Discussion with Hans-Peter Duerr
on the quantum Ansatz
Dear Hans-Peter,
After further consideration, I have some new insights into your Ansatz I would like to share with you to see if we are seeing more or less eye to eye and if I can add anything to your very interesting point of view.
P.S. See what I mean about my list? Would you want to meet with any of these characters? I thought Scarfatti would have a better sense of humor about the Scarface reference - he is a great movie buff, apparently, but perhaps he hasn't seen Scarface - it is classic Pacino - one of my favorites. Seriously, though, what is the good of such personal communion as you advocate if one is still in a fundamentally deluded human condition, as are almost all humans? Is it not for the most part a bourgeoise form of self-deception and ego-tripping? I mean if we can't even have the lesser degree of agreement implied by an e-mail conversation, why should we think to reach agreement just by virtue of social intercourse? Isn't it really just a matter of putting aside the underlying disagreements? In that way, it would seem, nothing can ever really get resolved. What is needed, it seems to me, is a complete transformation of the inner point of view. The "soul" is called a unit of awareness or such an inner point of view. I believe a fundamental inner and outer transformation is both possible and necessary for the human being at this juncture in history. I live only for that purpose, having long since renounced the world such as it is and all the "pretty people, drinking, thinking that they got it made". -Bob Dylan
Sincerely, and with apologies for Scarfatti's vicious sense of humor,
Peter Mutnick
Please see my insert below.
[Hans-Peter Duerr]
Dear Peter,
Thank you for your long message. Scarfatti [Scarface] is right when he mentions as one of the reasons "we are too busy". I think this is correct as a very general statement. Also I am busy but I do everything to get out of this. I give a lot of lectures at different places, for different audiences, about 60 per year, on very different topics: philosophy, epistemology, politics (local, state, federation, global), economics, development, disarmament, art of peace, conflict management, bridging disciplines (physics, biology, medicine, ...) and cultures. I consider my contribution not so much in teaching but in reminding people what they already know. Dialogue is for me an effective way to undig important important layers of our experience. A lot of my communications become something like communions. Our business hinders us in this approach.
It is my experience that such intense and deep dialogues cannot be done by the new media. At least, it does not work for me. Or to be more correct: I have intense e-mail exchanges with a few people with whom I have discussed personally before for years. Our messages exchange connect and rekindle these dialogues but after some time need personal refreshing if intuition fades and prehension is more and more replaced by intellectual considerations, when we fall back into our accustomed pattern of thinking and arguing.
[Peter Mutnick]
I feel that what I have is something entirely new that *can* be conveyed at least in part through word symbols and hence ideally through this medium. Symbols are the language of the Unconscious and also of Consciousness, i.e., it is the way God speaks to us. I feel that we MUST share the symbolic messages that God has shared with each of us, for if we do not, we shall not be properly prepared for His immanent advent into the world. And even though you speak to many, are you sure that you are offering the best and most pertinent message that you could possibly be offering? Do you tell them of the Presence of God in the world and of His immanent advent into the world (in a most literal way)? Do you teach them His knowledge?
[Hans-Peter, cont.]
If I had more time I perhaps could have gotten more involved in your dialogue. But I feel, that we, the participants of your group, are still too far away in the basis of our imaginations, thinking, ideas, concepts and the reference frames we use. For example, there is the concept of the field which for most is something like the Schroedinger wave function, or the probability field or expectation field of Born, fields which very much look like the electromagnetic field (massless), a gestalt of nothingness, but a bit different, because of its complex-valuedness in the mathematical description (which connects to the duality aspect location/momentum but is much more general). It is, in a way, still within the ontological framework. Also the fields used in string theory are still imagined as the old "classical" fields with more complicated transformation properties and higher dimensional spaces which should be first "quantized" in the conventional way to be useful. This is the old method of quantization starting from classical analogues. We have given this up long ago. E.g. there is no corresponding quark field in classical language. The operator algebra of Heisenberg is quite different in its appearance. And hence the quantum field is an operator quantum field very distinct from the original quantum mechanical field. In the operator language there is no "existence" but only change, metamorphosis, genuine connectedness, which in an ontological language appears as potentiality, as something of an as-well-as structure.
[PETER, LATER]
We can talk about a field of operators or a ring of operators, and to my mind this implies an implicate quantum structure to an essentially classical set of entities, since all operators essentially represent classical operations (we don't know what a quantum operation would be, though we can certainly try to imagine it - I think von Neumann tried).
Your use of "potentiality" here is interesting, since it is certainly not the same thing as the Aristotelian "potentia", which represents noumenal Nature and which takes the form of "potential" for an "actual event" at a measuring device when the quantum noumenon comes into interaction with the measuring device. As you say, you are talking about something far removed from anything in external Nature - you are talking about an abstract or ideal possibility for transformation, within us, connecting the inner principles of one with another.
