Observation and Insight in the Science of Experience

“O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”

Melville, Moby-Dick

Introduction

My main intention in this paper is to elucidate the mind-body question by a convergent analysis of the deepest theories of both separately. This dilemma, perhaps the most intractable and anxiety-ridden in the history of Western thought, is also the most urgent and personal—the plight of each individual being its unique working-out (resolution, if not solution). The problem is usually approached theoretically by discerning analogies in the two domains, but such analogies are often cheap or trite. To say something interesting, I will try not merely to connect analagous terms (such as energy and time), but rather enter into both theories in some depth to bring out correspondences in the structures of each theory as a whole. This resembles the theoretical strategy by which Freud, in locating a structural analogy of dreams and symptoms, revealed a deep common substrate in Reality, and thus inaugurated basic psychoanalytic theory.

According to my level of expertise, the discussion of quantum mechanics will comprise only an exposition of the theory’s basic structure—hopefully bringing this out clearly. Then I will turn to an explication of psychoanalytic metapsychology. I will focus on the psychoanalytic theory of the subjective origin (psychogenesis) of space and time. I will then juxtapose these two basic theories of mind and matter, concentrating especially on the interface implications of the quantum measurement problem.

Quantum Mechanics

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Albert Einstein

Quantum mechanics [QM] is a mathematical theory of fundamental physics that, on the one hand, makes predictions of astonishing accuracy in experimental observations, but, on the other, points to a deep incomprehensibility in the Reality hidden behind the things we observe. This situation is best appreciated by first considering the differences between quantum mechanics and the classical physics from which it emerged.

Classical mechanics (dynamics) studies objects in motion under conditions of force. The particular object and its dynamic features are, for the theory, contingent variables. The primary Reality, as in all physics, is something invariant, obtaining everywhere and for all time. The reality which is basic for the science—its ultimate objective—is the law of nature (for instance,the gravitational inverse square law). The law of nature is expressed as a mathematical equation; it describes the time evolution of any given object in the field of force.

In applying the law, the physical object must, to enter the formalism, first be idealized. This is achieved by its being splintered into dynamic predicate attributes. The object is represented by being decomposed into its dynamic properties—mass, length, velocity, time—all of which are, in turn, extensions of our daily notions of the physical world. Moreover, these properties all denote observable (measurable) features of the objects. Operationally, these properties—split from each other—are taken as variables to be inserted into the mathematical equation which carries them all, as it were, in a unitary process. However, at any moment, as in a freeze-frame, the process can be stopped—the equation solved, and the object reconstituted as the unity of these same predicates. Thus, the object endures latently integral in the formalism. One can picture a trajectory: an identifiable object persists throughout the regulated lawful transitions, even as its properties fluctuate in magnitude and degree. The operation of the law upon the object is deterministic in precisely specifying all of its properties at a given time. Furthermore, all of this change is continuous; the law defines a process of causation.

In the miracle year of 1900, the publication date for The Interpretation of Dreams, Max Planck, in Berlin, solved an anamolous problem of crisis proportions in classical physics(“black-body radiation”). This was achieved by a paradigmatic innovation of the most radical order—the theoretical discovery in physics of the “quantum of action.” We learn that our most common-sense (i.e. empirical) notions of...