Spooky reality.

It’s quite amazing how physics is catching up to, and blurring the lines, between the age-old enemies of science and philosophy. Three articles have recently been published in respected scientific papers. One titled, “Quantum chicken-or-egg experiment blurs the distinction between before and after,”  the second reported on the “Nobel Prize Awarded to Two Quantum Physicists,” and the third “The Quantum Theory That Peels Away the Mystery of Measurement” occurred just three days ago.

All three make note of the growing consensus within the physics community that what Einstein referred to as “spooky” can be explained by a principle known as quantum entanglement that allows quanta, perhaps many thousands of miles apart, to reflect a mystical connection that defies rational logic, where before and after are not sequential but rather simultaneously connected.

This chicken and egg, logical, conundrum was postulated, under a different name, nearly four millennia ago in India with the principle of “dependent origination”—Pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskrit.  It is a very simple principle to understand philosophically but, until now, made no logical sense. But then neither did the chicken and egg puzzle. 

At the simplest of philosophical levels, consider “up” and “down,” neither of which can exist without the other. When up arises, down arises simultaneously. When one disappears, the other disappears simultaneously. So too a mother and a child (e.g., chicken and egg). A mother can’t possibly be a mother until the instance of birth since that is how we understand the difference between a mother and a non-mother woman. Before that point of creation, a woman was not yet a mother.

The philosophy takes this a step further (as physics may one day) by pointing out that the nature of one thing is conjoined with another of a completely opposite nature; thus conditional and unconditional. Conditions (the realm of physics) are constantly in motion, even at the quantum level, whereas the unconditional (the realm of metaphysic) never changes, and just like chickens and eggs, one can’t exist without the other. Before the big bang, there was nothing, yet out of Singularity came everything—total opposites.

There are broad and meaningful implications to the latter philosophical observation, concerning the survival of the human race. And these implications takes us into human self-understanding that could save our collective behinds, but only by opening the door and embracing this new/old notion of universal connectivity: We are all different, yet exactly the same, simultaneously. Spooky! Yet not.