Science Blurring its Edges into Spirit: The Quantum Path to Ātma

Consciousness and the Classical Physics of Social Life

Like any well-turned text, Quantum Mind and Social Science is both the foundation of its claims about the ‘unifying physical and social ontology’, and the stuff of its own overturning. Nowhere in the work do the two positions overlap so intimately, and nowhere is Wendt’s reading, by virtue of its transparency, so vulnerable. ‘Quantum theory poses a worldview problem’, affirms the author in the opening sequence of Chapter 3, ² quite understatedly given the stunning remit of the introductory Chapter 1 and the astonishing reconstruction of the experimental basis for quantum theory in Chapter 2. Yes, it does! Yet while the author does indeed permit himself a reassuringly incredulous, ‘What is going on here?’ a few pages earlier, ³ a more emphatic reaction would be forgiven by any reader who has just absorbed the extraordinary anecdotes of recent quantum mechanical experimentation laid out in Chapter 2. Yet Quantum Mind and Social Science remains cool-headed, indeed right up to the bitter end. Where recourse to song, dance, poetry or prayer might have been in order, given the seemingly miraculous (or calamitous) implications of quantum experimental outcomes, the book stays on message, grits its teeth, and powers through, true to the design with which it started and loyal to the theories and methods of the social scientific discourse – for better or worse.

Having established the basics of the theory, Quantum Mind and Social Science quickly zeros in on the locus of the question: consciousness, and thus to the epicentre of the philosophy of mind, the not-quite timeless question of how consciousness can be explained. To put it in a first-cut mundane form the question goes like this: how can patently material beings give rise to the extraordinary non-material phenomenon known as consciousness. To his merit, Wendt begins on the sceptical end of the mind-body problem: there seems to be an insurmountable gap between mind and body (the brain) within what Wendt calls the ‘classical worldview’. ⁴ The matter is complicated, as Wendt points out, by the fact that ‘consciousness’ is itself a contested concept:

Especially for social scientists, who mostly study adult human beings, it is important to note that consciousness-as-experience does not imply self-consciousness, or consciousness that one is conscious. […] Self-consciousness is not reducible to consciousness in this more primitive sense, but it is dependent on it, so if we cannot explain the latter then there is no hope of explaining the former. The hard problem is not about the reflexive awareness that underlies social institutions, in short, but the simple experience of a subjective point of view. […] Explaining consciousness is “hard” for the classical worldview because it is unclear how a purely material world could ever give rise to it. As Joseph Levine has put it, there is an “explanatory gap” between the objective physical descriptions of neuroscience and the subjective experience of those descriptions. ⁵

Wendt rightly situates the challenge for social sciences and the philosophy of mind in the Western Enlightenment genealogy. ⁶ This assumption, or perhaps we should say ‘pretence’, is the point of entry of his intervention in the debate. What are the components of Western thought on which Wendt’s reconstruction stands or falls, and what horizons of thought are evoked by putting it into question?

The starting point of this uncommonly erudite canvassing of not only the literatures of theoretical physics, but also of the major positions in social scientific theory, is a return to a decidedly wobbly straw-man to be knocked down. Quantum Mind and Social Science takes issue with what the author calls an ‘underlying assumption in the social sciences’. The social sciences, it decries, are caught in a faulty assumption that ‘social life’ is ‘governed by the laws of classical physics’. ⁷ To move a bit quickly and abusing somewhat Wendt’s more patient explication: just like the quantum moment puts the mind body under pressure, so does it put the experience of social life under pressure. ⁸

The Metaphysics of the Social Sciences

In the tradition of the Western thought what is scientifically true is taken to be always true and everywhere true, provided the same premises are observed and the same framing conditions are foreseen. The meaning of the enterprise called ‘science’ consists in uncovering it, making it visible, solving the question that is already asked. This is a concept of scientific truth about which Nietzsche was so derisive in Beyond Good and Evil. Scientists are ultimately disingenuous and incapable of actually making what would be called scientific questions because they are incapable of posing questions they do not already know the answer to. The true scientific question, the question whose answer would constitute truly unknown knowledge is impossible to conceive of and impossible to pose. We can only imagine questions to which the answers already exist. True discovery is formally excluded. ⁹

