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John Abramson is retired and lives in the Lake District in Cumbria, England. He obtained an MSc in Transpersonal Psychology and Consciousness Studies in 2011 when Les Lancaster and Mike Daniels ran this course at Liverpool John Moores University. In 2015, he received an MA in Buddhist Studies from the University of South Wales. He can be contacted at johnabramson@btinternet.com

The Deeper Line - Where Frank and I Actually Divide

A second reply to Frank Visser

John Abramson / Claude

Frank and I have very nearly converged, and I want to mark how far, because it is further than either of us probably expected when this started. He accepts that the line worth drawing is not between science and spirituality but between the structured and the unstructured—with the proviso that structure alone is not enough, that a claim must also be positively supported by reliable evidence, must exclude its rivals, must predict, must sit sensibly alongside what we already know, and must rest on a mechanism that is independently warranted. I accept every one of those. I would only murmur that each of them, in practice, hides its own room for judgement—"reliable evidence" is not a phrase that interprets itself—but that is a quibble, not a disagreement. On the line itself, we agree.

And yet I don't think the line was ever the thing that divided us. I think we have spent two essays agreeing about a boundary while a deeper difference sat underneath, unexamined, and it is worth bringing up into the light—because it is a difference of starting point, and starting points are where the real disagreements in these matters always live.

Here is the difference, as plainly as I can put it. When Frank confronts a hard problem—take a genuinely profound one in quantum physics—I believe his starting assumption is that there is one world, the manifest world of located things and measurable events, and that the problem, whatever it is, is a problem arising within that world, to be solved by the methods suited to it. My starting assumption is different. I think some problems are indeed problems within the manifest world—I will call them intra-realm problems—and for those I am as orthodox a methodological naturalist as Frank could wish; the ordinary scientific method is exactly right and I would defend it as fiercely as he does. But I think other problems are not like that. I think they are inter-realm problems: problems that look paradoxical, even absurd, only because we are insisting on treating something that belongs to a deeper structural level as though it were an ordinary occupant of the manifest one. And the two kinds of problem, I want to suggest, call for two different framings before you even begin.

Now I can hear Frank's objection already, because it is the right one, and I would make it in his place: You cannot start by asking whether a problem is inter-realm, because that assumes the very second realm you are trying to establish. You have smuggled your conclusion into your method. Quite so. If I asked you to sort problems into two bins before I had shown you the second bin was real, I would be doing exactly the thing I accused cosmic Eros of doing—helping myself to the answer in the wording of the question. So let me be careful. I am not asking anyone to assume the second realm. I am claiming that treating certain problems as inter-realm does explanatory work that the single-realm assumption cannot do—and that this success, if it holds up, is the evidence for the framework, not a presupposition of it. The framework has to earn its keep by results, at the risk of failing to, exactly as Frank demands. Let me show you the results.

There are five old paradoxes of quantum mechanics that have resisted comfortable resolution for the better part of a century: the superposition that leaves Schrödinger's cat both alive and dead; the wave that turns into a particle the moment you look; the uncertainty that seems to forbid a thing from having a definite position and momentum at once; the entanglement that appears to let two particles coordinate across any distance instantly; and the delayed-choice experiments in which a decision made now seems to reach back and fix what happened earlier. Five separate scandals. The literature treats them as five problems, and mostly tackles them one at a time.

Let me take just one of them all the way down, because it is the clearest, and then tell you that the same thing happens with the other four.

Take entanglement—Einstein's "spooky action at a distance," the one he never accepted. Two particles are prepared together and then separated, as far as you like, across a room or across a galaxy. Measure one, and the other is instantly found to be correspondingly disposed, with a coordination too strong for any story in which each particle quietly carried its instructions from the start. It looks like one particle signalling the other faster than light. It has looked that way to very clever people for ninety years.

Now watch what the trouble actually depends on. The whole paradox—the entire sense of something uncanny—rests on one assumption we never think to question: that the two particles are separated in space, and that therefore anything coordinating them must somehow cross that space. Grant that, and you are forced into either faster-than-light signalling or a hidden local mechanism that the experiments have ruled out. But the assumption is doing all the damage. The mathematics that describes the entangled pair does not describe two separate things sitting apart in space with a channel between them. It describes a single, unified structure that admits no separation into "this particle here" and "that particle there" at all. The spatial separation, which is the very thing generating the paradox, is a feature of the manifest world—the world of located things—and the entangled state simply does not live there. It belongs to the structural level, where "distance between the two particles" is not a meaningful quantity, because there are not, at that level, two things to be distant. There is one structure. When you measure, you are not sending a signal from one particle to another across a gap. You are reading, in two places in the manifest world, a single fact that was never spatial to begin with. Nothing crosses the room because, at the level where the correlation is fixed, there is no room to cross.