Your use of the term "metamorphosis" is also interesting. I have in my mandala the painting by Dali, "The Metamorphosis of Narcissus". It represents to me the ati-manas, or supermind of Aurobindo. At some point, our inner principles contact the outer world - that point is what you call the ground, or asymmetric ground state. Now, Bohm also talked about the ground - he considered the background the implicate order, from which emerged the foreground of the classical explicate order. I would propose that this is exactly what you meant by asymmetric ground state. The emergent foreground is like Kant's Understanding or thought process (as a physical superstructure) that links oroborically to the meta-physical realm of the Observer and the true Mind of the Observer, which is our highest inner principle. However, the background is not a classical frame, and I don't know if you were suggesting that it is. Is there not a quantum portion of the ground state that is in fact something like Bohm's implicate order? It seems to me to be noumenal in character, i.e., essentially unknowable, but definable as the implicate order. Classical frames emerge from that as various explicate orders. These then link oroborically to the Observer and are projected back again as the representations of observable operators. That is why complementarity works in the first place, because the classical frames have in fact emerged from the quantum noumenon in nature. Gell-Mann's decoherence is essentially a theory to account for the emergence of classical frames in this way.
[Hans-Peter, cont.]
The transition from "pure connectedness" to "as-well-as existence" is that from an algebra or group to its representations. The choice of the representation comes with the measurement or the use of some imagined classical (limit of many quantum degrees of freedom) reference frame, the "actual world" in the background (which in most quantum field theories are assumed to be simply the vacuum, leaving out the observer with his/her consciousness and his classical measurement equipment etc.). You can introduce something more sophisticated as we did when we introduced 1958 the concept of the asymmetrical ground state which let to the fertile concept of broken symmetries etc.. ....Well, I could go on ...for which I have unfortunately no time...
[Peter]
Please try to make time for *this*, as a last ditch attempt on my part to convey what I feel is very important for me to convey to you. Let me just try to give very briefly my metaphysical Ansatz, as a preliminary to addressing your Ansatz. I say that as classical observers, we are far from the quantum physical world. This is shocking. Most people assume that they live in the physical world, but the quantum revolution says something quite different. The physical world is no longer conceived as classical, BUT THE OBSERVER IS STILL CONCEIVED AS CLASSICAL. Simple logic then dictates that the Observer is NOT physical. I say he/she is meta-physical and he/she exists in the seventh or meta-physical world. I put the following worlds between the observer and the observed:
7. meta-physical---Observer, Mind of the Observer
6. causal-----------worlds 7-5 von Neumann's III (the actual observer)
5. phenomenal-----Phenomenon - representation of Noumenon
4. etheric----------von Neumann's II (the measuring instrument)
3. mental----------State Vector
2. emotional-------worlds 3-1 von Neumann's I (the actually observed)
1. physical--------Observed; Noumenon; Representation - Wave Function
Now to address your Ansatz, given above.
I think of the State Vector as Mental and its representation or Wave Function as Physical. An observable Operator I think of as Meta-Physical (seventh world). The Eigenvector is fifth world and first world, while the Eigen-Value is third world. So the eigenvalue equation, O E = o E, spans the metaphysical spectrum from meta-physical observer to physical observed. Observable Operators are classical and their representations are classical projections onto noumenal or quantum reality.
However, you assert that Field Operators, at least, are somewhat the opposite of this. You say:
"The transition from 'pure connectedness' to 'as-well-as existence' is that from an algebra or group to its representations. The choice of the representation comes with the measurement or the use of some imagined classical (limit of many quantum degrees of freedom) reference frame, the 'actual world' in the background (which in most quantum field theories are assumed to be simply the vacuum, leaving out the observer with his/her consciousness and his classical measurement equipment etc.)."
You seem to see the operator as representing the true (quantum) world of oneness and the representation as being inherently classical. It seems to me that the operator is inherently classical and the representation is a projection of the classical reality onto the noumenal quantum reality. That this works is of course the central mystery of quantum theory, called by Bohr "complementarity".
Field Operators and algebras of operators may be a little different, but I put them basically in the sixth or causal world, as abstractions emanated from the Mind of the Observer, in the seventh or meta-physical world. Now, here is why those algebras have the character of true oneness to both you and Basil Hiley and perhaps many others: It is because the Mind of the Observer is a form of the quantum *implicate* order, and yet it is in the Meta-Physical classical world of the Observer. How is this possible? Simply because the classical thought attribute is the seed of the thought-like quantum conception of physical reality. But before that thought attribute can unfold into the quantum explicate order of quantum noumenal reality in Nature, it must first emerge into the mental sub-world which is the Mind of the Observer.
