Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology

Abstract

Two hundred years ago Friedrich Schleiermacher (See Wellmon 2006) modified Kant’s notion of anthropology—‘hermeneutically,’ as he said—so as to make it inclusive of the tribes that Captain Cook found in the South Sea Islands. This paper honors the late Joseph J. Kockelmans for making a similar hermeneutic move to update Kant’s notion of natural science so as to make it inclusive of the phenomenological lifeworld (For ‘lifeworld,’ see Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, 1954, 121–148, and the ‘lifeworld’ theme throughout the Crisis.) syntheses of classical, relativity, and quantum physics. The new synthesis is in fact not alien to the views of some of the founders of quantum mechanics, notably Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg—possibly even Albert Einstein. In this hermeneutical move, the ‘observer’ is ‘embodied consciousness,’ and ‘measure-numbers’ represent ‘observable presence.’ The new theoretical synthesis of physics is a representation of a physical system as a dynamic Hilbert Vector Space; empirical ‘observables’ are represented by projection operators, each of which maps a subspace of definite measurable values. Among these projection operators, some pairs are ‘complementary’ and share a common subspace of the Hilbert Space where they can be precisely measured together in a common laboratory setting. Some pairs, however, are ‘non-complementary’ and do not share a common subspace; these lead to Uncertainty Principles of the quantum mechanical kind. The quantum notion of an “observable” introduces into the discursive language of physics the common sense lifeworld notion of “contextuality.” This analysis completes Husserl’s analysis of science in the Crisis, so well articulated and developed by Kockelmans (See Kockelmans’ contributions to the phenomenology of natural science in Kockelmans and Kisiel (1970)).

NOTES ON SOURCES: Some of the sources used in this paper are listed in the references below. Most of the referenced Heelan texts can be found on the website, https://gushare.georgetown.edu/heelanp/ or http://fordham.bepress.com/phil_research/. In the field of mathematics and theoretical physics, I have learned from my physics mentors: from the lectures of Erwin Schrödinger and John Synge on classical non-Euclidean geometries, and from personal communications with and the publications of Nobelists Eugene Wigner (cf. 1963, 1967) and Werner Heisenberg (cf. 1950) on the role of subjectivity in assessing the rationality of the quantum theory. I have also profited from discussions on cognitive science with Karl Pribram and his writings (cf. 1971, 1991) on the building of a scientific model of human embodied consciousness. In linguistics, I have learnt much about language from my colleague in German Linguistics, Heidi Byrnes at Georgetown University. I owe a special debt to Babette Babich, at Fordham University, my former student, who has been a constant partner in scholarship for many years. These, among many others too numerous to mention, are the principal dialogical and dialectical sources of the rational heuristic I have used to explore the nature of the human consciousness and the Spirit that raises it up above pure Nature.