Quantum Physics and Process Metaphysics (dialogue with Flavio Lanfanconi)

A transcript of our conversation:

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Good to see you. Great. I was just trying to keep up with everything you’ve posted recently. It’s difficult, but…

Matt Segall: Sorry about that.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Never mind, it’s great. I was just finishing your last conversation with…

Matt Segall: Roman.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Roman. Yep, exactly. I’m bad with names, sorry.

Matt Segall: Yeah, that was a wide-ranging one.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yeah, that was great. Really, going from fundamental ideas to political implications. Very interesting.

Matt Segall: Yeah, well, I’m excited to see you start your YouTube channel and share some of your own ideas.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: I’m impressed.

Matt Segall: These questions… you know, it’s really encouraging for me to see more scientists and people with a background in physics getting interested in Whitehead’s interpretations and finally taking a look at some of the philosophical puzzles and implications that physicists have ignored for—well, most physicists—for a century or so.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yeah.

Matt Segall: So I hope this is a new trend that you’re a part of here.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Fingers crossed.

Matt Segall: Yeah. I hope you plan to continue that series.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: I, I…

Matt Segall: It’s a very engaging format, and you’ve got a good way of gently easing people into what could very easily be confusing and difficult ideas.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: We’ll see how that goes. I always have too many projects going on—having a family and working as a teacher, but still also having to finish my diploma to be allowed to be a teacher. And yeah, I would also like to find more time for training and meditation and… yeah, everything. But I think, actually, if you don’t mind, in terms of Whitehead and his ideas and physicists being interested in those ideas… I think, for me at least, it felt so obvious or necessary—sorry, sorry for my English—because we physicists, I think, should at least know that we have a problem in quantum mechanics, that quantum mechanics fundamentally needs this additional satisfactory moment in physics, which is called the collapse of the wave function—something that changes quantum mechanics into a reality. I think it should be so obvious that this is not part of physics at the moment.

Matt Segall: Right.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: And I never understood, while studying physics, why this was not a problem for more people. But this is where I really resonated when I heard about Whitehead’s ideas because, to me at least, the process of concrescence felt like such a natural way of describing what we describe in physics and quantum mechanics. It’s so similar, even in wording sometimes. But it offers the solution that physics did not, so I was just thrilled.

Matt Segall: Yeah, and it’s no coincidence, right? Because Whitehead was writing and developing this metaphysical scheme in the 1920s, trying to really respond to the beginnings of quantum theory and also relativity theory. That was his goal: to speak the language of the latest physics and recognize the ways in which the old understanding in classical physics, of a universe that exists independently of our observation and our measurement, turned out not to be an adequate way of framing the situation. But in your opinion, what’s the reason that, a hundred years ago, as these ideas were formulated, physics decided not to go any further with trying to explain the results they were getting? I mean, on some level, there are dozens of interpretations, right?

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yes.

Matt Segall: But no consensus.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: I think there are two main reasons. One is that the transition actually went step by step. So even though it looks like a single, momentarily big shift from classical physics to quantum mechanics, where everything changes, quantum mechanics was developed gradually. In the beginning, it was absolutely clear that this was just meant to be a sort of mathematical trick that we needed to use for a preliminary time until we understand things better, and then this math will go away again, right? Planck’s constant, for example, was introduced in a similar fashion to when you do calculus: you introduce a finite length that you then take the limit of infinitesimal smallness, and then it vanishes again. So you don’t need this H anymore because, in the limit, you get continuous functions. The hope was that at some point we would be able to take a limit function, and then everything would be smooth again, without these weird quantization jumps that we needed to explain things. So that was on a mathematical level. There was hope that this would just go away again.

But then also, quantum mechanics was never meant to be a theory about the world as a whole. It was strictly meant to describe isolated systems that still interact with a normal, reasonable, classical world. But just when you isolate small parts, like atoms or something, then they start to behave in weird ways that we need some quantum mechanical weirdness to describe until it interacts with the real world again, at which point we call that the collapse of the wave function. The collapse was meant to be the interaction of the quantum mechanical system with the reality of the classical world. So you have a real apparatus shielding the quantum mechanical system, thereby invoking quantum weirdness inside. But then, when this interacts with the apparatus, giving a measurement, that again is like the interaction with the classical world, and everything’s fine again from there on, right?

I remember very clearly when I had to look this up in one of the Russian textbooks, because I was told that if you really want to understand a theory, you have to go to the Russians because they always nailed it with a deeper understanding. There are these big volumes by Landau and Lifshitz, describing all of theoretical physics—if you really want to have the math right, you go there. And I very clearly remember reading the introduction to quantum mechanics, where he says quantum mechanics describes a system apart from classical physics, and for ease of use, we will call a quantum mechanical system an electron from here on out. Then he only talks about electrons as quantum mechanical. So this is, I think, one important reason: it was thought that it would just describe a small part of the world temporarily, in space and time, so we need this description for now to describe a small part of the world. But the rest is fine. Only gradually did it become clear that if we describe atoms that way, and if we think that all of matter is composed of atoms, then actually everything is quantum mechanical. But then we have entanglement that goes on and on and on forever, and there’s interaction from the Big Bang to now, and Schrödinger’s cat never decides whether she’s alive or dead. This can’t be true. Then these interpretations started to pop up, and, as you said, there are many of them.

So that’s reason number one. Reason number two, I think, is cultural. During that time, physics shifted—while also moving from being very much Europe-centered to being more and more America-centered—from being really about understanding the world to being almost engineering, needing to yield results. Right? In that time, when the atomic bomb was developed as the biggest project in physics, it was an engineering problem. Physicists were almost like… they needed to develop a theory to be able to build this thing or to decide whether it was possible because the Americans were afraid that the Germans had it, even though they didn’t. But there was this race, right? And so that’s where Feynman’s quote, “Shut up and calculate,” comes in very strongly. Physics shifted from having this responsibility to explain itself to just yielding results. I think that’s the second important reason.

Matt Segall: Hmm, very interesting.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Answered?

Matt Segall: No, I love it, I love it. So there are the more theoretical issues of the founders, many of the founders of quantum theory, thinking that this was a stopgap sort of mathematical way of dealing with confounding experimental results that eventually we would be able to explain in a traditional kind of deterministic way, and…

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Once we understand things better, this weirdness will go away, yeah?

Matt Segall: Einstein and… I mean, Bohr didn’t agree with that, at least, but Einstein did, and others. They had quite a battle with each other over this question: is quantum mechanics complete or not? It seems like, given experiments on entanglement and non-locality and whatnot in the interim decades, it’s pretty clear that it’s not incomplete. It’s describing something as well as it can be described, though there’s still the issue of unifying it with relativity and gravity and everything. Maybe we can get into that. I have all sorts of questions about that, but…

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: I’m not sure I have any answers.

Matt Segall: Well, you might help me, at least. But maybe we’ll get there. But then the other question is the difference, if there is one, between the quantum and the classical realms. Whether or not… yeah, is the whole universe a quantum system? What do we mean when we talk about the collapse of the wave function? Are the quantum effects only the result of a very isolated, abstracted system that is averaged out when you talk about larger systems? With cosmology nowadays, as a result of the Big Bang model, the idea is that the whole universe has expanded from a singularity, and so these quantum effects all of a sudden become relevant everywhere. So that’s on the theoretical side. Then I like what you say about what happened when quantum theory shifted from this European context, where there was more interest in the theoretical interpretation, to this more pragmatic American cultural context, where, obviously in the middle of the war, we want to get the bomb built. So it’s more of this engineering mentality, where it’s just, let’s figure out how to do the calculations right to build this—leaving the theoretical interpretation to the side.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yeah, and I think this has continued into modern times. The usefulness of science is often very strongly linked to its technological results, right? So why do we need science? Because it gave us digital cameras and smartphones, and so obviously, those are good, so that’s why science is good. And I think the… yeah, we as a guild, we as scientists, and physicists in particular, are not held to the standard of needing to be able to explain ourselves that well to society anymore. Which I think we absolutely should. It would also show us our place in society. I think science and physics is a bit overrated in our worldview of things because a lot of people, I think, don’t really bother to try and understand physics but then also are very physicalist in their worldview. So they think physics has all the answers, even though they don’t really bother checking them.

Matt Segall: It seems questionable today whether or not the best models in fundamental physics are even adequately described as a materialist ontology. I mean…

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yeah, true.

Matt Segall: There’s no real material there.

Matt Segall: Yeah, I mean, the idea of locality is out the window. The idea of nature at an instant is out the window, even though point instances are an important aspect of many models in physics. It’s clear that if you’re talking about actual events in nature, the attempt to model them based on point instances is always going to be an approximation. And so is physics even materialist anymore? I don’t think so. We’re talking about pervasive fields. And something like an electron is… a very useful—I mean, this is a question, not a statement—when you talk about an electron, is this a useful theoretical abstraction that allows us to make sense of measurements and predictions that are technologically useful? Or would you say that, no, there is such a thing as an electron. It exists in nature, and we have discovered it.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Okay, so an ontological question. I have to specify: are you asking me as an individual or me as a physicist representing…

Matt Segall: Well, if there are different answers, I’d be curious how you answer it while wearing your different hats. But just to express it a little bit more clearly, electrons are said to have… they don’t take up any volume, they’re just points, right? And so when we think of what nature is, a point is a kind of Platonic idea. I think we can imagine it, but you can’t really locate one in the real world, right? So when I ask, is an electron a theoretical entity that’s very useful for making predictions, or is it a thing that we have discovered in the world, that’s kind of the context. But wherever you want to go with that.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Cool. So… because I was asking because, me as a person, I’m very much inclined to interpret an electron as an event that is probably actually really happening in a Whiteheadian way, I think. So I would think that it means something to be an electron. In that sense, it will be real insofar as it has… Let me try. I would say reality can be ascribed to a moment or occasion exactly as far as it has consequences, either for its own reappearance in a later time, so as a repetition of itself, and/or consequences upon other events. So strictly relational. Reality is whenever there’s shared interaction and consequence of that interaction. So I think, yeah, reality is consequence of interaction. So an electron can be something absolutely real if it has any consequences for either itself or anything else. That would be my personal answer. Then, more precisely, what I think it is in terms of how we as human beings can talk about it and make sense of it.

So yeah, as far as I understand the current—or not current, but the theory that was taught to me—the idea is that there’s a singular electron field permeating all of reality, of the whole universe, and this electron field can have excitations in it. These excitations come in quantized lumps, and these lumps we call electrons, and they are fluctuations in that field. They again show themselves in terms of being able to influence other things as non-local points that have specific attributes. So there’s a non-local, smeared-out, point-like wave-like excitation in a global field that has specific attributes. There’s a specific mass attributed to this point, and a specific charge, and a specific spin. These things again show themselves to be present in this smeared-out point by virtue of interacting with other things.

So maybe to make more precise this idea of a point, but also a smeared-out thing, there again is this idea of the smeared-out thing and the wave excitation of the field—that’s the quantum mechanical description of it. But then you need a collapse of this wave function into an actual point in space from where this interaction can propagate outwards. After this momentary collapse, again, the wave function will smear out, and the thing will be non-local until it is localized again. The most useful interpretation, I think, from quantum mechanics, for when or why this collapse happens, needs to be based on some kind of interaction with something else. There’s the idea that if there are just enough interactions, there’s a sort of critical mass at which point there is a noticeable threshold that makes it collapse. That’s Penrose’s idea of objective reduction: that you have this objective threshold that you could figure out, and then you would know at what mass of a quantum mechanical system there’s a collapse. I think that to me is the closest to a reasonable interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Matt Segall: Interesting. So I have a few more questions about this. I think you did a great job trying to describe something tangible yet mysterious. So every electron has an identical mass, is that true? And then some of these other attributes, like spin, there are several different kinds of spin an electron can have, right?

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: No, no, an electron always has spin one-half.

Matt Segall: Okay. And so…

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: There are excitations in that…

Matt Segall: So is every electron identical?

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yes, yes. Actually, there’s an interpretation that I heard of quantum field theory, because in quantum field theory you also have the opposite of the electron, the antimatter particle, the positron, which in quantum field theory is described as an electron moving backwards through time. Or can be described that way, which I also never fully understood. But there’s an interpretation I heard that actually, there’s only one electron that’s just traveling back and forth through the history of time, of the universe. And so there are multiple iterations of that electron present at any given time because it’s moving back and forth through time and making copies of itself each time it passes back and forth. Right? So in that interpretation, there only exists one electron, and they are all the same one. But yes. So in other words, yes, every electron is an exact copy of itself, basically, or of other electrons.

Matt Segall: This might be too vast of a question, but when I study the history of physics, it’s often said that for most of the 19th century, the luminiferous ether was sort of taken for granted. Like, if electromagnetic waves are a thing, they must be propagating through some kind of medium. Michelson and Morley’s experiment didn’t seem to show evidence of this. Einstein introduces his gravitational field, and it’s often said that we don’t need the ether anymore, even though Einstein says, I think in the 1920s, that his gravitational field is a new ether, basically. And so I wonder, in the context of the fields that quantum physics is introducing—the electron field, let’s say—to what extent is this a new kind of ether? And to what extent do we need to not imagine the electrons are vibrating in a medium, even though you said they’re an excitation in a field? Is it a different concept, or can we draw some parallels here?

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: It’s a very good question, but I think I’m not qualified to give an exact answer because I never really went that deep into quantum field theory. But as far as I understood, the idea is very reminiscent of an ether, just with the very clear difference that it’s always strictly relativistic, in the sense of not being thought of as a static background in a Cartesian sense of an X, Y, Z coordinate system that things play out within, but always as just… in relation to other things. Right? So there’s no movement through the field other than the excitations that move through that field and interact with other things in this field. But it’s even more etheric, more ghost-like than the original ether already was, I think.

Matt Segall: So the original ether was conceived of as a very fine, subtle, material substance.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Exactly, yeah.

Matt Segall: And it’s subtle, but still there, right? And this new ether is, in some sense, more abstract and relativistic—it’s not a container through which things move. Whitehead developed this idea of what he called the ether of events, which is his way of… you know, describing… as you were saying, electrons are real in the sense that they are conveying… The interactions are being conveyed, and there’s a propagation of influence. And so an electron, if we were to try to describe it in Whitehead’s sense, would be an occurrence. He would talk about electronic occasions.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yep.

Matt Segall: And we’re talking about a rhythmic pattern that follows certain very precise mathematical rules. What’s finally real, from a Whiteheadian point of view, is a certain emotional valence or a feeling of some kind. So the electron is a very simple type of feeling that’s highly repetitive. It’s a vibratory feeling, and that gives us some content by which we can connect to the meaning of what is otherwise a very abstract idea. I mean, when you talk about the spin of an electron or the spin of a particle, it’s a spin in a higher-dimensional space. It’s not even…

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: A spin, yeah.

Matt Segall: In conventional space, right? And so…

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yeah, it’s not an actual spinning spin. It’s just a name that we need because there are different kinds of things, and we call them spin one-half and integer spin things. And one of the spin one-half things can bump into each other and repel each other by virtue of not being able to be in the same state at the same place. The spin one things—like photons and bosons—they don’t have that property, so they can be at the same place in the same state, and they can aggregate and form condensates. For example, if you concentrate light enough, you get these Bose-Einstein condensates of lots and lots of photons in the same place. And you cannot do that with electrons. You have this rule that says they cannot be at the same place, so they have to occupy a different energy level.

Matt Segall: That’s because of their charge, and photons have no charge?

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: No, because of their spin. There are these two kinds of things in the standard model, right? There are bosons and fermions. Fermions are spin one-half particles, and bosons are spin one or integer spin things. The bosons—like photons and W bosons—are sort of the interaction particles. And then fermions are sort of the matter stuff. So electrons and quarks are fermions. But then, also, the bosons are the things that mediate the forces. So the idea is that photons are also what mediates the electrostatic interaction.

Matt Segall: So when you learned about Whitehead’s metaphysics and his process of concrescence, what was the first indication you had that this might help you make more sense of what’s going on at the quantum level?

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Hmm. Well, I mean, it solved two riddles at once, right? Because I was also already very interested in the science of consciousness and a little bit in the philosophy of mind, but more in the hard problem of consciousness—of why matter would make mind and how. The idea of being able to have a framework that naturally encompasses both aspects of the physical and the mental as poles in this picture, and at the same time solving this fundamental, unresolved problem of having no story behind what the collapse of the wave function is or why it occurs… and what quantum mechanics as a whole says about the world—all of this, I think, was just sort of solved in an instant when I heard you describing concrescence, this process of, at the same time, having this very deterministic, influencing prehension part of reality.

As a physicist, I was thinking exactly in terms of forces acting on something that’s actually not yet really formed. Then this something sort of comes together and gathers itself and solidifies into existence because you have this one additional ingredient that physics does not have, which is creativity—this one thing that actually drives the universe onward and forward. Physics doesn’t have that. There’s nothing that really needs to go on in physics, right? There’s often the question of why there is anything rather than nothing, which I think creativity answers. If there is creativity involved, then you get excitement and interest in new things, and excitement of new things like that, and you naturally build things—you make a universe if you are creative, obviously. And it obviously wants to go on and explore creatively more novelty and more things. So to me, it just solved so many problems in such a beautiful and simple way. I’m still very much in love with the idea of Occam’s razor, of finding the simplest model, theory, or story to describe something. But I think this story just makes so much more sense than a story that doesn’t have anything like creativity in it.

Matt Segall: Yeah. Whitehead calls it sometimes the principle of unrest, that there is this ongoingness, and nothing in the universe ever happens twice. And so, you know, concrescence is meant to apply at the level of fundamental particles on up to our own conscious human experience—one category to rule them all, as it were, across all of these scales. But the key is—and let me know if this matches your understanding—that Whitehead is saying it’s the wrong problem to ask… A lot of times, the way this gets framed is the observer—the conscious observer—collapses the wave function, with the implication being the human conscious observer. Whitehead says, no. All of these forms of self-organization in nature—whether we’re talking about atoms or cells or human persons—are capable of making decisions. A decision isn’t necessarily conscious; it’s a process of self-actualization, which is just another way of talking about concrescence. There’s a bit of mentality, or a mental pole, even in an electron, which is part of what allows an electron to make a decision as it relates to an environment about which potentialities it’s going to actualize. That doesn’t depend on a human being coming in and looking. Nature, in Whitehead’s pan-experientialist understanding of the natural world, observes itself all the time. Nature is measuring itself all the time. In other words, nature is measuring itself all the time.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yep.

Matt Segall: And so… In other words, nature is measuring itself all the time. It’s interesting you bring up Occam and parsimony and the simplest explanation because, on the one hand, you and I might find that Whitehead’s account of this is far more parsimonious, but then there are other people like Hugh Everett and Sean Carroll nowadays, who defend this many-worlds interpretation, where they think the simplest explanation is to take the wave function and say, “That is the whole of reality. You don’t need to do any more interpreting.” It’s just… every possibility is actualized in some parallel universe.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: No…

Matt Segall: I think for us that’s the opposite of parsimony. You’re literally imagining infinitely many other universes branching out moment by moment by moment.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Not even moment by moment, but also continuously in time.

Matt Segall: Continuously.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Continuously many moments in time. You branch out continuously many universes at continuously every space in space.

Matt Segall: So from Carroll’s point of view, that’s parsimonious because you don’t need anything more than the wave function. But from our point of view…

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: But you still do. I think you still do because we do not experience all of them. So you just push the problem from physics to mental, and you ignore that… why does our consciousness choose one and not the other? Then you just have the exact same problem. You made the other part way more complicated just to be able to take this one problem out. But you still have the problem. It’s just a magic trick. You just put it in your pocket, but it’s still there. The problem is still there. You still need to explain why our consciousness chooses one particular reality all the time. I don’t know if there’s an answer to this question.

Matt Segall: That’s very insightful. I hadn’t considered the way that many-worlds interpretation is sort of… it’s presupposing what Whitehead called the bifurcation of nature. So our subjective experience and our inability to understand how it is that we only perceive one timeline is a function of our own perceptual limitation, some kind of illusion, a spell that we’re under.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Let’s not talk about that because consciousness doesn’t exist. Then, yeah, it’s simpler. Of course, a universe without any observer and without any consciousness in it would probably be a universe that’s more easily describable mathematically than one with it. But that’s not…

Matt Segall: There’d be no one there to do the mathematics, unfortunately.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yeah, that was not the homework that you were assigned. Your job is to explain reality, and reality includes knowing that it’s real because I see it. I don’t understand this idea of epiphenomenalism, of having consciousness as something that we don’t need to explain because it just is this whistle of the train. But on a train, I can still explain how the noise of the whistle comes about when the steam blows through this whistle. Epiphenomenalists cannot explain how consciousness comes about, so this is different. In the many-worlds interpretation, I don’t see that solved at all. I think it’s just giving up on the problem, sort of, or giving up on the complications and just saying it doesn’t exist. But I don’t think that makes it go away if you just ignore it. You were talking about this other famous interpretation, right? The Copenhagen interpretation, where the collapse happens by interaction with consciousness again, right? So consciousness was in this picture from the get-go, right? Somehow it was obvious that those two things are linked. I think it’s very unfair to Penrose that he’s often quoted as saying quantum mechanics and consciousness must have something in common because they are both weird, and we don’t understand them. That’s not what he says. Also, I think it’s obvious that this problem of consciousness was very obviously linked to the problems of quantum mechanics from the beginning.

So there was the idea that the collapse happens by the interaction with the classical world, and then this was pushed to the interaction of the measurement moment—it was pushed from the apparatus back to a conscious observation of the measurement apparatus. So it was pushed into consciousness. But then you have a very extreme dualistic situation because you forbid the possibility of consciousness being part of the physical world because you need the external interaction of the physical world with an external consciousness to make physics work. So you forbid any kind of bridge between those worlds. I think you need some kind of mentality interwoven in all of reality. Otherwise, I don’t see any solution to this problem. I think that’s the only solution forward, admitting that this is only a problem in our worldview because that means we have the wrong worldview.

Matt Segall: No, I follow you. The challenge is, how do we arrive at… I mean, for Whitehead, metaphysics is about finding generalizations that apply across as many different disciplines as possible. Is there a way that we can develop concepts that apply as much to our experience as conscious agents—making the decisions that we make, exploring possibilities before deciding on which possibility we want to actualize—as to what’s going on in a quantum event, a field of probabilities that gets actualized? Whitehead develops this idea of prehension, and there are physical prehensions and conceptual prehensions. Every actual occasion, whether it’s an electronic occasion or an animal occasion, includes both of these poles—the physical and the conceptual. The physical is just feeling what’s already happened, conforming to its causality, basically conforming to the past, its efficient causation, whereas the mental pole or conceptual prehension is what he would call the ingression of possibilities. It’s the feeling of alternatives. In our human conscious experience, we can explore possibilities and select one. In a simple particle or electron, there’s not as much imaginative freedom, but nonetheless, there’s a decision that occurs to actualize. There’s not determinism there—we know that.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Exactly, we know. We’ve made the experiments.

Matt Segall: Whitehead’s speculative wager is that we can make an analogy here, that there’s some degree of freedom to decide, even in an electron. It’s not conscious; it’s not considering the options, but it’s having to choose. There must be some degree of mentality even at that scale. It’s like a fundamental attitude in response to the existence of consciousness. When we do science, so often the attitude is, first of all, I need to simplify the situation. If I include my own mind in nature, it’s going to be much more difficult to offer a simple mathematical, deterministic equation that will describe what’s happening. So can I just focus on the behavior of measurable forces and leave myself out of the equation? Physics really advanced quite well with that assumption for a few hundred years, but eventually, we got to this point where applying the most reductionistic methods didn’t work anymore. Your choice of what to measure—you want to know the position or the momentum because you can’t know both, right? All of a sudden, our decisions are seemingly affecting the measurements, the systems at least, that we’re trying to measure. Whitehead’s suggestion here is that we really need to bring the mind back into nature and understand ourselves as a very intense, amplified form of experience or prehension that’s actually pervasive in nature. Then we have one set of categories through which we can understand everything, instead of thinking that consciousness is some weird, epiphenomenal anomaly that has no place in an otherwise well-behaved natural world—except that it doesn’t behave as we expect because of quantum theory. So that’s the challenge that Whitehead is trying to address, right? And it seems like a hard pill to swallow from the perspective of classical physics, but it seems way easier to swallow than the many-worlds interpretation.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Absolutely. Quantum mechanics still gives us additional information in all of this, right? Because it gives us the exact description of the spectrum of possibilities that the electron can choose from. We have the exact probability distribution. We know that most likely it will follow the pack and do exactly the same thing as it did before, but it has a smaller degree of possibility to choose differently this time. It can be a sort of rebel and be at the outskirt of the probability function, but it’s almost definite that it doesn’t turn into a bird and fly away at the next instance. It’s possible that it can do something weird, but we can describe its range of possibilities. I think that is, again, much easier to understand in this framework than in one where we cannot say the word “choice.”

Matt Segall: The constraints on what an electron can do are increasingly limited when it’s part of a larger system, right? Like if it’s part of a carbon atom or something, we know with even more precision how the electrons will behave versus if it’s in an isolated situation somehow, then it’s more unpredictable. Is that right?

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yeah, exactly. I would say the more interaction it has with other things, the more closely defined its reality and existence becomes because it has this constant feedback from its environment of who it is and where it is, and so that makes it behave much more reliably and more easily describable. I’m looking at the clock. I think you have to run soon already, is that true?