So, then, the explicate order need not be conceived as classical. It is in fact quantum in character, because our conception of external physical world Nature is now quantum, rather than classical. Bohr's hesitancy to talk about a noumenal quantum reality or a quantum world created much confusion over this very issue, but is it not a fact that our present conception of Nature is that it obeys quantum laws rather than classical? How can there not be a quantum world, in that case? The world is quantum, so there is most certainly a quantum world. And yet there is also a classical world, the world of the observer, but that is superseded as a description of Nature and displaced from the physical world - it now must be conceived as meta-physical.
And yet, I do not agree with Henry Stapp and others that the (Universal) Wave Function is itself the noumenon. I agree with Bohr that we must most certainly make a distinction between the Wave Function, which is an algorithm representing the Noumenon, and the Noumenon itself. The State Vector (of the Universe) is more like the Noumenon, but precisely it is like the thing-in-itself, and the thing-in-itself is the thing-in-its-idea, which means that it is Mental, not Physical. The Noumenon, proper, is Physical and the root of the Physical.
[Hans-Peter, cont.]
Just aside to mention some of the real tragedies which disturb our devotion to basic considerations and steel our creative time: ...indeed, it is a great pain in the neck and thoroughly discouraging that with the new US presidency we have to spend again so much time on misconceived issues which we thought we had settled 15 years ago for good. Why could human experienced not be used to bypass some of the most severe failures we have gone through in our histories....
[Peter]
Quite frankly, I think the reason Bush HAD to be elected, and it was a necessity, is that the liberal establishment world-wide is still as phony as ever, as oblivious to the real cry of anguish on the part of humanity, and as oblivious to the real answer. You, for instance, and I must speak completely frankly here, are oblivious to my cry for knowledge, not just on my own behalf, but on behalf of the universal Cosmic Consciousness with which I have become merged. You are probably the only one on the planet who can provide an essential piece of the puzzle we are trying to solve (because we MUST solve), and yet you withhold it and withdraw, rather than recognizing the cry for knowledge on the part of one who had dedicated his whole life unconditionally to the pursuit of the higher knowledge, regardless of personal considerations, such as remuneration, reputation, position, etc. The pursuit of the higher knowledge is not for its own sake, but for the sake of enlightenment, which alone can set free the suffering humanity. It is only with the comprehension of the central spiritual order that we have any chance at human liberation. If the coming revolution is not a revolution based on Cosmic Enlightenment, then what shall be its basis? And if Cosmic Enlightenment does not emerge from the coming economic collapse, then what kind of Fascism will inevitably emerge???
Please, go to my website and see the face of God. The Master Babaji, depicted there in an artist's idealized drawing based on an actual appearance and in actual photographs, as well, is the Guru and Father of Jesus Christ. The Naga Raj signature is His. In that form, He has been alive on earth, near Badrinath, since 203 A.D. He is more or less the same as Maitreya (*the* Christ and coming Buddha), also depicted in an actual photograph, although that body was not born of a woman but materialized by kriyashakti. Maitreya is now living in London, but appearing miraculously around the world. Jesus Christ has already returned to earth as Sananda in 1961. He was responsible for the Rapture in the late 60's, when many had genuine spiritual experiences of the White Light of the Christ, which is the gateway to absolute or pure Consciousness, which is God.
I say all this to tell you from whence I am getting my information, so that you may know that it is not the rantings of a madman, as some unscrupulous and very stupid psychiatrists believe. You turn your back on my revelation at the peril of your soul, for there is a cosmic urgency about raising the consciousness of earth's brightest people in preparation for the Second Coming. There is no other way! If we do not go consciously into the Light of God, we shall be burnt to cinders by it. The choice is yours: incineration (in-sin-eration) or enlightenment.
[Hans-Peter, cont.]
Again, Peter, do not let yourself be discouraged by my withdrawal. But perhaps do consider in your group whether it will be not also advantageous for you all to meet once in a while in person to give your exchanges more depth such that, instead of arguing, pointing and using metaphores or parables may prove more effective in getting closer to that what we cannot grasp.
[Peter]
These are not my friends. I know you better than I know almost all of them, with a very few exceptions. My only friend is the God who dwells within me as me, who upholds my identity and every atom of my being, who compels me to teach his knowledge and to receive his knowledge from those with whom he has vouchsafed it (such as yourself). The time for social niceties is fading fast. We must find the answer fast or perish utterly - the answer is God, and God is here among us, right now. Will you not join with me in spreading the good news? There will be plenty of bad news to come - woe to the earth if we do not bring the good news, as well.
Hans-Peter
Peter Joseph Mutnick 1949 - 2000
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