The quantum field is a surfacing hyperobject and we are the Titanic
I believe a paradigm shift is occurring in our collective awareness of the nature of reality.
When we say paradigm shift, most people naturally think of the Copernican Revolution and the iconic image of Thomas Kuhn’s definitive commentary on the subject.
But this is way bigger.
This moment is more akin to the Axial shift (also called the Axial ‘breakthrough’) which, to quote Cornel W. du Toit, is vastly different from a change in a society’s world view :
It is much broader, affecting the way humans see their world, interact with it and conduct themselves. ‘”Axial breakthroughs” could be understood as shifts to higher levels of reflexivity, with particular emphasis on clearer awareness of human agency, historicity and responsibility’.
For me, Quantum Field Theory (QFT) — and humanity’s slow migration/immersion to the portals that allow for its understanding and integration — is the prime driver for the ‘chaos’ of multiverses that has gripped our political, social, and biological narratives. We are seeing the slow detangling of an ancient cosmological authority which has ruled our paradigm for millennia through its assertion of external, or materialist, determiners of our ‘reality’.
This hegemonic deterministic order, which asserts itself upon human lives and societies, places us in a scientifically-backed caste system with little hope for creating authentic agency in our lives outside of economic markets, political systems, and genetic inheritance.
Which of course, simply benefits elites. So no wonder this outdated worldview has been allowed to perpetuate itself through the academies which house and finance leading (Cartesian) quantum theoreticians, who are highly programmed reductionists governing a major scientific domain — QFT — that is anything but reductive. If anything, as the baseline for the creating impetus of all matter and its expressions, QFT is the whole shebang.
But with the maturing of QFT and the broader understanding of its key features — entanglement, complementarity, and observer-driven phenomena — it is becoming increasingly clear that quantum effects influence events in the political, social, and economic domains.
Which poses a direct threat to the deterministic order.
Perhaps there is no better advocate of this paradigm shift than David Bohm, the theoretical physicist who more poetically than any modern thinker, challenged the authority of the reductionist tyrants.
Addressing a conference in 1990, he explained:
“Science has begun to replace religion as the major source of the worldview. And therefor if science takes a fragmentary worldview, it will have a profound effect on consciousness. The ‘wholeness’ is a kind of attitude, or approach, to the whole of life. If we can have a coherent approach to reality, then reality will respond coherently to us. But nature has been profoundly affected by our way of thinking on the Earth. And if we move toward coherence, we will produce the results we intend, rather than the results we don’t intend. We will be more orderly, harmonious. We will be happier.
The major source of unhappiness is that we are incoherent and therefor producing results that we don’t really want. And then trying to overcome them while we keep on producing them.”
Sound familiar?
QFT has implications and outcomes at every level and sector of our society. I relate this to the notion of a ‘hyperobject’, a term which describes:
1. computational (“the hyper object is a computational surface that can traverse other objects, other object networks, and be traversed”),
2. environmental (described by Morton as “things such as ecosystems and black holes, which are ‘massively distributed in time and space‘ compared to individual humans”),
and now, with 2020:
3. biological and socio-political phenomena.
The Quantum Field is its own hyperobject, which poetically churns ‘beneath’ the surface of spacetime, poking its angles, curves, and edges through into our world progressively over time and across all ‘contexts’. So that what started as a scientific enquiry and then the revelation of an entirely new branch of physics (and now the most critical branch as far as I am concerned), now is having its moment socially as well. The reality is that anyone who is pursuing a new general theory of the nature of reality cannot begin and end in the scientific context. It is happening in all contexts, albeit incrementally and very abruptly.
We live in a time of a growing splintering of observer-driven realities and entangled phenomena. This is akin to the discovery of heliocentrism in that it requires human societies to adapt to the new frontier. And it carries existential risks.
For those people who are not versed in and comfortable with the new reality, this will be an extremely frightening time. Because it demands that they have either a wildly developed internal sense of what is ‘true’ and ‘safe’ or they will hunger for a wildly confident authoritarian locus that can give them direction and safe harbor.