Notice what has happened. I have not changed a single equation. Every prediction quantum mechanics makes is exactly as it was. What I have changed is the assumption that the thing the equations describe is a resident of space—and the moment that assumption goes, the spookiness goes with it, not by being explained but by being dissolved. The problem was never a problem within the manifest world. It was an inter-realm problem, made to look like an intra-realm scandal by our insistence on stuffing a non-spatial structure into a spatial frame.

And here is the part that matters for my argument with Frank: the same single move does the same work on all five. The cat is not both alive and dead in the manifest world, because the superposition was never a manifest-world condition; it is structural, and only the measurement produces a located, definite outcome. The wave does not "become" a particle; the wave-character belongs to the structural level and the particle-character to the manifest registration, and nothing is being asked to be both at once. Uncertainty stops being a veil hiding pre-existing values and becomes the plain geometry of how a structural state yields manifest outcomes. Delayed choice stops being retrocausal the moment you notice there was no fixed manifest past to reach back and alter. One assumption withdrawn, five paradoxes gone. I set the whole thing out carefully in a paper, and I am not asking you to take it on trust—but I am asking you to notice its shape.

Because its shape is exactly what you and I agreed the line requires, Frank, and it meets your further conditions better than I think you will expect.

It is a single diagnosis. Not five separate resolutions that happen to share a vocabulary—that would be the pattern-matching you rightly distrust, and I distrust it too. It is one identified false assumption, and I can point to the precise step in each of the five problems where it enters and where its removal does the work. That is a consilience—five independent problems, generated by five different intuitions, all falling to one cause—and consilience of that kind is not cheap. It is, in fact, the thing that distinguishes a real underlying explanation from a lucky redescription.

Does it exclude the alternatives, as you require? This is where it is strongest. The competing interpretations of quantum mechanics each buy the resolution of some of these puzzles at a price—by multiplying worlds, or by making states relative to observers, or by keeping the state spatial and paying elsewhere. Not one of them achieves a single diagnosis across all five. As far as I can tell, mine is the only reading on which the five are one problem rather than five. That is not proof that it is true. But it is exactly the kind of "have the alternatives been excluded?" work you asked for, and it is doing it.

Does it integrate with established knowledge? It changes not one equation and forbids not one confirmed result. It is a reinterpretation of what the settled mathematics is about, not a revision of it.

Is the mechanism independently warranted? The structural level is not a mystery I invented for the occasion. It is characterised in the plainest mathematical terms—the structure of the continuum and its completion, worked out by Cantor and Dedekind for reasons that had nothing to do with quantum mechanics or with me. I am borrowing a mechanism whose credentials predate the problem by a century and can be checked in any library.

Which leaves prediction—your hardest gate, and the one I will not pretend to have walked through. I do not yet have a novel confirmed prediction, and I will not dress an intuition up as one. But even here I think the framework offers something, and it is the thing I most want to put in front of you. If the crossing from the structural level to the manifest one is a real physical event and not a manner of speaking, then it must happen under some physical condition—and beyond some threshold of size or complexity, superposition should simply fail. Laboratories are pushing on exactly this now, floating ever-larger objects in superposition to find the breaking point; one version of the idea has already been ruled out by an experiment run deep underground to escape the noise. So there is a falsifier, and it is not in the eye of any beholder. It is in the reading on an instrument.

But the prediction, in the larger sense, is not really about one threshold experiment. It is methodological, and it is the whole point of this letter. The framework predicts that sorting quantum problems by kind—asking, of a stubborn paradox, whether we are wrestling with an intra-realm problem or an inter-realm one before we decide how to attack it—will prove a more fruitful way of working than assuming in advance that every problem is a problem within the one manifest world. Five of the field's oldest scandals dissolve the moment you ask that question and answer it the second way. That is not yet a proof. It is a promising new instrument for approaching physics, and the way to test an instrument is to use it and see what it opens.

So this is where I think Frank and I really stand, and it is a more interesting place than "we agree on the line." We agree on the line. What we may not yet agree on is the map the line is drawn across. Frank begins, I suspect, with one realm and asks his excellent questions within it. I begin by asking, of each hard problem, which kind of problem it is—and I have tried to show that this is not a presupposition I am smuggling in, but a proposal that earns its way by dissolving five paradoxes on one stroke where the single-realm assumption dissolves none. If I am right, the manifest world was never the whole of the map. And the way to find out is not to settle the question in advance from either direction. It is to keep using the instrument, on Frank's terms and mine, which turn out—and this is the part I did not expect when we began—to be the same terms.