“The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.” Such is the prospectus for physics held out for us by Teilhard de Chardin, his an attempt “to see and to make others see what happens to man.” If man is indeed the key to the universe, then there is no doubt that he can himself become a perfect object of knowledge for any scientific investigation. One who studies gets turned into an object of study.

But the present-day science itself is fettered by its principles of approach, by its own thoughts and its procedural methodology. The stringent and pure objectivity of the classical age has now disappeared and the physical object seems to look as if it were only a mental construction of the observer himself, as if his making. Teilhard de Chardin is quite aware of this dilemma and even wonders whether the subjective viewpoint by itself could light up the object, whether it could light it up at all. There is a hesitancy about its ability to bring out the reality of the object to the level of sense perception. That would presuppose putting man on a double focus: he as the viewer of the universe with a kind of detached impersonality of the witness and, at the same time, an involving participator in its modes of functioning. If this is possible then that would indeed be a wonderful enrichment of his endowments and capabilities. That would mean opening out brighter and broader doors for the “true physics” to step into the realms of an organised complexity, even of studying consciousness, a study that would culminate in the investigation of a fully developed and progressive personality. In fact, if “evolution is an ascent towards consciousness”, it must perforce arrive, in its eventual growth, at the Omega Point; that will be the gathering up of the personal and the universal in the hyper-personal.

But before we come to this “true physics”, let us briefly consider the view of Teilhard de Chardin about the stuff of the universe in terms of its irreducibles, the foundational basis that makes up the Alpha Point of the evolutionary process. He posits three elemental states of matter that we recognise in their insistent tangibility: atomicity, relational unity, and ceaseless activity. The particulate nature of the grain of sand and the raindrop is, on a speculative level, the immediate prompter of the Democretean idea of the atomic character of matter. But the infinitesimal at the deeper level is an insubstantial tenuous entity. “Indeed our sensory experience turns out to be a floating condensation on a swarm of the infinitesimal.”

In this microscopic domain we witness radioactivity which only goes to show the state of constant disintegration in which matter seems to perpetually exist. But that is not the whole truth of the matter, of matter, and there are as well enduring entities that support the solidity of this great universe. Call them billiard balls, molecules, atoms, electrons, or in modern terms quarks, fermions, or by any other name, what we persistently see is the inalienable unity of this vast objective world based on them. But it is also important to recognise that it is not by simply aggregating these entities, by adding them together, putting them in a single basket, that we can get the substance of the object. There is a kind of collective unity shared by them all, they organising themselves in their togetherness, they contributing to be members of the club, to their participative mutuality, the contribution of their binding energy. But for this to happen there has to be also a unifying power, unifying energy, a participatory interaction, a bosonic exchange of deeper mutuality. Material particles are therefore nothing but the “transient reservoirs of this concentrated power.” If this is so then, asserts Teilhard de Chardin, “the universe would find its stability and final unity at the end of its decomposition. It would be held together from below.”

Thus, in the current physics, Teilhard de Chardin sees energy to be the last support for the material universe. As seen from below this is the kind of picture that emerges in his view.

But then “it is only by reason of complexity, from above” that things are held, and held together. In other words, the totality of matter lies in its being an ‘atom’ at every stage of its organisation. The universe itself is an atom, as much as is the solar system, or a mountain, or a drop of water, or the uranium nucleus. Constituents don’t make a whole and a group of individuals is not a society. A uranium nucleus may break into bits but these bits cannot be just brought back and the original nucleus obtained. This happens at every stage of disintegrated aggregates.

Which also means that a system cannot be considered as made up of parts, that by aggregating them it can be synthesised. It always holds itself as a complete whole. No doubt the parts of the whole are necessary to make a whole, but it is not by the addition of properties of those can the character of the whole be arrived at. “The order and the design do not appear except in the whole. The mesh of the universe is the universe itself.” But such a whole, such a universe without the quantum of activity, without the element of dynamism, without the binding mechanism is altogether meaningless. If space is nothing but the characteristic of the ‘atom’ itself, then it must be a field of activity too. The quantum of energy would then imply duration as well.

The stage is now set for matter’s evolutionary drama to begin. But then this is a strange drama in which the participants themselves constantly keep on changing their faces, keep on evolving as if they are under the influence of events that are yet to occur. The present modifies itself under the influence of the future. What is to be is not something that just stands at a far-off distance; but it seems that that also directs what presently is moulding it so. Naturally, therefore, the “true physics” will be significantly concerned with this active participation of the effect on the cause, of the consequence on the driving push that comes from behind, the future governing the present and the past. This is a new dynamics with its own cause-and-effect relationships and operations. The mirror of time shows a mysterious reflection of the threefold happenings.

