Quanta Organica Part Two
22.05.2024 Dane Harrison
Read Quanta Organica Part One.
Science does not exist on its own, it exists as part of a broader culture from which it is never separate. And culture is an organic and not a static form. Like any other living organism it has a life cycle characterised by the fulfilment of attributes. It starts off small like a sapling, it grows fast, it matures, it flowers and drops its seed. After, it begins to wither, then returns to from whence it came. Each life, each occurrence in nature is like a rainbow, an arc of equal ascent and descent. Where is the western culture along this rainbow? Is it growing still, has it bloomed, or is it drying out and folding back on itself, is it preparing for the next thing?
A spanner in the works signifies change, but it is not the only spanner on display. To look at the rest of the western culture at the same moment when quantum physics appears, all facets present the symptom. In literature we get modernism, a movement divergent within itself, difficult to define because of its disunity, loosely characterised as an authorship of fragmentation. In music we get jazz. In place of melody comes deviation, in place of structure comes improvisation, rhythm becomes syncopated and from an old recipe, a new disharmonic sound is awoken. In painting we get cubism. In architecture; constructivism. Form is being broken from all sides and everything appears at once, as if travelling along every conceivable path.
Society itself bears the greatest example when a murder in Sarajevo was enough to send the entire European house of cards tumbling into the first world war. In nature, nothing appears arbitrarily, each appearance is the symbol of a feeling for the world within the culture. So what do these appearances signal? Something is changing, something is coming undone, something is being liberated through disintegration. It is us and our world that is disintegrating.
Science, which has become the leading force of modern culture, is unconsciously doing the same. At the inception of western science was the belief that the natural order could be realised, universal laws discovered and humanity's place amongst the cosmos determined. Born out of an antagonism for religious dogma, only what can be proven would be accepted and there could be no room for error. In other words, uncertainty must not enter the halls of science. Three hundred years later and the doors are wide open. The entire foundation of modern science is uncertainty. In place of eternal truths we have temporary hypotheses. Instead of facts we have probabilities. Instead of one answer we have many possible answers. Does this not represent a contradiction?
The temptation is to make a moral judgement, to credit the scientific establishment for the acceptance of its own limitations here, and conceptualise this shift to make it appear as an advancement. But we must not make moral statements unless we want to make all sciences into political sciences. We must judge science on its own terms: objectively. And objectively speaking, science today justifies itself in a way that it said it would not allow. It has bent its own rules. The question is not whether quantum physics is right or wrong - what is right or wrong? All knowledge is composed of each. The question is what does this change signify? What secret desires in the reservoir of the western soul-feeling does the new science fulfil?
Revenons à nos moutons. I said in the beginning that it was a problem of observation, of observing nature as such, but more than that it is a problem with the nature of observation itself. Rewritten, the problem is not in observing things too small to be seen, it is that there must be someone to see them in the first place. To observe there must be an observer. This has always been the case, but it has never been a problem until now. Today, a new intuition directs our eyes. Our focal point has changed, our awareness has shifted and the significance of the observer has become imperative. The implication being that the results depend solely on them. How did we arrive here? We had just discovered the nature of everything visible; now we can't even trust our own eyes.
Still we go on, asking the same questions, looking at the same world, only we see something different now. The light is scattering into so many discontinuous strands, yet still we are compelled to bring them all together. We grope along in the dark, reaching for a handrail which we cannot see, but sense to be near, believing we are moving forward, boxed up in the narrowness of a western moment. Always believing we are going forward. Believing that the new task is the most significant, that we are on the precipice of discovering the missing link, the loose thread which will tie it all together.
Indeed, it is necessary to think that way, a necessary blindness. New discoveries lead to new branches of science. The discoveries of new science force them to branch again. Specialised disciplines appear to bridge the gap in knowledge, each with decreasing awareness and comprehension of the others, whose findings inevitably cause them to branch again. The tree of knowledge grows, but each day it grows further apart. It is only connected at the roots. Each branch is a divergent arm, from which more and more hands appear, but none of them can grasp what is happening. We are growing still, but we are only growing older. We are somewhere in the canopy, knowing everything of what's around us and nothing of ourselves - and realising that now. Somewhere in the canopy from where there is no stimulus to ascend further. Our ascension is a dive into disunity, in form, in idea, in behaviour, in belief. Our fulfilment is to deliver the seed, the new thing, the new life, the organica which will regrow itself.
Of course, this is all a story, but when dealing with things you cannot see, it can be helpful to talk in stories. If there is anything I take from quantum physics it is that we must be even more humble with what we think we know. We have made a place for our own imperfection, for our own limitations, maybe we are wiser now, but is this not the wisdom of age? It is the child who dreams they will solve everything, the child who creates unaware of the effect of its own creation. It is the child who does not worry about tomorrow, for they have time. Maybe we are wiser now, but certainly we are less young.
These are strange thoughts from a Balinese hut over a pond of carp in the rice fields, but looking out on the morning, over nature, I see everything has its time and its place here. Nothing exists where it couldn't exist. And everything is taken care of. It has in itself all it needs, it moves without deviation into the fulfilment of itself. And unlike us it didn't look for the answer. We are helpless to personify nature, space, the universe. We look at a blank canvas and read off our own idiosyncrasy. Of course, this is all just a story, but in nature it is an existence entire. There is no negative, no deficit, nothing other. There is no absence here because there is nothing for that absence to be relative to.
There is only process which is unbroken. The unbroken thing cannot be measured because there is nowhere that it is not arbitrary to begin that measurement. But nature does not break itself, it does not dislodge any part from another, or rupture, or divide. Nature doesn't discriminate. It is the intruder who causes the discrimination when they see nature from a point of view. What point? Where? How does it all begin?
We are the intruder, the great divided unity, the individual amongst the indivisible. It is the human who breaks the process of nature and then tries to figure out how it fits together again. The human who posits themselves as a thing on their own, a separateness, an otherness amongst the unfamiliar. But there is no otherness and nothing unfamiliar. It is just a problem in the way we look at the world. It seems to me that quantum physics is a solution to the problem of observation, as I say, but there is a greater problem of observation of which science, of which art, of which philosophy, of which the greater culture are all symptoms.
The problem of observation is not to be solved because there is no problem. To observe there must be an observer - as we have seen - but nature does not observe itself; it simply exists. And until we see that we too are part of nature, of the soil and the cosmos, we will look into the world without existing in it. We will exist in our own world, limited by our vision, a rockpool within the oceanic, a mammalian in utero within the organica, a storyteller reading more and more problems into what we are seeing.