Miro Painting (Man With Candle) 1925 Oil on canvas over Mark Toby’s World (1959)

“Know, verily, that the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel.”-Baha’u’llah

As we can see clearly from this statement, the project of understanding the complete nature of the soul is an impossible task. In other places it is likened to the inaccessible knowledge of God. To illustrate this point Baha’u’llah has elaborated on the Quranic verse, “He hath known God who hath known himself” as well as the well known Islamic tradition, “Man is My mystery, and I am his mystery.”

However in Baha’u’llah’s Tablet of Wisdom there is an intriguing statement which might provide a hint as to some aspects of the soul and its interaction with the material world using the knowledge acquired in modern physics.

“What a penetrating vision into philosophy this eminent man had! He is the most distinguished of all philosophers….He (Socrates) it is who perceived a unique, a tempered, and a pervasive nature in things, bearing the closest likeness to the human spirit, and he discovered this nature to be distinct from the substance of things in their refined form. He hath a special pronouncement on this weighty theme. Wert thou to ask from the worldly wise of this generation about this exposition, thou wouldst witness their incapacity to grasp it…” –Baha’u’llah Tablet of Wisdom (1873)

To me this verse seems to prefigure the modern concept of a quantum field that underlies matter. To restate the argument I have made in previous articles: It would seem he is describing, within the limits of the language available to him, the existence of a quantum field. If we reflect on this word “spirit” and what it really means, one can see that it contains both the concepts of non-physicality and pervasiveness, which are the hallmarks of the quantum wave function. In fact he even uses the word “pervasive” as if to emphasize this aspect.

Finally he also states that the people of his generation were incapable of grasping the implications of this idea. This is an interesting point, since Plato’s theory of forms (which I assume is being referred to) was of course well known and thoroughly studied for several millennia. One could understand such a statement in light of what would come some 50 years later with the advent of quantum mechanics.

More recently I have been thinking about what this quote may be telling us, if we accept that it is the quantum field which is being described in this verse. The verse, in this light, provides possibly an important hint at the nature of the human spirit, since he says it bears “the closest likeness to the human spirit”. The idea that by looking to the natural world we can better understand the spiritual, is not a new idea. Throughout Baha’i writings references are made to familiar natural phenomena in order to better understand the spiritual. For example the appearance of the manifestation of God in each age is likened to the coming of the Sun. Or the analogy of the growth of a flower is used to understand the growth of ones soul. What is new, is the idea that, ‘new’ discoveries of physics might reveal new spiritual truths and understanding. In fact we might expect that this mode of inquiry to be fruitful given Abdu’l-Baha’s statement in the Tablet of the Universe, “For physical things are signs and imprints of spiritual things;”

First to clarify the terms, ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’, Abdu’l-Baha in Some Answered Questions explains, “The human spirit, which distinguishes man from the animal, is the rational soul, and these two terms — the human spirit and the rational soul — designate one and the same thing.” Abdu’l-Baha goes on to explain how the mind is related to the spirit, “As for the mind, it is the power of the human spirit. The spirit is as the lamp, and the mind as the light that shines from it. The spirit is as the tree, and the mind as the fruit. The mind is the perfection of the spirit and a necessary attribute thereof, even as the rays of the sun are an essential requirement of the sun itself.” So mind is an attribute of the spirit.

Perhaps if we are to understand how the spirit and it’s attribute of mind is physically expressed, we can look to the relationship between say an electron and the quantum field which gives rise to it.

Schrödinger’s cat, By Luis.avila.epr (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

It could be that the physical expression of the mind arises from the human spirit in a manner similar to how the physical attributes of an electron’s position or momentum are manifested from the quantum field. As if to reinforce this view, is the idea that the spirit is able exhibit a type of ‘superposition’ of the highest order. In quantum mechanics, the property of superposition permits a particle to maintain several contradictory properties at the same time. So for example a particle can exist in superposition of different positions, momentums or different spin states at the same time (In the popularized case, Schrödinger’s unfortunate cat is in a superposition of life and death).