Given such a perspective, it is then obvious that “the world appears like a mass in process of transformation.”  Cosmogenesis is hence inherently present in the wholeness of matter and the quantum of activity witnessed in it. From the simplest elements of matter all the way up to bio-organic substance we see a growing complexity in the material organisation; eventually it becomes sufficiently large and rich to pass on to life. The origin of life is in complixification. Even in its most rudimentary or early or crudest formulation “matter reveals itself to us in a state of genesis,” in a state of realisable becoming. But such a becoming demands energy and, if it is a close system, the system itself providing the needed inputs, it has to overcome the declining probability of its happening. If the scientific world, the world that strictly follows the laws of science, is a closed world then the increasing complexification should mean the final dissipation of the process which is not really observed.

However, this is a very conventional view of physics and is a view about the outside of matter, asserts Teilhard de Chardin. We still make it an object of study, we ourselves standing outside it. In order to advance in the direction of man “we must extend the bases of our future edifices into the within of that same matter.” The compulsion of accepting the within-dimension becomes more and more imperative as we rise to a higher and higher degree of organisational complexity.

But then can at all the within be made a subject of scientific investigation? No, this cannot be so, for the simple reason that it would make that within itself an object of the without; the within cannot be its own object. While this might be so, there is still a question: can it at least come in the purview of what de Chardin calls as “true physics”? Can it belong to its domain? Even this may be a doubtful proposition if we are to retain the otherwise most fruitful methodology of physics. The tools of observation and perception in the two worlds are, in their strictest sense, entirely different from each other. Whatever be the shortcomings of physics, it must be admitted that it has given a certain kind of solidity to our understanding of the physical world, made that understanding secure on an unprecedented scale in the history of knowledge. It has even made an entry into the occult depths of matter as is clear when we see it beginning to tap that matter itself for the undiminished supply of energy. No physicist would like to abdicate its gains, nor should it be allowed to fritter away the gift that has come to us. The hard-core physics may be too rigid, too dogmatic so to say, but it is also a gainful way of doing things in the material world.

While delineating the evolutionary phenomenon of man Teilhard de Chardin has a compulsion to make the stuff of the universe as its starting point. Pre-life emerging from the atom is the foundation for the future appearance of thought or consciousness as it is generally understood. Awareness cannot arrive unless there is an organised material structure. In fact, “To think, we must eat.” But then this may give the impression that the awareness which we have acquired is after all a property of, to extend Teilhard’s coinage, complexificated matter which is in the process of “convergent integration”. Strictly speaking, however, this is not so. For example, thought is not a property of the brain which is a material apparatus, though it cannot manifest here without such an apparatus, without a cerebral gadget or outfit. To our proximate or superficial view there may seem to be some content present in the statement that a certain functioning of the biologically organised matter is itself thought and thinking the other way round may even be dubbed non-scientific, that it simply is no thought. The hiatus between the true physics which hopefully will one day include man in its description and the professional physics as is practised today is therefore pretty bewildering and there is no immediate scope or chance of its being filled. In that respect Teilhard de Chardin appears to be standing quite far from science. In the very reckoning of science itself the Teilhardean cerebration is therefore far from scientific.

In the strides of the current professional physics there is no doubt that we have moved quite a distance from the uncompromising stiffness of the classical physics. The Laplacian determinism, and with it all the materialist’s arrogance, has certainly weakened today. But then there is nowhere the desperate sense of abandonment of such a fruitful methodology that has been the shining logo of its gainful achievements. As a matter of fact, there is a much strengthened belief in it, a conviction that that will govern our destiny itself, open for us post-human prospects.

Thus there is nothing uncertain, for instance, about the Uncertainty Principle which is one of the strong pillars of its structural edifice. That also means that the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics does not provide any scope in it for the play of freewill. It will be far-fetched to say that it does allow the electron to behave either like a wave or like a particle depending upon its choice and that that choice is an attentive choice. The ‘observed’ duality exists not so much because of that character of its, but essentially because of the limitations of mathematical formulations; its roots are in them. We should rather maintain that duality is really not material but conceptual. What is therefore necessary to do at this stage is to attend to the issue concerned and remove the limitations, get out of the conceptual formulations into which we are trapped, remove the difficulty arising from them, arising from our differential notion of things, from artifacts of the differentials. Instead, what we have started seeing because of them are the strange mystagogical aspects in the material universe. The results are weird and we hail them as the entry of physics in the mystical realms. Anthropic extrapolations leading to the eerie notions of multiple universes is in a way a kind of haste towards some strange and mystifying happiness.

