Chapter 5
The Quantum Signatures of the Divine
Jesus lamented that the kingdom of God is everywhere, but people don't see it. Well, the evidence is subtle; it is easy for ordinary people to miss it. But scientists are special people; they are experts in deciphering subtleties of evidence. Why have they been missing the signatures of the divine?
The Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman expressed this myopia of the scientists of recent times when he offered this admonishment against unbridled imagination. He said, “Scientific imagination is imagination within a straightjacket.” The straitjacket Feynman and other materialists wear is the belief system called scientific materialism, which I have already mentioned. And the doctrine that binds the most is the exclusivity of the reductionist's doctrine of upward causation.
This entire book is an exercise in how to get free from the straitjacket of materialism. In chapter 1, I argued that quantum physics is showing us the way by giving us back downward causation and its agent: God acting through the observer. In Newtonian physics, objects are determined things. But in quantum physics, objects are possibilities from which consciousness chooses. When a person looks, his or her consciousness chooses among the quantum possibilities to collapse an actuality of experience.
But how is this evidence for the existence of God? It sounds like a Pogo cartoon: we have searched and found God—and it is us! Maybe the ancient Hindus were right when they said there are 330 million Gods. Well, it is six billion now because of inflation. If we are God, why do we live the way we do? Why do we have such a hard time manifesting godly qualities like nonviolence and love?
The evidence for God is within us, but to see it we have to be subtle. To live it, we have to grow.
WE CREATE OUR OWN REALITY, BUT…
It was in the 1970s that the physicist Fred Alan Wolf (1970) created the evocative phrase “we create our own reality.” The images the phrase evoked led, however, to many disappointments. Some people tried to manifest Cadillacs, others vegetable gardens in desert environments, and still others parking spaces for their cars in busy downtown areas. Everybody was inspired by the idea of the quantum creation of reality, no doubt, but the attempts at creation produced a mixed bag of results because the would-be creators were unaware of a subtlety.
We create our own reality, but there is a subtlety. We do not create reality in our ordinary state of consciousness, but in a non-ordinary state of consciousness. This becomes clear when you ponder the paradox of Wigner's friend, a thought experiment proposed by the Nobel laureate physicist Eugene Wigner, who first thought of the paradox. Here I present the paradox with a simple example.
Imagine that Wigner is approaching a quantum traffic light with two possibilities, red and green, and that at the same time his friend is approaching the same light on a cross street. Being busy Americans, they both choose green. Unfortunately, their choices are contradictory: if both choices materialize at the same time, there would be pandemonium. Obviously, only one of their choices counts—but whose?
After many decades, three physicists in different places at different times—Ludvik Bass (1971) in Australia, I (Goswami, 1989, 1993) in Oregon, and Casey Blood (1993, 2001) in New Jersey—independently discovered the solution to the paradox: consciousness is one, nonlocal, and cosmic, behind the two local individualities of Wigner and his friend. They both choose, but only figuratively speaking: the one unified consciousness chooses for both of them, avoiding any contradiction. This allows the result dictated by quantum probability calculations that, if Wigner and his friend arrived at the same traffic light on many occasions, each would get green 50% of the time, yet for any one occasion, a creative opportunity for getting green is left open for each.
In 2003, I was invited to give a talk at a scientific conference on consciousness in London. After my talk, a BBC reporter had a question for me: “Does your theory prove the existence of God?” I saw the trap in his question immediately. If I said yes, he would have a sensational headline for his report, “Quantum physicist supports the idea of God sitting on a majestic throne in heaven doling out acts of downward causation.” So I said cautiously, “No and yes.” He seemed a little disappointed that I did not fall into his trap. I elaborated. No, because the God rediscovered by quantum physics is not the simplistic God of popular religions. God is not an emperor in heaven doling out downward causation, judgments as to who is to go to heaven and who is bound for hell. Yes, because the author of quantum creation, the free agent of downward causation, transcends our ordinary ego. It is universal and cosmic, exactly like the creator God posited by all the esoteric traditions of spirituality. You can call It quantum consciousness, but Its flavor is uniquely that of what the traditions call God.
