By Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.
It was intriguing to read about Pauli’s relationship with Jung and his ideas about using Jung in physics. I’m not sure it works very well, which of course is Pauli’s problem, not that of the admins. Yet I have some criticisms:
When you say: “As long as nobody’s looking, observing, or measuring this electron, it’s actually everywhere on the circle at once,” this overlooks the wave/particle duality and discounts the physical reality of the wave. The electron as a wave is an extended object, and it extends right around the atom, with varying magnitude. Trying to observe the electron collapses the wave function, and the electron, as a particle, appears at a discrete location. A lot of treatments of quantum mechanics don’t pay much attention to the wave function except when squared, as a probability distribution, but the wave is the only thing that accounts for interference effects and for the fact that the electron in an orbit cannot move without constantly emitting radiation – by which it would lose all its energy and collapse into the nucleus of the atom. This is what perplexed everyone until Bohr’s theory of the quantum atom.
It is the duality that is the strange thing about quantum mechanics. The wave function itself is deterministic, just as Schrodinger and Einstein would have wanted. It is the transition to the observed particle that involves the random factor. But even that isn’t all that random. The probability function is also deterministic, which means that populations of electrons do not behave randomly.
You say that “there is still no answer as to why reality seems to change states when we aren’t looking.” Actually, reality changes states when we are not looking all the time. What you should say is that reality behaves differently depending on whether we are looking or not. It functions as waves in the former case, particles in the latter.
The presence of an observer does “alter the facts” in the sense that things function differently depending on whether they are waves or particles, and the presence of an observer can “alter the facts” in the sense of collapsing the wave function, but none of this “alters the facts” in the commonsense way that a reader might understand, e.g. that Mitt Romney was elected President before we looked but then Obama was afterwards.
This connects up with something you say later, that “Kant did not think that our consciousness of the world would be able to alter the things-in-themselves.” This is not quite right. The presence of consciousness, in effecting the synthesis of phenomena, does not alter things-in-themselves; but the actions of our will, whether we are conscious or not, can make all sorts of alterations in things-in-themselves – from closing the window to building dams, etc. This is a key distinction in Kant. Sensibility is passive with respect to existence. Will is active and alters existence.
Your essay says that “according to Pauli, when a person observes a phenomenon in the natural universe, that person will always have a subjective expectation of what the outcome of that phenomenon will be.” And later that “Pauli wants us to engage with the irrational and subjective, and he wonders whether psychological differences in the observer can also be shown to lead to variances in the observed quantum phenomena.”
One problem here is that if your subjective expectation can determine where the electron will appear when the wave function collapses, then in principle you could make the electron appear at that location for an indefinite run. This would violate the deterministic form of the laws of probability in quantum mechanics, violating the probability of the electron appearing at other locations. Making something happen is not random or probabilistic, but that is what the theory requires.
Perhaps we could explain this as follows: By making the electron appear at a certain location for a week, say, it would then be naturally compensated by the electron not appearing there, without our influence, for another week. There are runs in random sequences. But the sense here is that we are causing the appearance of the electron, and this in fact does not fit well with Jung’s own theory of Synchronicity, which Jung calls “an acausal connecting principle.” Jung does not want to compromise the causal necessity of the laws of nature.
If Pauli’s way forward is that “there is something about our powers of observation that causes quantum phenomena to change…” then I don’t see it. No real case has been made that our “powers of observation” control the collapse of the wave function in specific, non-probabilistic, ways. Pauli’s “way forward” is then no different from that of the Maharishi’s doctrine of Transcendental Meditation that is also supposed to be able to control quantum randomness. There is a movie about this: What the Bleep Do We Know!? (2004), where we have Marlee Matlin led through some standard physics, until it jumps the rails into Transcendental Meditation. So who needs Pauli or Jung when we have the Maharishi? This has been taken care of.
The problems here cut the connection to the archetypes. But the ultimate limitation of quantum mechanics is what defines probabilities, in the realm of the possible. What is possible? That is not a question that can be answered, but human creativity and free will are what open up new possibilities. Things that have never been seen before. Jung’s archetypes, as versions of Platonic Forms, are about the possibilities of individuation in the human personality. This is way beyond physics, just because possibility itself is a metaphysical question, which physics cannot properly explore. “Many-worlds” interpretations of quantum mechanics are knock-offs of the multiple worlds interpretations of possibility and necessity in philosophy. As science these are not really testable and as philosophy they grossly violate Ockham’s Razor.