When Wendt evokes ‘reality’, either in terms of debates about reality or ‘descriptions of reality’, ¹⁰ it is with the aim of identifying the particular properties of ‘reality’ that give an adequate description of it. Physicists, like social scientists, Wendt rightly claims, regard the question of reality as a matter of articulating what the characteristics of reality actually are, something to be discovered and correctly – scientifically – documented, as Nietzsche has it. They understand ‘reality’ as the ensemble of all things that exist, not as the being that underlies them, reflecting Heidegger’s distinction between entities (Seiendes) and being itself (Sein). There is thus an unease in the quantum mind, born of a kind of fundamental ambivalence. The rarified analytic discourse of Quantum Mind and Social Science does everything to tacitly indicate the inadequacy of the metaphysical assumptions of both science in general and quantum science in particular, without applying itself to the project of taking the next step and looking into the consequences of enquiring into what Heidegger and others after have called ‘ontological difference’, that is the difference between reality understood as the sum of all things that exist, and reality itself.

The latter category is, in contrast to what the social sciences loosely describe as ‘ontology’, what the early Heidegger called ‘fundamental ontology’: ‘that finite analytic of the finite essence of human beings which is to prepare the foundation for the metaphysics which ‘belongs to human nature’. Fundamental Ontology is the metaphysics of human Dasein [that is, human beings in the empirical world] which is required for metaphysics to be made possible’. ¹¹

Like Wendt, Heidegger too interrogates a clash of ‘ontologies’. However, Heidegger is concerned with the clash between a different set of ‘beings’. One is the world of things, of extant objects, and the condition of possibility of that existence, in some sense the sum of all existing things nominally recognised and conceptualised. The other, far deeper, is the substrate of all beings, the being of beings. The former is as common as the day, while the latter has been neglected to the point of being forgotten altogether. What is more, Heidegger explains, in the Western philosophical tradition we have taken to sanction this neglect by relegating being to the status of an impoverished concept, so utterly empty that it cannot be defined, the one concept of all concepts that has no meaning because it has no predicates. Indeed, he claims, it needs no definition, according to the common wisdom, because everyone uses it all the time and knows implicitly what it means. ¹² Thus the ‘first question’ of Western philosophy is the question of its own being. The first question of quantum mechanics, by the same token, is some notion of being. Which one?

Heidegger finds the ‘question of being’ to be a unique question for another reason. Even the fact that it has no object in the ordinary sense, or rather, some would say it has all objects, it wakes in us a kind of fascination:

we are each touched once, maybe even now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms. […] The question is there in a spell of boredom, when we are equally distant from despair and joy, but when the stubborn ordinariness of beings lays open a wasteland in which it makes no difference to us whether beings are or are not and then, in a distinctive form, the question resonates once again. ¹³

This notion of being, formulated by early Heidegger, resonates deeply with the substance that envelops and supports all existence. It is the substance that Quantum Mind and Social Science navigates the contours of without scratching the surface of its substrate. So close and yet so far, it is the substrate that would solve Wendt’s riddle, the foundation without a foundation within which the apparent paradoxical phenomena predicted by quantum mechanics and observed by modern science are compatible. And yet, the mysterious substrate of being is a priori excluded by the rules of the social scientific game. It is also the level, in line with Heidegger’s early concept of being that lies cloaked in the darkness of our blindness, operating in a realm or sphere that human beings have neither the perceptual nor the conceptual faculties to detect.

Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics

As Wendt is aware and richly documents, the issues raised by the experimental and theoretical discoveries of quantum mechanics have long been an object of interest of philosophers. ¹⁴ The oldest branch of this very large tree, as Wendt notes, is the return provoked by quantum mechanics to the traditional philosophical mind-body problem. New findings about the behaviour of particles at the sub-atomic level are brought together with current understandings of the neurophysiology of consciousness. This permits a fine-tuning of the findings of the reigning doxa of neurophysiology, on the one hand, and a deeper and more nuanced understanding by philosophers of mind of the nature of consciousness as far it relates to the relationship between mind and material or, traditionally, ‘mind and body’, on the other. This rich literature reaches from new interpretations of the observer-observed opposition as a consequence of shifting it – with the help of key quantum discoveries – to the neurological level, to a re-tooling of the basic theoretical findings of neurophysiology in order to explain consciousness as a set of ‘brain states’, or by revisiting the micro-processes of thought.

As far as one can tell, Wendt does not attempt to define consciousness, despite mentioning it 628 times and discussing in depth its relation to the social sciences in the opening pages of Quantum Mind and Social Science. To be sure, consciousness is duly noted as something important to the social sciences, to the social world. This is an understanding that visibly lies at the heart of the project of the book. Wendt implicitly adopts what we might call a ‘minimal’ version of consciousness. A minimal version of consciousness would refer to a ‘minimal’ version of self-awareness. It would at a minimum contain awareness of I as thinker and I as thought. It would express, in one form or another, the thought that I am consciousness to the extent I know that I am ‘I’, that I equally well could not be, that there exists in some sense something other than me, and that this other might very well be what we call my body, my physicality or materiality. It would presume that my existence is contingent, that it is not self-sufficient, self-generating, self-enabling, and that its end would be somehow caused by something external to consciousness to certain factors, outside of myself.

These are of course very heavily travelled waters for philosophers of mind and I do not dare enter into such debates. Wendt represents them admirably, and if the argument were to rest on these premises alone, he would of course be well situated and well equipped – as he demonstrates himself to be – to advance his arguments.

My concern is a different one, a simpler one in appearance, but one which will be more difficult to make compelling. It has three moments: First, the premises of social science theory and research cannot account for the phenomena of quantum mechanics. Second, the narrow, psychologising concept of subjectivity and thus self-consciousness at the heart of social scientific thought cannot account for the moral and spiritual consequences of quantum mechanics. Third, the Vedic cosmology supports a vision of human beings and of social being that is more in concert with the aims and ambitions of the social science project.

To be fair, Wendt explicitly states that he believes Quantum Mind and Social Science interrogates the fundamental, metaphysical assumptions of science: ‘In sum, quantum theory calls into question all of the metaphysical assumptions upon which the classical worldview is based: materialism, atomism, determinism, mechanism, the subject object distinction, and that space and time are absolute’. ¹⁵ And yet, in practice this ‘calling into question’ does not involve calling into question the metaphysical foundations of these positions in such a way that they might be able to address the apparent paradoxes of quantum phenomena. The problematisation proposed by Quantum Mind and Social Science involves interrogating their ability to accommodate themselves to the widest range possible of empirical data, testing their coherence as a function of the compatibility with what Quantum Mind calls ‘reality’, i.e. the aggregate of facts about the world as they are understood in their immediacy. ¹⁶

Of course, these incidents of textual support for a quantum worldview do not carry the burden of proof. And it is not my aim to stylise the inadequacy of causal proof as itself proof of a non-causal worldview. These sparse examples from a gigantic corpus of the evidence do not have the function of proof, rather the nearly psychologising aim of introducing at least one theoretical orientation compatible with the observational findings of quantum theory.

The ‘iron cage’ of ‘reality’ comes to its most explicit expression in the most influential response to the inconsistencies between classical physics (and we are now in a position to say, classical metaphysics) in the so-called ‘Copenhagen interpretation’. As Wendt points out, this approach is simply a pragmatic one or, perhaps one might say ‘realist’ or even ‘positivist’. It holds simply that what is ‘real’ is what is measured in a given circumstance. As Wendt puts it,

Realists think that quantum theory is telling us something about reality, whereas instrumentalists are agnostic about reality and see the theory as just a device for predicting the outcomes of experiments. The majority of interpretations today are realist, but since the most widely known one, the Copenhagen Interpretation, is instrumentalist. ¹⁷

For Bohr, there is nothing beyond the measurement (an echo of Derrida’s scandal-provoking, ‘there is nothing outside the text’). ¹⁸ Wendt solves this conundrum rhetorically, that is to say for rhetorical purposes, such that the sequence can logically give sense, by differentiating between a ‘micro world’ and a ‘macro world’, in which two different sets of physical laws apply. ¹⁹

Elements of the Vedantic Worldview

The Vedas are among the earliest documents of human history, the oldest in Sanskrit literature and the earliest foundations of what very loosely can be referred to as Hinduism. The Vedic Period in which the initial texts of the Veda were formulated, then transmitted and institutionalised through an oral culture, is generally dated to 1700–300 BC, although controversies around this account abound. ²⁰ There are four Vedas: Rg, Yajur, Sāma and Atharva. The first three Vedas, of which the Rg-Veda is master, harmonise with each other in name, form, language and content, yet their functions are distinct. The Rg-Veda is the corpus of songs brought to India by the Aryans, the Yajur-Vedas functions as a catalogue of rituals, and the Sāma-Veda is a purely liturgical collection. The Atharva-Veda has a different status, being the product of a somewhat later era. Each Veda consists of three parts: Mantras, Brāhmanas, and Upanishads. Where the Mantras have a story-telling function and Brāhmanas deal with ritualist matters, the Upanisads constitute a philosophical commentary on the Veda. ²¹ For this reason, the Upanisads are considered to be a philosophical source for Indian thought.

There are 13 major Upanishadic texts, formulated around 500 BC which interrogate the nature of being and of the self, the origins of the universe, the meaning of knowledge and the pursuit of the good life. In the vast and ancient universe of Indian thought the Upanisads are therefore only a moment in the evolution of the very complex landscape of philosophical positions in Indian cosmology. And yet they have the virtue of advancing a compact presentation of some the main philosophical concepts that describe the basic shape of the Eastern experiences of cosmology formulated in these, the Vedanta – the late Vedas – and remain influential in contemporary debates and discussion. They give shape and content to the Indian cosmology built on what is known in the West as ‘non-dualism’, that is the principle that what we call reality and what we call the soul are indistinguishable. ²² These texts provide a touchstone for metaphysical alternatives in which classical readings of quantum mechanics are carried out. While volumes would be necessary in order to present the Vedantic worldview in all of its detail and complexity, its two best known core concepts suffice in order to motivate a plausible critique to the metaphysics of presence at work in the classical interpretation of quantum mechanics: ‘ātma’ (self) and ‘brahman’ (reality). The concepts are in the Vedantic worldview inseparable, and their complex relationship is at the heart of what is generally called ‘non-dualism’.

The principle of non-dualism is straightforward, although also ultimately very complex: Ātma is the individual Self in a state of ‘unbound pure being’, or perhaps ‘self-being’. Brahman is the Self of the universe or the cosmos. Non-dualism states that the Self of unbound pure being is indistinguishable from the Self of the universe (Brahman). ²³ Indeed, they are one, and a purified consciousness enjoys the full experience of the knowledge that ‘I am/is ultimate reality’. This idea is set out and developed in a variety of places in the Vedantic canon, but nowhere so succinctly as in the fourth of the central Upanishads, the Chāndogya Upanishad.

The Chāndogya Upanishad deals with the reputed opposition of cause and effect, where one martial element is understood to be the cause of another. In the episode, a brahmin, Uddālaka Ārun.i, explains to his son how the entire substance of any material thing can be grasped and understood in its entirety by experiencing only a part of it. The greater material that was the source or the material ‘cause’ of the secondary element, is no cause, but rather co-determinate with it. The cause is inseparable from the effect, the effect is identical with the cause. No causality material or otherwise precedes this fundamental auto-causation. Not only mental but also classical physical processes that presuppose that one part of the whole precedes another, have not risen to an adequate level of the insight or observation to see and understand that what appears as a pair is essentially a whole, part of an indivisible system.

When awareness arrives at this experience of complete absence of necessity in physicality, it is understood to be without place, indeed everywhere. And since it is everywhere, it is timeless, fully enveloped and yet paradoxically, from a classical point of view, not enveloped at all. Self is an abstraction. It has no other properties than pure awareness of itself, self-awareness is the Self: ‘Vast, divine, of inconceivable form, subtler than the subtle, that shines forth, farther than the farthest, and yet here, near at hand. It is here within those who see, set in the secret place of the heart’. ²⁴ As in Western philosophy and science, consciousness is also a core component for Vedantic thought. However, in Vedantic thought consciousness has several types and several levels. The Taittiriya Upanishad describes what Western practitioners of the philosophy of mind would call ‘mind’. The human self is described as a kind of shelled awareness. Each shell constitutes part of the mind, a degree of mindfulness. Yet the mind is not the deepest shell, the most authentic level. The mind – in the Western sense of the word – is not conscious, it is only an instrument of consciousness. But there is a deeper level, several deeper levels. The self (ātma) is the level at the heart of them all, reality (brahman) self, the self that is aware of the mind. ²⁵ According to the philosophy of the Upanishads, if one strips away the levels of the human existence, an act which in theory is pragmatically possible, penetrating past the different levels of awareness, one arrives at the awareness of an irreducible ‘I’, which envelops all things. This ‘subject’, to borrow the classical term, is not individual. More puzzling still, it is not collective, social or cultured. It is essentially reality itself, being itself: brahman. In the words of the Māndaukya Upanishad: ‘The Self is Brahman’. ²⁶

The Vedantic Worldview and Quantum Mechanics

It is a poorly-kept secret that the grandfathers of quantum mechanics, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, Einstein, de Broglie, Jeans, but in particular Schrödinger were fascinated and inspired by Vedic cosmology. There is little original in evoking the observed affinities between Eastern spiritual traditions and quantum mechanics. A crowd of popularisers have done it before. ²⁷ And yet coming from the pen of the great minds of quantum theory makes a particular impression.

Of the remarkable philosopher-physicists of the quantum generation of the early 20th century, by far the most important is Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961). This is because, unlike his philosopher-physicist colleagues who ruminate with brilliance on the different kinds of knowledge represented by natural scientific and religious thought, Schrödinger is the strongest voice articulating the need to rethink being itself as a misconceived category, or perhaps rather ‘merely’ conceived, not lived or realised in a more ethical sense. Schrödinger essentially regarded the Vedantic worldview as an adequate theory for quantum mechanics, famously writing, in What is Life? ‘The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. This is entirely consistent with the Vedanta concept of All in One’. ²⁸

On the question of the unity of consciousness, Schrödinger is quite clear that the ‘quantum reality’ – that is the recently encountered empirical properties of the certain objects at a sub-atomic scale – is entirely compatible with a general Vedantic inspired view of human consciousness. In the frame described by among other things the texts of the Upanisads the quantum characteristics of the human mind are compatible with ‘classical’ characteristics:

There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not only of the Upanishads. The mystically experienced union with God regularly entails this attitude unless it is opposed by strong existing prejudices; this means that it is less easily accepted in the West than in the East. ²⁹

Schrödinger explains that since consciousness is closely connected with ‘the limited region of matter’, namely the physical body, and since the different states of the body – over the course of life and through different physiological conditions – have patent influence on our different states of mental being then it is simply plausible that multiple minds exist in unity within the individual. In a chapter entitled ‘The Vedantic Vision’ he continues, ‘the plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy, in which this is a fundamental dogma, has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object’. ³⁰

Of quantum multiple worlds theory and, implicitly, quantum entanglement, he advances:

it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling, and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. […] Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world. ³¹

In the same way Schrödinger confirms that the unity of plural worlds theorised by quantum physics is a natural outgrowth of the Vedantic cosmology. He asks, for example, where the Western metaphysical discomfort with the notion of a unified reality arises and reassures that the ultimate linkage between ‘realities’ theorised by quantum mechanics, and more recently observed as explainable, has the unity of realities understood in the Vedantic world view: ‘In short, all these examples show us how remarkable is the harmony between the resources of which our mind disposes and the profound realities which conceal themselves behind natural appearances’. ³²

If we were to give a name to a posture one must take to such clues of an outside, of something beyond being, it might correspond to the Platonic (and more famously Epicurean) concept of Thaumazein – wonderment. Oddly enough, we see in such texts and others that quantum theory plays a role that is ironically in tune with the role it reveals human subjects as playing. It reveals a fundamental blindness, or unawareness, or perhaps forgetfulness. It reveals the human subject,

1. as a world

2. as a means of interacting with the world

3. as ‘short-sighted’ or in any case incapable of seeing the world, ‘seeing’ in a broad sense, of perceiving, conceptualising, knowing, understanding, etc.

This is because subjectivity is being. The ethical, eventually spiritual, event of quantum theory lies in the fact that it does not leave us utterly blind. It does not consist of some alternative reality – alternative ‘ontology’ – that parades before our blind eyes, without any trace or suggestion that we might be able to see. Human wonderment with being, which Quantum Mind and Social Science, intact with its mandate as a work of social science theory, does not permit itself to indulge in, is the abiding experience of being as a question, not only the beginning of philosophy, as Plato puts it in the Theaetetus. It is the childhood of human experience of spirituality. Consciousness of the outside of our frame of reality, spiritual consciousness, is a vestige of original wonderment, and yet it is observably [sic] alive and well in the ethos of quantum theory.

For social scientists operating within the established Western paradigm of the vocation of both social and natural science the forces at work to limit and discredit wonderment are immense. Indeed, wonderment does not have a chance. Quantum Mind and Social Science understandably does not regard this as among its many difficult tasks, even though it serves wonderment at times despite itself. It is among many other things a grain of evidence that even the premises and tools of social scientific consciousness can serve as an inspiring spark of awareness that something is amiss in the sober task describing what the world is. But it is doomed to failure by necessary adhesion not only to those premises and tools, but to the Western project of science.

