Quantum Drummer

As a follow up on the analysis of Complementarity, I will expand the limits of the concept from the traditional view to a much wider application. The idea behind this effort is to maximize the opportunities that integration and addition provide us, in comparison to differentiation and substraction, trying to describe the power of “building from” or “building upon” instead of falling in the trap of breaking down everything into smaller parts, minimizing each one of those parts. In a literal way, but also in a metaphorical way, I will make my best effort in showing that human progress will be much faster and greater by collaborating and adding strengths, than by embracing conflict and competition as is the rule of the dominating paradigm. A few years back, I found a T-shirt that I really liked. It had an image of a forest, and the message: “Forget the box, just think outside”. This is a great message to represent this effort, let’s think outside, no box, no dogma, no artificial limitations. Walk ahead with curiosity, imagination and most of all, open minds.

Wilczek (2021) has shown an open mind that is uncommon in science, particularly in Physics, and this is a reason to have hope, to see a crack in the hard shell of the scientific dogma, through which the light of a new paradigm might have a chance to appear.

Some scientists in history have been rebels against the established dogma. The few brave ones have normally lived their lives under pressure and with little recognition, if any, from the scientific communities. One of the main examples is David Bohm. A first class mind, described by Einstein as his successor while working together in Princeton, Bohm was victim of the political anti-communist hysteria of the 1950’s, and when he refused to declare against Robert Oppenheimer, accusing him of communist, when they worked together at UC Berkeley, Bohm was dismissed from Princeton University and was required to leave the US to Brazil and then to England, and being isolated from the mainstream of scientific advances. His work being ignored by other physicists of his time. After his death, the work of David Bohm has been recognized as the work of a real genius, including his own quantum theory works in opposition to the then accepted Copenhagen Interpretation, his theory of the Implicate Order and his view of a holographic universe.

One of Bohm’s publications is Thought as a System, which is a book based on a seminar that he held in Ojai, CA in 1990. On this book, Bohm reflects on the relationship between mind ~ matter and the way that our thoughts participate actively in creating our perceptions, guide our actions and provide our sense of meaning. About the relationship of his work in this publication and complementarity, Bohm describes the way in which everything in nature is interdependent, but how humans use the element of fragmentation, in the way we approach the world and society. In the first part of the book, Bohm offers a description of the world conditions in the early 90’s, his comments being applicable even more in today’s world:

“By way of review, we all know that the world is in a difficult situation and has been basically for a long time; that we now have many crises in various parts of the world. We have the fact that there is nationalism all over. People seem to have all sorts of hatreds, such as religious hatred or racial hatred and so on. There is the ecological crisis, which goes on and off the back burner, and there is continuing economic crisis developing. People seem unable to get together to face the common problems, such as the ecological one or the economic one. Everything is interdependent; and yet the more interdependent we get, the more we seem to split up into little groups that don’t like each other and are inclined to fight each other and kill each other, or at least not to cooperate.” (Bohm, 1992, p. 1).

Today, unfortunately the divisions among human beings have expanded. It has been said that if humanity got into a condition of having a common enemy, it would tend to unite and work together with a similar goal. Even this appears to be difficult, since the recent COVID-19 global pandemic is impacting all humanity the same, and even this situation has not been able to unite the different factions to work together in solving the problem, if anything, the pandemic has had the effect of separating and polarizing the different groups even more, as it has been the case of the United States and its growing internal divisions.

In Bohm’s view, the main issue with humanity’s limitation in solving its problems has to do with the fact that the source of these problems is not clearly seen, given that “the source is basically in thought…the means by which we try to solve (the problems) are the source” (Bohm, 1992, pp. 2-3). Thought under the materialist paradigm breaks things up in small pieces, some of which should not be broken up. Nationalism, racism, and economic inequalities, under the materialistic paradigm creates greater division among humans and make conflicts grow. The example in science is that every specialty of knowledge is fragmented from all others, even if the division generated is artificial. The fragmentation problem, as mentioned, is directly tied to the materialistic paradigm that has dominated the world. This paradigm is what Bohm describes as thought, and the systemic way that thought works. Bohm indicates:

“Thought has produced tremendous effects outwardly (in reference to the individuals). And, as we will discuss further on, it produces tremendous effects inwardly in each person. Yet the general tacit assumption in thought is that it is just telling you the way things are and that is not doing anything – that ‘you’ are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But I want to say that you do not decide what to do with the information. The information takes over. It runs you.”(Bohm, 1992, p. 5)

This is an extremely important point to take in consideration. Basically, it explains how the information that is available to the individual is shaping the way he or she thinks, which explains the reason why there is so much people believing that COVID vaccines are bad, and choosing to die, rather than get the vaccination, as well as explaining how is possible for so many fringe conspiration theories are believed and acted upon.

Bohm proposes the concept of explaining the thought as a system, generating these radical behaviors in people. In order to be able to assist in the solution of the problems of fragmentation, a new paradigm is needed. A paradigm that integrates, and builds the value of collaboration, based in the reality that we are all interdependent. Complementarity as a new paradigm can take this role. To build upon the concepts defined by Bohm, in addition to analyzing the thought as a system, I propose that we study the complementary pair of thought, which is emotion. In the next chapters, I will expand on the nature of emotions, and the correlations of the complementary pair emotion ~ thought, and the behaviors this generate in individuals.