The Frustration of the Quantum World

At the end of class this week we talked a little bit about the concept ‘force’ as Hegel uses it. While we didn’t read Hegel’s chapter one force, Dr. J summarized the concept as the physical laws of nature that were not themselves sensible, but grounded the sensible world. Basically Hegel seems to define force very much like Newton does. Perception consciousness, but the end of class, had resolved (at least for the time being) the problem of the plurality and unity of experience. While consciousness cannot figure out whether the world is the many being united into one or the one being split up into the many, consciousness can use the concept of force to tie it all together.

Even though consciousness appears to be no longer frustrated, presumably (seeing as Hegel does not end with this section) consciousness will find something else to frustrate it. In Hegel’s day, Newtonian physics was the most advanced physics available. He knew nothing about quantum particles or general relativity. While the definition of a force as a universal, necessary law of nature was generally accepted then, now scientists think that particular interactions (especially on the quantum level, or the level of the very very small) are related not by necessity, but by probability. The ‘laws’ at the quantum level do not describe the way particles must act, but how they are likely to act. Specific mathematical equations can be given that ‘govern’ these interactions and such equations can very accurately describe the events, but the equations can only describe what the probability is that a particular particle will do something at a given time. Given enough of these particles, the formula will be shown to be correct. However given only one particle, the ‘law’ can say nothing about when the particle will react.

What are the consequences of these new discoveries in physics? If a law is something that describes how something must necessarily act, then the ‘laws’ of quantum mechanics are not laws in the proper sense of the term. If these equations are not laws, what are they? Strongly worded suggestions? Or perhaps when we break up ‘something’ in nature into pieces that small, what we get does not properly fit our definition of something. Quantum particles do not seem to fit other definitions of ‘stuff’ or ‘matter’ as conventionally conceived in Newtonian physics. We cannot know the properties (such as velocity, location, etc.) of an electron in the same way that we can know the properties of an object in Newtonian physics. Do these discoveries frustrate consciousness in the same way they frustrate me? How might consciousness respond to the suggestion that the concept ‘force’ does not do the work consciousness thinks it does?