Platonic Physics: In Dialogue with Wolfgang Smith

Perennial or Evolutionary Spirituality?

Here is my conversation, recorded yesterday, with Dr. Wolfgang Smith. His new book PHYSICS: A Science in Quest of an Ontology is available from many online bookstores.

We discussed a range of topics, including wholeness in physics and mathematics, Whitehead and Russell's different interpretations of the failure of the Principia Mathematica project, the fallacy of bifurcation, a Platonic interpretation of quantum physics, and the compatibility (or lack thereof) between Whitehead's later Philosophy of Organism and Wolfgang's Platonic vision of a tripartite reality. I’ve shared a transcript below.

I let Wolfgang do most of the talking during our discussion, as I was eager to better understand his approach to resolving some long-standing confusions with regard to the ontology of quantum physics. I wish we'd had another hour just to discuss my final question concerning the spiritual meaning of history. I shared some of my concerns on this point with Ashton on a walk just following my interview with Wolfgang:

Transcript:
Near Verbatim Transcript (with minor corrections for clarity and completeness)

Matt Segall:

Dr. Wolfgang Smith, welcome to my podcast. This is the Footnotes to Plato podcast, which, as you probably know, I have borrowed from Alfred North Whitehead’s remark that all of Western or European philosophy can be understood as a series of footnotes to Plato. We are going to talk a bit about Platonism today and about your own attempts to bring some clarity and make some sense of contemporary physics—quantum physics in particular. We might touch on relativity as well; I know you have some insightful thoughts about that. We want to shed light on contemporary physics in view of this ancient wisdom coming out of Plato’s dialogues and the tradition of Neoplatonism that followed in the wake of those dialogues.

I would like to start on a more biographical note to understand a bit about how your own career unfolded and your own intellectual trajectory unfolded. I know you have degrees in mathematics and physics and taught mathematics for a number of years. But how did you end up moving from physics and mathematics into the wisdom of the Ancients and the work of Plato in particular? I take it you did not start there—or maybe you did. Can you lay that out for us?

Wolfgang Smith:

Well, I guess I really started with physics. I remember I was 14 years old and I became very curious to understand, in a rather childish, implicit way no doubt, what the world is all about—what its structure is. Incidentally, it was at that time that I somehow acquired a copy of Whitehead’s book Science and the Modern World. I read that when I was 14 years old. I do not know how much I understood at the time, but I was very excited about it. In fact, I remember my mother would call me down to dinner, and I would say, “I can’t come now; I’m thinking.” So I was very interested, and it somehow meant a great deal to me to try to understand, in what was undoubtedly a very childish way, the structure of the world. I conceived of it in terms of physics.

Matt Segall:

I know you did some important work on physics related to the re-entry of spacecraft into the Earth’s atmosphere and so on, but you also would eventually decide to study and teach mathematics. Was there something about the way that physics was being practiced and theorized that led you to decide to move more into mathematics?

Wolfgang Smith:

Well, actually, even at that early age, my ideas about physics and the structure of the world were very much at odds with the contemporary Zeitgeist—the prevailing, official worldview of our civilization. I decided to get my PhD in mathematics and become a professor of mathematics because, actually, mathematics is probably the only academic subject where one will not be accused—so, in fact, cannot be accused—of somehow violating the premises of our Zeitgeist. The subject of political correctness does not come up in mathematics. It cannot. This is really one of the deciding reasons I picked that subject. I wanted to be free to think about matters of physics and philosophy without in any way being constrained by the norms of academia in this regard.

Matt Segall:

I understand. My next question would be: when you compare this modern Zeitgeist—and, in particular, the approach to natural science that has developed out of a Cartesian framework and the whole scientific revolution in the 17th century—how has that view departed from the view of the Ancients, like Plato, regarding the nature of the cosmos, both in its physical dimension and perhaps its metaphysical dimension? In other words, what was it that the ancient philosophers, Plato in particular, understood that modern science has forgotten or distorted?

Wolfgang Smith:

Well, it is an excellent question, and I would say that the contemporary answer to these basic questions—in other words, the contemporary worldview—is really, strictly speaking, the diametric opposite of the Platonist. They are antipodal because the contemporary worldview is really premised upon the belief that the things that compose our cosmos are made up of tiny little particles, however conceived—in other words, that it consists of wholes which are merely the sum of parts.

I would say that the basic ontological premise of not only Platonism but all the profound ancient metaphysical schools is the opposite, namely that the real entities which compose our perceptible cosmos are what I call “irreducible wholes,” which means that they are something more than simply a sum of parts. So, I think this is a central conception in Platonist ontology: that being is an irreducible whole, which means that it precedes ontologically the spatial-temporal atomization, if you want to call it that, which pertains to the entities that we perceive in our daily life.

To the contemporary scientists, all these entities are sums of parts. It does not matter whether you conceive of these parts in classical physics or quantum theory; they are sums of parts and nothing more. The Platonist says, “No, mistaken. The real entities, the entities that have being, are not the sum of parts. They are more than that, and in fact, they pre-exist in an ontological sphere where spatial and temporal conditions do not exist.”

Matt Segall:

Might you relate this difference in how wholeness is conceived—or misconceived, as it were—to mathematics and our conception of number? For instance, the difference between starting with a whole that can then be divided into individual numbers versus thinking of numbers as already individual and adding up to a whole. The Neoplatonic or Platonic view, it would seem to me, is that the ultimate is the One, and that the One can divide itself, or appear to divide itself, whereas contemporary physics and its reductionism—but also our understanding of number—seem to have a more additive character, in which wholeness is something that is achieved by the addition of parts rather than preceding the parts. The parts would instead be a division from the whole. Do you follow my distinction here?

