QUANTUM PSYCHOID FREEWILL? Excerpt by Quantum Psychoid Freewill?

From "Psyche and Reality"

Abstract: What we've considered so far about the epistemology of human sciences comes up again as to the concept of "destiny''and human free will: who "must" tell us if we are destined or not? Either Neuroscientists or sociologists? Either Philosophers or biochemists? Has psychology anything to say? Do we need a pool to gather them all? Many other questions come up: what determines us and how much? ls there any sense in talking about destiny? We are a complex system and our conscience is an epiphenomenon of a unitary hierarchical system: would this exclude any possibility of choice? And what does "free choice" mean? And what about the consequences on the ethics? Being Jung and Pauli's thought a reference point, might we outline a comprehensive reading as regards such problems, even thinking of a sort of quantum psychoid free will? " On the other hand God himself appears To be free and bound at the same time." ( Spinoza ) We want now outline the hypothesis that Jung and Pauli's theory on synchronicity might contribute to today's debate on the comprehension

of the problem of human liberty.

We'll start from Jung's conception of the Self, that he considered psychoid, and present the possible attributions and peculiarities coming from such "quantum psychoid " inflection.

In this text we'll only outline such possibilities, aiming to deal the subject more fully in another context.

In order to make clear our thought, with this work we would share a decisively anti-reductionist line ( see O'Connor and Dupré's positions ) of today's philosophical debate on free will problem. Our assumption is that Jung and Pauli's work about the theory of synchronicity might at least allow to consider interesting a quantum psychoid side inside the debate about free will; therefore we don't presume to trace a finished theory. We only want to suggest the hypothesis that the epistemology of synchronistic phenomena working in the ambit of a superordered a-causal law might in some way contribute to today's debate on human liberty.

Let's then consider Pauli's position about the fundamental problem of the psychic laws being autonomous as to the physical laws, or of their possible adjustment or reduction.

The epistemologicaI studies about the conception of free will have taken different positions just as to this kind of relation epistemologically "fundamental". Let's quote Pauli (1948) :

Since the deterministic conception has been abandoned in physics, there are not even reasons to maintain a vitalistic conception according to which the soul might or should "violate'' the physical laws. lt rather seems to me that an essential part of the "universal harmony" consists in making the physical laws to leave just a margin for a different way to observe and consider things (biology and psychology) so that the soul can achieve all its "aims" without violating the physical laws. In this context psyche and reality appear as undersystems of a superordered global system; the autonomy of the two systems is safe and in Pauli's vision physical and psychic laws are wholly compatible, psyche mirrors matter and matter mirrors psyche:

According to psychology, physical laws seem to be a "projection" of a constellation of archetypal ideas while, seen from outside, also microphysical events are to be interpreted as archetypal and their "reflection" in the psyche is a necessary condition to sense them. This is the foundation of our position and the passage we have just quoted seems to us an accurate, courageous and also moving "manifesto" of a new era, when psyche and reality will be considered as interconnected.

We would start then from Von Franz; in her opinion the acknowledgment of a possible complex genetic, cultural, psychic, social nucleus existing in the individuals doesn't exempt man from the active involvement in the struggle between good and evil; the subjective feeling of moral liberty is an integral part of man just as the experience of non-liberty.

But if stimulus most of all of superindividual order drive us, they are not nourished by a mere genetic-environmental and socio-cultural nucleus, but just by instinctive and archetypal motivations and inclinations. In our opinion they don't prejudice the possibility of ranges of free effectiveness of the human will, in a sense that we define quantum psychoid, but then

it is necessary, according to Jung, to define better the whole sense and the possible consequences of answering the archetypal needs of the collective unconscious.

Let's now see better the subjective sensations mentioned by Von Franz that can be interpreted as the possible personal perception of "destined situation" but most of all as real psychic canalizing lines that the unconscious is able to produce, as also Freud tells us.

Compensation as a sort of "destiny", therefore the contents that come from the Self and that the I doesn't accept are projected towards the outside and personified; they take the appearance of "compensatory" persons and situations, both in friendship and in love; such projections, coming from contents unaccepted by the unconscious, predominate with the Numinous' strength and are perceived as exterior, with the sensation of a sort of inevitability and external intrusion.

In this sense the individuals themselves "create" if not their destiny, situations that help them to evolve as to the denied contents, whose assimilation therefore represents a new evolutionary possibility.

Let's see a passage from Greene (1984) :

In such circumstances the beloved object that is "responsible" for invoking such a mental whirl of archetypal images is seldom human; rather it is semidivine, owing to the mythological nature of the projection and the numinous character that accompanies these experiences of the inmost interior. Such meetings are usually defined as "predestined" because they are perceived in this way. lt's hard to confute all this, since such meetings appear appropriate, both as to their effect in the immediate future and in terms of influence during the evolution of both individuals.... Such, models that I think to be the nucleus of mythological stories and which Jung refers to as "complex" are, in a certain sense, destiny, they are planned since birth.

And Greene again (1984) :

What according to a certain point of view appears as Moira's sullen face becomes a design with its own meaning, seen from another perspective: in spite of this no one is ever given this second opportunity, maybe because no one needs it; or, if there were another possibility, maybe we all would be able, but we're not allowed such opportunity. The same sensation of something "perfectly fitting" emerges when one works at deep level with the dreams, because they perfectly fit that given person and while they seem to take a casual, senseless course, in the end they always reveal a noteworthy order and a design, order and design whose reasons are repeatedly before the patient's eyes. Furthermore, the topics that seemed out of focus some months before come back to the surface, in a perfect juxtaposition, reflecting the changes that meanwhile had taken place in the conscience. lt's the "live" commentary on life, told by "something" interior. One has the unavoidable sensation that a superhuman craftsman has weaved this storyline. But what can be then the Ego cole with reference to the overwhelming

energy of the Self?

The problem is evidently to elaborate, if possible, the I's and the Self's roles, as we are going to try further and in the next chapter.

We want to start from the Selfs central role. In tune with the Jungian hypothesis we believe that this regulatory center of the psyche, the Self as said, may be more deeply analyzed in its substantial quantum psychoid

evolution.

We say quantum psychoid since the Self appears as we'll outline in the next chapter as a sort of quantum psychoid transductor of the psyche's evolutive spiritual necessities in a general sense.

We think that the whole psychic system as outlined by Jung and articulated in the finalistic web that simultaneously involves the symbol's energetics has a synchronistic matrix. This by means of the transcendental function that operates in the dreams and the imaginative productions driven by the individuation principle guided by the Self. In the same way also many biochemical interior processes might be of quantum psychoid nature, including perhaps the strange phenomenon of the placebo effect, but evident scientific results in this direction need still more researching.

On the other hand we know that to Jung " synchronicity is the principle of the unique cases that compose the whole reality'' as Von Franz (1988) writes:

Such evolution of the Self in a quantum psychoid sense seems to be a possible direction of research to pursue in Jungian ambit; we think it may be fruitful in euristic sense, for a broader understanding both of the relations between the two fundamental psychic exigencies and also of the phenomenology of human liberty. We think that the relations between the Ego and the Self may be better understood not according to the binary logic but by means of a "tertium" that can include them, just a psychoid space, a sort of matrix that, whether existing in the ambit of the relations between psyche and reality, can be able to exist even inside the psyche and inside the matter, just because both seem to belong to a superordered order whose point of contact is the psychoid space.

We agree with Greene when he writes (1984) :

The Self is the image of that interior instinct that drives the individual to evolve into himself, to become the only single and meaningful whole that has always remained in a " potential" state. We think then to perceive the harmony of the Jungian system as a whole that, even if not defined with the nomotetic coherence of a scientific proof or in the logic consistency of a philosophical system can however

rely on the powerful atout (trump card) of the empirical coherence and on the contribution in transparency of the tradition, both religious and of thought in the Western and the Eastern world; the empirical research of various disciplines such as the cultural anthropology as to the concept of compensation, coincidence of the opposites or the universal knowledge of the use and perception of the symbolic may also be a reference point, just as the ethological studies, as it has by now been underlined.

In Jungian hypothesis this central archetype, the Self, seems to be the most charged energetically speaking, therefore able to operate through the quantum psychoid space, bypassing the usual space-time and material barriers, just as it occurs in synchronistic phenomena; it would also be capable of operating in the individuals' bodily sphere and, unexpectedly, of canalizing meetings, decisions, events.