The oneness of the choosing consciousness is an outcome of the question we pose: What is the nature of consciousness that enables it to be the free agent of downward causation without any paradox? For one thing, consciousness has to be unitive, one and only for all of us. This oneness of consciousness is then a prediction of the theory.
When my paper (Goswami, 1989) was published proclaiming this prediction in an obscure physics journal, University of Mexico neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum noticed it. Jacobo had been doing experiments with pairs of human subjects and strange transfers of electrical brain activity between them. He intuited that my theory may have something important to add to the interpretation of his experiments. So I got an excited call from him. To make a long story short, I flew out to his laboratory at the University of Mexico, checked out his experimental setup and the data, and helped him interpret it. And in a short while, Grinberg-Zylberbaum and three collaborators (1994) wrote the first paper proclaiming a modern scientific verification of the idea of oneness of consciousness.
THE GOOD NEWS EXPERIMENT: WE ARE ONE
The good news is that four separate experiments are now showing that quantum consciousness, the author of downward causation, nonlocal, unitive, is God.
As mentioned above, the first such experiment proving it unequivocally (with objective machines and not through subjective experiences of people) was performed by the neurophysiologist Grinberg-Zylberbaum and his collaborators at the University of Mexico. Let's go into some details.
Quantum physics gives us an amazing principle—nonlocality. The principle of locality says that all communication must proceed through local signals that have a speed limit. Einstein established this limit as the speed of light (the enormous but finite speed of 299,792,458 m/s). So this locality principle, a limitation imposed by Einsteinian thinking, precludes instantaneous communication via signals. And yet, quantum objects are able to influence one another instantly, once they interact and become correlated through quantum nonlocality. This was demonstrated by the physicist Alain Aspect and his collaborators (1982) for a pair of photons (quanta of light). The data are not seen as a contradiction to Einsteinian thinking, once we recognize quantum nonlocality as signal-less interconnectedness outside local space and time.
Grinberg-Zylberbaum, in 1993, was trying to demonstrate quantum nonlocality for two correlated brains. Two people meditate together with the intention of direct (signal-less, nonlocal) communication. After 20 minutes, they are separated (while continuing to meditate upon their intention) and placed in individual Faraday cages (electromagnetically impervious chambers), where each brain is wired up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine. One subject is shown a series of light flashes producing electrical brain activity that is recorded by the EEG machine. From this record, an “evoked potential” is extracted with the help of a computer (upon subtraction of the brain noise). This evoked potential is somehow transferred to the second subject's brain, as indicated by the EEG record of this subject, which gives (upon subtraction of noise) a potential similar in phase and strength to the potential evoked in the first subject. This is shown in figure 5-1. Control subjects (who do not meditate together or are unable meditatively to hold the intention for signal-less communication during the experiment) do not show any transferred potential (figure 5-2).
The experiment demonstrates the nonlocality of brain responses to be sure, but also something even more important—nonlocality of quantum consciousness. How else can we explain how the forced choice of the evoked response in one subject's brain can lead to the free choice of an (almost) identical response in the correlated partner's brain? As stated above, the experiment has been replicated several times—first, by the neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick and collaborators (Sabell et al., 2001) in London; second, by Jiri Wackermann et al. (2003); and third, by the Bastyr University researcher Leanna Standish and her collaborators (Standish et al., 2004).
The conclusion based on these experiments is radical. Quantum consciousness, the precipitator of the downward causation of choice from quantum possibilities, is what esoteric spiritual traditions call God. We have rediscovered God within science. And more. These experiments usher a new paradigm of science based not on the primacy of matter, like the old science, but on the primacy of consciousness. Consciousness is the ground of all being, which we now can recognize as what the spiritual traditions call Godhead (Christianity), Brahman (Hinduism), Ain Sof (Judaism), Shunyata (Buddhism), and so on.