Wolfgang Smith:

Yes. What you have touched upon here is, in my opinion, very, very central to the entire problem of ontology. Namely, the Greeks and the Pythagorean schools looked upon mathematics in a completely different way from the contemporary approach.

We can talk about arithmetic or geometry. I think what I am trying to say now can be understood more readily in geometry. Take any geometric entity, say a line segment. To the contemporary mathematician, a line segment is a sum of parts, and ultimately, the ultimate parts are points. So, ultimately, a line segment is conceived as a point set.

Well, the important fact is that in the Greek, and in the Pythagorean and Platonic schools (to be precise), a line segment was not conceived as a point set. It was conceived precisely as an irreducible whole, and so as something that pre-exists in a realm beyond the reach of space and time.

Let me say that this is also why geometry was so highly respected in the Platonist schools and was regarded as a means by which the mind of a human being can be elevated from the psychic to the intellectual realm. The Platonists believed that, for example, the prototype of a line segment is, in fact, an irreducible wholeness, which is situated beyond space and time.

Let me say that the development of modern mathematics, that is, “modern” in the sense of post-Cartesian, following the so-called Enlightenment, had as its fundamental aim precisely to reduce mathematics to the level of point sets. This was regarded as a great achievement. In fact, our friend Alfred North Whitehead was very much involved in that. In 1913, he, in collaboration with Bertrand Russell, published that epochal work Principia Mathematica in three volumes. I think there are few books in the history of the world that have had a comparable influence while at the same time being read only by a handful of people. It is so abstruse; only a handful of specialists have ever read this book.

But let me just say that whereas contemporary mathematicians regard it as a landmark—where you are finally getting to the bottom of things—from a Platonist point of view, it is regarded in just the opposite way. It was a betrayal of what might be called the “higher side” of mathematics. From the standpoint of the Principia, you cannot have the faintest idea even of what geometry meant in the Pythagorean-Platonic schools.

I always like to remind people of that alleged inscription over the portal of Plato’s Academy, which read, “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.” It is a very mysterious saying, but it alerts us to the fact that in the Pythagorean and Platonic schools, geometry played a very, very central role. If you look at it from our contemporary point of view, from the view of Whitehead and Russell, that geometry, which we now have set down as a standard—as “real geometry”—has nothing to say anymore at all. In other words, the geometry alluded to in this inscription alerts us to the fact that, to the Greeks—the great thinkers of ancient Greece—geometry was something very, very different from what we now conceive it to be.

Matt Segall:

The good news for our friend Whitehead is, I think, he and Russell had differing opinions about what was achieved in this series of volumes—the Principia Mathematica. There was a fourth volume planned on geometry; the first three focused more on arithmetic. But even on Russell’s admission, the project failed because of all the sort of logical tricks that were needed to make the argument work. He said at the end of it something like his dream of clarifying the foundations of mathematics by grounding it in set theory—the logic of set theory—had failed and dissolved in a nest of confusion, I think is how he phrased it. He was really disappointed by this.

But Whitehead seems to me to have been quite liberated by this failure, and this was even before Gödel’s incompleteness theorems formally showed why it was destined to fail. Whitehead was liberated from this in the sense that I see Whitehead as having a deeper grasp of the intuitive dimension of mathematics that could not be reduced to some series of logical deductions or formalisms. There is a sense in which we are participating in these higher forms or patterns. Whitehead would later say he would try to define mathematics as having to do with the study of patterns and the relationships among patterns. Pattern is something that has an intuitive and almost an aesthetic dimension to it.

I think this sense of harmony within pattern and between patterns is much more Pythagorean in orientation. The good news is I think Whitehead was not entirely convinced—even though he was a brilliant logician who tried to carry this project forward with Russell, who started as his student—he was not at all wedded to this project. His later metaphysics, I think, shows the very different direction he went in after this earlier phase of his career.

I do not want to—well, we are going to talk about your book that is coming out, I believe, today, but maybe we can just dwell for a moment on the influence of Whitehead. You said that as a 14-year-old, you read Science and the Modern World, and that was very influential for you. I know you have also, in a number of your books, drawn upon Whitehead’s famous “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” as a criticism of contemporary science and physics, and also his protest against the bifurcation of nature between the so-called primary characteristics, which could be measured and quantified, and the so-called secondary characteristics—everything subjective and qualitative—which would be concerned with the inner experience of human beings, which, for materialists, amounts to little more than a kind of illusion or projection. Science is really about putting those qualitative illusions to the side to get to the real quantitative, measurable heart of the world.

So, what do you find so important about Whitehead’s protest against this bifurcation, and what would science look like if it overcame this?

Wolfgang Smith:

I would say that what Whitehead calls the fallacy of bifurcation is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of physical science that liberates us from a tremendous illusion which has now become practically universal. It is very hard to go through a course of studies in the contemporary university without coming out on the other end as a bifurcationist. Bifurcation is a complete inversion of the truth.

Let me try to explain it as simply as possible. What bifurcation affirms—it is an ontology, a metaphysics, introduced, well, actually, first by Democritus around 400-something BC in this famous fragment of his that denies the naive belief in color, the bitter and the sweet. In reality, there exist only atoms in the void. This is basically the ontological position that bifurcation imposes upon us—not because it is true or has been verified, say, by empirical means, but simply because, a priori, it leaves no other alternative but “atoms and the void.”