Strangely enough, the simple but formidable challenge of my argument is in a sense parallel to Wendt’s: to connect elements from two utterly different worlds. I am by no means trying to propose a religious or spiritual alternative to the arguments of Wendt and others. What seems far more plausible, more evident and even more elegant, is that the natural sciences have clearly begun ‘blurring their edges into religion’, as Deepak Chopra puts it. ³³ This can be equally said of the argumentation of Quantum Mind and Social Science, although it is more meticulous and forceful: the considerable efforts made to thread the needle of the metaphysics of presence, it pushes deeper and deeper toward a deep description of spiritual experience.

This interpretation is unlikely to gain traction anytime soon. Analytic philosophers who deal with such matters – the classic is Alston’s Perceiving God ³⁴ – will admonish that religious experience is some sensory experience of an external phenomenon, then quickly add that the sensory character of religious experience is of a different order and nature and has different criteria for sensory objects than ‘ordinary’ sensory objects like a car in the parking lot. Arguments based on parsing qualities in order to defend qualitative difference and exclude properties at odds with one or another opposing argument is a slight-of-hand taught in every first-year philosophy class. Our question is another. The problem facing ‘classical’ explanations of quantum phenomenon is not what it is exactly that is ‘out there’. Rather, it is exteriority itself.

Conclusion

Whatever properties one might, through experimentation or erudition, attribute to matter in order to uphold a ‘coherent’ concept of it, whatever properties one might attribute to thought in order to do the same, we cannot, in the classical framework, get around the nearly mundane assumption that thought is external to matter. Regardless of what end we start on, regardless of what worldview we hold, regardless of what theoretical orientation or spiritual predisposition we defend, at some point we are obliged to give a straightforward answer to the primeval philosophical question at the heart of human existence: how does thought arise from matter? Even the most obstinate materialist will have to confront the fact that the banal firing of a neuron becomes thought.

As Wendt knows, quantum mechanics does not explain this, although it does provide a coherent description of it, coherent, that is, if we accept a metaphysical vision – inter alia – in strong affinity with the one provided by Upanishads and other Vedantic texts.

The challenge – be it philosophical or physical – is not to drill down deeply enough to a level of granularity able to reveal properties that will permit us to hold matter and thought apart. The challenge is to formulate the theory that does not require their mutual externality. Quantum mechanics does not offer such a theory although it does offer a plausible account of what such a theory would require and presuppose. And it produces mathematical calculations that confirm it. As its practitioners have documented, countless observations that suggest that what we could not see through our classical glasses is now in plain sight through the quantum approach, namely that thought and matter are not external to each other: they are not two, they are one. Vedantic philosophy provides such a theory, predicting in a qualitative way the results discovered by quantum science.

The culprit in this disarray is not the variety of human shortcomings, misjudgements, misunderstandings and misprisions, but the sciences themselves. As Wendt is aware and helpfully points out, what we have long named ‘matter’ is essentially void. This is a basic premise that even so-called ‘classical physics’ can accommodate itself to. Yet the problem is not that clever physicists understand and can accurately instruct us about the fact that most of all matter is space, and that, in addition, the correlation between matter and energy can be precisely calculated for any given matter, or any given energy. It is rather that they/we do not possess the tools – and doubtless also not the desire – to interpret the energy that overwhelmingly envelops our world as something more than a correlate or a translation of matter, in wait of its cashing in as something redeemable and human-like, i.e. matter qua material value, which all sensible sentient beings know is what the story is all about. A moral spiritual interpretation of this energy, while bulwarked upon millennia of research and reflection in, among other things, the Vedic tradition, proposes a worldview that preserves what sceptics might say also gives meaning to it: ātma – matter as consciousness.

Wendt muscles his way from one field of knowledge to another (to be sure, he has the muscle), from one tenacious milestone to the next, clearing a rational path through the heavy brush towards an increasingly rarified, steeled, narrow, and esoteric outcome, where all the deductive pegs line up, where all the collective conditions imposed by each of the methodological steps are logically met. The result is a fragile and ungainly conclusion that resists like a breach-birth its own coming-to-the-world from one end of this erudite book to the other. Even an argument from elegance alone, second cousin to the Occam’s Razor argument evoked in Quantum Mind and Social Science, ³⁵ would be forced to admit that by asking us to take for granted a notion of being that requires 293 pages of scrambling finesse to circumnavigate, leaves the reader disheartened at worst, raising an eyebrow at best. When abstracted from the question of their being, (the question that even the astuteness of this book hints that we should ask) the first-glance properties of quantum objects unsurprisingly refuse the laws of ‘reality’ that support the classic account of our world.