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One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness, which denies the classical idea of analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts. . . . We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent “elementary parts” of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independently behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.7 What quantum physics underscores again and again is the fact that the classical notion of atomism is not only misleading, but fundamentally flawed. All of the characteristics previously ascribed to particles from the early Greek atomists through Newton are wrong—particles are not indestructible or uncreated; they are not immutable, and they are not clearly localized in space. As Čapek succinctly puts it, “they are not particles at all.”8 It is very difficult for us, as human beings, to give up the idea that particles are tiny, self-sufficient balls of matter whizzing through empty space, but as Bergson argued, decades before physics came around to his way of thinking, this commonsense understanding is simply not the truth. It is meaningless to think of “billiard ball-like” particles cascading and rebounding in the void. There is no void, there are no billiard ball particles. Instead, what we find is a universe filled to the brim with ceaseless dynamism, a universe permeated with complex, interpenetrating , and overlapping fields, a universe that is itself nothing but motion and change. From the perspective of quantum physics, the understanding of the universe as a type of giant Clock has been smashed, not into tiny bits, but rather into a vortex of interconnecting vibrations and fields. Atoms which were, at one point, thought to be indestructible and unchanging chunks of matter are now viewed as complex interactions of dynamic fields of energy. Empty space is now considered to be a vibrant ocean of potentiality, a matrix from which countless numbers of particles emerge and disappear. And the rigid determinism assumed by classical physics has softened into a complex science of tendencies and probabilities.9 Bergson Said It First Astonishingly, the non-atomistic vision of material reality that is articulated by quantum physics is strikingly similar to what Bergson had anticipated in 1896 (when Matter and Memory was published). At this time, the revolutions that were about to overtake physics were just barely on the horizon. Nonetheless, even then, Bergson was convinced that we would never be able to explain the 84 LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS nature of material reality if we continue to think that it is composed of discrete particles, of stable objects that move about from place to place in an unchanging space. In Matter and Memory, Bergson argued that matter cannot be reduced to atoms moving in the void, if only because of the fact that something else exists as well: energy or force. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, it was recognized that various types of forces seem to operate between atoms (e.g., the forces of attraction and repulsion that bind or separate molecules or the force of gravity ). But Bergson was not convinced that there was an ontological difference between these forces and atoms. He hypothesized that the only reason why we distinguish between the seemingly solid matter of atoms and the more amorphous reality of various forces is that, from the standpoint of our survival needs, we urgently attempt to “distinguish, in our daily experience, between passive things and actions effected by these things in space” (MM 200). In effect, Bergson was suggesting that our tendency to think that atoms are solid objects is based more on our deeply ingrained need to carve up the world into dense unchanging things than from any innate structure that atoms might possess. He was convinced that it was likely that, in the future, as science progressed , we would “see force more and more materialized, the atom more and more idealized, the two terms converging toward a common limit and the universe thus recovering its continuity” (MM 200). He predicted that with this convergence of matter and energy (a convergence that was realized with Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2), scientists would continue to speak in terms of individual atoms (if for no other reason than from their habitual and human need to have a distinct “picture” of what they...

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