Helgoland by Rovelli, Erica (story read aloud txt) 📕

up new spaces for thought, intersecting with our culture and our knowledge. This is the meaning of culture: an endless dialogue that enriches us by feeding on experiences, knowledge and, above all, exchanges.

I am not a philosopher, I am a physicist: a simple mechanic. And this simple mechanic, who deals with quanta, is taught by Nāgārjuna that it is possible to think of the manifestations of objects without having to ask what the object is in itself, independent from its manifestations.

But Nāgārjuna’s emptiness also nourishes an ethical stance that clears the sky from the endless disquietude: to understand that we do not exist as autonomous entities helps us free ourselves from attachments and suffering. Precisely because of its impermanence, because of the absence of any absolute, the now has meaning and is precious.

For me as a human being, Nāgārjuna teaches the serenity, the lightness and the shining beauty of the world: we are nothing but images of images. Reality, including our selves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which . . . there is nothing.

VI

“FOR NATURE IT IS A PROBLEM ALREADY SOLVED”

In which I dare to ask myself where thoughts dwell. And whether the new physics could change a little the terms of this vexata quaestio.

SIMPLE MATTER?

However mysterious the mind–body problem may be for us, we should always remember that it is a solved problem for nature.120

It is with sadness that every so often I spend a few hours on the internet, reading or listening to the mountain of stupidity dressed up with the word “quantum.” Quantum medicine; holistic quantum theories of every kind; mystical quantum spiritualism—and so on and on, in an almost unbelievable parade of quantum nonsense.

Worst of all is the pseudo-medicine. Every so often I receive an alarmed email from a relative of one of its victims: “My sister is being treated by a quantum medic. What do you think of it, Professor?” I think the worst it is possible to think: try to rescue your sister immediately. When it comes to medicine, this is the kind of situation in which the law, I believe, should be involved. Everyone has the right to seek to cure themselves as they see fit. But none has the right to cheat their fellow citizens with the kind of quackery that can cost lives.

Someone else writes me: “I have the sensation of having already lived this moment before: is this a quantum effect?” For pity’s sake, no! What does the complexity of our memory and of our thoughts have to do with quanta? Absolutely nothing. Quantum mechanics has nothing to say about paranormal phenomena, alternative medicine or the influence of mysterious waves or vibrations.

For heaven’s sake, I am all in favor of good vibrations. I, too, once had long hair tied with a red bandanna, and sat cross-legged next to Allen Ginsberg chanting “Om.” But the delicate complexity of the emotional connection between ourselves and the universe has as much to do with ψ waves as a Bach cantata has to do with the carburetor in my old car.

The world is sufficiently complex to account for the beauty of Bach’s music and the good vibrations of our deepest spiritual life, without the need to resort to the strangeness of quanta.

Or vice versa, if you will: the reality of quanta is much stranger than all the delicate, mysterious, enchanting, intricate aspects of our psychological reality and spiritual life. I find attempts to use quantum mechanics to explain complex phenomena that we know relatively little about, such as how the mind works, utterly unconvincing.

And yet, even if remote from our direct everyday experience, the discovery of the nature of the quantum world is too radical to have no relevance to precisely such big, open questions as the nature of mind. Not because the mind or other phenomena that we still know little about are quantum phenomena, but because by modifying our conception of the physical world and of matter, the discovery of quanta changes the terms of our questions.

The conviction on which this book is based is that we human beings are a part of nature. We are a particular case among innumerable natural phenomena, none of which can escape the great laws of nature that are known to us. Yet who has never wondered, in some form or other: “If the world is made of simple matter, particles in motion in space, how is it that thoughts, subjectivity, values, beauty, meaning . . . come about?” How can “simple matter” produce colors, emotions and the burning lively sensation of existing? How is it that we can know and learn, be moved and amazed, read a book, understand, and even come to question how matter itself works?

Quantum mechanics doesn’t have any direct answers to these questions. I fail to see any quantum explanation for subjectivity, perceptions, intelligence, consciousness or any other aspects of our mental life. Quantum phenomena intervene in the dynamics of atoms, photons, electromagnetic impulses and all other microscopic structures which give rise to our body—but there is nothing specifically quantum that could help us understand what thoughts, perception and subjectivity are. These are aspects that involve the functioning of the brain at a large scale: that is precisely where quantum interference is lost in the noise of complexity. Quantum theory is of no direct help in understanding the mind.

But indirectly it may teach us something relevant, because it alters the terms of the problem.

It teaches us that the source of the confusion might lie in our erroneous intuitions, not just about the nature of consciousness (where our intuitions are certainly misleading), but also, crucially, about what “simple matter” is and how it functions.

Perhaps it is difficult to imagine how we as human beings may be made only of tiny stones bouncing against each other. But looked at closely, a stone is a vast world: a galaxy of swarming quantum entities where probabilities