The new science integrates. Whereas most of these terms that denote the ground of being, Godhead for example, indicate its fullness, the Buddhist term Shunyata indicates a void or nothingness. Contradiction? The new science explains: the ground of being is full of possibilities, yes, but possibilities are not “things,” so it can also be correctly called “no thing-ness.”
FIGURE 5-1. Evoked (uppermost) and Transferred (middle) potential. The bottom curve shows a 71 percent overlap between the two (from Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al., 1994).
THE POWER OF INTENTION
One of the most important aspects of the Grinberg-Zylberbaum experiment is demonstrating the power of our intention. His subjects intended that their nonlocal connections manifest. The parapsychologist Dean Radin (1997, 2006) has done more experiments demonstrating the power of intention.
FIGURE 5-2. Control subjects: no transferred potential. Note how much smaller the observed potential for the second subject is (middle curve; pay special attention to the vertical scale). Also, the bottom curve shows no appreciable overlap.
One of his experiments took advantage of the O. J. Simpson trial in 1994-1995. At that time, lots of people were watching the televised trial and Radin correctly hypothesized that their intention watching the trial would fluctuate widely depending on whether the courtroom drama was intense or ho-hum. On the one hand, he had a group of psychologists make a plot of the intensity of the courtroom drama (and hence the intensity of people's intentions) as a function of real time. On the other hand, in the laboratory he measured the deviation from randomness of what are called random number generators (which translate random quantum events of radioactivity into random sequences of zeroes and ones). He found that the random number generators deviated from randomness maximally at precisely those times when the courtroom drama was the most intense. What does this mean? The philosopher Gregory Bateson has said, “The opposite of randomness is choice.” So the correlation proves the creative power of intention.
In another series of experiments, Radin found that random number generators deviate from randomness in meditation halls when people meditate together (showing high intention), but not at a corporate board meeting!
The inquisitive reader is bound to ask about how to develop the power of intention. The fact is, we all try to manifest things through our intentions; sometimes they work, but more often they do not. Now we see that this is because we are in our ego when we intend. But how do we change that?
This is a very good question. An intention must start with the ego; that is where we ordinarily are—local, individual, and selfish. In the second stage, we intend for everyone to achieve what we want to achieve; this is to go beyond selfishness. We don't need to worry; we haven't lost anything—when we say “everyone,” that includes us, too. In the third stage, we allow our intentions to become a prayer: “If my intention resonates with the intention of the whole, of God, then let it come to fruition.” In the fourth stage, the prayer must pass into silence and become a meditation. This is important because only in silence can the possibilities to choose from grow.
If you seriously practice this, don't expect overnight results. Today, with our busy lifestyles, silence is difficult for us. Grow silence. Slow down your lifestyle. Make room for new possibilities. Then, manifest your intention, discontinuously. This is the real secret of manifestation.
DISCONTINUITY AND QUANTUM LEAP
Downward causation occurs in a nonordinary state of consciousness that we call God-consciousness. Yet we are unaware of it. Why are we unaware? Mystics have been telling us about the oneness of God-consciousness and our ordinary consciousness for millennia, but we haven't heard them for the most part. Why?
The Upanishads of the Hindus say emphatically, “You are That,” meaning you are God! Jesus said, no less emphatically, “You are all the children of God.” This is a key. We are children of God; we have to grow up to realize our God-consciousness. There are mechanisms (see below) that obscure our Godness, giving rise to our ordinary l-separateness that we call ego. This ego creates a barrier, preventing us from seeing our oneness with God and oneness with one another. Growing in spirituality means growing beyond the ego.
A key point is that the quantum downward causation of choice is exerted discontinuously. If choice were continuous, a mathematical model or at least a computer algorithm could be constructed for it. As such, the outcome of the choice would be predictable, and its author would be redundant and could not be called God. Our ordinary waking state of consciousness, dominated by the ego, smoothes out the discontinuity by obscuring our freedom to choose, limiting the choice only to the known. To be aware that we choose freely is to jump beyond the ego, taking a discontinuous leap into the unknown—call it a quantum leap.
If you are having difficulty picturing a discontinuous quantum leap, a clarification by Niels Bohr can help. Bohr proposed a model of the atom in 1913. He suggested that electrons can move only in certain ways. Electrons go around the nucleus in continuous orbits. But when an electron jumps from one orbit to another, it moves in a very discontinuous way; it never goes through the intermediate space between the orbits. It disappears from one orbit and reappears in the other, causing energy quanta to be emitted or absorbed, depending on the direction of the jump. The jump is a quantum leap.
How does the cosmic, nonlocal quantum consciousness, God, identify with an individual, become individualized? Or, how does an individual experience his or her God-consciousness? How does continuity of the mundane world obscure discontinuity? Primarily via observership, and secondarily via conditioning.
Before observership, our God-consciousness is one and undivided from its possibilities. Observership implies a subject-object split, a split between the self that observes and the world that is observed. The world-experiencing subject or self is unitive and cosmic in the primary experience of a stimulus. In this primary experience, our God-consciousness chooses its response to the stimulus from the quantum possibilities with total creative freedom, subject only to the constraint of the laws of quantum dynamics governing the situation.
With additional experiences of the same stimulus, experiences that lead to learning, our ego responses become biased by past responses to the stimulus. This is what psychologists call conditioning (Mitchell and Goswami, 1992). Identifying with the conditioned pattern of stimulus responses (habits of character) and the history of past responses gives the subject/self an apparent local individuality, the ego. (For further details, see Goswami, 1993.)
When we operate from the ego and our individual patterns of conditioning, our experiences, being predictable, acquire an apparent causal continuity. As a result, we develop a greater sense of our personal self. We feel separate from our unitive whole self and from our God-consciousness. It is then that our intentions don't always produce the intended result.
THE QUESTION OF FREE WILL
The sum and substance of conditioning is that as consciousness progressively identifies with the ego, there is a corresponding loss of freedom. At the extreme of infinite conditioning, the loss of freedom is 100 percent. At that point, the only choice left to us, metaphorically speaking, is the choice between very familiar flavors of ice cream: chocolate or vanilla, a choice between conditioned alternatives. Not that we want to depreciate the value of even this much freedom, but obviously this is not real freedom. At this extreme, behaviorism holds; it is the so-called correspondence principle limit of the new science. (The correspondence principle in quantum theory was formulated by Bohr in 1923, according to which quantum and classical Newtonian theories tend to agree in certain situations, for example, in the macroscopic domain of reality. The conditions under which quantum physics and classical physics agree are called the correspondence limit or the classical limit.)
But do not fear. We never go that far in our conditioning. Even in our ego, we retain some freedom. A most important aspect of the freedom that we retain is the freedom to say “no” to conditioning, a freedom that allows us to be creative every once in a while.
There are experimental data that support this position. In the 1960s, neurophysiologists discovered the P300 event-related potential that suggested our conditioned nature. (In brief, a P300 ERP is a short—300 milliseconds—electrical wave in a person's electroencephalogram [EEG]. The P300 is used as an index of mental activity, a measure of how the brain waves discriminate between potentially important stimuli and non-important stimuli. The amplitude of the P300 wave increases with stimuli that are unpredictable, unlikely, or highly significant.)
Suppose that, as a demonstration of your free will, you declare your freedom to raise your right arm and then you proceed to do it. Guess what? By looking at an electroencephalograph attached to your brain, a neurophysiologist can easily predict from the appearance of the P300 wave that you are going to raise your arm. What kind of free will do you have if your decision can be predicted?
So then, is it the behaviorist who is right? Is there no free will for the ego? Maybe the mystics are right—the only free will is God's will, to which we must surrender. And then a paradox: how do we surrender to God's will if we are not free to surrender?
But again, do not fear. The neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet (1985) did an experiment that rescues a modicum of free will even for the ego. Libet asked his subjects to negate action as soon as they became aware of their being able to freely will to raise their arms. In that case, neurophysiologists would still predict from the P300 that they would raise their arms. But more often than not, Libet's subjects were able to resist their will and not raise their arms, demonstrating that they retained their free will to say “no” to the conditioned action of raising their arms.
EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE OF DISCONTINUITY
There are many situations in which analysis makes it unambiguous that electrons make quantum leaps quite routinely, not just situations in which atoms emit light as a result of these leaps. For example, there is the phenomenon of radioactivity, in which electrons sometimes come out from the nuclei of the radioactive atoms. Analysis shows that the electrons “penetrate an energy barrier.” But how can an electron penetrate an energy barrier when it doesn't have enough energy to jump over it? Some physicists use the term “tunneling” to describe this phenomenon. The electron passes the energy barrier by making a quantum leap, without going through space to do its tunneling. Now it is on this side of the barrier; an instant later, it is on the other side, with a quantum jump.
But analysis is still just theory. Are there experiments that actually show that electrons are not continuously passing through an energy barrier, but really discontinuously quantum-jumping it? Yes. The same kind of “tunneling” phenomenon is found in certain transistors. In that case, experimenters have shown that the electrons make the transition from one side of the energy barrier to the other faster than the speed of light. Since, according to the experimentally verified theory of relativity, electrons cannot move faster than light in space, the electrons must be moving instantly without going through space. In other words, they are making a quantum leap.
In terms of possibility waves, the experimenter collapses the possibility wave of an electron on one side of the barrier—and then, immediately after, the electron is once again a possibility wave: one of its possible facets is that it is on the other side of the energy barrier. When our observation collapses the possibility wave on the other side, since no time elapses between the two observations, we must conclude that quantum collapse is discontinuous.
But it is a long way from a submicroscopic electron to a bulky human. How do we show that discontinuity is relevant for events pertaining to human consciousness to which everybody can relate? Are there indelible quantum leap signatures of the divine in macroscopic affairs of the world? Yes.
IS CREATIVITY A QUANTUM LEAP?
I hope the question of creativity being a quantum leap is not evoking images of creative people such as Newton, Michelangelo, and Martha Graham effortlessly jumping over great physical barriers. As you undoubtedly recognize, on the physical plane quantum effects tend to be smoothed out at the macro level. (See chapter 1.) We have to look at the mental plane, and that's where creativity is.
What is creativity? A little analysis will show you that work that we usually call creative consists of a discovery of new mental meaning—it involves a big change in how we process meaning.
Take the case of Einstein's relativity. When Einstein was a teenager, he came across a conflict between two theories of physics. On one hand, there was a theory by Isaac Newton; on the other hand there was a theory by James Maxwell—both great theories and both verified in their own right within the domain of their originators' intent. But the domains seemed to overlap and conflicts erupted in the domain of the overlap. Einstein worked ten long years on the problem, attempting to resolve the conflict; he made some progress, but a complete solution eluded him—until he woke up with a brilliant change of context for his entire framework of thinking. The context of the problem was two conflicting theories of physics, but the context of his solution was how we look at time.
Before Einstein, everyone thought that time was absolute, that everything happened in time and that clocks operated unaffected by movements. Wrong, said Einstein's creative insight. Instead, time is relative to motion. A moving clock, such as one carried on a spaceship, runs slower. This new context of looking at time resolved the conflict between Newton's theory and Maxwell's theory, and it enabled Einstein to develop a new mechanics from which came the wonderful idea of E= mc2. This is an example of creativity. But was it discontinuous?
It had to be, because there was nothing manifest in anyone's thinking, either published or in scientific discussion, from which Einstein could have gotten the idea of moving clocks running slower. No algorithm could have given it to him. This is according to his statement, “I did not discover relativity by rational thinking alone.”
To their credit, many scientists today agree with the idea that creative insights are quantum jumps in mental meaning and that they arrive discontinuously. This is partly because creativity research has solidly established, through many case studies, that creative insights in any field happen suddenly. How else would you explain the fact that one of the few established myths of science is about a creative event—Newton's discovery of gravity? I mean, of course, the apple story.
Cholera broke out in Cambridge in 1666, so Isaac Newton, a 23-year-old professor of physics, went to his mother's farm in Lincolnshire. There, while relaxing one morning under an apple tree in the garden, young Isaac saw an apple fall. And, wham! The idea of universal gravity, that all objects attract one another via the force of gravity, suddenly came to Newton.
Did it really happen like that? Some historians think that Newton's niece, when she was visiting France, started the story. But why did this story become part of the physics lore, when most of the physics community believed that science is done through trial and error—the scientific method—all logical and rational?
It's been said that mythology is the history of our souls. But when the traditional interpretations of the scientific discovery process as the result of continuous trial-and-error scientific method were not doing justice to the soul, guess what? A myth was created.
And of course, quantum leaps of creativity do not happen only in science. There is enormous evidence of discontinuous quantum leaps in the arts, music, literature, mathematics, and so on. You can find the evidence in many case histories compiled by creativity researchers. (Read, for example, Briggs, 1990.) You can also find the evidence in individual testimonies. Here are two samples:
Finally, two days ago, I succeeded, not on account of my painful efforts, but by the Grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible. (mathematician Karl Fredrick Gauss, quoted in Hadamard, 1939, p. 15.)
Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly…. It takes route with extraordinary force, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms. (composer Tchaikovsky, quoted in Harman and Rheingold, 1984, p. 45.)
I think the best proof for the discontinuity of the quantum leaps of creativity is our own childhood experiences of learning new contexts of meaning. The philosopher Gregory Bateson classified learning in two ways. Learning 1 is learning within a given fixed context of meaning; for example, rote learning, memorization. But there is also learning 2, according to Bateson, involving a shift of the context. This one takes a quantum leap.
When I was three years old, I remember my mother teaching me numbers. At first, I was memorizing how to count up to 100. Not much fun, but I did it because my mother drilled me. She fixed the context. The numbers had no meaning for me. Then she was telling me about sets of two—two pencils, two cats—or sets of three—three rupees, three shirts. This went on for a while, and then one day, unexpectedly, I got it. The difference between two and three (and all other numbers) became clear to me. Implicitly, I had understood numbers within a new context—the set—although of course not in that language. And it was an extremely joyful experience. (Mind you, though, the concept of set was implicit, not explicit, in my consciousness when this experience occurred. In those days, sets were not introduced that early in our education.)
In the same vein, you may remember the experience of comprehending connected meaning for the first time when reading a story. Or the experience of comprehending what the purpose of algebra is. Or you may have had the experience of comprehending how individual notes, properly composed, make music come alive. Our childhood is full of the quantum leaping of such experiences.
Even dolphins are capable of taking quantum leaps of learning. Gregory Bateson (1980) tells the story of training a new dolphin under his guidance.
The animal went through a series of learning sessions. In each, whenever the dolphin did something that the trainer wanted repeated, he would blow a whistle. If the dolphin repeated her behavior, she would be rewarded with food. This is the usual training for showcase dolphins.
Bateson introduced the additional rule that the dolphin would never be rewarded for behavior already rewarded in a previous session. But in practice, the trainer could never maintain Bateson's rule, because the dolphin would be so upset about being wrong and not getting fish!
In the initial 14 sessions, the dolphin was just repeating the behavior previously rewarded and getting unearned fish if she was too upset. Once in a while, she was doing something new, but seemingly only by accident.
However, between the fourteenth and fifteenth sessions, the [dolphin] appeared to be much excited, and when she came onstage for the fifteenth session she put on an elaborate performance including eight conspicuous pieces of behaviour of which four were entirely new—never before observed in this species of animal. From the animal's point of view, there is a jump, a discontinuity. (Bateson, 1980, p. 337)
TANGLED HIERARCHY
You may not have noticed, but there is another way that we can see a paradox in the observer effect. The observer chooses, out of the quantum possibilities presented by the object, the actual event of experience. But before the collapse of the possibilities, the observer himself or herself (his or her brain) consists of possibilities and is not manifest. So we can posit the paradox as a circularity: observer (brain) is needed for collapsing the quantum possibility wave of an object; but collapse is needed for manifesting the observer (brain). More succinctly, no collapse without an observer; but no observer without a collapse.
If we stay on one level, the material level, there is no solution to the paradox. The consciousness solution works only because we posit that consciousness collapses the possibility waves of both observer (brain) and the object from the transcendent reality of the ground of being that consciousness represents.
The artificial intelligence researcher Douglas Hofstadter (1980) gave us the clue for understanding what is occurring. Such circularities, he noted, are called tangled hierarchies. Most interesting is that self-reference, a subject-object split, emerges from such circularities.
Let's consider an example given by Hofstadter. Consider the liar's paradox expressed in the sentence, I am a liar. Notice the circularity: if I am a liar, then I am telling the truth, and if I am telling the truth, then I am lying, and so on ad infinitum. This is a tangled hierarchy because the causal efficacy does not lie entirely with either the subject or the predicate, but instead fluctuates unendingly between them. These infinite oscillations have made the sentence very special—the sentence is speaking of itself, separate from the rest of the world of discourse.
But this apparent separation of the self of the sentence and its world depends on our understanding the rules of English grammar and staying within them. The circularity of the sentence disappears for a child who will ask the speaker of the sentence, “Why are you a liar?” The child fails to appreciate the tangle and get caught up in it because the language rules are obscure to him or her. But once we know and abide by these language rules, we are looking at the sentence from inside and we cannot escape the tangle. Grammar, although the real cause, is implicit, transcending the sentence.
Similarly, in the observer effect, the reason it took us physicists a while to decipher the situation was because the choosing consciousness—God—is implicit, not explicit; transcendent, not immanent. The collapse is tangled-hierarchical, giving the appearance of self-reference or of the subject-object split. However, the observer-I, the apparent subject of the collapse, arises codependently with the object.
Whenever there is a collapse of a quantum possibility wave, there is a tangled hierarchy in its measurement. Along with nonlocality and discontinuity, tangled hierarchy is another indelible quantum signature of divine downward causation.
So the idea of tangled hierarchical quantum measurement is the final step that gives us a completely paradox-free solution to the quantum measurement problem that has puzzled physicists for decades. Additionally, this one idea helps us solve several very big mysteries of reality.
In the 1980s, I was talking with a Chilean physicist about the idea of consciousness collapsing the quantum possibility wave. He immediately raised the question, “At the moment of the ‘hot’ big bang creation of the universe, there were obviously no conscious observers around. So, pray tell, how did the universe collapse into actuality?” When I chuckled and showed him the solution (see chapter 7), he was mollified.
There is also the problem of the origin of life that haunts biologists even today. Apply the lessons of quantum measurement theory to that problem, and the solution springs out. (See chapters 7 and 8.)
The concept of the unconscious was introduced by Sigmund Freud in psychology. Since then the idea has been experimentally verified. Despite all of the recent successes of cognitive psychology, it is a fact that these scientists cannot explain how to distinguish between the unconscious and the conscious and how the subject-object split of conscious awareness arises. These problems are also solved using the idea of tangled hierarchical quantum measurement. (See chapter 6.) And in all these solutions to some of the most serious scientific research problems, we find indisputable evidence and support for the quantum God hypothesis.