Quantum Mechanics and the Holiday Blues
Does this pseudo-tree look sad to you? It looks sad to me. Hoboken, New Jersey, December 2, 2023.
December 3, 2023. This is an updated version of a column I wrote for Scientific American in 2021, which feels even more relevant this holiday season. –John Horgan
As I jogged along the Hudson River recently, a few lonely snowflakes fell, and I composed a haiku in my head:
Every snowflake is
special. But so what? They melt
too fast to matter.
I’ve been glum lately, not sure why. My blues are over-determined. Maybe it’s the slaughter in Ukraine and the Middle East, the snowballing effects of climate change, the cringey state of U.S. politics. Maybe it’s seasonal affective disorder. Whatever. This holiday season ain’t very merry.
My futile struggle to comprehend quantum mechanics doesn’t help. My goal, when I began this project in 2020, was to crack open the black box at the heart of physics so the world would seem less weird. Instead, the opposite has happened. The black box of quantum mechanics has expanded to encompass the world. Everything, including my own self, baffles me more than ever.
Like every sentient creature, I am a marvel of fantastically intricate engineering. I routinely perform tasks too tough for the fanciest artificial intelligences, like teasing my girlfriend, “Emily,” about her Scrooge-ish disdain for Christmas without annoying her. And yet I have only a murky, hand-wavy sense of why I do what I do or feel what I feel. I’m a black box to myself.
I want to believe self-knowledge is possible, because self-knowledge is a prerequisite for self-control, that is, free will, and free will is a prerequisite for a meaningful life. But I’m reluctantly beginning to agree with philosopher Daniel Dennett that we are much less self-aware than we think we are. We carry out chores on our to-do lists like automatons, displaying what Dennett calls “competence without comprehension.”
Mind-scientists labor to explicate us, with theories ranging from psychoanalysis (yeah, Freudians are still out there) to neuro-evo-psycho-cognitive whatever. They blame our dysfunction on repressed childhood trauma; on ebbs and flows of neurotransmitters; on instincts that helped our ancestors propagate but are maladaptive today; on wayward genes.
Psychiatrists and psychologists talk to us, shock us and above all medicate us to lift us from our funks. But the abundance of therapies for the mind indicates that none works that well. So does the persistence of religion, our pre-scientific panacea for the human condition.
Buddhism, enthusiasts claim, isn’t a religion, it’s a science that employs meditation as an instrument for achieving self-knowledge and self-control. Meditation soothes my feverish mind, but come on, it’s really just a form of self-brainwashing, a method for suppressing rather than understanding unpleasant aspects of the self.
Some scientists are so desperate to fathom the mind that they turn to quantum mechanics for answers. This move seems likely to compound our confusion, given the theory’s weirdness. An electron, when we’re not looking at it, is suspended in a “superposition” of many possible paths; only when we observe the electron does it take one path.
Some theorists, notably David Bohm, maintain that “hidden variables” determine the particle’s apparently random behavior. Bohm postulates that particles are guided by a “pilot wave” that pervades the cosmos and links all its parts instantaneously, via the quantum mechanism called entanglement. The pilot wave, Bohm suggests, belongs to an “implicate order” that underpins our reality and gives rise to matter and mind.
Other quantum theorists, such as John Wheeler, propose that our conscious observation of the world determines its properties and even, in a sense, brings it into existence. Such conjectures flatter us, by implying that we are a vital component of reality; if we weren’t here to observe the universe, it would not exist.
Will we ever discover a true mind-body theory, one that brings all our hidden variables into the light? That accounts for our thoughts, moods and behaviors? A mind-body theory based, perhaps, on quantum computation?
I doubt it. If quantum mechanics can’t explain why a single electron veers this way rather than that way, how can it explain the quirks of our minds? I suspect that even if we become super-intelligent cyborgs, with brains boosted by quantum chips, we’ll still be black boxes to ourselves.
A final point. I began this column wondering why I’ve been feeling glum. I omitted the most likely source of my gloom: Two dear old friends recently succumbed to cancer, another is struggling with Parkinson’s disease. Melancholy seems like a reasonable response to the certainty of death, the inevitable loss of everything we love.
The question should be, why aren’t we always glum? Why, now and then, while I’m buying a Christmas tree with my son, or watching the schmaltzy x-mas flick Jingle Jangle (which features a robot with a quantum mechanical heart) with Emily, am I overwhelmed by joy and gratitude? Another haiku comes to mind:
Everything must pass.
Heat death awaits us. I’m so
glad to be alive!
Further Reading:
Entropy, Meaninglessness and Miracles
For more thoughts on the mind-body problem and quantum mechanics, see my free online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment.