QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

Pauli emphasized, in the same way as Heisenberg, that the situation we meet when analysing
observations in quantum mechanics forces us to abandon Cartesian dualism. In particular, Pauli
was critical of the idea of psychophysical parallelism created on the basis of this dualism.
Parallelism remains a foggy spiritual cloud in western thought because it still is without scientific
motivation, and also because, over the last few centuries, it has resulted in a sharp distinction
being made between natural sciences and humanistic sciences as well as between science and
religion. For Pauli, the complementarity of quantum mechanics provided a model for
approaching the psychophysical problem. He thought that physical and psychic phenomena are
mutually complementary in the same way that the wave description and the particle description
are complementary in atomic theory. Both are manifestations of an abstract transcendent whole
that is not describable within the framework of any rational theory. 682
Pauli’s sketchy attempt to outline a psycho-physical reality can be criticised from many
directions. In his model, Pauli to some extent actually explained away the new freedom
discovered in nature. The world as he portrayed it was neither completely random nor did it give
humans real freedom, since the archetypes could affect test results and lead development in any
direction they desired, for example via the experimenter’s subconscious mind. When it appeared
that physical laws no longer determined the results of individual experiments, the traditional
objective way of thinking perhaps pushed Pauli into searching for metaphysical causes. The
ontological way of approach he was targeting is unavoidably problematical when talking about
phenomena which cannot be directly observed. Even though the psycho-physical problem
obviously vanishes if reality is postulated as psycho-physical, the more accurate portrayal of
such a postulated metaphysical reality remains a problem. David Bohm did not speak about
archetypes, but instead drew attention to the active information and implicate order present in
reality.
Bohm notes that the quantum wholeness brought out in his idea of quantum potential is
reminiscent of the wholeness usually associated with living organisms. The whole may be said to
organise the activities of the parts in a way that is not obtained by putting together the parts of a
machine. His notion of active information begins to resemble the domain of mind and suggests a
rudimentary mind-like behaviour in matter, since for Bohm, the essential quality of mind is just
some kind of activity of form rather than of substance. Active information is simultaneously
physical and mental in nature and accounts for the inseparability of the mental and physical sides
682 Laurikainen 1997, 30-31, 84.
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