Platonic Physics In Dialogue With Wolfgang Smith

TITLE: Platonic Physics: In Dialogue with Wolfgang Smith CHANNEL: Footnotes2Plato DATE: 2023-01-23 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Wolfgang Dr Wolfgang Smith welcome uh to my podcast this is uh the footnotes to Plato podcast which as you probably know uh I’ve borrowed from Alfred North Whitehead’s remark that all of Western or european philosophy can be understood as a series of footnotes to Plato we’re going to talk a bit about platonism today and about your own attempts to bring some clarity uh and make some sense of contemporary physics quantum physics in particular we might touch on relativity as well I know you have some insightful thoughts about that um but to shed light on contemporary physics in light of this uh ancient um wisdom coming out of Plato’s dialogues and the tradition of of neoplatonism that followed in in the wake of those dialogues but I’d like to start on a more biographical note to understand a bit about how your own career unfolded in your own uh intellectual trajectory uh unfolded I know you have degrees in mathematics and physics and and taught mathematics for a number of years but how did you end up uh moving from physics and Mathematics into uh the wisdom of the Ancients and um the work of Plato in particular you I take it you didn’t start there or maybe you did but can you can you lay that out for us well I guess I really started with physics I remember I was 14 years old and I became very curious to understand in a rather childish implicit way no doubt what the world is all about what what its structure is and incidentally it was at that time that I somehow acquired a copy of Whitehead’s book science into modern world so I read that when I was 14 years old I don’t know how much I understood at the time but I was very excited about it and in fact I remember my mother would call me down to dinner and I would say I can’t come now I’m thinking so I was very interested and it somehow meant a great deal to me to try to understand and what was undoubtedly very childish way the structure of the world and I conceived of it in terms of physics and I know you did some important work on physics related to uh the re-entry of uh spacecraft into the Earth’s atmosphere and so on but you also uh would eventually decide to study and teach mathematics um and so was there something about the way that physics was being was being practiced and theorized that led you to decide to move more into mathematics well actually even at that early age my ideas about physics and and the structure of the world were very much at odds with the Contemporary Zeitgeist the prevailing official world view of our civilization and I decided to get my PhD in mathematics and become a professor of mathematics because actually mathematics is probably the only academic subject where uh one will not be accused so in fact cannot be accused or somehow violating the premises of our Zeitgeist so the the subject of political correctness does not come up in mathematics it cannot and this is really one of the deciding reasons I picked that subject I wanted to be free to think about methods of physics and philosophy without in any way being constrained by the Norms of Academia in this regard um I understand uh my next question would would be when you compare This Modern Zeitgeist and in particular the approach to Natural Science that has really developed um out of a kind of Cartesian framework um and the whole scientific revolution in the 17th century um how how has that view departed from the the view of the Ancients like Plato as regards the nature of um the cosmos both in its physical Dimension and perhaps it’s it’s metaphysical Dimension um what was it in other words that the ancient philosophers Plato in particular uh understood that modern science has forgotten or distorted well it’s an excellent question and I would say that the contemporary answer to this these basic questions in other words the Contemporary world view is really strictly speaking the diametric opposite of the platonist they are antipodal because the uh contemporary worldview is really premised upon the belief that the the things that compose our Cosmos are made up of tiny little particles however conceived in other words that it consists of horse which are the merely the sum of parts and I would say that the basic ontological premise of not only platonism but all the ancient the profound ancient metaphysical schools is the opposite namely that the real entities which compose our perceptible Cosmos are what I call irreducible holes which means that they are something more than simply a sum of parts and so I think this is a central conception in platonist ontology that being is an irreducible horror which means that it uh proceeds ontologically the spatial temporal atomization if you want to call it that which pertains to the entities that we perceive in our daily life to the Contemporary scientists all these entities are sums of Parts doesn’t matter whether you conceive of these parts of classical physics or quantum theory there are sums of parts and nothing more and the platonist says no mistaken the real entities the entities that had been are not the sum of Parts they are more than that and in fact they pre-exist in an ontological sphere with spatial and temporal conditions do not exist hmm might you relate this difference in how wholeness is conceived or misconceived as it were to to mathematics and our conception of number and say uh the difference between starting with a hole that can then be divided into individual numbers versus thinking of numbers as already individual and adding up to a whole the neoplatonic or platonic view would seem to me to be that uh the ultimate is is the one and that the one can divide itself or appear to divide itself uh whereas contemporary uh physics and its reductionism uh but also our understanding of number uh seems to me to be to have a more um additive character in which wholeness is something that is achieved by the addition of parts right rather than preceding the parts where Parts would be instead a division from the whole is this do you follow my distinction here yes I uh what you have touched upon here is in my opinion very very Central to the entire problem of uh of ontology namely the greatness and the Pythagorean schools looked upon mathematics in a completely different way from the contemporary uh we can talk about arithmetic or geometry I think what I’m trying to say now can be understood more readily in Geometry take any geometric entity say a line segment to the Contemporary mathematician a line segment is a sum of parts and ultimately the ultimate parts are points so ultimately a line segment is conceived as a point set well the important fact is that in the Greek and in the Pythagorean and platonic schools to be precise a line segment was not conceived as a point set it was conceived precisely as an irreducible whole and so as something that pre-exists in a realm beyond the reach of space and time and let me say that this is also why geometry was so highly respected in the platonist schools and regarded as a means by which the mind of a uh over a human being can be elevated from the psychic to the intellectual realm because the platonists believed that for example the the Prototype of a line segment is in fact an irreducible whoreness