Quantum Revelations and Otherworlds

Psychedelic Visions, Dimensional Shifts

Today in The Future of Consciousness, we have two amazing thinkers tee’d up: Paul Levy and David Luke. There is still time to sign up and join the seminar (use this link for 20% off tickets). You can catch today’s live session plus future sessions, and review the ones we have already done.

Next Wednesday, we present Warren Neidich, artist and author of The Glossary of Cognitive Activism, and Alex Ebert, musician and philosopher, joining us. We will discuss “cognitive Capitalism”—how the brain is being transformed by contemporary technologies integrated in a market-driven system of extraction and profit-maximization—among other topics.

Here are some video excerpts from our last sessions:

Below, I take a look at Levy and Luke’s contributions to contemporary thought:

Quantum Revelation

The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics went to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their investigation of quantum entanglement: Once linked, two subatomic particles maintain a relationship over vast distances. When we make an observation of one particle changing its spin or direction, the other does as well — simultaneously, across vast distances, entirely ignoring the speed of light. Collectively, their work proves there are no “hidden variables” that could account for what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” 

These now definitive inquiries demonstrate that the universe is not locally real. This means that objects only take a definitive, measurable form in the presence of an observer. The universe performs eerily like a video game where the only objects actually rendered are the ones that we directly encounter. This is no longer a mere theory, but completely proven. 

We would be in our rights to consider this discovery to be earth-shattering, mind-blowing, and paradigm-smashing. It might be sufficient cause for worldwide parades, mass celebrations, and new religious expressions (the science supports many ideas found in Eastern traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism). As enough of us understand and integrate this still-new knowledge, it will, I strongly suspect, transform our world in profound and fundamental ways. It already is transforming us, I believe, even as we try to catch up to it.

In Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality (SelectBooks, 2018), Paul Levy explores the explosive nature of quantum theory, for psychology and for humanity’s future. Levy asks: What does quantum theory mean for us — for our future lives, both individually and collectively?

He writes: 

Quantum physics is a flag bearer of an epochal paradigm shift currently taking place within human consciousness, deep within the collective unconscious, concerning the nature of reality itself. The discoveries of quantum physics are directly pointing to the hitherto unsuspected powers of the mind to cast reality in its image rather than the other way around. Quantum theory provides insight into how conscious entities, such as ourselves, can alter the course of the physically described aspects of reality through the decisions they make. The new physics is the beginning of the realization that the human psyche can intervene creatively in the physical and chemical processes of nature.

Many of the great Twentieth Century physicists who contributed to quantum theory — people like John Archibald Wheeler, David Bohm, Arthur Eddingtion, and Niels Bohr — reached a deep level of philosophical and spiritual insight. They understood that their discoveries revealed consciousness, not matter, as the underlying foundation – that the world was more like a “great thought” or an idea or a mental construct than a projection of random physical stuff. 

We often find a gulf between those at the inception point of a new idea or new artistic style and those who glom onto it later. The initiators are forced to fully confront the new language, the new possibility. This direct, ontological confrontation changes them forever. The Quantum Revelation provides many quotes that demonstrate this: 

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”

Erwin Schrödinger

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Max Planck

“We go down and down from crystal to molecule, from molecule to atom, from atom to nucleus, from nucleus to particle, and there’s still something beyond both geometry and particle. In the end we have to come back to mind.”

John Wheeler

“The human endeavor to access the deep, fundamental structure of nature, the very heart of matter, has resulted not in finding anything material, but rather has led to the subjective and immaterial realm of ideas.”

Werner Heisenberg

”The stuff of the world is mind stuff….. consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness, and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature … it is difficult for the matter of fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character.”

Arthur Eddington

Among the current generation of physicists who write popular books, many have toggled back to a perspective that aligns better with reductive materialism, denying a foundational primacy to consciousness. In many cases, this involves rhetorical shifts and changes in emphasis.

Sabine Hossfelder, for example, in Existential Physics counters the idea that consciousness causes the wave to “collapse” into a definitive particle. Instead, she calls this, the “update of the wave function.” She proposes that, instead of consciousness causing this update, “ it is the other way round: that the update of the wave function would play a role in conscious awareness.” She admits this is “highly speculative and no evidence speaks for it,” but it is “compatible with what we know.”

