Abstract
AbstractIn putting Wendt's recent Quantum Mind in a larger context both of his own disciplinary engagement and some larger philosophical issues, I try to avoid a hasty dismissal, since the book seems at first blush to offer a ‘theory of everything’, or an uncritical acceptance, since the desire to know what makes the world hand together has always been part of the knowledge game. As to the first problem, I find it rather odd that Wendt spends little time in justifying his particular take on quantum theory, which is far from uncontroversial. Second, I attempt to understand why he has given up on the profession trying now to solve puzzles in the field by claiming that ‘quantum consciousness theory’ provides us with an ‘ace up the sleeve’. But the fact that wave collapse plays havoc with our traditional notions of cause, location, and mass, does not without further ado entitle us to claim that all or most problems in social science dealing with issues of validity and meaning of our concepts (rather than ‘truth/falsity’, as decided by making existential assertions) have been solved by quantum mechanics.
Highlights
The eternal quest In the Introduction to his First Critique Immanuel Kant remarked that the ‘odd destiny of human reason consists of the fact that it is in its nature to be confronted with questions which it cannot reject but which it cannot answer as they transcend the limits of human reason’
This, poses some serious questions of how to think about progress and the accumulation of knowledge, which is again the subtext of Wendt’s book, only that this time not International Relations (IR) theories but metaphysical controversies serve as the drivers of this project
It is no longer brute matter – as in the earlier ‘rump materialism’ – but matter matters because it possesses forces that we usually ascribed only to the mind
Summary
The eternal quest In the Introduction to his First Critique Immanuel Kant remarked that the ‘odd destiny of human reason consists of the fact that it is in its nature to be confronted with questions which it cannot reject but which it cannot answer as they transcend the limits of human reason’.1 He identifies thereby the paradox that we cannot resolve certain metaphysical questions, such as why there is anything instead of nothing, or what makes the universe hang together, we cannot give up on them. The assertion that a ‘theory of everything’ is in the offing would require, as Chernoff points out, a different type of ontology – comparable perhaps with giving up on absolute time and space – that can hardly be squared with just another version of ‘scientific realism’, which Wendt professes.2 Or as Prozorov questions: ‘What is the status of potentialities in (Wendt’s) quantum theory?’3
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