| Ellie Epp workshop index | Embodiment Studies web worksite index |
Body and cosmos III. What is a body? Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, [the human] either vanishes altogether or loses [its] primacy. the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up - the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and sub-atomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains. My question in this session is how to understand the quantum physics discussion if we keep the human body central. What is the relation between quantum theory and embodiment studies? Our newer understanding of materiality grounds the notion of embodiment in a kind of etheriality. What can be the relation between what is speculated to be the unified but unsubstantial physical ground of the cosmos and the substantial and separate bodies we experience concretely and theorize at human scale? Can quantum theory be used to enrich our sense of bodies at the human scale?
1. Philosophical subtlety in relation to quantum results We are in an interregnum in the interpretation of quantum results during which we should be developing subtlety.
We are trying to think about that scale using concepts of wholes and parts, objects and causes that we have developed at our own scale. Those concepts do not work at quantum scales. Quantum systems can be analyzed rigorously only by treating the entire system as a whole. The term "photon" is neither clear nor rigorously defined with respect to an entangled system. When people talk about "entangled photons", there really aren't two clearly defined separate or independent photons, there's only the (more complex) quantum state of a (more complex) combined quantum system. Applying ideas or concepts derived from simple rigorously defined photon systems to this more complex system can get you in trouble. Entities that belong to the atomic and subatomic domains cannot be described by a single model what the models describe are not the entities themselves Substance-attribute description has to be given up. Attributes belong to the measuring set-up too. Steven Weinstein Suggestion: study subatomic physics results carefully separating experiment from interpretation. Be interested in the ways paradoxes and confusions in our understanding of QP may be the result of conceptual mistakes that operate on other scales too, for instance on the way we understand larger-scale structures in bodies. For instance the way we tend to think of bodily organs as entirely bounded by their enclosing membranes whereas at the level of fields they may interpenetrate each other.
Quantum theory is being done by evolved, embedded bodies.
Use a (transitive) verb: bodies are sometimes conscious of something. Talk about the aboutness of bodies, so that we can imagine various kinds of aboutness as all being structural - sentient aboutness included. Image: the caustic figure in Trapline
Embodiment studies would be looking for a metaphysical framework that has felt and sensed knowing integrable with the larger physical framework. And that is workable as a framework for experiences and intuitions so far unexplained. In reading the range of QP interpretation be aware of the effects of theological/body denial motives on interpretations. We need a feminist critique of quantum theory in terms of its unconscious social agenda. Ways quantum theory is like ancient religious visions - priestly declarations intimidating the uninitiated and convincing them to distrust their own perception. Akin to studies of Torah? Emphasis on unknowability at a time when more people, including women, have more access to confident knowledge. Compare the postmodern critique of identity and authority formulated at a time when women were just beginning to speak publicly with authority.
What is the underlying appeal? (For me it's a visual appeal.) Look carefully at the pathologies of quantum interpretation. Magical and primary process thinking. Sort out the ways 'our minds' can legitimately be understood to be in control of reality and the ways they cannot.
- And be aware that if everything is everything, nothing can be anything in particular. For instance fields extending to various distances both 'belong to' bodies and are shared. It alters what is meant by an object if its field is included. An object's field is part of it and another object 'feels' it.
2. What is a field? Mathematical fields and hypothesized physical fields. I've come to think that the three-dimensional geometrical web, extending in all directions is the molecular level. There are no objects or bodies or boundaries at this level-only the ever-changing network or web, the crystalline lattices of replicating patterns. an ocean of light, ephemeral fabric of the real The building block perspective on matter as but bricks with which objects were constructed was replaced by a view of matter as being active, composed of patterns of energy and excitation. (The following description is from the web, author unknown.) In physics, a region throughout which a force may be exerted; examples are the gravitational, electric, and magnetic fields that surround, respectively, masses, electric charges, and magnets. Michael Faraday first realized the importance of a field as a physical object, during his investigations into magnetism. He realized that electric and magnetic fields are not only fields of force which dictate the motion of particles, but also have an independent physical reality because they carry energy. In a field description, rather than body A directly exerting a force on body B, body A (the source) creates a field in every direction around it and body B (the detector) experiences the field that exists at its position. If a change occurs at the source, its effect propagates outward through the field at a constant speed and is felt at the detector only after a certain delay in time. ... Each type of force (electric, magnetic, nuclear, or gravitational) has its own appropriate field Field theory usually refers to a construction of the dynamics of a field, i.e. a specification of how a field changes with time or with respect to other components of the field. A field is a condition of space surrounding a body This condition of space is the seat of energy. Energy is thus continuously spread through space by a medium we call a field. Action at a distance then can be understood as action in a field. Field forces comprise the activation this energy. Quantum void or vacuum. Field of fields. Plenum, ephemeral fabric of the real. Textured space. Images: the jumpy clumpy granularity in Bright and dark. The sensitivity of the water's surface in Trapline. 4 kinds of bonding 'forces'/energies that come into play at different densities. Gravitational, electric, strong, weak. Cosmological story of the big bang, early cooling - sequence by which the 4 basic forces themselves evolve. Quark-gluon soup, phase transitions first to nuclear forces, then to atomic and molecular forces, and then to gravitational forces. quantum field theory assumes that all of space is filled with a quantum field and interprets all stable particles and the messenger particles as excitations of this field. For quite a long time many physicists thought that the world consisted of both fields and particles In its mature form, the idea of quantum field theory is that quantum fields are the basic ingredients of the universe, and particles are just bundles of energy and momentum of the fields.