which is such is situated beyond space and time and let me say that uh the development of modern mathematics that is modern in the sense of post-cartesian uh following the so-called enlightenment the aim of mathematicians on the fundamental level was precisely to reduce mathematics to the level of Point sets and this was regarded as a great achievement and in fact our friend Alfred North Whitehead was very much involved in that in 1913 he in collaboration with Bertrand Russell published that ebook to work principia Mathematica in three volumes I think there are few books in the history of the world that have had uh a comparable influence while at the same time being read only by a handful of people it’s it’s so Arts truths only a handful of Specialists have ever written this book but let me just say that whereas contemporary mathematicians regardless as a landmark where you’re finally getting to the bottom of things as a platonist are regarded in just the opposite way it was a betrayal of what might be called the higher side of mathematics from the standpoint of the principia you cannot have the focused idea even of what geometry meant in the Pythagorean platonic schools and I always like to remind people of that alleged uh inscription over the portal of Plato’s Academy which read let no one ignorant of geometry enter here it’s a very mysterious saying but it alerts us to the fact that in the Pythagorean and platonic schools geometry played a very very uh Central role and uh if you look at it from our contemporary point of view from from the view of Whitehead and Russell uh that geometry that we now have set down as a standard as a real geometry has nothing to say anymore at all in other words the geometry alluded to in this inscription alerts us to the fact that to the Greeks the great thinkers of ancient Greece geometry was something very very different from what we now conceive it to be yes um the good news for our friend Whitehead is I think he and Russell had differing opinions about uh what was achieved in this this uh series of volumes uh the principia Mathematica there was a fourth volume planned on Geometry the first three focused more on arithmetic right but um on even on Russell’s admission the project failed uh because of all of the um sort of logical tricks um that were needed to uh to make the argument work he said at the end of it something like um you know his his dream of clarifying the foundations of mathematics uh by grounding it in set theory the logic of set theory had failed and uh dissolved in a nest of uh confusion I think is how he phrased it and he was really disappointed by this but Whitehead seems to me to have been quite liberated by this failure and this was even before girdles uh incompleteness theorems kind of showed formally why it was destined to fail but Whitehead was liberated from this in the sense that I I see Whitehead as having a deeper grasp of the intuitive dimension of mathematics that could not be reduced to some series of logical deductions uh or or formalisms that there’s a sense in which we’re participating in these higher forms or patterns and Whitehead would later say that he would try to Define mathematics as having to do with uh the study of patterns and the relationships among patterns and pattern is something um that has an intuitive and almost an aesthetic Dimension to it uh and I think this this sense of of the harmony uh within pattern and between patterns is much more Pythagorean in orientation and so uh the good news is I think Whitehead was not entirely convinced uh even though he was a brilliant you know logician um who tried to carry this project forward with Russell who started as his student right he wasn’t at all um you know wedded to this project I think and his later you know metaphysics I think um shows uh the very different direction that he went in after this earlier phase uh of his career um I don’t wanna we’re gonna talk about about your book uh that’s coming out I believe today but maybe we can just dwell for a moment um on the influence of Whitehead you said that as a 14 year old you read science and the modern world and that was very influential for you I know you’ve also in a number of your books uh drawn upon Whitehead’s famous fallacy of misplaced concreteness as a criticism of contemporary science and physics and also his uh his protest against the bifurcation of nature between uh the uh so-called primary characteristics which could be measured and Quantified and the so-called secondary characteristics everything subjective and qualitative uh which would be you know concerned with the inner experience of human beings which for materialists amounts to a little more than a kind of Illusion or projection and science is really about putting those qualitative Illusions to the side to get to the real quantitative uh measurable heart of the world so what what do you find so important about Whitehead’s protests against this bifurcation and and what would science look like if it overcame this I would say that the fallacy what Whitehead calls the fallacy or bifocation is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of physical science which uh as it were liberates us from a tremendous illusion which has now become practically Universal uh it is very hard to go through a course of studies in the Contemporary University without coming out on the other end as a bifurcationist and bifurcation is a complete uh inversion of the truth uh let me try to explain it as simple as as possible what what bifurcation affirms it it is an an ontology a metaphysics introduced well actually it was first introduced by the marketers uh about 400 something BC in in this famous fragment of his that uh the the naive belief in color the bitter and the sweet but in reality there exists only atoms in the void um this is basically the ontological position that bifurcation imposes upon us not because it’s true or has been verified Say by empirical means but simply because our priori it leaves no other alternative but atoms and the void and incidentally this uh philosophical postulate of Democritus was very much attacked by Plato and the in his school and was very quickly abandoned but they were informed so for about two thousand years the philosophically informed public knew that this was a A Primitive heresy that had been disproved and they did not entertain a bifurcationist Wilton Sean and it was in the uh 17th century at the hands of Renee Descartes that this ancient heresy was reintroduced and has sent since then become the fundamental metaphysical premise of Western Civilization that’s what you learn in so-called higher studies in in philosophy departments so I’d like I think it’s important to understand the the the background also it is important to understand that this is a pure assumption for which there are not and in fact cannot be any kind of evidence uh it it is poured out of thin air and however it is the metaphysics that our scientists especially our physical scientists have sourced to speak imbibed as if their mother’s milk I mean unknowingly through the education to which they are subjects they they come out of it as bifurcationists and the the interesting thing is that if you try to explain to them that what this bifurcation is postulate affirms and why it is drawn out of thin air without any actual support they do not understand what you’re