The Plight of `I Am'

                          ___________________

 

                             Joy Christian

 

     Wolfson College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6UD, England

                 joy.christian@wolfson.oxford.ac.uk

                      (received: May 21, 1996)

 

Once upon a time ......... there was a French soldier called Descartes.

 

One fine evening, as he was passing through a battle ground, he saw `I am'

sitting happily on the wall of sound metaphysics.

 

He gazed at it for a while, and --- after a bit of thinking --- proclaimed:

 

             ``I THINK, therefore I am (i.e., I exist).''

                                                (Discourse on Method, 1637)

 

`I am' smiled at him, easing itself into its comfortable classical seat on the

tall wall.

 

Three hundred years went by. Empires declined and fell, and empires were born.

Yet, nothing really deterred `I am' from its privileged pedestal. Nothing,

that is, that was as momentous as what was to happen.

 

Then, in 1900, Planck glimpsed the Quantum. Once refined by Heisenberg,

Schroedinger, and Dirac, this Quantum lead to the great fall of `I am'.

For a quantal `I am' is merely a `potential' (or indefinite) `I am' and not

necessarily an `actual' (or definite) `I am'.

 

Off it went tumbling down the wall of sound metaphysics, utterly bemused.

 

As luck would have it, a brave and mighty knight called Bohr was passing by,

just in time to save it --- so he thought. While still riding on his

unflinching classical horse, he charged in with his cutting quantal sword and

decreed:

 

                ``I am CLASSICAL, therefore I am.''

                                                   (Copenhagen, 1935)

 

But, clearly, his decree did not have the right ring to it. For the classical

could not be distilled from the quantal. This, in fact, was the VERY REASON

for the plight of `I am'!

 

Yet, Bohr found many followers in his crusade to save `I am' --- all happy and

content, if not complacent. And his decree might have been final, had it not

been for the heretics like Einstein, Bohm, Wigner, and Everett.

 

With some help from his ingenious confederate von Neumann, Wigner sought to

mend the weakness of Bohr's decree. He reached out deep into his own psyche

and surmised:

 

               ``I AM (conscious), therefore I am.''

                                                     (Princeton, 1961)

 

But this did not sound tautologous perhaps only to the God of Moses (Exodus

3:14).

 

For Bohm, on the other hand, the quantal was too much. He was quite happy to

be classical, even if he would have to remain `hidden' for it. So, in the face

of Bohr's decree, he dared divulge his scheme:

 

      ``I CLOAK (and uncloak only non-locally), therefore I am.''

                                                               (London, 1952)

 

Although Lord Krishna got away with such a specious trick (Bhagavad-Gita

7:24-25, 8:18-21, 9:4-5), Everett was clearly opposed to it --- vehemently

opposed to it. For he preferred to be purely quantal all the way! No, no,

no, David, he exclaimed,

 

                      ``I SPLIT, therefore I am.''

                                                (Princeton, 1957)

                                                (Apologies to Karel Kucha\v r)

                    (cf. The Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges, 1941)

 

This splitting did a lot of good to Captain Kirk as he boldly took his

star-ship Enterprise where no man had gone before.

 

But others did not feel like splitting --- or cloaking, for that matter.

 

And then there was this curious camp in the battle field, still in awe of

Bohr. One of the many puissant emissaries of this largest and oldest camp

was Gell-Mann. Reminiscent of Bohr's decree, he appealed to the environment

and maintained:

 

                ``I DECOHERE, therefore, FAPP, I am.''

                                                     (DLP, 1962 - Omnes, 1994)

                                        (Apologies, again, to Karel Kucha\v r)

 

This seemed to do a lot of good for quantum cosmology, if not for quantum

gravity.

 

Well, perhaps, frowned the mutineers, who found no prudence in decoherence.

They preferred the genuine `I am' and not a FAPP `I am'. A FAPP `I am', they

cried out, is still only a `potential' `I am', not an `actual' `I am' --- a

FAPP `I am' is no `I am'!

 

And, so, they longed for more than just decoherence --- so much more that they

established a small outpost of their own, and conspired to FUDGE the Quantum.

The commander-in-chief of this small but worthy faction was Ghirardi. From the

sanctuary of their godfather John Bell, Ghirardi gathered his troops together

and declared:

 

                ``I SPONTANEOUSLY LOCALIZE, therefore I am.''

                                                              (Italy, 1986)

 

But their fudge remained ad hoc as their physics remained obscure.