There is, to take an example, a definite and unstoppable quantum mechanical process involved in the radioactive decay; it is there, natural, whether the observer is present or not. There is no observer present there to make the wavefunction collapse one way or the other, as is believed to be the case in the multiple-worlds view. The stars burn in a perfectly systematic manner and the machine particles have a very predictable character which assures us that we can build machines. If these are entirely valid empirical considerations then we must dismiss from our minds the hope of consciousness and freewill entering into any discussion. The laws of physics are quite sound and well-founded in this respect and therefore any talk of “genesis” or “becoming” in matter will lie outside the domain of our immediate understanding of the physical nature.

If these extraneous considerations or factors, what Teilhard de Chardin calls as the “within” of the object, are to enter at all into any discussion they can be reckoned with only when they would lend themselves to the rigours and methods of science; but there doesn’t seem to be any chance for that kind of a thing happening,—at least at the present juncture. In effect there is nothing like “true physics” as we have been asked to believe. Physics is always physics although it may have its own severe limitations, its own boundary conditions of operation.

Teilhard de Chardin is aware of the fact that he is not a physicist. He is also aware of the risk involved in proposing a theory or a model which quite often proves to be short-lived. Conceptual formulation based on “hypotheses which are only expected to last for a day, even in the minds of those who originate them” is a risky business. That certainly is an abundant precaution on his part. But then in that very proportion his study presenting the universe in evolution also becomes as much less scientific. The provisionality that is always there in the empirical sciences is well known and no enduring ontological proposals can be really founded on them. And yet the prestige enjoyed by these sciences is very often invoked by everybody, they being summoned to support every speculative notion. The acceptance of such a tentative evolutionary argument and gearing it up with the machinery of scientific thought is one such perilous undertaking.

In fact, philosophically, to consider evolution as an “ascent towards consciousness”, as if it were a process from no consciousness towards consciousness, could be challengeable. It would certainly be so from a deeper spiritual point of view, as it would be almost tantamount to the non-recognition of consciousness which indeed is present everywhere. No doubt there are more and more complex grades of consciousness, but nowhere is it absent; in the last bit it is present as involved consciousness. Thus if we concede that thought, for example, steps into the process of formation of the brain, then we have to understand that which would make brain move towards thought. Any essay purporting to be scientific has an obligation to give us a satisfactory basis for this to happen. The urge of the without towards complexification, assuming that urge to be present in it, has not been integrated to arrive convincingly at the phenomenon of man.

But is such a thing, of the appearance of man in the process of complexification, possible at all? Fundamentally, we have to admit that science has no access to this urge that it can be investigated in a physical process, that it can come under its purview. If this urge is some deep creative faculty, or some driving power in the material energy, then it must first lend itself to the technique of competent observability, lend itself to its methodology to be meaningful to it. To remain sincere to its creed,—that is the minimum demand of science, and it is a fair demand too. If we accept this demand then, we have to enlarge the scope of this urge in the encompassment of the very Omega Point itself, the grand Urge driving the whole evolution.

But we have to keep in mind that the Omega Point is in no way an object of scientific study, it cannot be; certainly it is not amenable to the Cartesian analysis. Actually it is a kind of both within and without, both at once; it is Within-Without, the originator and the culminator of the entire becoming that we are. Going a step farther, it is also the endless becoming in its own new dimensional possibilities. The Omega Point is trans-descriptive and trans-analytical, yet holding and encompassing all that we are, and all that we shall be, in its newer and happier truth. If transcendence is one of the attributes of this emerging and immerging Urge, then it is well understood that it will escape all scaling up or down, will prevent all quantification of the mysterious Within-Without. It cannot be described in terms of scientific measurements that are relative in the Einsteinean sense. Then, even on a lesser level to make man as an object of measurement and knowledge becomes fallacious. The notion of “true physics” projecting itself in the phenomenon of man eventually turns out to be non-scientific if we have to retain the full connotation and context of the physics proper.

RY Deshpande

[Source: Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium by RY Deshpande published in December 1999. The article has been touched up here and there while posting it at the Mirror of Tomorrow.]