The Quantum Moment

IS THE UNIVERSE conscious? This question has intrigued humanity for millennia. Now it would seem that mainstream science is suddenly interested in it. A slew of articles, even in popular science magazines including The New Scientist and Scientific American, have flagged this issue. Their focus is a new theory called panpsychism, which I will come to later.

First, let’s backtrack a bit. In New Perspectives on Indian Science and Civilization (Routledge, 2020), a volume that I edited, I argued that when we try to apply scientific ideas and concepts to other areas of human experience and endeavour, we often make some category errors. What are some of these pitfalls?

Simply speaking, being unable or unwilling to distinguish between science, pseudo-science, non-science, and nonsense. The prestige of science makes it very tempting to apply scientific ideas to the humanities and social studies. In India, we are especially prone to asserting that Indic wisdom is scientific.

But one such trial by fire, the Derridean idea of indeterminacy, along with many postmodernist notions, ended being derided and discredited. Not so much because of the paradox that the idea of indeterminacy would itself become indeterminably incomprehensible through interminable deferral. What Jacques Derrida dubbed différance— one signifier only leading to another, never to a definite signified.

An endless postponement not just of conclusions, but of sense itself. Like waiting for Godot. Because without the metaphysics of presence, how could there be meaning? But the theory itself metaphysicalises the matter because much of human communication is based not on exactitude but supposition. Rather than waiting to know exactly what something means, we simply assume what we think it is and proceed.

When exported to the welcoming arms of the US academy, the post-al tide buoyed, uplifted, escalated, even catapulted many an aspiring academic to tenured professorship in the most prestigious of American universities. One crucial link in this seductive chain of signification was the arrival of Paul de Man at Johns Hopkins. Later attacked for being a Nazi sympathiser, de Man was also the dissertation supervisor of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Spivak shot into fame and limelight because she translated Jacques Derrida’s French original De la grammatologie (1967) into English.

But a sharp nail in the coffin of postmodernism was the “Sokal Hoax”. The revenge of physics on linguistics or what came to be called the “linguistic turn” in Western continental philosophy? Back in 1996, Alan Sokal demonstrated how an academic paper submitted, and subsequently published in the prestigious journal Social Text, was peppered with high-sounding nonsense. The journal, with such Leftist luminaries as leading American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson on its editorial board, published jargonised bilge if, as Sokal put it, “it sounded good and it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”

Sokal’s paper was titled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’. One can immediately guess how “transgress” would be one of the typical buzzwords in the algorithm of the New Left. Funnily enough, it still is. Anything “transgressive”, “subversive”, “insurgent”, “insurrectionary”, etc, has a much better chance of passing leftist peer reviews. After all, these are milder words for revolution.

Sokal, in a later interview, said he tried out his subversive strategy on reading Higher Superstition (1994) by Paul R Gross and Norman Levitt. All it took to break into the most prestigious of humanities journals was “proper leftist thought” written with trendy terminology. In the wake of the MAGA pushback, we can now see how this was discursive anti-capitalism, anti-establishmentarianism, even anti-intellectualism which, arguably, led to the politics of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI). Any surprise that hardly anyone in the Humanities & Social Studies across the US votes Republican?

What had started as the post-modernist upending of the Enlightenment project and the dethroning of rationality soon veered into a toxic theoretical Molotov cocktail of political correctness. The takeover of top humanities and social studies departments by menacing doctrines such as critical race theory and the intersectionality of deprivations, ended up as bullying and patrolling: cancel culture policing the academy.

Gross and Levitt defended the scientific method and rationality as opposed to the “repertoire of rationalizations” to avoid being scientific. But was there a deeper, underlying reason for the great success of critical theory, including deconstruction? I believe that this movement in the humanities and social studies rode on the prestige and power of the new discoveries in Physics that happened over three decades earlier, between the two world wars.

One such development, over a hundred years back, was what came to be called German theoretical physicist Werner Karl Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”. With supporting experiments and theoretical postulates by fellow quantum scientists like Erwin Schrödinger, the world came to believe that we could never know for sure where a particular particle is at any given time and whether it would behave as a particle or a wave in the future.

There is no question that the work of quantum theorists like Heisenberg and Schrödinger dramatically transformed our understanding of the subatomic world. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle postulates that we cannot simultaneously know both the position and momentum of a particle with perfect accuracy. Schrödinger’s equation describes the behaviour of quantum systems using wave functions to predict the probability of finding a particle at a specific location.

I am not suggesting that that Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and their less famous contemporaries, blithely and facilely transposed scientific ideas onto humanities, but one might argue that the whole postmodernist, linguistic turn had behind it the thrust and prestige that came from the upending of classical physics by quantum mechanics. After all, we live in world where what CP Snow famously called the “two cultures” are constantly colliding and converging. Uncertainty and indeterminacy are very much a part of the overriding episteme or zeitgeist of our times. Only we should be careful not to turn them into doxa or use them to dox those we disagree with.

Are we facing a similar moment now when we try to apply “Quantum-like” modelling to other areas, including economics and even politics? With AI and robotics, on the other side, challenging conventional ideas of what consciousness is and how it operates?

I will return to this question and to panpsychism in my follow-up column.

human experienceIndic traditionscientific ideasscientific theoriessocial scienceSocial Text