Matt Segall: Yeah, I’ve got a few more minutes here. We’re going to have to do another round because I have…

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: I would love to, because I was doing much of the talking now, but actually, I wanted to ask you questions.

Matt Segall: Oh, I’m sorry!

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Because I find when I watch these videos, I always find the parts where you speak much more insightful. So I didn’t want to speak that much, but nevertheless, thank you for giving me that opportunity.

Matt Segall: I’m trying to learn here from you as well. Just on this last issue, Whitehead has his category of societies, which has to do with the relationships among actual occasions. There’s a way in which he wants to describe, as nature becomes more complex and you get these enduring patterns that we could call atoms, stars, galaxies, planets, cells, plants, animals, these are societies of occasions of experience that have an enduring pattern that they’re reliably repeating. So it’s a matter of when quantum phenomena become increasingly entangled in these relationships, they’re more predictable. But what Whitehead is trying to say is, as this social order and the habits of these social relationships build up in the course of evolution, something occurs where a space is created within that social order for more novelty and freedom to be sheltered, as it were. He uses that word, sheltered. So in the case of the brain of an organism with a nervous system, he wants there to be a great degree of freedom sort of protected and sheltered within the organism for more probabilities to be explored. But that presupposes and depends upon the constraints provided by the rest of that system, which is very highly ordered. It’s this interplay between habit and novelty that allows for consciousness, as we know and love it, to emerge out of this more primordial form of experience. But something has clicked for you. What are you thinking?

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Yeah, sorry. I was trying to look up something that I heard you say in another talk when describing these hierarchies of systems. I think you said something like an amplifier.

Matt Segall: The human body functions as a complex amplifier.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Complex amplifier, yes, exactly. Because this ties into something that I really wanted to talk with you about as well, and this is the idea of the scale-free nature of his picture and this idea from solid-state physics. For example, in the so-called Ising model that was developed to describe magnetism in solid magnets like iron, where you have these little spins again, pointing one way or the other. If they’re all aligned, then the thing is magnetic. At first, they are sort of randomly oriented, but they all influence each other. So you have these pockets that are already aligned, but then you have another pocket that’s aligned in a different direction next to it, and you have this. The size of the pockets is at all scales. So you have pockets from just one thing being that way to really big parts that are already ordered. You have pockets at every scale. This is very important because then you can describe the system just through one simple parameter—the so-called order parameter. This has a critical value, at which point the whole thing flips into one or the other orientation and becomes magnetic. The interesting thing is that at that moment, when it flips, the whole system becomes susceptible to all parts. So it really matters what every single spin in this system is at that very moment, whether it will flip up or flip down as a whole. And only at that moment, actually, can it be described as truly scale-free. There’s a mathematical proof that shows those things are identical. If you have a scale-free description of a system, that automatically means it’s susceptible to all the parts. For me, that means if the universe can be described in a scale-free manner—so you have actual occasions, and they can be at any scale, and it works—that automatically means that every single occasion in the universe has the capability of influencing the whole universe. Which I think makes our human interaction with the world so much more exciting because if every decision that you make and every decision that every electron makes can, in principle, have a profound impact on the universe as a whole and its whole history, that’s quite exciting.

Matt Segall: A lot of responsibility as well. This is where Whitehead would—and we can question his choice of language here—talk about the consequent nature of God, which is where all of the occasions, which in their private experience might appear individual, actually contribute to this larger cosmic memory that is objectively immortal. That then becomes part of the data that the next concrescence inherits. Whatever scale a decision is made at, it can become relevant to an occasion at a totally different scale as a result of this divine milieu. We could borrow one of Teilhard de Chardin’s terms to describe the way that Whitehead imagines these interconnections. So yeah, we can very quickly go from hard science to process theology in Whitehead’s universe. Interesting insight. Okay, so for part two, I will shut up and answer your questions, and we can get more into the philosophy.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: I’m…

Matt Segall: As a real dialogue.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: I think this is really interesting because my main goal is to build up this understanding of a coherent worldview where everything that I know somehow fits in, and this is really helping—these actual discussions, back and forth. So yeah, I’ll have some questions as well.

Matt Segall: Maybe next week?

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: I’ll email you. I’ll have to email you because I’ll have to organize with my family.

Matt Segall: That would be great. I’d love it.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Thank you for your time. It’s an honor and a privilege.

Matt Segall: Alright, Flavio, thanks very much for answering my questions.

Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: You, too.