3. What is a living body? One can best feel in dealing with living things how primitive physics still is. Albert Einstein body: OE bodig What a body is - not a spirit and not a machine more to be discovered. What do we mean by 'physical structure'? structure: L struere to build
If we drew a line representing the history of the universe from the big bang until today, say, 100 feet long, then the first inch would represent the time it took to establish all the subatomic particles, their interactions and all the laws of physics still obtaining today ... on this same 100 foot scale, the creation of the earth occurs in the last inch ...zoom in on that inch of earth time until that final inch looks like 100 feet ... the first living organisms appear about halfway, and the first mammals in the last 5 feet ... in the last inch, precursors to [human people] ... zoom in on this last inch until it looks like 100 feet once more ... Moses walked on the earth only in the last inch-and-a-half ... in the last eighth of an inch ... printing and looms ... movies, computers Michael Benedikt Image: a paramecium, simple organism as both bounded and connected Workable structure. Highly selective permeable boundaries. Taking in, keeping out. It's temporally continuous. It builds itself, it maintains itself, it in-forms itself, it eventually fails. Structure at any given time is the result of a history of structuring events.
b. quantum biology Question in quantum biology whether or how quantum effects are relevant at biological scale. The case for quantum biology remains one of "not proven." There are many suggestive experiments and lines of argument indicating that some biological functions operate close to, or within, the quantum regime, but as yet no clear-cut example has been presented of non-trivial quantum effects at work in a key biological process. Davies 2004 If quantum mechanics is to play a non-trivial role in bio-systems, then some way to sustain quantum coherence at least for biochemically, if not biologically, significant time scales must be found. Without this crucial step, quantum biology is dead. "Biology is not about applying QM as it is already known through experiences of traditional physics, but rather about an attempt to extend QM in the manner that physicists have not tried." [from the web] "Living systems have mastered the making and breaking of chemical bonds, which are quantum mechanical phenomena." Plants synthesizing elements. Inorganic nuclear science asserts huge energies are needed to do this, but the evidence is that enzymes accomplish low-energy transmutation at the nuclear level. "A deeper level of nuclear chemistry," "a type of reaction, specifically utilized by life, which brings about fusion in a strangely quiet way." Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird 1973 The secret life of plants Penguin p.252
4. Imagining the whole Big bang rapid cooling gluon soup - quantum void. What happens if you think of it as a continuous fabric - everywhere very textured - actual space and time intervals and relative positions - lumpy and active with a lot of differences on a lot of scales regions where there is a lot of one kind of thing, regions where there is less it's all one soup simultaneous and grainy. None of the grain can really be thought to be one thing continuous over time there are bitty quantities of spin, charge, mass all of which are understood by how they affect other bits and each of these relative densities of whatever it is can travel relative to other things. By the nature of the fabric itself it's a oneness not bits plus space these distributed intensities self-organize they sort into regions and as they sort still other things can happen. A nucleus grain forms, which is just a locking of certain configurations of buzz: the fact of that locking-in is called the strong force. When a nucleus grain forms, some of it clumps up very tight into stars. Some of it this depends spatially on the way it initially splashes out pulls buzz-bits of opposite charge into another size of grain: this is called the electrical force. A thick aggregation of either kind of grain somehow pulls other aggregations: gravitational force. All of these kinds of organization are thought of as being formed by other kinds of exchange of buzz. Stable atomic grain and then stable molecular grain, all held in aggregation by electrical relations made possible by the tight stability of the nucleus. Molecular grain established where aggregations are stable enough. Matter is pattern of grain. Molecules are patterns of atom grain but the bound-togetherness in the more complicated ones needs and makes something extra? Associations of molecule patterns. Then molecule patterns that can organize the surrounding patterns into replicate patterns. There are no solid things being patterned but when there is a complex field of pattern there is enough stability and instability for organisms which must be able to elaborate patterns by pulling in and ejecting patterns at various grain. The cosmological field is self-organizing; the organism is self organizing in a way that runs somewhat against the grain of the cosmic field's character. The new thing to imagine is that some of this vast organization of buzz intensities sort of just pops very briefly and some of it is stable. The whole vast weave keeps strict balances and there's a jumpiness about it kind of a spatio-temporal jumpiness the rebalancing happens in space-time jumps. Solidity as we know it is both a fact of relative concentration and organization, and a fact of scale that's how we live. Solidity like all of our contact knowledge is a fact both of our nature and its. Things at our scale of aggregation and limits of resolution can 'measure' or 'detect' things at the ultimately small scale only by arranging macroscopic locations and thereby also the smaller grain within these locations. They wait for it like a hunter waits for a deer but at this scale the trap set has altered its whole surroundings so that anything that comes along cannot possibly be a deer.
Body and cosmos III. - brief bibliography A unified ground Steven Weinberg 1997 What is quantum field theory and what did we think it was? Conference talk on the web. Mary Hesse 1965 Forces and Fields Littlefield, Adams & Co Mary Hesse 1967 "Action at a Distance and Field Theory," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 19-15 Macmillan James Gleick 1988 Chaos: Making a New Science
Guy Murchie 1967 Music of the spheres, Vol II The microcosm Dover.
Tarthang Tulku 1977 Time, space, and knowledge: a new vision of reality Dharma Publishing
Organic bodies Robert Rosen 1991 Life Itself Columbia
EJH Corner 1964 The life of plants Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Bodies being about George Lakoff and M Johnson 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books Antonio Damasio Descartes' error
Walter Freeman 1991 The physiology of perception, Scientific American Feb 1991:78-85
|