talking about because it is something that they have assumed it’s part of their uh the fundamental built on song and so uh they are really incapable of entering into a debate on that it is simply a postulate which say assume unknowing unknowingly they are not aware of the fact that they are metaphysicians that they do make a metaphysical assumption which is basic to all of their physics they do not understand that and anyone who’s ever tried to converse with physicists about this issue will will I think confirm what I’m saying it’s almost impossible and you know Alfred North Whitehead was one of these for decades he went to all the big universities in England and America and and lectured these people on the uh Aid the unfoundedness and B the the damage to to physics itself that this postulate causes and there has been almost zero Acceptance in the scientific world of what Whitehead had to say um yeah it’s as though a methodological shortcut which would allow one to build toy models of the universe which may have some um predictive success and technological application became mistaken for or gradually became um reified as a as a metaphysical presupposition and and silverified in fact that it became unconscious uh that the phys the physicists nowadays don’t even recognize as you’re saying that they are unconscious metaphysicians who have uh removed themselves and everything subjective and uh intelligent from the universe so as to uh gain access to a very simplified uh model toy model of of what the universe is and how it might operate this has led to some technological innovations but it has also left physics in a state of um deep ontological confusion uh and I take it that your uh I mean many of your books but um including your your more recent book physics a science inquest of an ontology is an attempt uh to to bring some sense um Common Sense back into physics uh Quantum theorists Nobel prize winning Quantum theorists Like Richard Feynman are famous for saying things like nobody understands quantum physics then even affirming and celebrating the absurdity of nature uh as he understood it this seems to me from a philosophical point of view um to be an example of just how muddled to use one of Whitehead’s favorite words uh contemporary physics has become that they that physicists would be celebrating the irrationality and absurdity of the picture that they’re presenting to us of how the physical world operates so let’s get into your proposals here for a new ontology for quantum physics can you lead us into uh your distinction between the what’s described in quantum physics and what you call the corporeal Realm and how physics has become ontologically confused about what is real versus what is a artifact of their means of of calculating uh what is real it’s a very wonderful question I I think the first point that should be made is uh concerns perception and the most important case here of course is visual perception we until uh Democritus and and the card came along all the world believed that we do perceive the external world when we look at the world with our normal eyes what we see is not a race cognitance a thing of the mind we see external objects of many kinds and more or less at the time of Descartes a stereo visual perception imposed itself upon Western Civilization uh which is called the retinal image Theory and if you study cognitive psychology at any University I would strongly imagine that this is what you will be presented with not as a theory but as simply the way things are and I think we all understand basically what this visual retinal image theory has to say it recognizes that in a sense perception starts on the retina where light impinging upon the eye causes electric impulses which are then channeled into various so-called visual centers in the cortex last I heard there were 20 or 21 such visual centers and an enormous amount of information has been gathered and sorry to say that tens of thousands of monkeys have had to pay with their life for this information but in any case this is science there’s no question about it the the trouble is that these visual centers only take apart the visual uh the the the retinal image and so you have 20 different outcomes of that and as the experts in that field admit we now see how the uh visual cortex puts takes the image apart but quote we do not yet see how it puts it back together and the answer to this question I’m totally convinced is and can only be this that the neuronal mechanism does not put the image back together again it in fact it can’t so the end product of this immensely complicated neuronal mechanism in the cortex the end product of it all is many different uh versions of the retinal image taking apart and so it it emerged from these considerations that the neurophysiologist has a big problem and this problem was called The Binding problem how uh do you pass from a million on off positions of neurons scattered throughout various centers in the cortex of the brain to an image of a red rose and uh I answered this problem we in the only way I believe that it can be answered I think there is no other way and the answer is based upon the platonist ontology and what is that answer well according to platonist ontology the cosmos breaks into three levels so planes if you want to call it that the highest what I call the the platon is called the intelligible Realm the the point about the intelligible realm is that it is not subject to either space or time and this is where everything starts this is where the irreducible holes which constitute what we call being originates they originate in this intelligible realm on the opposite extreme the third the third level is the corporeal world as we know it’s true sense perception and in in between and and this corporeal world as everyone knows is subject to both space and time and now in between these two extremes we have what the platonists called sometimes the psychic realm or the vital realm I call it the intermediary and the point is that the intermediary realm is subject to the condition of time but not of space and so the binding problem is resolved and can only be resolved there is no other way it can only be resolved on the intermediary level where the spatial separation of these millions of neurons is transcendent what binds this neuronal uh States into into a Unity a Oneness which is what we visually perceive at any instant of time what binds uh this multiplicity into Unity is a principle pertaining to the intermediary realm that means subject to time but not to space and let me just say that in days gone by every child knew exactly what that principle is this is the soul the animal so man if if man consisted only of a corporeal body without an animal to enliven it visual perception would be impossible because what makes it impossible is The Binding problem here on the corporeal Realm the process of visual perception ends in a vast Multiplicity and there is not a scientist in the world who can scientifically explain to you how that vast multiplicity of neuronal states is brought together into the form say a landscape that you perceive visually yeah or uh let me let me I want to invite you to transition into the relevance of quantum physics in a moment but it seems to me just on this issue of visual perception that we can stick just within the corporeal realm and understand that uh one of the