In The Big Picture, Sean Carrol writes

“If there is any one aspect of reality that causes people to doubt a purely physical and naturalist conception of the world, it’s the existence of consciousness. And it can be hard to persuade the skeptics, since even the most optimistic neuroscientist doesn’t claim to have a complete and comprehensive theory of consciousness… The idea of a unified physical world has been enormously successful in many contexts, and there is every reason to think that it will be able to account for consciousness as well.”

Here, Carrol ignores scientists’ ongoing failure to solve the “hard problem” of consciousness, while rejecting the philosophically grounded understanding that many of the great physicists of the last century established and substantiated. 

Why do scientists struggle to accept the repeatedly demonstrated results of the “quantum revelation?” Levy explores different reasons for this. Science is still mainly utilized instrumentally, as a tool to increase the power and control of military and corporate interests. The reductive materialist framing is a much better fit for a physics that maximizes its technical utility (for quantum computing and the like).

Physicists are trapped in a limited mindset which makes it impossible for them to step across the threshold into the new paradigm, even experimentally. As science closes ranks around a narrow physicalist vision, it is left to outsiders from the scientific community and media mainstream to tackle the deeper questions of meaning. Poets, artists, Jungians, and other visionaries must do the hard work of integrating the new worldview for themselves, then communicating it to others.

According to quantum theory, the universe is brought into manifestation by the co-creative activity of the observer/participant. When we choose what to measure, what to observe, we are already creatively responding to the world and, through our continuous act of observation, transforming it. Buddhism has a term for this. It translates: “As Viewed, So Appears.”

Levy proposes that contemporary physicists unwittingly ensnare themselves in a tautologous trap reinforced by the intrinsic logic of the quantum world: “Our universe is dreamlike in nature; quantum physics is the physics of the dreamlike nature of reality. If physicists think that quantum physics is not the physics of the dream, then due to the magic of As Viewed, So Appears, quantum physics will manifest so as to supply all the needed evidence to prove that it is not the physics of the dream.” If materialist scientists believe that “the outer world objectively exists and has nothing to do with how they observe it, will experience a world that reflects back their viewpoint.” The irony is that they will receive confirmation of their idea that the world exists separate from the observer “through the very quantum principle of genesis by observership that they are denying.” I find this a clarifying way of understanding the problem. 

Otherworlds

David Luke is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich, London. He is also Honorary Senior Lecturer at Imperial College, London, and Lecturer for the Alef Trust as programme leader in Psychedelics, Altered States and Transpersonal Psychology. He teaches on the MSc Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology accredited by Liverpool John Moores University. He also directs the wonderful biannual psychedelic conference, Breaking Convention, which takes place in the UK (go if you get a chance!).

His books include Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experiences, as well as the anthologies DMT Entity Encounters and Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine. His research focuses on transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomena and altered states of consciousness, especially via psychedelics. He has published more than 100 academic papers in this area. Luke is on the academic cutting-edge with his ongoing exploration of the link between psychedelics and psychic experience, as he discussed in a TedX talk:

What I discovered was that 50% of people who had taken a psychedelic substance had had an experience of telepathy under the influence of that substance. That's quite an astonishing amount of people if you compare that for instance to people using non-psychedelic substances like maybe heroin or alcohol or coffee or cocaine. People don't report having experiences of telepathy with those substances so there's something very specific to psychedelics that induce these kinds of experiences… but are they real, are they in any way genuine?

Otherworlds includes a wonderful chapter where Luke writes about a terrifying meeting with the Islamic “Angel of Death,” Azareal, on a DMT trip:

I took myself off to a secluded beach on the banks of the River Ganges. I prepared myself with an improvised ritual hoping to gird myself against whatever lay beyond and inhaled a pipe full of the foul plastic-tasting resin. Sucked into the space between the pipe and my brain I found myself breaking through the veil like a gatecrasher at a party of swirling smiling eyeballs all attached to snake bodies, which were as startled to see me as I was to be there. The whole ordered assortment of eyes and snakes acted as one being and in the brief moment before it reacted to my arrival I managed to catch a glimpse over what might loosely be described as the shoulder of this strange being and instantly realized that I had seen something I should not have - a brief glance at the truly forbidden.

The being tells him its name, which matches with archetypes from a number of other cultures including Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. What’s fantastic about Luke’s work is his combination of academic rigor and discipline with a wide-open curiosity about a vast range of possibilities denied by reductive materialism.

I hope you will join us today. The Future of Consciousness is, I believe, as mind-expanding as any psychedelic, with far less risk of negative side effects.