Incidentally, this philosophical postulate of Democritus was very much attacked by Plato and his school, and it was very quickly abandoned by the well-informed. So for about two thousand years, the philosophically informed public knew that this was a primitive heresy that had been disproved, and they did not entertain a bifurcationist Weltanschauung. It was in the 17th century, at the hands of René Descartes, that this ancient heresy was reintroduced and has since then become the fundamental metaphysical premise of Western civilization. That is what you learn in so-called higher studies in philosophy departments.

I think it is important to understand the background. Also, it is important to understand that this is a pure assumption for which there are not—and, in fact, cannot be—any kind of evidence. It is pulled out of thin air. However, it is the metaphysics that our scientists, especially our physical scientists, have, so to speak, imbibed as if in their mother’s milk. Unknowingly, through the education to which they are subject, they come out of it as bifurcationists.

The interesting thing is that if you try to explain to them what this bifurcationist postulate affirms and why it is drawn out of thin air without any actual support, they do not understand what you are talking about. It is something that they have assumed. It is part of their fundamental Weltanschauung. Thus, they are really incapable of entering into a debate on that. It is simply a postulate that they assume unknowingly. They are not aware of the fact that they are metaphysicians, that they do make a metaphysical assumption which is basic to all of their physics. They do not understand that.

Anyone who has ever tried to converse with physicists about this issue will, I think, confirm what I am saying. It is almost impossible. Alfred North Whitehead was one of those who, for decades, went to all the big universities in England and America and lectured on the unfoundedness and the damage to physics itself that this postulate causes, and there has been almost zero acceptance in the scientific world of what Whitehead had to say.

Matt Segall:

Yes, it is as though a methodological shortcut, which would allow one to build toy models of the universe that may have some predictive success and technological application, became mistaken for—or gradually became—reified as a metaphysical presupposition, and so reified, in fact, that it became unconscious. Physicists nowadays do not even recognize, as you are saying, that they are unconscious metaphysicians who have removed themselves, and everything subjective and intelligent, from the universe so as to gain access to a very simplified model—“toy model” of what the universe is and how it might operate.

This has led to some technological innovations, but it has also left physics in a state of deep ontological confusion. I take it that many of your books, including your more recent book, Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology, are attempts to bring some sense—common sense—back into physics. Quantum theorists and Nobel Prize–winning quantum theorists like Richard Feynman are famous for saying things like, “Nobody understands quantum physics,” then even affirming and celebrating the absurdity of nature, as he understood it. This seems to me, from a philosophical point of view, to be an example of just how muddled—one of Whitehead’s favorite words—contemporary physics has become: that physicists would be celebrating the irrationality and absurdity of the picture they are presenting to us of how the physical world operates.

So let us get into your proposals here for a new ontology for quantum physics. Can you lead us into your distinction between what is described in quantum physics and what you call the corporeal realm, and how physics has become ontologically confused about what is real versus what is an artifact of their means of calculating what is real?

Wolfgang Smith:

That is a wonderful question. I think the first point that should be made concerns perception, and the most important case here, of course, is visual perception. Until Democritus and Descartes came along, the entire world believed that we do perceive the external world. When we look at the world with our normal eyes, what we see is not a res cogitans, a thing of the mind; we see external objects of many kinds.

More or less at the time of Descartes, a theory of visual perception imposed itself upon Western civilization, which is called the retinal image theory. If you study cognitive psychology at any university, I would strongly imagine that this is what you will be presented with, not as a theory but as simply the way things are. I think we all understand basically what this retinal image theory says: it recognizes that, in a sense, perception starts on the retina, where light impinging upon the eye causes electric impulses, which are then channeled into various so-called visual centers in the cortex. Last I heard, there were 20 or 21 such visual centers, and an enormous amount of information has been gathered. Sorry to say that tens of thousands of monkeys have had to pay with their lives for this information, but in any case, this is science—there is no question about it.

The trouble is that these visual centers only take apart the retinal image. So you have 20 different outcomes of that. As the experts in that field admit, we now see how the visual cortex takes the image apart, but, quote, “We do not yet see how it puts it back together.” The answer to this question, I am totally convinced, is, and can only be, this: the neuronal mechanism does not put the image back together again. In fact, it cannot. So the end product of this immensely complicated neuronal mechanism in the cortex is 20 different versions of the retinal image taken apart.

Thus, it emerges from these considerations that the neurophysiologist has a big problem, and this problem is called the “binding problem”: how do you pass from a million on/off positions of neurons scattered throughout various centers in the cortex of the brain to an image of a red rose?

I answered this problem in the only way I believe it can be answered. I think there is no other way, and the answer is based upon the Platonist ontology. What is that answer? Well, according to Platonist ontology, the cosmos breaks into three levels or planes, if you want to call it that. The highest is what the Platonists call the intelligible realm. The point about the intelligible realm is that it is not subject to either space or time. This is where everything starts. This is where the irreducible wholes—which constitute what we call being—originate.

On the opposite extreme, the third level is the corporeal world, as we know it through sense perception. This corporeal world, as everyone knows, is subject to both space and time. In between these two extremes, we have what the Platonists sometimes called the “psychic realm” or the “vital realm.” I call it the “intermediary.” The point is that the intermediary realm is subject to the condition of time but not of space.