mistakes that leads to this problem The Binding problem uh that many cognitive psychologists have been making is that there’s this implicit presupposition that somehow the brain and the body are separate from their environment uh when in fact um you know as Whitehead’s always pointing out uh you know the the boundary between what’s inside the body and outside the body is very fuzzy and uh rather than having to concoct this whole what is sometimes also called the representational theory of perception where there’s supposed to be uh a kind of neurally based language of thought inside the skull that’s representing and reassembling the sense data coming in from the outside there never was a time when the brain or the retina the eyes were separate from the surrounding world it’s all sort of energetic process relating uh relating to itself and so one can say one can one can remain within the domain of just the corporeal and indeed you draw on uh Gibson’s theory of ecological perception and so far as I know he wasn’t a platonist um but nonetheless recognize the need to put the brain and the body back in the world and to see how our visual perception is a kind of participatory Affair where just by virtue of the way that um light reflects off of objects in our environment there’s far more uh were bathed by far more information than what can be represented on the two-dimensional surface of the retina and that our capacity to perceive depth and so on uh can only be explained with a realistic understanding of perception as I actually um you know participating in the world and not uh separated off from it within the skull as though there was a little man watching a projection uh on a screen inside of our heads right but what you’re proposing this deeper platonic um ontology gets us into this other problem in cognitive science uh the hard problem of Consciousness it seems to me that on Strictly physicalist grounds um there simply should be no consciousness there should be no visual perception at all in the sense of a conscious perception uh and so that there is consciousness suggests to me that uh and should suggest to cognitive scientists that they’re making some ontological mistakes uh earlier in the process of reasoning that led to this so-called hard problem of Consciousness um the solution to the hard problem of Consciousness is is to change our ontology ultimately right and so this platonic vision of a uh a three-fold order of reality I think is one way uh of doing that but you know if if Consciousness didn’t exist there wouldn’t be any science so we wouldn’t be asking these questions um we would simply be um you know zombies so it’s this is this seems quite obvious to me that we need to to make some um changes in our underlying ontology now when you talk about the the intelligible the intermediary and the corporeal realm there’s a way of uh interpreting quantum physics and making sense of quantum physics in terms of this this scheme right can you lay out for us uh what say the the wave function Schrodinger’s wave equation what is it describing and how how does it uh relate to the corporeal world of our sense experience and the intelligible world uh that would be the the ontological source of of our uh of the realm of appearances that we sense and situate Us in in your platonic interpretation of quantum theory well that’s an excellent question and it is a question that I think can be answered meaningfully only after the heavy lifting is done to put contemporary physics on an ontological basis which I believe can be done only on platinous grounds you know and I think this is really the reason why Feynman has very astutely made this observation which has become very famous namely quote no one understands quantum theory I think this is literally true that what it really means is that if you look at the world through Cartesian eyes as almost every physics professional does then quantum theory is is a is a realm that makes no sense you cannot really understand what it deals with and why what what gives it a kind of correctness a kind of validity yeah I have become absolutely convinced that in order to answer this question you have to abandon bifurcation abandon the uh almost instinctive way Western thinkers now conceive of the so-called physical universe and look at the look at the entire problem from a platonist’s point of view where you have this tripartite Cosmos and uh then the answer to this question what is quantum theory and of course that also implies that you answer what is classical physics you can’t understand quantum theory unless you also understand classical physics in the bargain the point is that both of these Sciences as it were calling out for an ontology because the ontology that uh Springs from the Cartesian Axiom of bifurcation just doesn’t work it makes no sense and on that basis you really do not understand physics at all it’s not just quantum theory that’s not understood less obviously but equally an equally written sense you do not understand classical physics at all so what you’re asking me is how does uh really two questions first of all what is the platonist ontology of physics how how does a platonist understand uh the ontological basis of physics and how does that uh enable you to understand quantum theory so these These are the implications well let me say the outset what I find so surprising is the fact that once you have trust the spreadness try partition into the intelligible the psychic and the corporeal or the eve Eternal intermediary the corporeal once you have understood the stripe partition the ontological understanding of physics comes out very simply very rigorously and it leads to a clear sharp understanding of classical physics on the one side and quantum theory on the other you see that physics naturally breaks into these two into these two disciplines so since you’ve asked the question let me try to answer it as simply as I can but it will take a few minutes I mean I I said it’s simple every child really can understand it but even so uh it requires a bit of concentration to uh to go through the steps of of this interpretation so according to platonist metaphysics or being comes or derives from the Avital plane you see it’s it’s it’s it’s exact opposite of the Contemporary scientistic Outlook which thinks that of Things Come From Below from Quantum particles these particles unite into bigger and bigger Aggregates and voila the things of the corporeal world and whatever lies Beyond uh are formed in this way no uh it’s just the other way around uh the first thing to understand is that the platonist ontology distinguishes between being and non-being and a mere sum of Parts entity this the sort of thing that a physicist conceives and works with uh is not regarded it’s not viewed in the platalist ontology at all ontology deals with being and what is that it is an irreducible whoreness so if you will the entities comprising the corporeal world break into two kinds the kind that the physicist works with and understands and can can tell you about and these are sums of Parts realities and from a plate on this point of Vantage a sum of part reality is not a has no being at all it is a kind of a fantasy so being from a playlist point of view is an irreducible whoreness which means it is a manifestation in space and time if if so be it of something that actually transcends space and