Context:

We finally arrived at the destination of our Book club’s journey: Karen Barad’s “Meeting the Universe Halfway”. The way we got here was reading Bergson’s “Time and Free Will” (see report here) to then see how Bergson’s initial challenge to psychophysics morphed into the Einstein-Bergson debate about the primacy of physics over philosophy (see report here). We then stopped over at A.N. Whitehead’s “Process and Reality” to see another principled objection to a classical-corpuscular view of mechanistic physics as the ideal scientific and philosophical view (see report here). His more holistic interpretation of the universe based on physico-mathematical interpretations (known as ‘process philosophy’) is largely ignored in contemporary analytic philosophy but serves as direct inspiration to many contemporary thinkers across scientific disciplines. Although Barad does not explicitly make reference to him, it proved worthwhile to contrast Whitehead’s thinking with that of N. Bohr (see report here). Indeed, the philosophical ideas of Bohr are the starting point of Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway and Whitehead as well as Bohr developed their ideas in explicit contrast with those of Einstein. Small wonder then that the same respectful criticism of Einstein is a fil rouge in Barad who, herself a quantum physicist, takes up the philosophical implications of  physics which have proven so counterintuitive for deterministic thinking. As it is a quite massive book giving rise to a lot of intra-acting (see how dogeared it is) we split the debate in two. In this penultimate session we talk about her interpretation of quantum physics (the chapters 3, 4, 7). In the next (final) one we conclude by looking at the ethical ramifications she distills out of this interpretation (ethics is a common theme across all these thinkers!).

Barad on Bohr – the agreement:

Bohr’s ‘philosophy-physics’ is the starting point for Barad. She first disentangles it in a very meticulous way from the ‘uncertainty’ reading which is probably most well known from the like-named principle proposed by Heisenberg. Instead, according to us quite rightly so, it is argued that Bohr preferred the term ‘indeterminacy’ as this captured the lesson of quantum physics more accurately. Indeed, it is not that there is something determined in spacetime that we cannot measure without disturbing it, i.e. without uncertainty. Rather, Bohr’s idea of complementarity holds that there’s no such determined thing prior to (or separate from) our observation of it. Instead, the fact revealed by quantum physics is that, when we observe a quantum phenomenon, we need to make a choice on how we want to observe it. It is this choice that allows us to determine the phenomenon either as to its object characteristic (its position) or as to its wave characteristics (its momentum). These two complementary ways of observing it require two different, and mutually exclusive, experimental arrangements. In this way the very idea of physics as deterministics, so preferred by Einstein, is no longer a tenable position (as Barad, specifically in chapter 7 explains with reference to experiments that could not be carried out in Bohr’s time but have been carried out in the meantime).

As the below picture tries to illustrate, this puts Barad and Bohr very far removed from the contemporary Western consensus assuming that a scientific explanation needs ultimately to be grounded by concept of an isolated particular or individual. In this her analysis is to a large extent on the same wavelength as that of Whitehead who, as we saw before, started from the non-separability of phenomena based on the image of wave propagation. This is far removed from the current Western consensus, with its view of the particular importance of the thought of a conscious individual human being. This is illustrated by both Whitehead and Bohr emphasizing affinity of their philosophy and science with Eastern thought.

That said, Barad also explicitly says she wants to go further than Bohr. Maybe fittingly, this is also where our discussion group started disagreeing. This, hopefully productive, debate is summarized in the next section but before we switch to that I complete the discussion of the above picture by stating that Barad’s view emphasizes (see Whitehead’s starting point) the entangled nature of nature. As she herself says, the title Meeting the Universe Halfway is not about taking a kind of middle position in the way Bohr can be interpreted. No, she is clearly taking diffraction as the ultimate truth revealed by quantum physics.

Barad on Bohr – the disagreement:

We can be brief about the disagreement of Barad and Bohr (hence about us disagreeing in our discussion). The basic issue Barad has with Bohr is that he limited his official lesson to a lesson of epistemology (how we can know nature) where she argues his argument leads to a straightforward ontological conclusion (how nature is). For Barad, philosophy-physics as proposed by Bohr should not be limited to the way we, humans, obtain knowledge but it should be seen as the generic way in which phenomena come to matter. This allows her to introduce her key concept of intra-agency within phenomena connecting epistemology not only to ontology but also to ethics. The limit of human knowledge which Bohr self-imposed on himself is then a remnant of a humanism that still makes humans to be too exceptional a species in our world.

We disagreed on whether this extension of Bohr’s epistemological lesson is correct and – relatedly –  whether his self-avowed humanism indeed restricts his ethical outlook to one in which the human species is the be all and end all of nature. Luckily, we have one session left to see whether we can find agreement based on our previous readings where, as said above already, ethical questions always lurked in the background. Whatever else we might find of Barad, she clearly has the merit of putting these questions front and center in a bold way within a principled discussion of contemporary advances in scientific knowledge! 

To be continued – humanism vs. posthumanism:

Next time, and this will be the coronation of this specific book club, we therefore start with specifical ethical questions that motivated the NeuroEpigenEthics project. This will bring us to the issues why ‘New Materialist’ views are critically important in no longer separating of issues of a scientific/materialistic and an ethics/diversity nature. We will read the remaining chapters of Meeting The Universe Halfway that make a connection between interpretation of (quantum) physics and ethical theorizing (a connection that all of the thinkers discussed in this book club endorse in one way or the other). We will then see whether the humanism of Bohr is indeed incompatible with the insights of contemporary continental thought such as for instance developed in posthumanism. Or whether we can find some “golden middle” ground where we can all meet after all.