Notes From Underground- January 17, 2025
Next week's topic for my weekly roundtable at City Club: "Light of the Mind, Light of the World"- Spencer Klavan's radical reading of modern physics.
Greetings from Underground!
Over the past week, I've been reckoning with Spencer Klavan's "Light of the Mind, Light of the World." (PDF of Chapter 7 here).
The thrust of Klavan's argument is that our day-to-day conception of the world is riddled with defunct, Newtonian suppositions, and that the resulting mechanical scientism obscures a more sophisticated world-view— one in which the most revolutionary ideas of twentieth century physics do not contradict ancient wisdom traditions, but instead articulate their core proclamations in the language of mathematics and physics.
An excerpt from Klavan:
The Reappearance of Things
It was not just cities that the quantum revolution wiped away into nothing. An entire picture of the world was being erased: the picture of the mechanical universe, with its solid moving parts churning on unseen, was beginning to fade and dissolve. For some of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers, this prospect was too much to bear. Einstein refused to countenance what he called the “ghost waves” and “dice games” of quantum mechanics: somewhere underlying all of it there must be a solid mathematical picture, “a theory which describes exhaustively physical reality, including four-dimensional space,” whether observed by a human onlooker or not.
Yet it was becoming clear to everyone, as Schrödinger put it in 1931, that “the mathematical apparatus derived by Newton is inadequately adapted to nature.” At Bohr’s relentless prompting, the pioneers of quantum physics were forced to grapple with the possibility that their discoveries might—in the words of Schrödinger’s translator and interviewer James Murphy—“reduce the last building stones of the universe to something like a spiritual throb that comes as near as possible to our concept of pure thought.” Bodies in motion were not the heart of things: they arose out of a darker and more mysterious well, resolving before human eyes into the familiar shapes described by geometry. Perhaps it was only when they could be seen by a conscious observer that “objects” made any sense at all.
This was an ancient truth. It had been hinted at in scripture and wisdom literature all along. But it also represented the end of a centuries-long quest. The scientific revolution had begun in the hope of going beyond appearances, puncturing the fantasies of the human mind and seeing things as they “really are.” Galileo and Descartes had aspired to gaze past all the merely subjective qualities of the material world, peeling away color and texture and sound until only the raw mathematical facts of position, size, and location were left. But now it is becoming clear that even those supposedly pristine numerical attributes are partly indebted to human perception. They are not arbitrary: any two healthy observers can match up their experiences and agree on the location of a tree or a house. But even concepts like “location” can only accurately be used to describe the smallest objects once someone is there to do the describing.
It could never have been otherwise. From the beginning, mathematics was only ever designed to “save the appearances.” It was an abstraction derived from and about human experience, created to explain and apply to human experience. The most optimistic impresarios of the scientific revolution made more daring promises on behalf of numbers, claiming that they could trap the universe in amber and freeze the world into a perfect interlocking mechanism of material objects. But the world is not made only of material objects. It is made of the meeting between mind and matter. It is this human encounter with the outside world that brings it shimmering into an array of form, color, and light.
The human mind—that supposedly primitive and dispensable screen of illusions—is far more fundamental than was once assumed.20 It is not an obstacle, throwing up its dreamlike fancies of selfhood and spirit into the way of hard numerical truth. It is a vehicle, bringing the potential of the unformed material world into definite reality. Things are not divided into “primary” and “secondary” qualities, split between the hard facts of matter and the vaporous deceit of human experience. Human experience is part of the world, which is built up from the raw potential of existence into the panoply of color and light that passes before our eyes. The reign of the small gods is over, and their Tower of Babel is fallen. We are left at the center of the universe, helping to grant it life.
Klavan, Spencer A.. Light of the Mind, Light of the World. (pp. 147-160). Skyhorse Publishing.
Is this just new-fangled solipsism? Wish-casting? Pseudo-scientific mathematical hermeneutics? Metaphysical gymnastics?
Help me, compatriots, you're my only hope.
Onward,
JKLC