So the binding problem is resolved, and can only be resolved—there is no other way—in the intermediary level, where the spatial separation of these millions of neurons is transcended. What binds these neuronal states into a unity, a oneness—which is what we visually perceive at any instant of time? What binds this multiplicity into unity is a principle pertaining to the intermediary realm, that means subject to time but not to space. Let me just say that, in days gone by, every child knew exactly what that principle is: this is the soul, the anima, the “psyche.” If man consisted only of a corporeal body without an anima to enliven it, visual perception would be impossible, because what makes it impossible is the binding problem. Here on the corporeal realm, the process of visual perception ends in a vast multiplicity, and there is not a scientist in the world who can scientifically explain to you how that vast multiplicity of neuronal states is brought together into the form, say, of a landscape that you perceive visually.

Matt Segall:

Let me—I want to invite you to transition into the relevance of quantum physics in a moment. But it seems to me, just on this issue of visual perception, that we can stick just within the corporeal realm and understand that one of the mistakes that leads to this problem—“the binding problem”—that many cognitive psychologists have been making is that there is this implicit presupposition that somehow the brain and the body are separate from their environment. When in fact, as Whitehead is always pointing out, the boundary between what is inside the body and outside the body is very fuzzy. Rather than having to concoct this whole, what is sometimes also called the “representational theory” of perception, where there is supposed to be a kind of neurally based language of thought inside the skull that is reassembling the sense data coming in from the outside, there never was a time when the brain or the retina—the eyes—were separate from the surrounding world. It is all an energetic process relating to itself.

So one can remain within the domain of just the corporeal. Indeed, you draw on Gibson’s theory of ecological perception, and as far as I know, he was not a Platonist, but nonetheless recognized the need to put the brain and the body back in the world and to see how our visual perception is a kind of participatory affair, where just by virtue of the way that light reflects off objects in our environment, we are bathed by far more information than what can be represented on the two-dimensional surface of the retina. Our capacity to perceive depth and so on can only be explained with a realistic understanding of perception as actually participating in the world, and not separated off from it within the skull, as though there were a little man watching a projection on a screen inside of our heads.

But what you are proposing—this deeper Platonic ontology—gets us into this other problem in cognitive science: the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness. It seems to me that on strictly physicalist grounds, there simply should be no consciousness. There should be no visual perception at all, in the sense of a conscious perception. So the fact that there is consciousness suggests to me—and should suggest to cognitive scientists—that they are making some ontological mistakes earlier in the process of reasoning that led to this so-called “hard problem of consciousness.” The solution to the hard problem of consciousness is to change our ontology, ultimately. This Platonic vision of a threefold order of reality, I think, is one way of doing that. If consciousness did not exist, there would not be any science, so we would not be asking these questions. We would simply be zombies. It seems quite obvious to me that we need to make some changes in our underlying ontology.

Now, when you talk about the intelligible, the intermediary, and the corporeal realm, there is a way of interpreting quantum physics and making sense of quantum physics in terms of this scheme. Can you lay out for us what, say, the wave function—Schrödinger’s wave equation—is describing, and how does it relate to the corporeal world of our sense experience and the intelligible world that would be the ontological source of the realm of appearances that we sense? How do you situate us in your Platonic interpretation of quantum theory?

Wolfgang Smith:

Well, that is an excellent question, and it is a question that I think can be answered meaningfully only after the heavy lifting is done to put contemporary physics on an ontological basis, which I believe can be done only on Platonic grounds. I think this is really the reason why Feynman has very astutely made this observation, which has become very famous—namely, “No one understands quantum theory.” I think this is literally true, and what it really means is that if you look at the world through Cartesian eyes, as almost every physics professional does, then quantum theory is a realm that makes no sense. You cannot really understand what it deals with and what gives it a kind of correctness, a kind of validity.

I have become absolutely convinced that in order to answer this question, you have to abandon bifurcation, abandon the almost instinctive way Western thinkers now conceive of the so-called physical universe, and look at the entire problem from a Platonist point of view, where you have this tripartite cosmos. Then the answer to this question—“What is quantum theory?”—of course also implies that you answer, “What is classical physics?” You cannot understand quantum theory unless you also understand classical physics in the bargain. The point is that both of these sciences are calling out for an ontology, because the ontology that springs from the Cartesian axiom of bifurcation just does not work; it makes no sense. On that basis, you really do not understand physics at all. It is not just quantum theory that is not understood; less obviously but equally in a rigorous sense, you do not understand classical physics at all.

So what you are asking me is: how does the Platonist ontology of physics work? How does a Platonist understand the ontological basis of physics, and how does that enable you to understand quantum theory? These are the implications.

Let me say, at the outset, what I find so surprising is that once you have grasped this Platonist tripartition into the intelligible, the psychic, and the corporeal—or the “aviternal,” “intermediary,” and “corporeal”—the ontological understanding of physics comes out very simply, very rigorously, and it leads to a clear, sharp understanding of classical physics on the one side and quantum theory on the other. You see that physics naturally breaks into these two disciplines.

Since you have asked the question, let me try to answer it as simply as I can. It will take a few minutes. I said it is simple—every child really can understand it—but even so, it requires a bit of concentration to go through the steps of this interpretation.

According to Platonist metaphysics, all being comes or derives from the aviternal plane. It is exactly the opposite of the contemporary “scientistic” outlook, which thinks that things come from below, from quantum particles. These particles unite into bigger and bigger aggregates, and voila, the things of the corporeal world, and whatever lies beyond, are formed in this way. No, it is just the other way around.

