Review: The One, by Heinrich Päs
Review: The One, by Heinrich Päs
Quantum reality is a timeless, undivided, unified whole.
Happy New Year again to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:
One of the books that I really want to read in 2023 is “The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science” by Erik Hoel, to be published in July. In his excellent Substack newsletter “The Intrinsic Perspective” (please subscribe), Erik says “one or two posts this year will be previews of chapters from an upcoming book of mine that makes the scientific case for free will (published by Simon & Schuster, out summer of 2023 - more on this soon).”
I’ve been reading again “Introduction to Christianity” by the late lamented Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.
In “Il fascino inquietante dell'ultraumano: Teilhard de Chardin e la ricezione del suo pensiero nella Chiesa cattolica” (republished in “Credere nel futuro: Il lato mistico del transumanesimo”), my friend Riccardo Campa notes that, in the book, Ratzinger frequently cited and (almost) endorsed the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, previously condemned by the Vatican.
My favorite passage: “This leads to a further passage in Teilhard de Chardin that is worth quoting... ‘The Universal Energy must be a Thinking Energy…’” Ratzinger translated this and other Teilhard quotes from “Introduction à La Pensée De Teilhard De Chardin” by Caude Tresmontant.
I have been reading a review copy of “The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics” (2023), by Heinrich Päs, to be published on January 17.
In his previous book “The Perfect Wave: With Neutrinos at the Boundary of Space and Time” (2014), Päs gives accessible mental pictures of branes in the multi-dimensional bulk space of string theory, and then drops the bomb: backward time travel could be physically possible in a special geometry with two additional big space dimensions (that is, five big space dimensions in total). Päs, with his colleagues James Dent, Sandip Pakvasa and Thomas Weiler, proposed to test this with sterile neutrinos: hypothetical particles that, like gravitons, can leave our brane and travel into the bulk.
“Perhaps in the distant future, we will evolve so that our consciousness resides in a ball of sterile neutrinos,” said Weiler in an interview. “Then we can teletransport ourselves.”
I was hooked because, if this is correct, future humans might be able to migrate outward into the bulk or other branes, travel in time, and resurrect the dead from the past by copying them out. Päs and his colleagues are in my list of highly imaginative scientists to watch.
In his new book Päs tackles really fundamental issues in philosophy and physics: is reality an undivided One, and if so why do we perceive separate things? According to Päs, reality is One. This philosophical position is known as “monism.”
Two main protagonists of the book are Hugh Everett, who proposed a much discussed interpretation of quantum physics that, in turn, has been interpreted in different ways, and Dieter Zeh, who discovered an important part of quantum physics that helps make sense of Everett’s ideas on the one hand, and of the world we perceive on the other.
Another protagonist is the Egyptian goddess Isis, “the symbol of a hidden, all-encompassing unity… veiled so that she wouldn’t be exposed to the eyes of the mortals.” Isis is the personification of “a timeless, unified whole.” The inscription on a statue of Isis reads: “I am all that has been and is and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my mantle.”
Back to Everett and Zeh. The interpretation of quantum mechanics proposed by Everett is usually referred to as Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI). But Päs argues (and I totally agree) that what Everett had in mind is One Big World, not many small worlds. Fundamental quantum reality is an undivided, entangled One that can’t be described as many disentangled parts. Entangled correlations “appear as a miracle... unless the related subsystems are understood in the context of the whole.”
Cool! But then why do we perceive the world as many disentangled parts?
Enter Zeh. He discovered decoherence, which is the bridge between the One reality of Everett and the world we perceive. Perhaps Everett himself had something like decoherence in mind, but Zeh deserves the credit for describing decoherence conceptually and mathematically. Päs explains:
“Whenever a quantum system is measured or coupled with its environment, entanglement causes the quantum system, the observer, and the rest of the universe to become interwoven with each other.”
At that point, decoherence rapidly causes the entangled quantum reality to apparently split into separate Everett worlds. From the perspective of the observer, Päs says, decoherence eliminates “the glue between quantum realities,” which “break up into parallel realities in which quasi-classical objects such as particles with a definite location emerge.”
“As a consequence, decoherence acts as if it would open a zipper between quantum physics’ parallel realities.”
The apparently eliminated information, or “glue,” is dispersed into the environment and becomes inaccessible from the perspective of the local observer.
“The information still exists, it is just not observable for someone who interacts locally with the universe,” Päs told me. “That’s also the basis of my speculations about consciousness and quantum mechanics later on in the book.”
Readers with some knowledge of quantum physics may miss a more technical treatment of how decoherence goes about unzipping quantum reality. See Sean Carroll’s excellent book “Something Deeply Hidden” and references therein.
See also Päs’ chapter in “From Quantum to Classical: Essays in Honour of H.-Dieter Zeh” (2022, edited by Claus Kiefer), which can be read as a short summary of “The One.”
The overall worldview of Päs is similar to that of Carroll. But while Carroll doesn’t stray far from the territory of physics, in the second part of the book Päs traces a detailed history of monistic metaphysics in the world’s philosophies and theologies.
In the last part of the book Päs goes back to science. “Physics,” he says, “should start with a quantum mechanical state vector of the universe, and space, time, and the Standard Model of particle physics should be derived from this fundamental description through decoherence.”
In other words, not only the physics of matter and energy in space and time, but also space and time themselves should be treated as derived aspects that decoherence plucks out of the fundamental reality of The One.
Decoherence “describes how an entirely quantum mechanical universe looks to a local observer.” Max Tegmark referred to our view of the universe from the inside, and a theoretical view from the outside, as frog and bird perspectives: “the latter is the outside overview of a physicist studying its mathematical structure, like a bird surveying a landscape from high above; the former is the inside view of an observer living in this structure, like a frog living in the landscape surveyed by the bird.”
Similarly, Frank Wilczek noted the tension between “the God’s-eye view of reality comprehended as a whole and the ant’s-eye view of human consciousness, which senses a succession of events in time.” The ant’s-eye view is the temporal perspective of an observer following a timelike trajectory through the spacetime of general relativity, while the God’s-eye view is the outside view onto the relativistic block universe. “To me, ascending from the ant’s-eye view to the God’s-eye view of physical reality is the most profound challenge for fundamental physics in the next 100 years,” added Wilczek.
Päs summarizes many ongoing, speculative research works in this direction. His speculations on consciousness are especially interesting.
Decoherence unzips quantum reality, but quantum mechanics allows for different ways to do so. In which of many possible directions, so to speak, does quantum reality get unzipped? This is known as the “preferred basis” problem, and the answer could be related to consciousness.
In this monistic framework, “both the conscious self and a quasi-classical world (including time) emerge together.” The quasi-classical worlds that we experience can only be worlds where human-like consciousness can work. “I see the preference for a particular basis as being rooted in the nature of consciousness, rather than in the nature of the physical world in general,” argued Michael Lockwood. Päs goes even further by suggesting that there could be “parallel multiverses in different bases” and “quantum aliens” with entirely different ways to experience their reality. All experienced realities, however, emerge from the holistic quantum reality of The One.
Päs doesn’t rule out that altered states of consciousness, perhaps induced by psychoactive drugs or future neural prostheses, could experience glimpses of the holistic quantum reality of The One.
I’ll chat with Päs in a few days about all that and publish the conversation in the Turing Church podcast.