Spencer Heath Archive

Item 419..

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath, slightly amended by Heath. Note some penciled commentary by Alvin Lowi on the original sheets.

January 22, 1954

 

 

 

 

QUANTUM METAPHYSICS

 

Scientists are human. One of their weaknesses in common with others is often to assume that things or events which they are unable to fit into their experience do not in fact exist. In this they resemble the person who in discussion doggedly opposes a proposition or fact in terms of his inability to conceive or to comprehend. Or, as they say, “I cannot see” this or that or the other that may be in course of presentation to them. They indulge themselves with this negative in all seriousness and often with the utmost finality. These persons are naively unaware that what they are talking about is really their own personal limitations rather than the subject matter under discussion.

 

For an example of this in the scientific world, we may point to the supposed limitations of the quantum. The quantum has been defined as an action or event of the least possible magnitude, an event of minimal dimensions often called the “atom of action.” It has been well demonstrated and accepted throughout the scientific world that there is, at least apparently, such an almost infinitesimal event and yet an event large enough that it can be measured and experienced. The common assertion is that such an event is indivisible and that all larger events are made up of these units, just as all material things used to be con­sidered as made up of indivisible atoms all of one size.

 

The plain fact of the matter is that science has found itself unable to experience and therefore unable to measure any event or events of less than the given magnitude. This is taken as grounds for asserting that no lesser events can exist or occur, and that all quanta and greater events are aggregations of these individual units. Here we have what seems like the very arrogant assumption that the world of action, or events, consists only in that which scientists find themselves able to experience of it — that the cosmic realm is no broader or deeper than that portion of it which comes within the range of their necessarily limited human experience.

 

It is not denied that human beings are finite, that there are definite limits to our various sense perceptions, a spectrum of energy waves outside of which our visual organs do not respond. The same is true of our auditory, tactile and other responses. Besides these special senses, it must also be recognized that we have a faculty of general experience, a certain range of access to the objective world around us. This generalized sense or capacity of response, like our other senses, must be limited or unlimited, finite or infinite, relative or absolute.

 

It is difficult to presume that any human experience can be absolute unless we presume the human being himself is without limitations. It would seem, therefore, that our scientists are more likely describing their own subjective incapacity rather than any necessary limitations in the dimensions inherent in objective events. They refuse to entertain that which does not come within the realm of our experience much as our obstinate friend in discussion refuses to entertain that which he says he is unable to “see” or comprehend.

 

Once we grant that these scientific limitations are in reality the limitations of the human capacity to experience, we have a hypothesis on which strongly to infer the existence of a so-called “extra-sensory” world, a world which physical scientists admit transcends and yields no responses to the limited and experimental methods and demonstrations within which physical science is by definition restricted.

 

This leaves room for the existence of sub-quantal events, but no room for any physical or experiential apprehension of them. We can, however, experience their effects at any point or points in our physical experiences where they emerge or combine out of their sub-quantal dimensions, as is the case with visible rays, which do not affect the photographic plate till enough quanta have accumulated there. A similar example may be in the generally acknowledged mystery of “action at a distance.” A magnet exerts force or energy upon an armature across an intervening and apparently “empty” space. Something takes place in the intervening “void,” yet between the magnet and the armature force or energy certainly does pass. What baffles us is that we have found in ourselves and in our apparatus no capacity for experiencing what takes place between the two. We only know it in terms of the behavior at the quantum and super-quantum level of the magnet and its armature.

 

If there are, as there may well be, forms of energy or action similar to those of which we can have experience but that elude experience by reason of their sub-quantal magnitudes, then the mystery of “action at a distance” becomes comprehensible to our minds notwithstanding it is beyond the range of our factual experience.

 

Working with such a hypothesis, we may feel assured, with Hamlet, that “There are more things in heaven and earth ..than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

 

It gives us a kind of philosophy that takes a great deal of the mystery and anomaly out of what is called the extra­sensory world around us. It opens a whole realm of the metaphysical which, though it transcend our sensory experience, becomes nevertheless comprehensible to our conceptual minds and gives us a larger, or higher, point of reference from which to understand and creatively manipulate our objectively phenomenal world.

 

Let us then give thought to the metaphysical, the extrasensory, as well as to the physical and sensory world of our immediate experience. We need anticipate no disharmony between the two. We may rather infer that an understanding of both will enlarge our powers of self-determination and our creative and thereby spiritual capacity to incorporate transcendent aspirations and dreams, to build higher degrees of order and harmony, beyond our present limitations with respect to the physical, objective world.

 

(Such understanding releases human nature from its prior limitations, enables the future to transcend the past in greater degree than it already is doing.)

 

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/Remarks by Heath on reading

Over the above transcription:/

This should have great appeal to those persons who are deeply enamored, not to say bogged down, in what they call the spiritual, or super-sensory, world. It is not necessary to identify the metaphysical with the spiritual. The metaphysical is only that which transcends the physical. The spiritual is more properly conceived as that persistence of the entire cosmos to move in the direction of more enduring and thus higher organizational forms. This is the creative urge in which men are capable of participation through learning how to embody their metaphysical conceptions and dreams into their surrounding physical world. It is this creative element in the cosmos and this potential of participation in the creative process /that/ is the spiritual character of the cosmos itself and the parallel spiritual nature and capacity of mankind. Not in our apprehension of mystery, but in our potentiality to create, are we spiritual and, in our finite way, divine.

 

The only thing I see spiritual in the metaphysical is its inherent tendency to integrate into more enduring forms.