The first thing to understand is that Platonist ontology distinguishes between being and non-being. A mere sum-of-parts entity—this is the sort of thing that a physicist conceives of and works with—is not regarded, is not viewed, in the Platonist ontology at all. Ontology deals with being. What is that? It is an irreducible wholeness. So, if you will, the entities comprising the corporeal world break into two kinds: the kind that the physicist works with and understands and can tell you about—these are sums of parts—and from a Platonist vantage point, a sum-of-parts entity is not a being at all. It is a kind of a fantasy.

Being, from a Platonist point of view, is an irreducible wholeness, which means it is a manifestation in space and time (if so be it) of something that actually transcends space and time, something that is intelligible to the intellect. The difference between “intellect” and “reason” is that intellect deals with irreducible wholes; ratio, or “reason,” deals with sums of parts. The kind of mathematics that ends in the Principia Mathematica—Whitehead and Russell’s version—is a mathematics of ratio, a mathematics of reason. It is completely outside the mathematics of being, the Platonist-Pythagorean mathematics. It has nothing to do with that.

So, in the corporeal world, you have these two kinds of realities: what the Platonists call being and what the contemporary physicist deals with, which happens to be a mere sum of parts, and as such it lacks being. When I first began to observe this, I was rather fascinated to see that, strictly speaking, from a metaphysical point of view, there are, in a way, two different worlds—two different universes: the universe of the ontologist, which derives from the aviternal and is made up of irreducible wholes, and then the world of the physicist, with its galaxies and black holes and this and that. These are all sum-of-parts realities, which actually the Platonist does not even see and does not want to see, because there is no being there.

The Platonist is interested in being, and incidentally, every living organism is a being—from the amoeba to the anthropos—and therefore cannot in principle be comprehended on the basis of physics. Now, of course, the physicist can tell you many things about the body, and obviously, what he has to say can have empirical validity. But yet, in a sense, he does not even see the organism, because the organism is not a sum of parts; the organism is an irreducible whole. When our scientists in the 19th century talked about elan vital and all these things, they were simply alluding to the fact that only from a Platonist point of view can you really understand living organisms. Obviously, physics can say certain things about it, but what it says—what it talks about—always is below the ontological level of an organism. So biology is a closed field to the physicist.

The world, then, consists, in a sense, of two worlds in which we live: the Platonist world of irreducible wholes and the physicist’s world of the ten thousand things which he talks about. Incidentally, you may ask the question, “Does he construct these things, or does he discover them?” The answer is a little of both.

The first thing that the ontologist must teach the scientist is the distinction between, if you will, the “really real” world, which consists of irreducible wholes—and organisms are part of that—and then the empirical world, for lack of a better name, which is the world as the scientist, the physical scientist, conceives of things. That is something entirely different. You cannot confuse these two. But the beauty is that in a certain sense, that only the metaphysician can understand, you can really say that the difference between the world of the metaphysician, which comprises irreducible wholes, and the world of the physicist, which comprises these sum-of-parts entities, is that one is real, the other is not. In the final analysis, it comes down to that.

There is an interesting line in one of the Vedic scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita, which says: “The unreal never is; the real never ceases to be. The conclusion about these two is discerned rightly by the seers of truth.” It is a wonderful statement. When you ponder it, you see it hits the nail on the head. The unreal never is—the things that the physicist talks about never are. Please understand, it does not mean to say that it is just imaginary or anything like that. No, I am using technical language here; you have to, otherwise you get nowhere.

So there are these two worlds. Now that I have hopefully explained that, the question arises, “What does that imply regarding physics?” That is what we need to ask ourselves now.

Let me first of all point out the ontological definition or conception of classical physics. Ontologically speaking, there are corporeal objects. What does that mean? A corporeal object is an object pertaining to the corporeal stratum, which constitutes an irreducible whole. The physicist knows nothing about that because he does not talk about irreducible wholeness; he cannot even conceive it in physical terms, because our mathematics does not describe irreducible wholes. Our mathematics is geared to point sets.

Take an irreducible entity—a red apple, just to be concrete. There is the corporeal apple, and it is something that we can perceive. It is something that derives its irreducible wholeness directly from the aviternal plane. There is a corporeal apple because, before that, there pre-exists an intelligible apple. Now that I have introduced this idea of a corporeal object, I can tell you, from this ontological point of view, what classical physics is about: classical physics is the physics of “sub-corporeal” entities.

Take a corporeal entity—an apple, let us say. Call it X. Associated with this X, there is a physical apple, which you can call X-sub-F. This physical apple—incidentally, the corporeal apple is red, and it is sweet, and whatever other perceptible attributes it may have. The physical apple is neither red nor sweet, because it is the apple as the physicist conceives of it. It is fully describable in mathematical terms, except for one thing. Here we come to the crucial point: since X, the corporeal apple, is an irreducible wholeness, so is the physical apple. The physical apple is still an irreducible wholeness, which means it has being.

As I say, the classical physicist takes this for granted and cannot conceive of these things—they are beyond the vocabulary of physics. Let us now go to quantum physics, quantum mechanics. What are the quantum entities? As we would all expect at this point, having already understood what I said a moment ago, we would certainly say that quantum physics deals with entities that are not sub-corporeal. The fact that they are not sub-corporeal means that they have no irreducible wholeness. This is where the weirdness of quantum theory comes in, because ontologically speaking, it deals with entities that have no being. No wonder no one understands quantum theory, because it is not natural for the human mind to think about things that have no being. It is also why it takes a while to learn physics; it is quite a job to learn to think about things that have no being.