In the book Promulgation of Universal Peace, Abdu’l-Baha appears to be describing a similar phenomena when explaining the attributes of the human spirit:

“The spirit of man, however, can manifest itself in all forms at the same time. For example, we say that a material body is either square or spherical, triangular or hexagonal. While it is triangular, it cannot be square; and while it is square, it is not triangular. Similarly, it cannot be spherical and hexagonal at the same time. These various forms or shapes cannot be manifest at the same instant in one material object. Therefore, the form of the physical body of man must be destroyed and abandoned before it can assume or take unto itself another. Mortality, therefore, means transference from one form to another — that is, transference from the human kingdom to the kingdom of the mineral. When the physical man is dead, he will return to dust; and this transference is equivalent to nonexistence. But the human spirit in itself contains all these forms, shapes and figures. It is not possible to break or destroy one form so that it may transfer itself into another. As an evidence of this, at the present moment in the human spirit you have the shape of a square and the figure of a triangle. Simultaneously also you can conceive a hexagonal form. All these can be conceived at the same moment in the human spirit, and not one of them needs to be destroyed or broken in order that the spirit of man may be transferred to another. There is no annihilation, no destruction; therefore, the human spirit is immortal because it is not transferred from one body into another body.”

Actually from a strictly materialistic point of view, such a conjecture concerning the rise of consciousness or agency in inanimate matter may not be so far fetched. If we consider recent work addressing the issue of the agency problem in biological systems, there is the new idea put forward by Erik Hoel for “casual emergence”. This is described nicely in a recent article in Quanta magazine. The “agency” problem occurs when one considers the casual relationships operating in complex biological systems. For example physicists are used to a describing cause and effect in a reductionist manner. So one begins with a fine grained description of physical interactions and builds up a model which describe a given system. At the end of the day all causes are reduced to the physics of the interaction of particles and fields. However how does one deal with cause and effect if a cat hits a ball with its paw? In principle the common thought is that one could proceed to describe in all detail the different interactions of particles, then atoms and neurons to produce an exquisite model of the cat, ball and its environment. However in reality it doesn’t make sense to attempt to parse all the particle interactions which lead to the entity of the cat hitting the ball. We can intuitively see that at some level such fine level of description becomes ineffective.

What is very interesting about this work, is that Hoel showed using the concept of “effective information”, that contrary to naive expectations, a more detailed description of a given system doesn’t translate into a better ability to predict a given systems response, (or have more ‘causal’ power).

“At a certain macroscopic scale, effective information peaks: This is the scale at which states of the system have the most causal power, predicting future states in the most reliable, effective manner. Coarse-grain further, and you start to lose important details about the system’s causal structure.” — “A Theory of Reality as More Than the Sum of Its Parts”, Quanta Magazine.

So it's not just that a finer grained description doesn’t add more predictive information, it actually looses predictive information. This is interesting because what it seems to imply is that the ‘best’ description of an emergent phenomena might be an abstract or mathematical object and not just the ‘matter’ and detailed interactions which comprise its physical expression.

By Valerius Geng (Own work) (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)

We are accustomed to think of a bottom up emergence of these macro-states, however given this work, a case might be made that this is inverting the relationship. As is mentioned in the Quanta Magazine article, Cosmologist, George Ellis in his article on “Recognizing Top-Down Causation” makes this argument. He considers top-down causation from the point of view of ‘boundary-conditions’ imposed on the system from an abstracted entity (for example social norms or software). Here these non-physical relational entities have ‘real’ physical effects which act downward (i.e. the flow of electrons in a circuit). He touches on emergent phenomena but suggests that these ordering effects are secondary.

However I would suggest and even more unorthodox argument. For example, following Platonic like logic, if we consider a shadow, normally we understand that there is an object which ‘casts a shadow’ and the shadow is a projection of part of the properties of the given object. It is not a ‘full’ description of the object. We usually don’t invert the relationship and have the object emerging from the projection since it has lower informational content. In fact one might propose that the distinction between primary object and its shadow is the amount of predictive informational content a thing has. So whatever thing has more relevant informational content is more ‘primary’ or ‘causal’.

Given this, perhaps one could cast emergent phenomena in a manner similar to how we currently describe the relationship between quantum field and a particle. Here the particle’s attributes (position, momentum, spin…etc.) are a projection of the underlying non-physical quantum state function. In this case even emergent phenomena might be thought of as ‘caused’ by the abstracted form which is seen to arise, rather than being ‘emergent’. If we go beyond emergent phenomena, to the case of the physical expression of consciousness or mind. It might be fruitful not just to consider its fullest or primary expression to be abstracted from the fine grained physics, but to consider the possibility of mind being the very cause of its physical expression.