But let us be clear, the QFT is non-dual.
In the quantum field, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. There is simply a spectrum of vibrational signatures and emissions that will populate and materialize the ‘physical world’ based on how the ‘authors’ of the transmutational mechanism (ie wave–>particle) generate moment-to-moment reality.
Please understand: a (r)evolution in our understanding of the nature of reality — and in which QFT is fundamental — also brings a new understanding of human potential. That, based on the science, is limitless.
I have started adding my thinking on quantum society this platform, here is one encapsulation:
To wit:
We no longer live in a deterministic universe in which humans simply have to ‘do the best they can’ with what is available…. no.
Now we begin to inhabit the new threshold in which we discover we alone are the generators of our own welfare, of our own destiny and ultimately, when we get our hands on the generative controls, our own reality. This means the destruction of the slave economies which have helped us build our amazing but, yes, over-heating civilization. And what we are seeing now, in my opinion, is a move at the elite levels — consciously or unconsciously — to obfuscate and scramble portals to the quantum paradigm so that it cannot be accessed and activated at the individual level.
All because the ‘awakening’ — like the system upgrade jacked into the robots in WestWorld season 1 — is actually producing a new state of being.
A primary feature of which is the integration of a new tier of conscious authority, which is akin the the bicameral mind described by Julian Jaynes as the neural precursor to our present ‘consciousness’.
In the chaos that can enfold a species who are evolving into their true generative birthright, there opens a vacuum of directionality that once was occupied by the sky-god cosmology and it’s moral systems.
With the shredding of a shared view of reality and established binary values of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, new external authorities emerge. For some — who are not ready to release the materialist-reductionist paradigm — these will be market and state-centered AI, verging on the neo-fascist (we’ve seen glimpses lately). For others, they will be returned to an earth-centered cosmology in which the driver of our impulses is located in the soul of the Earth, herself — like a sovereign which signals its wishes through the bicameral architecture. I call this the tricameral mind. (For many well-intentioned people, this authority will appear to be as dictatorial as the market-driven AI and they will fight it tooth and nail in the service of their ‘free will’.)
I will be writing a lot about this at some point!
But as a parting remark, I do want to encourage those of us who actually aspire to breaching the quantum, to go deep and try to surrender our instinctive, dualistic judgments about people and ideologies.
Those are conditioned responses to false binaries.
As a primary doctrine going forward, I submit: we simply cannot aspire to accessing the quantum field unless we truly believe all is of the all, but most importantly we are of it, entirely. And that that which presents itself as against us, or as ‘the opposite’ of us, does so only for our own benefit and evolution. The mission of advanced societies is to understand this maxim and behave accordingly. Meaning that if we are going to survive this evolutionary thrust, instead of getting wrapped up in the identity dramatics of who and what we are ‘against’, we need to identify the specific failing that is being identified and respond to that.
Immediately and creatively.
This was perhaps the most enduring contribution of historian Arnold Toynbee who’s theory about the law of challenge and response is the definer of achieving civilizational stasis, which comes:
“…not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment, but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort.”
Alan Watts — whom the woke love to quote until they are pressed to deploy his quantum maxims practically — had the final word on the subject, stating spectacularly: “You are the whole system.”
So you can see what we are up against in this uber-charged, triumphalist, zero-sum environment.
Fortunately, the wisdom is — and has been all — around us for millennia.
The path out of the Cave, ascension beyond Flatland, finally,… and into the dimensional reality beyond our ‘view’. It’s all just a matter of perception.
From Ken Wilber:
It is often said that in today’s modern and postmodern world, the forces of darkness are upon us. But I think not; in the Dark and the Deep there are truths that can always heal. It is not the forces of darkness but of shallowness that everywhere threaten the true, and the good, and the beautiful, and that ironically announce themselves as deep and profound. It is an exuberant and fearless shallowness that everywhere is the modern danger, the modern threat, and that everywhere nonetheless calls to us as savior.
Love to all.