time something that is intelligible to the intellect and well and the difference between intellect and reason is that intellect deals with uh irreducible holes uh razio or the reason deals with sums of parts so the kind of mathematics that ends that the principia Mathematica whiter than Russell describes is a mathematics of razio it is a mathematics of reason it is completely outside the mathematics of being the the platonist Pythagorean mathematics it’s it has nothing to do with that okay so the other in the corporeal World these two kinds of realities what the platon is called being and what the Contemporary physicist deals with which happens to be a mere sum of parts and as such it lacks being so in the when I first began to observe this I was rather fascinated to see that strictly speaking from a metaphysical point of view there are in a way two different worlds two different universes the universe of the ontologist which derives from the Ave Eternal and is made up of um of irreducible hordes and then the word of the physicist with his galaxies and his black holes and this and that these are all some of parts realities which actually the platonist doesn’t even see and doesn’t doesn’t want to see because it there’s no being there the platonist is interested in being and incidentally every living organism is a being from the amoeba to the anthropos and therefore cannot in principle be comprehended on the basis of physics now of course the physicists can tell you many things about the body and it’s obviously what he has to say can have empirical validity but yet in a sense he doesn’t even see the organism because the organism is not a sum of Parts the organism is an irreducible whole and when our scientists in the 19th century talked about along with Talent all these things they were simply alluding to the fact that only from a plate on this point of view can you really understand the living organisms and obviously physics can say certain things about it but what it says what it talks about always is below the ontological level of an organism so biology is across it’s a closed field to the physicist so the world then consists in a sense that two worlds in which we live the platonist world of irreducible Horrors and the physicists world of the 10 000 things which he uh which he talks about and incidentally uh you may ask the question does he construct these things or does he discover them the answer is a little of both so the first thing that the ontologists must teach the scientists is the distinction between if you will the really real world which consists of irreducible holes and organisms are part of that and then the empirical world for lack of a better name which is a world which is how the scientists the physical scientist concedes of things and that’s something entirely different you cannot confuse these two but the beauty is that in a certain sense that only the metaphysician can understand you can really say that the difference between the world of the metaphysician which comprises irreducible force in the world of the physicist which comprises these some of parts entities the difference is the one is real the other is not the final analysis it comes down to that there’s a uh an interesting line in one of The Vedic scriptures the bhagavad-gita which says the unreal never is the real never ceases to be the conclusion about these two discernment is uh rightly perceived by the seers of truth it’s a wonderful statement when you ponder it you see it hits the nail on the head the unreal never is the things that the physicists talks about it never is and please understand it doesn’t mean to say that it’s it’s just imaginary or anything like that no I’m I’m using technical language here you have to otherwise you get nowhere so there are these two words and now now that I have hopefully explained that the question arises what does that imply regarding physics that’s what we need to ask ourselves now well uh let me first of all point out the ontological definition or conception of classical physics ontologically speaking there are corporeal objects what does that mean a corporeal object is an object pertaining to the corporeal stratum which constitutes an irreducible horn the physicist knows nothing about that because he he doesn’t talk about irreducible wholeness he can’t even conceive of it in physical terms because our mathematics does not describe irreducible holes our mathematics is geared to point sets so uh so take an irreducible uh and a red apple just to be concrete so there is the corporeal Apple and it is something that we can perceive and it is something that derives its irreducible whoreness directly from the Eternal plane there is a corporeal Apple because before that the pre-exists an intelligible Apple and so now that I have introduced this idea of corporeal objects I can tell you from from this ontological point of view what classical physics is about classical physics is the physics of sub corporeal entities so take a corporeal entity an apple let us say call it X associated with this x there is a physical Apple which you can call SF and this physical Apple uh incidentally the corporeal apple is red and it is sweet and whatever other perceptible attributes it may have the physical Apple is is neither red nor sweet because it is the apple as a physicist consists of it so it is fully describable in mathematical terms except for one thing and here here we come to the to the crucial point since X the corporeal apple is an irreducible hardness so is the physical Apple the physical apple is still an irreducible whoreness which in other words means that it has been I’ve already I think explained this idea that being is the same thing as irreducible orders so the point is that classical physics is subcoporial and this means that it deals with entities which have irreducible wholeness entities which have been now uh please note that what this entails this entails that the objects of classical physics are more than what the physicists can conceive because the physicists cannot conceive and does not conceive of irreducible whoreness that’s the conception no differential equations for that that’s that’s an ontological conception the point is however that unbeknownst to the physicist every sub corporeal object is an irreducible War which means that it has B now as I say the classical physicist takes this for granted and he cannot conceive of these things they are beyond the vocabulary of physics now let us go to quantum physics quantum mechanics what are the quantum entities well as we all would expect at this point having already understood what I said a moment ago we would certainly say that quantum physics deals with entities that are not sub corporeal and the fact that they are not subcoporeal means that they have no irreducible hormones and this is where the weirdness of quantum theory comes in because ontologically speaking it deals with entities which have no being no wonder no one understands quantum theory because it is not natural for the human mind to think about things which have no being it takes it is also why it takes a while to learn physics it’s quite a job to learn to think about things that have no being all right now if that was the whole story about Quantum objects there could obviously be no quantum theory because there can be no real physics no real empirical knowledge concerning