellectuals, and linguistics experts. It makes clear that Indigenous traditions and verb-centric languages are better at working with quantum dualities and other process-relational concepts compared to noun-dominated European languages.

***To be clear, we don't find quantum entanglement above the quantum level, but that's just one instantiation of process-relationality. I'm not making any arguments based on interpretation of quantum decoherence, a subject of hot debate.