Friday, October 30, 2015

Trying to apply entanglement to humanism

Marilynne Robinson writes in The Nation, an extreme left-wing magazine:
Humanism, Science, and the Radical Expansion of the Possible
Why we shouldn’t let neuroscience banish mystery from human life.

Humanism was the particular glory of the Renaissance. ...

The antidote to our gloom is to be found in contemporary science. ...

The phenomenon called quantum entanglement, relatively old as theory and thoroughly demonstrated as fact, raises fundamental questions about time and space, and therefore about causality.

Particles that are “entangled,” however distant from one another, undergo the same changes simultaneously. This fact challenges our most deeply embedded habits of thought. To try to imagine any event occurring outside the constraints of locality and sequence is difficult enough. Then there is the problem of conceiving of a universe in which the old rituals of cause and effect seem a gross inefficiency beside the elegance and sleight of hand that operate discreetly beyond the reach of all but the most rarefied scientific inference and observation. However pervasive and robust entanglement is or is not, it implies a cosmos that unfolds or emerges on principles that bear scant analogy to the universe of common sense. It is abetted in this by string theory, which adds seven unexpressed dimensions to our familiar four. And, of course, those four seem suddenly tenuous when the fundamental character of time and space is being called into question. Mathematics, ontology, and metaphysics have become one thing. Einstein’s universe seems mechanistic in comparison. Newton’s, the work of a tinkerer. If Galileo shocked the world by removing the sun from its place, so to speak, then this polyglot army of mathematicians and cosmologists who offer always new grounds for new conceptions of absolute reality should dazzle us all, freeing us at last from the circle of old Urizen’s compass. But we are not free. ...

I find the soul a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience. ...

I am content to place humankind at the center of Creation. ...

I am a theist, so my habits of mind have a particular character.
I am not trying to summarize this, or even to comment on the merits of her arguments. I just want to point out how bad physics makes its way into humanities essays.

No comments:

Post a Comment