If that was the whole story about quantum objects, there could obviously be no quantum theory, because there can be no real physics, no real empirical knowledge concerning things that simply and purely do not have being. So somewhere along the line, being must come into the picture. How does it come into the picture? The answer is really obvious: being enters into quantum theory in the act of measurement or observation. In the act of measurement or observation, the quantum non-entity comes into contact with a corporeal instrument which is endowed with being—endowed with irreducible wholeness. In the act of measurement, this irreducible wholeness of the instrument induces an irreducible wholeness in the measured object itself.

Incidentally, this is a rather technical point. In the book that you showed us a few minutes ago, I explain how this transfer of irreducible wholeness takes place. It takes place through a mode of causation that is primary, and by which actually the universe comes into being. This mode of causation differs radically from the mode of causation that physics deals with. Physics deals with a causation that takes place through some process moving through space and time. This is why you can write differential equations for it. This other mode of causation, which I call “vertical causation,” is operative only on the corporeal level, not above, because there is no space above that level—only time, and then eternity.

The point is that this transfer of irreducible wholeness from the instrument to the object of measurement takes place through what I call “vertical causation,” which is the primary causation of the cosmos. This is a causation physics cannot understand. This is also why, for example, the famous measurement problem—when quantum physicists try to understand how you measure a so-called quantum system and how that measurement instantaneously collapses the wave function and so on—was completely mystifying. Rightly so, because measurement cannot be understood in terms of horizontal causation.

The reason physicists never could, after almost 100 years, resolve the so-called measurement problem is very simple: the act of measurement requires vertical causation. It cannot be understood in terms of horizontal causation. I think I have now—I apologize for talking so long at this stretch, but it was unavoidable—explained how, on the basis of simple, straightforward Platonist ontology, you can explain, A, the rationale of classical physics, and B, the rationale of quantum physics. Let me assure you that in light of this explanation, all the pieces fit together. For example, if you think about the measurement problem, there are no more gaps. It all holds together, and you see that in terms of vertical causation and irreducible wholeness, it all fits together. In fact, it is easy. A child can understand it.

Matt Segall:

Thank you, Wolfgang. I appreciate you leading us through that. I want to—

Wolfgang Smith (interjecting):

Oh, good. For a moment, I did not hear you. Please, go on.

Matt Segall:

I wanted to invite you to lay out this account—this Platonist interpretation of both classical and quantum physics—and I appreciate you leading us through it step by step. I recognize that there are some technicalities and that it can be difficult just to rehearse it all impromptu like that. I thought you did a great job.

I want to try to connect this to Whitehead’s ontology and his cosmological scheme and see in what ways you find it compatible or incompatible. When you talk about these three levels of being—the intelligible, the intermediary, and the corporeal—it strikes me that one way of translating this into Whitehead’s scheme would be to talk about the corporeal as what he would call the “realm of actual entities” and the intelligible as the “realm of eternal objects.” Then this intermediary realm is really the core of Whitehead’s metaphysics. He comes up with this term “concrescence” to describe what goes on in the intermediary, though for him, as a process philosopher, he is really trying to throw this whole scheme of levels into dynamism, into motion, as it were, such that concrescence—this process of becoming—is a description of how the potential (which is his word for what the intelligible forms or the eternal objects are) becomes actual. In each moment of our experience—and in each moment of any actual entity’s experience—there is a process of concrescence whereby potentiality is becoming actualized. In the context of quantum theory, Whitehead would say that what the wave function is describing is not something actual, it is describing the potentialities that are available in any given event or process of concrescence. Then as concrescence moves through its phases of actualization, it is, in a way, collapsing the wave function, if you want.

Whitehead’s rendering of this is presupposing a non-Darwinian but nonetheless evolutionary understanding of the universe—of cosmogenesis as a process whereby ever more complex organisms are emerging. He would view organisms as an adequate account not just of the biological realm but perhaps, you know, you are familiar with how he calls his philosophy the “philosophy of organism,” because he thinks organism goes all the way down. In a sense, it describes the physical world just as well as the biological world. So galaxies and stars, for Whitehead, are species of organism. Atoms are species of organism. Evolution, for him, is this cosmic process whereby simpler organisms, like atoms, through processes of creative relationship and emergence, eventually eventuate in more complex organisms like human beings. He does have a vision of the divine as luring this process of evolution forward.

I know you have disagreed with this vision that Whitehead lays out, but where I see the differences arise is on the question of time and evolution. I wonder, given the influence of Whitehead on your work, as we have already discussed earlier—his understanding of bifurcation and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, his critique of materialistic physics, and Whitehead’s insistence, in Science and the Modern World, that a thoroughgoing evolutionary cosmology is incompatible with materialism, because materialism insists upon these fundamental particles that do not evolve and that are just sort of given—given his view of evolution, which is quite different from Darwin’s (which applies only to the biological realm), Whitehead did not think the Darwinian story of biological evolution was an adequate explanation for speciation or for living organisms. We can go into that if you would like, but can you describe for me where you part ways with Whitehead and what it is that you find inadequate about his interpretation of these questions?

Wolfgang Smith:

Well, I find it hard to believe that, for example, in the biological realm, there is any process at all which results in building complex organisms out of simpler organisms. Apart from the fact that the Darwinian mechanism of random mutations followed by natural selection is utterly incorrect—there is no truth in that at all, and it is impossible—apart from that, I do not think that this is how the highest species of organisms arrive in this world. I do not think there is any process at all—Darwinian or post-Darwinian—that builds, say, a mammal out of fish. I think this is pure fantasy.