things that simply and purely do not have been so somewhere along the line being must come into the picture how does it come into the picture and the answer is really obvious being enters into quantum theory in the act of measurement or observation because in the act of measurement or observation the quantum non-entity comes into contact with a corporeal instrument which is endowed with being is endowed with IW irreducible whoreness and in the act of measurement this irreducible whoreness of the instrument induces an IW in the measured object itself and incidentally this is a rather technical thing uh in in the book that you showed us a few minutes ago I I explain how this transfer of irreducible wholeness takes place it takes place through a mode of causation which is primary and which by which actually the universe the universe comes into being and this is a mode of causation which uh differs radically from the mode of causation that physics deals with physics deals with a causation that takes place through some process moving through space in time this is why you can write it write differential equations for it but this is a mode of causation which incidentally is operative only on the corporeal level not above because there’s no space above that level only time and then if eternity so the point is that this transfer of IW from the instrument to the object of measurement takes place through what I call vertical causation which is the primary causation of the of the cosmos and this is a causation physics cannot understand this is also why you see for example the famous measurement problem uh when when Quantum physicists tried to understand how you measure a a so-called Quantum system and how that measurement instantaneously collapses the wave function and so on they were completely mystified and right and so because uh measurement cannot be understood in terms of horizontal causation so the reason physicists never could after almost 100 years resolve the so-called measurement problem is very simple because the act of measurement requires vertical causation it cannot be understood in terms of horizontal causation so I think I have now I apologize for talking so long at this stretch I don’t think but it was unavoidable I have now really explained how on the basis of simple straightforward platonists ontology I can explain a the rationale of classical physics and B the rationale of quantum physics and to and let me assure you that in light of this explanation all the pieces fit together for example if you think about the measurement problem there are no more gaps it all holds together and you see that in terms of uh vertical causation and irreducible hardness it all fits together in fact it’s easy the child can understand it thank you Wolfgang uh I appreciate you leading us through that I want it together oh good for a moment I didn’t hear you please go on um I wanted to invite you to lay out this account um this platonist interpretation of of both classical and quantum physics and I appreciate you leading us through it step by step um I recognize that there are some technicalities and that it can be difficult to just uh you know re rehearse the doll um impromptu like that I thought you did a great job I want to try to connect this to um whiteheads uh ontology and and his cosmological scheme and see in what ways you find it compatible or or incompatible um when you talk about the this three levels of being um the intelligible the intermediary and the corporeal it strikes me that one way of translating this into Whitehead scheme would be to talk about the corporeal as what he would call the realm of actual entities and the intelligible as the realm of what he would call Eternal objects and then this intermediary realm is is really the core of Whitehead’s metaphysics he comes up with this term concrescence to describe uh what goes on in the intermediary though for him as a process philosopher he’s really trying to throw this whole scheme of levels into dynamism into into motion as it were um such that concrescence this this process of becoming is a description of how the potential which is his word for what the intelligible forms or the Eternal objects are their Potentials in his view how those potentials uh become actual how in each moment um of of our experience in each moment of um any actual entities experience there’s a process of concence whereby potentiality is becoming actualized and in the context of quantum theory Whitehead would say that you know what the the wave function is describing is not something actual it’s describing the potentialities that are available in any given um event or process of concence and that as concrescence moves from its through its phases of actualization it’s in a way collapsing the wave function if you want now you know Whitehead’s rendering of this is presupposing a non-darwinian but nonetheless evolutionary understanding of of the universe of cosmogenesis as a as a process whereby um ever more complex organisms are emerging right he would view organisms as uh an adequate account not just of the biological realm but perhaps you know you’re familiar he calls his philosophy the philosophy of organism because he thinks organism goes all the way down uh in a sense it describes the physical world just as well as the biological world so galaxies and and stars and so on for Whitehead their species of organism um atoms are species of organism and evolution for him is this Cosmic process uh whereby you know uh simpler organisms like atoms uh through processes of um uh creative relationship and emergence eventually if they eventuate in more complex organisms like human beings and he does have a a vision of the Divine as luring this process of evolution forward now I know you’ve disagreed uh with this Vision that Whitehead lays out but I do while while it’s the question of time and evolution right where the differences arise and I wonder given your the influence of Whitehead on um on your work as we’ve already discussed earlier his understanding of bifurcation and uh fallacy of misplaced concreteness his critique of materialistic physics and and Whitehead’s insistence on you know he says in science in the modern world I believe that in his view a thorough going evolutionary cosmology is incompatible with materialism because materialism insists upon these fundamental particles that do not evolve and that are just sort of given um and so given his view of evolution which is quite different from Darwin’s which only applies to the biological Realm um you know Whitehead didn’t think the darwinian story of biological evolution was was an adequate explanation for speciation or for living organisms we can go into that if you’d like but can you describe for me where you part ways with Whitehead and and what it is that you find um inadequate about his interpretation of these questions well I find it hard to believe that for example in the biological Realm there is any process at all which results in building complex and complex organism all those simpler organisms in other words apart from the fact that the darwinian mechanism if you will of random mutations followed by natural selection is utterly incorrect there’s no truth in that at all and it’s impossible apart from that I do not think that this is how the highest species of organisms uh arrive in this world I do not think that