On Entanglement

In my previous post, I consciously abused a lexical coincidence by invoking “entanglement” to support the introduction of the idea of a person as a boson.

Of all the weirdness in the quantum domain, entanglement is the strangest phenomenon of them all. Einstein, trailblazer of quantum theory, hated the idea, and struggled with accepting it for his entire life. Roger Penrose, another Nobel laureate, says Einstein was too kind, the theory is not incomplete, it is wrong. To this day, even though entanglement as such has been demonstrated repeatedly, and Einstein’s specific attacks have been rebuffed by John Stewart Bell and others, whether entanglement is displaying causation or correlation remains a hot topic among physicists.

Luckily, Richard Feynman, another giant of the field, has given us licence to be baffled, but not cowed. He has said that no one understands quantum mechanics, not even the experts like himself. In fact, Feynman went as far as to say: don’t bother trying to understand what’s happening; it’s too small down there; it’s too alien; it’s too far removed from our everyday experience to intuitively grasp. Just get on with it; it works: entanglement is quantifiable, predictive and repeatable.

So, what is entanglement?

Imagine a pair of shoes, entangled by handedness. If you split and separate them by shipping one to the moon, when you reveal to yourself whether the one you have kept is the left shoe or the right one, you will know within about 200 milliseconds what “handedness” the other shoe has. Nothing unusual so far: there’s no suggestion of information, or anything else, travelling between the shoe in your hand and the shoe on the moon at the moment of measurement – a distance that it takes light about a second to bridge.

mockups-design.com

If, however, your shoes were quantum sneakers, they would not be left- or right-handed until they were measured, they would be left- and right-handed until measured. And herein lies the difficulty: quantum theory seems to suggest that measuring either sneaker will instantly cause both shoes – one on earth, one on the moon – to respectively assume opposite definite states, one left, one right. Simply stated, this should be impossible.

It had been clear to me since the very first inkling I had had of the possibility of a quantum metaphor for human being, that entanglement would prove to be the most difficult phenomenon to transpose. And so it proved. For the longest time, regardless of the perspective or the interpretation that I assumed, none of the potential parallels that I imagined at the human scale withstood any kind of scrutiny. Eventually, I began to fear that my entire project would founder on this enigma.

Just as I was beginning to despair, it turned out – as is often the case in such situations – that the answer had been staring me in the face all along.

Let me back up a little.

Complexity theory is the study of so-called complex adaptive systems. Put very loosely: a complex adaptive system is some bounded collection of a large number of independent agents acting in partial concert under the influence of the environment that they themselves, in collaboration with their closest neighbours, are continually re-creating, in a dizzying dance of action and reaction.

Some complex adaptive systems are fleeting and very loosely coupled – like a murmuration of starlings. Others are more tightly coupled and longer lived – like ant-colonies or bee-hives. There are also complex adaptive systems with very high coupling, like human beings: think of the trillions of cells in our bodies, each doing their cell-y thing, which somehow emerges in almost real time as us doing our human thing.

Through my fascination for the mind-body problem, as mentioned in the previous post, I had been interested in complexity theory for some time, and had sensed certain parallels between the behaviour of the inscrutable scraps of being that are fundamental particles, and that of the vast recursive networks that are complex adaptive systems. When I discovered that Murray Gell-Mann, the person who gave the quark its name, had been developing similar ideas for years, as popularised in his book The Quark and the Jaguar, I knew I was on to something.

If quantum particles behave in some sense like complex adaptive systems, and human beings are complex adaptive systems, then the notion that a model of human being might resonate with our model of the quantum domain, suddenly seems less unhinged. Complexity theory was, therefore, somewhat counterintuitively, one of the warp-threads on which I wove my quantum metaphor for human being.

And so we return to our lexical coincidence.

The concept of entanglement exists in complexity theory too, but means something different from entanglement in quantum theory. In complexity theory, entanglement is descriptive. It is a qualitative expression of a paradoxical truth – that both the source of a system’s doing and being, and the seat of its secrets, are to be found in the intractable recursive whirr that is the wicked tangle of its constituent agents’ interaction.

When the epiphany came, it was more a slow unfolding than a eureka moment. I reminded myself that not only were human beings complex adaptive systems, if you took the right perspective, they themselves could be viewed in turn as agents in larger complex adaptive systems: a fan in a crowd at a concert, a protestor in a rabble on the street, a soldier in a brigade at the front. I caught a glimpse of a kinship between quantum entanglement and entanglement in complex systems; though they stated it in mutually exclusive ways, both somehow expressed the power of connection, and how the future must flow from the past – though the path from now to then may be indeterminate.

For once, the solution here was not clarity, but obfuscation – a fudge. If I mixed the language of entanglement from both theories, and switched my perspective on a person, from system to agent, and back again, as it suited me, I could conjure up a picture of entanglement at the human scale, without descending into absurdities. This is art, not science, and I claim poetic licence to submit to the power of the image, even as I am aware that its genealogy is confused.

You might venture, dear reader, that this is a cheap trick and a cop-out, and that I am a charlatan for employing it. You might be right.