Actually, when you reflect upon what I said earlier—namely that every living organism is an irreducible wholeness, which means that it is not the sum of parts, which means that you cannot conceive it as a sum of parts—I find it hard, Matthew, to conceive of Whitehead’s process philosophy in terms compatible with Platonism. Now, perhaps it is just an inability on my part, but I must tell you I am very, very dubious that this can be done.

If you reflect upon the fact that a living organism is an irreducible wholeness, then it seems to me quite obvious that the only way this irreducible wholeness can be put here is through an act of vertical causation originating in the intelligible ground. You know Whitehead far better than I; perhaps you can correct me, but I do not see anything in Whitehead’s philosophy corresponding to what I call “vertical causality,” a causality which acts instantaneously.

John (interjecting):

Matt, may I ask Wolfgang a question?

Matt Segall:

Sure.

John:

Wolfgang, I just wanted to ask a clarifying question. You were talking about how every corporeal object is essentially tripartite, correct?

Wolfgang Smith:

Yes.

John:

So your red apple example: there is sort of an eternal core to that apple, and you could say that the existence of the parts, the corporeal parts of the apple, emanate out from that inner one, the inner irreducibility, the inner being of that apple. I do not mean literally “inner,” corporeally inner; I mean existentially inner.

Now, another thing with this is that I wonder if you could speak to whether you would say that, when you come from—and this is backpedaling a little bit, but I think it is still pertinent—when you go from top-down versus bottom-up causality, from a top-down perspective, you cannot—well, we were all philosophy majors, so we all learned the principle, at one point or another (whether we agree with it or not), that the greater cannot come from the lesser, which I hold to be a pretty powerful principle of ontology as well as logic. In the case of the cosmic tripartition, you have essentially the many emanating from the One, in a sense. Would you agree with that?

Wolfgang Smith:

Well, you can certainly say those words, but there is a likelihood they will be misunderstood. The emanation of irreducible wholeness from the intelligible to the corporeal plane, let us say, does not actually involve a “lessening.” There is no greater and no smaller here. The point is that the irreducible whole on the corporeal level contains within itself the irreducible wholeness. So there is no lessening.

Let me say that if you realize the fact that there are wise men—and there have been, and there are—people who actually are able to “see” on an aviternal level, in their eyes, there is no lessening at all. What is here is also there, and what is not here is nowhere, as the Tabula Smaragdina says. So these ideas went all the way into the Middle Ages, when people still understood Platonism. That would be my answer to your question.

John:

Right. Now would you say alternatively—I think this is more to your language—that when you talk of pre-existence on the aviternal, you do not mean that in a temporal sense; you mean it in an ontological pre-existence. Rather, in the case of, say, a corporeal apple, we have the aviternal which is fragmented. The descent from the aviternal to the corporeal is a fragmenting of being, and then, furthermore, from the corporeal to the sub-corporeal is a further fragmentation, and finally, the trans-corporeal is ultimate fragmentation.

Wolfgang Smith:

Yes. I hope, John, I have answered your question. I think we should go back to Matthew now, let him continue.

John:

Thank you.

Matt Segall:

Yes, thank you. This is helpful in thinking about the relationship of the One and the many, and Whitehead’s attempts to, I would say, integrate a more perennialist Platonic view of the nature of reality with a more modern view of creative evolution, if you will. While he is calling his philosophy “process philosophy,” he is very clear in Process and Reality that we need to reconcile these two great intuitions of both flux and permanence. I would read Plato’s cosmological dialogue, the Timaeus, as an attempt to do just this in a way, though Plato obviously gives pride of place to the eternal. Nonetheless, in the Timaeus, there is a description of an ensouled universe with life and motion. There is something about the eternal forms that, at least as Plato often describes them, lacks life and motion—this would be Whitehead’s view.

When you were asking, “Is there anything equivalent to vertical causation in Whitehead?” I think there is. He would describe this in terms of what he calls the “primordial nature of God,” which is an eternal vision of the intelligible realm that is, in a sense, incarnate in every organism’s experience of the world. So God is present in each organism. God is present as what Whitehead calls the “initial aim” that shapes the experience of each organism—or each concrescing actual entity, to use his terms. I take this as the way in which there is a “whole-to-part” causality operative in his cosmology, which is how I understand what you mean by vertical causation, a kind of whole-to-part, even though the part is also itself a whole—every organism is an irreducible whole.

The problem with Whitehead is he had to invent his own rather idiosyncratic language in order to bring about this integration he sought between a Platonic vision of the eternal and, I think, a more contemporary vision of a creative universe.

I think we are coming toward the end of our time together, and where I would like to end is on this question of our religious and spiritual outlook. We have been talking mostly about science and how we understand the nature of reality and the nature of the universe. But when we think about our place as human beings in this mystery, I wonder about the role of history and the sense in which—particularly in the religions associated with the Bible or the Abrahamic religions, even including the Quran—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—history and the history of the human community plays a very important role in the revelation of the nature of the divine and the purpose of creation, ultimately.

I wonder, in the context of a more perennialist view where it would seem as though historical process is in some way an illusion, what meaning are we to make, as human beings, of our history—where we have come from and where we are going—if, in some sense, the truth, as I understand the perennialist perspective, is just to “return to the One,” as it were, to escape the illusion of history? If I am mischaracterizing, please correct me. But do you understand the sort of religious intuition that I would uphold would be one wherein there is a historical process, the divine is involved in it, and we are called to exercise a kind of freedom and love to bring about the culmination of this historical process? To simply say that historical time is illusory is to, in some ways, make that historical process meaningless, and our role as free human beings in that process meaningless. Do you understand what I am—

Wolfgang Smith:

Absolutely. I understand very well the question you are raising, and I think they are the most important questions one can raise. I wish we would have a full period to discuss these questions, but let me, in partial answer at least, tell you my view about these matters.