And most embarrassingly, there also remained the `tails' of Schroedinger's

Cat. They just would not go away. Einstein surely would not have liked this

--- neither would have Descartes, for that matter.

 

The tails did not bother Bell though. When `I am' questioned him about them at

a talk at MIT in 1990 shortly before his premature death, he quipped in his

characteristic Irish tone: ``Your worries are irrational.''

 

They did bother some, however, like Albert and Loewer (1990, 1996), who would

rather have their minds split a la Everett than have these tails dawdle

around. And even Shimony --- a staunch partisan of the fudge --- was somewhat

concerned about `I am' if, despite a cleverer fudge, the tails were to

remain (1991).

 

Others murmured that GRAVITY was the culprit fudging the Quantum. The most

prominent voice among these was that of Penrose. Unfortunately, he appeared to

be more concerned about ``orchestrating'' the state of the elusive conscious

rather than the state of the poor `I am'. Nevertheless, as one of the central

strategies for accomplishing his primary goal to fathom the conscious, he

contended:

 

                ``I QUANTUM-GRAVITATE, therefore I am.''

                                                        (Oxford, 1989, 1994)

 

He would rather quantum-gravitate and, as a result, NON-ALGORITHMICALLY

spontaneously localize than just boringly decohere.

 

But, again, no one was there to eradicate the tails. Not even Gravity the

Exotic. Surely, the fudge was so constructed that the tails were able to fool

Physics; and, thus, it was possible to relocate `I am' on the wall of almost

sound physics. But, of course, that is not where the poor `I am' belonged; and

Metaphysics was not going to be fooled by such an obtuse trick. For, to

Metaphysics, the tails were as monstrous as the Cat itself!

 

Alas! It was not possible to put `I am' back on the wall of sound metaphysics

even with the help of Gravity. Of course, Gell-Mann alone --- or DLP (1962) or

Hepp (1972), for that matter, long before him --- could have put `I am' on the

wall of almost sound physics --- and without resorting to the fudge! But that

was not the place for `I am'.

 

If `I am' was to REMAIN `I am', it HAD to be reestablished on the wall of

sound metaphysics, not just physics --- albeit with the help of fair Physics.

So, ...

 

......was `I am' an offshoot of a cleverer version of sponteneous-localization

due to quantum-gravitation? Or was it an intricate manifestation of a

yet-to-be-discovered much more elegant and subtle NON-COMPUTABLE facet of the

unknown quantum theory of gravity?

 

`I am' knew not.

 

For, as long as the tails of the Schroedinger's Cat lingered, `I am' was no

`I am'.

 

Thus, for now, `I am' lay shattered at the bottom of the wall it sought to

top, as all the Queen's horses and all the Queen's men toil to put the poor

`I am' back together again.

                      --------------X------------

 

References:

 

1. Rene Descartes, Discourse on the method of rightly conducting one's reason

   and reaching the truth in the sciences, (1637).

 

2. Niels Bohr, Physical Review, vol. 48, p. 696 (1935).

 

3. Eugene Wigner, in `The Scientist Speculates', edited by I.J. Good, p. 284

   (Heinemann, London, 1961).

 

4. David Bohm, Physical Review, vol. 85, p. 166 (1952).

 

5. Hugh Everett III, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 29, p. 454 (1957).

 

6. A. Daneri, A. Loinger, and G. Prosperi (DLP), Nuclear Physics, vol. 33,

   p. 297 (1962).

 

7. Ronald Omnes, `The interpretation of quantum mechanics' (Princeton

   University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1994).

 

8. G. Ghirardi, A. Rimini, and T. Weber, Physical Review, vol. D 34, p. 470

   (1986).

 

9. David Albert, in `Sixty-Two Years of Uncertainty', edited by A. Miller,

   p. 153 (Plenum Press, New York, 1990).

 

10. D. Albert and B. Loewer, in `Perspectives on Quantum Reality', edited by

    R. Clifton, p. 81 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, 1996).

 

11. Abner Shimony, `Search for a naturalistic world view', vol. II (Cambridge

    University Press, Cambridge, 1991) p. 55.

 

12. Roger Penrose, `Emperor's new mind' (Oxford University Press, Oxford,

    1989).

 

13. Roger Penrose, `Shadows of the mind' (Oxford University Press, Oxford,

    1994).

 

14. K. Hepp, Helv. Phys. Acta., vol. 45, p. 237 (1972).