there’s any process at all Dominion or postavinian that uh build say a mammal out of out of fish I think this is Pure Fantasy and actually when you reflect upon what I said earlier namely that every living organism is an irreducible whoreness which means that it is not the sum of Parts which means that you cannot conceive it as a sum of parts so I find it hard Matthew to conceive of whiteheads uh process philosophy in terms compatible with platonism now perhaps it’s just a inability on my part but I must tell you I’m very very dubious that this can be done if you reflect upon the fact that a living organism is an irreducible whoreness then it seems to me quite obvious that the only way this irreducible whoreness can be put here is through an act of vertical causation originating in the intelligible ground and I I you know why it had far better than I perhaps you can correct me but I do not see anything in whiteheads philosophy corresponding to what I call vertical cordiality a causality which Acts instantaneously Matt Matt may I ask Wolfgang a question sure Wolfgang um so I just wanted to ask a clarifying question um you know you were talking about the integrally every corporeal object is is essentially a tripartite correct yes right so so your red apple example uh there’s a sort of a Eternal core to that apple and you could say that the the existence of the parts the corporeal parts of the Apple emanate out from the inner one the inner irreducibility the inner being of that Apple I don’t mean literally inner obviously corporeally inner I mean existentially inner um now another thing with this is that I think that I wonder if you could speak to whether you would say that when you come from and this is backpedaling a little bit but I think it’s still pertinent to what we’re what you’re just you guys are discussing here that when you go from when you’re talking about a top-down versus a bottom up kind of causality from a from this top-down perspective you can’t well we’ve also we’ve we’ve all we’re all philosophy Majors so we all learned uh the principle at one point or another whether we agree with it or not that the greater cannot come that the greater cannot come from the Lesser um that’s you know which I I hold to be a pretty uh powerful principle of um ontological Principle as well as logical principle um but in the case of the cosmic tripartition uh you have essentially the many emanating from the one in a sense would you agree with that well you you can certainly say these words but um there is a likelihood that they will be misunderstood because uh the the emanation of uh irreducible wholeness from the intelligible to the corporeal plain let us say is does not actually involve a lessening there’s no greater and no smaller here the point is that the irreducible horror on the corporeal level uh contains within itself the irreducible wholeness so there’s no listening and [Music] let me say that if you realize the fact that there are wise men and there have been and there are people who who actually are able to um see on an Avital level uh in their eyes there’s no listening at all what is here is is also there and what is not here is nowhere as the tabulous maractino so these ideas went all the way into the Middle Ages when people still understood platonism so that would be my answer to your question right now would you say alternatively I think this is more tier to your language that when when well first of all when you talk of pre-existence on the Ave Eternal you don’t mean that in a temporal sense you mean that because we’re talking about vertical times right it’s an ontological pre-existence so what rather what we have in the case of say a corporeal Apple we have the avaternal which is fragmented the The Descent from the a Eternal to the corporeal is a fragmenting of the being of being and then furthermore from the corporeal to the sub corporeal is a further fragmentation and finally the trans corporeal is Ultimate fragmentation so I hope John I’ve answered your question and I think we should go back to Matthew now let him thank thank you yeah thank you this this is helpful though in thinking about the relationship of the one in the many and you know Whitehead’s attempts to I would say integrate a more perennialist uh platonic view of the nature of reality with a more um modern view of uh of of Creative Evolution if you will he he while he’s calling his philosophy process philosophy he’s very clear in his book process and reality that we need to reconcile these two great intuitions of uh both flux and permanence um I would read Plato’s cosmological dialogue for the Timaeus as an attempt to do just this in a way though Plato obviously gives pride of place to the Eternal nonetheless um in the Tomas there’s a description of an insult Universe with life and motion and there’s something about the Eternal forms that at least as Plato often describes them lacks life and emotion this would be Whitehead’s View um and so when you were asking is there anything equivalent to uh vertical causation in Whitehead and I think there is um he would he would describe this in terms of uh but he calls the primordial nature of God uh which is an eternal uh vision of of the of the intelligible realm that is in a sense um uh incarnate in every every organism’s experience of the world so God is present in each organism God is um present as what Whitehead calls the initial aim that that shapes uh the experience of each organism or each compressing actual entity again to use his terms and I take this as the way in which there’s a whole to part causality operative in in his cosmology which is how I understand what you mean by vertical causation a kind of holds apart even though the part is also itself a whole uh every organism is an irreducible whole but I think by virtue of this connection through vertical causation whereas horizontal causation would be more of a part to part um uh mode of causality the problem with Whitehead is he had to invent uh his own rather um idiosyncratic language in order to to bring about this integration that he sought between uh platonic vision of the Eternal and uh I think a more contemporary vision of a um a creative universe so uh I think we’re coming towards the end of our time together and I you know where I would like to to to end here is on this question of um our religious and spiritual Outlook um we’ve been talking mostly about science and how we understand the nature of reality and the nature of the universe but when we think about um our place as human beings in this mystery I wonder about the role of of history and the sense in which particularly in the religions associated with the Bible um or or the abrahamic religions even including the Quran um Judaism uh Christianity Islam history and the history of the human Community plays a very important role in the revelation of um you know the nature of the Divine and and the uh the purpose of creation ultimately but I wonder in the context of a more perennialist view where it would seem um as though historical processes in some way an illusion uh what meaning are we to make as human beings of of our history where we’ve come from and where we’re going if in some sense the truth as I understand the perennialist perspective is just to return to the one as it were to escape the illusion of history and if I’m mischaracterizing please correct me um