First of all, in regard to Platonism, I regard Platonism as inherently the same as the Vedic tradition. There is no essential difference of outlook between the Vedic outlook you find in, say, the Upanishads and the Platonist outlook. I would like to point out that, whether you are talking from the Vedic point of view or the Platonist, in either case, the purpose of philosophy is not to “bring anything down.” This is how we in the West would think. No—the purpose is, on the contrary, to ascend from where we are now to the aviternal plane.

Let me tell you very, very briefly that in my case, after getting my doctorate, I looked forward to a year that I spent in India. This was a long time ago, when conditions were still very, very different and the higher spirituality in India was far more accessible than it is presumably today. I spent about seven months living among sadhus in remote parts of India, as it were observing them and, to the extent possible, speaking with them and asking them what I wanted to know. The upshot of it is that I became convinced that, whereas we speak abstractly and philosophically about the triple world, these ascetics actually travel in it on a daily basis. As a matter of fact, in Sanskrit there is a term for the triple world: “tri-bhuvana,” literally “the three worlds.”

These yogis that were still in existence 50 years ago, when I was traveling there, on a daily basis would, as it were, go right through the intermediary—which is very dangerous, by the way. Even in medieval Christendom, it was called the “harrowing of hell,” and few saints even ventured to do that. It is not child’s play. These are realities, and there is a yogic means of doing it. Whether they still exist today, I do not know.

Getting back to the Platonist tradition, I was very, very excited when, not so long ago, I learned from an English Platonist—who should be much better known than he is—Thomas Taylor. He seems to have had some inside information about the Platonist and Pythagorean traditions. In a fascinating book dealing with Pythagoras and the first book of Euclid, Thomas Taylor describes a journey the young Pythagoras made to Egypt. When Pythagoras was a young man, he traveled to Egypt and became a disciple of one of the Egyptian masters. Thomas Taylor describes their life and their discipline, and when I read this, I realized, “This is practically identical to what I myself witnessed in India amongst the sadhus.”

First of all, this is something you cannot do yourself. You can only enter into these higher realms through discipleship. Only one who has himself acquired this through a master can initiate you and put you through these disciplines, which—if all goes well—will then in the end enable you also to attain. Attain what? It is a matter of vision; it is a matter of sight. What both Pythagoras and Plato tried to instill in their disciples is the ability to actually live, if you will, on the aviternal level, to merge in that trans-cosmic vision of reality directly, not through any intermediaries.

Incidentally, I learned that in India every 14-year-old Brahmin born in India understands that if you are seeking God in that sense of this vision on the intelligible level, you have to sacrifice the ordinary worldly aims and ambitions that we all have. It is a way of asceticism; it is a way of purification. The only point in which the Platonist-Pythagorean tradition differs from the Vedic is this: in the Platonist “yoga,” if you want to use that term, geometry plays a key role. To the best of my knowledge, this is nowhere to be found in the Vedic tradition. This is Western.

What is that role? Well, geometry, as we understand it, belongs to the intermediary plane. It is, if you will, psychic. If you think of a circle or a sphere, this is a psychic construct. However, within that psychic construct, there is an eternal archetype. So in principle, it is possible to transition from geometry in the sense in which we all understand the term to a direct vision of intelligible reality. This is a form of yoga, a form not known in India. But when I read about the actual life of these disciples—the celibacy and the mandatory initiation and the role of the guru, the spiritual guide—I realized this is part of the same overall tradition.

It gives you an entirely new way of understanding Platonism and the Pythagorean tradition, which are the same metaphysics; there is no difference there. We in the West have to learn that, because these ideas are all very strange, and the ideas about religion we have in the West are very, very different. Incidentally, there is a profound and irreducible difference between the Vedic and Platonist approach to religion on the one side and the Judeo-Christian on the other. In today’s culture, there is an enormous amount of confusion on this topic, and I am totally convinced that the so-called “perennialist school” is mistaken: they look upon the Judeo-Christian tradition through Vedantic eyes, and what you see through Vedantic eyes is always going to be Vedanta. The Judeo-Christian conceptions are simply not visible in Vedantic terms.

Anyhow, I am being very general in these remarks, but since you touched upon these themes, I just wanted to, in a word or two, give you my perspective on that. It is very different from the perennialists, and my understanding of Platonism I must say I owe squarely to the English Platonist Thomas Taylor. Where he got it from, I have no idea, but reading Thomas Taylor, I began to realize this is not a scholar who learned things from books. Somehow, he is an insider of this tradition.

Matt Segall:

Thank you, Wolfgang. I appreciate all that you have shared in the last 90 minutes or so. I wish we could go longer. Perhaps we can arrange to speak again at another time to go more in-depth, particularly on this final topic.

John:

Did you want to add something?

Matt Segall:

No, I just want to say thank you on behalf of everyone. It was very interesting.

John:

Yes, I agree. I want to thank you too, Matthew. I am very happy that you had Wolfgang on, and these are very major issues, needless to say, which you raised. God willing, perhaps we will have another occasion to continue.

Matt Segall:

I hope so. All right, well, thank you both. This is a great way to spend a Sunday morning.

Wolfgang Smith:

I agree. Thank you so much. All the best to you, Matthew.