SUNDAY, 6 APRIL 2025

This week I came across a quotation from Niels Bohr: ‘Quantum mechanics does not describe reality – it describes our knowledge of reality.’ Now obviously I know zilch about quantum mechanics, but this quote seems to counter the popular notion, easily picked up from a trawl through YouTube videos, that the vast majority of scientists are trenchantly materialist and believe that science based on reason and observation can give us direct apprehension of reality. It seems to be physicists who most often make statements like Bohr’s, while biologists tend to display less epistemological modesty, presumably because they are studying living organisms in their very material existence on planet Earth, not aiming to discover the ultimate nature of the universe.

To me, there seem to be four options regarding the latter: it is Matter, with mind as its epiphenomenon; it is Mind, creating the illusion of matter; it is a dualism of Mind and Matter linked in some mysterious, unfathomable way; or it is a singular substance and it is only our limited human thinking which experiences it as a binary opposition. I don’t see any way that we can choose between these options (other than subjective preference) since there seems no method that could ever provide sufficient and satisfying evidence for any of these options as an underlying ontology.

In arguments about the potential and the limitations of science, scientists, and physicists in particular, will always hold the advantage because they can understand what non-physicists say, while we generally cannot understand them, so we have to take what they say on trust and that they are not using their scientific background to gain a rhetorical advantage. If physicists tell us they have discovered the Higgs Boson, for example, we have no choice but to believe them, just as we must believe an expert in ancient Chinese pointing at a text and telling us what the characters mean. To understand the claims of quantum physicists, we also need a grasp of higher mathematics, and most of us are limited to the ability to count, to add, subtract, multiply and divide, which places us at a huge disadvantage. So we simply have to accept that when they talk about multiverses or string theory or a nothingness in which mysterious particles occasionally bubble up from nowhere into being, their words are grounded in observable and knowable facts rather than being closer to the vagueness of religious or mystical language, and that their claims about ultimate reality have much more substance than the poetry of creation myths.

If indeed the concept of an ultimate reality has any meaning. The idea of a foundational reality, whether God or some scientific alternative, may be a construct of the human mind and not necessarily exist. A lot of modern physics – which of course I admit I can’t begin to comprehend – seems to consist of a search for the ultimate particles of existence, as if there is a bottom to this rabbit hole, but perhaps there simply isn’t. Scientists, unlike artists and philosophers, tend to work from the assumption that if a question can be asked, it has a definite answer, at least in theory: if they get bogged down in defining abstract terms rather than observing the natural world, what they are doing is philosophy, not science or what used to be called natural philosophy. In short, on some level they have to believe that what they are seeing is real and, most importantly, knowable, at least until they leave the lab and step back into the murkiness of everyday life.

One attempt to bring our subjective experience of everyday life into philosophy is the concept of qualia, although many philosophers such as Dennett deny that the concept has any coherence. I struggle to understand why they have such a problem with allowing subjective experience into their thinking. Why should the stone that Johnson kicked be real, but his sensation of pain when he did this not be real? We experience both, and this happens internally in both cases. Why should the hills I see as I walk through them each morning be real, while the feeling of calm they evoke in me somehow be not? Admittedly, the pain Johnson felt can be explained by nerve signals to the brain, and my feeling of calm by the release of chemicals like dopamine. But these explanations are rooted in a kind of hierarchy of reality, in which substances like dopamine and electrical impulses are granted a kind of existential solidity that is denied to subjective feelings, which are dismissed as somehow less real. Is the word ‘real’ doing anything more here than justifying an unacknowledged metaphysics?

I suspect a lot of the difference in thinking can be explained by personality type and then rationalised through the use of the intellect: clever people are highly skilled at turning a disposition into a thesis dressed in logic and garnished with what is purported to be evidence. None of us likes the vision of the world which we have built up during a lifetime to be shaken and stirred. People like Dennett, Dawkins and Crick seem to relish thinking of themselves as mentally tough, seeing the world for what it really is, above the self-delusions and cowardly consolations of the religious believer and the mystic. The opposite holds true for those of a non-materialist bent. People with a propensity to believe will see the image of the crucifixion in the Turin Shroud and be quick to turn coincidence into meaningful synchronicity.  Human beings are tricky creatures. One thing about which I agree with the advocates of materialism is our capacity for self-deception: I just see that capacity being as active in Dennett and Dawkins as it is in everyone else.

When we think about scientists, we usually bring to mind people like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and modern quantum physicists, all of whose work has sparked deep philosophical speculation and has also led to prevalent metaphors that have influenced our whole way of thinking, but the majority of scientific work is humdrum and everyday, Kuhn’s ‘normal science’. That doesn’t mean it’s not important – far from it – but it does mean it doesn’t require a specific outlook or philosophy or metaphysics; there are procedures which must be followed, but not a fixed way of thinking other than a general commitment to logic and reason and observation. This flexible relationship between theory and practice is very enabling and isn’t limited to science; we need it in any field of human endeavour. In that of poetry, for instance, there is room for the fascist Pound and the communist Neruda: the practice of writing literature overrides the political distinction. The disciplines of specific fields are what determine the processes we follow, while the personal beliefs that we bring to the laboratory or telescope or blank page are much less important.

Although science is often perceived as a search for absolute truth, and despite the proclamations of some of the advocates of this idea, science is essentially pragmatic. The evidence for the correctness of theories in the abstruse realm of quantum mechanics, for instance, is that it works in practice in things like quantum computing even if the scientists themselves struggle to understand why. Theories come and go, but this test by efficacy remains. As someone who knows little about science and is at heart a writer, if I were forced to choose whether we can ever really know an absolute truth, I would swing on the side of it being impossible. Maybe this truth we are seeking is a chimera; on the other hand, perhaps those who see science as a form of teleological evolution are correct when they depict the history of science as an edging ever closer to this final truth. One thing is for sure, the universe is weird: so is it beyond the realms of possibility that, despite it breaking the basic principles of logic, both of these things may somehow be ‘true’ at the same time? But that’s mysticism, I guess, and our response to this idea may depend on our whole way of thinking rather than be something we can prove or disprove.