but do you understand the the sort of religious intuition that I would uphold will be one wherein there is a historical process the Divine is involved in it and that we are called to um exercise a kind of freedom and and love uh to bring about the the culmination of this historical process and that to Simply say that it’s that time historical time is illusory is to in some ways um make that historical process meaningless and our role as free human beings in that process to meaningless do you understand what I’m absolutely yeah I understand very well what you you the question you’re raising and I’m uh I think they are the most important questions you one can raise and I wish we would have a full period to discuss these questions but let me in answer in partial answer at least um tell you my my view about these matters now first of all in regard to platonism I regard platonism as inherently the same as The Vedic tradition there’s no essential there’s no essential difference of Outlook between The Vedic Outlook you find in the say the upanishads and the platonist Outlook and I would like to point out that uh whether you’re talking uh The Vedic The Vedic from The Vedic point of view or from the platonist in either case the purpose of philosophy is not to bring anything down this is this is how we in the west would think no the purpose is on the country to ascend from where we are now to the Ave Eternal plane and let me tell you very very briefly that in my case after getting my doctorate and I looked forward to a year that I spent uh in India this was a long time ago when conditions still were very very different and the higher spirituality in India was far more accessible than it is presumably today and so I spent about seven months living among sadhus in remote parts of India as it were observing them and to the extent that was possible speaking with them and asking them what I wanted to know and the upshot of it is that I became convinced that whereas we speak abstractly and philosophically about the uh the the triple word these ascetics actually travel in it on a daily basis as a matter of fact in Sanskrit there is a Sanskrit term for the Triple world it’s called the tribuvana literally literally the three worlds and these yogis that were still in existence of 50 years ago when I was traveling there on a daily basis would as it were go right through the intermediary which is very dangerous by the way even even if you could it’s in medieval Christendom it was called the harrowing of hell and few Saints even ventured to do that it’s it’s not child’s play this is a realities and there is um the ayogic means of doing it whether they still exist today I don’t know but getting back now to the platonist tradition I was very very excited when not so long ago I learned from an English platonist who should be much better known than he is Thomas Taylor he seems to have had some inside information about the platonist and Pythagorean traditions and in a fascinating book dealing with Pythagoras and the first book of Euclid uh Thomas Taylor describes that a journey with the young Pythagoras made to Egypt so when Pythagoras was a young man he traveled to Egypt and became a disciple of one of the Egyptian Masters and Thomas Taylor describes their life their discipline and when I read this I realized this is practically identical to what I myself witnessed in India amongst the sadness so first of all this is something that you cannot do yourself you can only enter into these higher Realms through discipleship only one who has himself acquired this through a master he can initiate you and put you through these disciplines which if all goes well will then in the end enable you also to attain attain what it is a matter of vision it is a matter of sight what both guitarists and Plato I’ll try to instill in their disciples is the ability to actually live if you will on the Avital level to merge in that trans trans Cosmic vision of reality direct not through any intermediaries and incidentally foreign I I learned that in India every 14 year old Brahman born in India understands that if you’re seeking God in that sense of this Vision on the intelligible level you have to sacrifice the ordinary worldly aims and Ambitions that we all have and so it is a way of syllabus it’s a way of purification and the only point in which the platonists Pythagorean tradition differs from The Vedic is this in the platonist yoga if you want to use that term geometry plays a key role and to the best of my knowledge this is nowhere to be found in The Vedic tradition this is this is Western and what is that role well geometry as we understand it belongs to the intermediary plane it is if you were a psychic if you think of a circle or a sphere this is a psychic construct however within that psychic construct there is eternal archetype and so in principle it is possible to transition from geometry in the sense in which we all understand the term to a direct vision of intelligible reality and this is a form of yoga uh a form not known in India but it is when I read about the actual life of these disciples the celibacy and the mandatory initiation and the role of the guru the spiritual guide I realize this is this is part of the same overall tradition and it it gives you an entirely new way of understanding platonism and the Pythagorean tradition which are the same uh metaphysical if there’s no difference there so we in the west have to learn that because these ideas are all very strange and such ideas about the religion as we have in the west are very very different and incidentally there is a profound and irreducible difference between The Vedic and platonist approach to religion on the one side and the judeo-christian on the other and in today’s culture there is an enormous amount of confusion on this topic and I’m totally convinced that the so-called perennialist school is mistaken that they look upon the judeo-christian tradition through vedantic eyes and what you see through vedantic eyes is always going to be vedanta the judeo-christian conceptions are simply not visible in pedantic terms so anyhow I’m being very general in in these remarks but since you touched upon these scenes I just wanted to in in a world or two give you my perspective on that it’s it’s very different from the perennialists and my understanding of platonism I must say I O squarely to the English platonist Thomas Taylor where he got a trauma I have no idea but reading Thomas Taylor I began to realize this is not a scholar who’s learn things from books somehow he is an Insider of this tradition thank you Wolfgang I appreciate all that you’ve shared in the last 90 minutes or so I I wish we could go longer uh perhaps we can we can arrange to speak again at another another time to go more into depth uh particularly particularly on this this final topic um John did you want to add something uh no I just wanted to uh say uh thanks on the on behalf of the initiative thanks for having Wolfgang on and uh it was it was very interesting yeah I agree I want to thank you to Matthew I I’m very happy that you had me on and these are very very major issues needless to say which you raised and uh God willing perhaps we’ll have another occasion to continue I hope so all right well thank you both uh this is a great way to spend a Sunday morning I agree thank you so much all the best to you Matthew