The Quantum and the Dream

This is a rollercoaster journey where the point of departure is 1900, the year in which Max Planck discovered the quantum, Freud published his ground-breaking work on the interpretation of dreams and, highlighted later in the book, The Wizard of Oz also appeared. The book outlines three shifts: from left brain hemisphere to right, from printed page to digital screen, and from the age of information to the age of recognition. Jung’s big dream of 1909 involved a descent into the unconscious, paralleled by a similar exploration in quantum physics into the subatomic realm. Interestingly, Jung invited Einstein to dinner before they both became famous, and this set him off thinking about time, space and psychic conditionality. CERN is also an underground installation, apparently featuring a statue of Shiva.

Rather than shutting up and calculating, Doug encourages us to open up and contemplate the bigger picture. Key concepts emerging from physics include entanglement and complementarity that also apply to conscious and unconscious, inner and outer; in his 1975 book The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra brings forward the web metaphor, which he later applies to life and which finds expression in the World Wide Web and its corresponding Wood Wide Web. Webs are interconnected, collaborative, decentralised and self-organising. Doug’s formula for a New Renaissance combines Nature’s intelligence, human intelligence and artificial intelligence (p. 174). The ideas of Lynn Margulis and Elisabet Sahtouris provide important orienting biological concepts in symbiosis, mutuality and cooperation. Wikipedia is an interesting example in the information field, though it does not in fact always live up to the advertised neutral point of view – for instance with respect to parapsychology and complementary medicine.

Doug forecasts that the New Renaissance will emerge from ‘a similar pattern of self-organising, undirected interplay of dialogue, grievances, novel insights, and imaginative leaps, induced in large part from the intensifying pressures of escalating climate change and massively accelerating computer intelligence which are transforming the planet and humanity at speeds never before experienced. (p. 220) And all this is taking place in VUCA conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity – a shift inward to a new consciousness will be generated by ‘heightened group collaborative intelligence’ in an era of planetisation and planetary integration that necessitates a new interconnected mindset reflecting the findings of psychology, physics, biology in our webs of information and meaning.