A fascinating result in the quantum world.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/?fbclid=IwAR1FPTVmo5IDgLa5I9JGCOmysbJb2m0giOnpZjpphON_oYFup5WtOS5QZfA
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Proietti and co’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist.
5 Responses to “Proietti and co’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist.”
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This impressive breakthrough in Quantum physics, “there is no objective reality” raises the question of the reality of the OBJECTIVE psyche. What could be meant by the objective psyche when this finding of physics claims that all reality is relative, that two observers can experience two conflicting realities. Does this finding challenge the reality of the objective psyche?
I once raised the question of the nature of the OBJECTIVE psyche in a lecture “way back” when I provocatively declared that dream work is mostly carried out in an extroverted fashion. The then President of the Seattle Jung Club paternalistically corrected me. “You mean ‘introverted’! “No, I mean ‘extroverted’” and continued with my talk. I meant that most dream work is carried out as if the dreamer is a subject over and against an object (the dream) and is not entangled with the dream stuff at every turn. This is the extroverted approach that leans on the scientific idea of objectivity, rooted in the subject-object split. So the dreamer remains quite untouched by her own dream research.
But Jung insisted on the objective psyche so this objectivity must be quite different from the subject-object, extroverted kind of objectivity, which is now challenged by quantum physics. I think it has something to do with this mystery: There are many relative perspectives available in a dream, the dream-ego’s being only one. This is the one partial perspective that the waking dreamer usually identifies with in order to make her “objective interpretation” of the dream’s reality. However, there is one perspective that is superordinate to all these partial perspectives, it is the perception of the “living whole”. The dreamer may feel herself to be part of this whole, gaining access, for a moment, to that unique perception that the whole has, even while continuing with her partial perspective. This is a moment of psychic consciousness, another poorly understood notion. Here is an example of an experience I had from around 1995:
I was going through a tumultuous night; I thought I was going to die. It reached a crescendo. Then it all stopped. Just stopped. utter stillness; the morning was emerging and there was a presence in me awakening to the morning, beyond the fluctuations of my own mind; an “other” was stirring who was perceiving the morning as well. It had a kind of timeless quality, a stillness beyond compare, a wakefulness, an “other” who was perceiving the glory of the morning for the first time, as well as myself who could see that it was a morning like any other.
So as quantum physics explores its version of a post modern world where anything “objective” is reduced to a partial perspective, we may give pause to Jung’s discovery of a kind of objectivity that may now come forward into manifestation, now that the subject-object split seems to be overcoming itself on the collective level. This objective “other” cannot be found in the obsessive search for aliens yet such frantic searches point to a sense that “something” is coming and we cannot contain it.
It contains us.
John, I agree with Tony. No matter how baffling the topic, your comments are “intriguing.”
Thanks from Paco.
John, I am intrigued by your comment, and it got me musing but I need some clarification and some tolerance on your part with my attempt to penetrate your thinking. I follow your argument that if all reality is relative, the possibility exists that two observers can experience independent, and potentially conflicting, realities. And you ask if this possibility challenges the reality of the objective psyche. Are you asking or saying then that there is a paradoxical nexus where subjective reality and objective reality are both and neither at the same time? Or that the distorted multiple personal subjectivities we all engage in cannot lead to a singular objective and transcendent reality that subsumes us all? Or that this objective reality cannot be declared as a ‘fact’ since it all depends on where the observer is in space and time? Your comments made me think of a line from one of Ann Ulanov’s many books and lectures: i.e., “Subjective truth is objective fact and objective fact is subjective truth.” Maybe objective reality has other, as yet hidden, qualities that may clarify it all. And I always wonder about these quantum physics experiments, mind-boggling that they are, if at the level of a photon, does it see the same paradox we observe, i.e., that it is manifesting conflicting realities, or does it see a fundamental super-reality that suffers no conflicts or discrepancies since it is both the observed and the observer?
Tony, I agree with you, your observations and your questions.
Paco
Hi Tony and Paco thanks for taking time to respond with this flurry of questions. Feels a bit like a cat got among pigeons and off they fly. Let’s see if they can swirl in somewhat of a circular way.
Tony it seems all these questions belong to your efforts to clarify and penetrate my thinking as you say. I assume this is true for Paco too. When you say it is my argument: ” I follow your argument that if all reality is relative, the possibility exists that two observers can experience independent, and potentially conflicting, realities,” we may have missed one another there. No, it is not my argument but that of quantum physics. I simply took up that argument and asked, “how does that argument affect our approach to the cornerstone of Jung’s opus, i.e. the reality of the objective psyche?”
You see, my work has to do with perceiving how language reflects psyche i.e. how can language (rhetoric) reflect soul movement, what can we learn about soul process through a soul phenomenological approach to language. So, any cultural practice at all, including quantum physics becomes fair game for this kind of examination. There I find soul movement on a collective level. The practitioners of whatever cultural practice usually have no idea of how soul is being reflected in their language practices. They simply focus on the content, or information, or references outside their language in their rhetoric. Their language is not transparent to soul for them. But it is transparent to the soul phenomenologist. This is what Jung calls the looming darkness behind the scenes:
there is a real “behind the scenes”, another picture looming up, covered by a thin veil of actual facts. The truth of this “behind the scenes” picture is not to be found in documentation, not to be seen by the outward eye but perceived by the mind alone.
So what I saw as the inwardness of the description of this quantum physics experiment was a soul movement of the greatest importance. Dominant cultural practices are beginning to notice, within the language of their discipline, the soul’s movement (always-already happened—it just takes culture a long time to change its practices accordingly) of having already overcome the subject-object split and its corresponding notion of (scientific) objectivity. Various individuals undergo this transformation (end of the world type experience, Jung being one) but it is now beginning to show up collectively as in this quantum research. As this dominant notion of objectivity goes under, (as it surely will) then a couple of consequences follow—whole scale destruction of all institutions and habits of thought that rely on this notion of the subject-object objectivity, which is happening, and the emergence of another transformed notion of objectivity as I describe in my post. This new notion of objectivity is the driving force of Jung’s entire opus. He called it the reality of the objective psyche and apparently to his dying days he despaired of anyone understanding what he is getting at. He was way ahead of his time but I guess you have to start somewhen.
This emergence of the objective psyche as a reality in our collective life (which the quantum experiment suggests to me) is also apocalyptic. We will experience ourselves not as subjects over and against an objective world but as being contained by something vastly greater than ourselves in experience, something that gazes into our being and makes us its object of attention, even as we sense its gazing into our being. This is what Jung means by psychic consciousness. And it will be terrifying!
We are collectively not prepared for this relativisation of our incorrigible conviction of being individual, isolated centres but it seems to be happening anyway. We are fighting it with every means possible. We will lose…
Don’t hesitate to respond more Tony and Paco, no need to be concerned about my tolerance.