We really find ourselves in an unexpected dimension. But we're not thinking of a vitalistic-pacifier conception of the individuation process and therefore of a luminous finalism, absolutely impossible considering the Jungian conception of an essentially compensatory and interpenetrating process operating in the psyche.

Since it is as if God had in a certain sense a terrific part of himself, expressing however the absolute "coincidentia oppositorum" (Cusano), and the numinous of the Self, real presence metaphorically but intensely divine inside us, in this conception couldn't help re-echoing in harmonic analogy with the Absolute.

It's evident anyway a marked finalism that Jung (1916-1917) has always encouraged to consider existing in the psyche.

The synchronistic phenomena appear to be guided by the intrinsic telos

of the individuation process linked to the Self's ineffability, that can

represent a process internal to the a-causal energetic of the quantum psychoid space, a sort of Bergson's élan vital.

We depict a quantum "profile" of the concept of human liberty, we would be free and constrained at the same time, just as the matter itself, interpenetrated with the psyche in this theoretical ambit, lives in a superimposed state.

Just as the position of the electrons as to their velocity (Heisenberg) is a cloud of possibilities, so in our opinion the Ego might represent a cloud of possibilities of choice and non-choice, of determinism and indeterminacy, in a simultaneous and superimposed "interpenetration".

Von Franz tells us that men are guided and at the same time free in every situation. A "mysterious farce" seems sometimes to come into play: it's a capricious farce; it mixes meaningful and non meaningful facts according to an order dictated by its own laws or by a lack of laws.

Then the sole logic can't lead us on this ground but, as we have seen, the Symbol outlines extra logic energetics that also seem guided by a sort of law of general analogy; as a tension towards the fulfilled and the harmonic, such energetics seem to appear at different levels of the reality and the psyche: something like the amazing finalism of the crystals producing harmonic forms.

The vision that we sketch out here recalls the French physicist J-E' Charon's conception (1989) . He writes in fact:

The behavior of the subatomic particles obeys a double compulsion in each instant: = a will, that allows the individual particle to know the possible behaviours and their respective probabilities, but without actually being able to act; = a nonwill formed by an intuitive link of the Spirit of the individual particle with the whole; it causes the particle to behave so as to meet the global evolution of the Whole (that is of the entire Universe) . As to the free will, we think it possible to hypothesize that the fact of testing simultaneously the moral experience and the experience of liberty in empirical and subjective way could appear in a certain sense as a synchronic experience, as a sort of sign of quantum psychoid liberty.

We want moreover claim that, whether the individuative telos exists in the psyche, whether, we mean, any form of energy should exist to continuously transcend the present state, to make the psyche evolve, to make it emerge as to the collective contents we continuously have to face, well, wouldn't it be plausible to hypothesize the existence of a space of liberty, considered such concentration of energy? Could it have any sense a process that prepares the conditions of choice as to the assimilation of the rejected contents of the unconscious, as to the possibility of learning from one's own mistakes, as to the courage of listening to oneself's most creative parts, could it have any sense without a degree of freedom? In front of so many possibilities, might not exist a free choice factor, even if a partial and a limited one, as we have described? We don't think so.

Furthermore we think that the quantum psychoid nature of human liberty can be sketched out just by the intrinsic nature of the psyche's regulatory centre that is the Self, of psychoid nature itself as Jung has claimed.

Let's mention also Duns Scoto's work. A true forerunner of modernity, he reflects on the possibility of man's liberty as to the divine: he asks himself whether there is human liberty in front of the divine omniscience and gets to the theory of synchronic contingency.

The question is in fact that the contemporaneous presence of the certain awareness of God and of the contingency of future events isn't possible. But every achievement in the way things are implies a contrary synchronic

possibility, since in every temporal moment there might exist unrealized possibilities; starting from this corollary Scoto proves that the contemporaneous presence of divine omniscience and future human contingency is possible.

The world present order, on the other hand, is not the only order possible, Scoto states, with an intuition that in some way anticipate Leibniz 'vision.

As to the synchronic contingency, in a certain sense it's a matter of quantum solution: to Scoto in fact the will can act both freely ( way of power acting ) and necessarily ( way of being of the object which the will refers to).

To conclude the philosophical references we'll mention Nicola Cusano, who considers the fundamental concept of the coincidence of the contraries as foundation of all beings' existence. The links with Jung are evident.

The creation is God's contraction, which is therefore the very universe, the way God manifests himself as Meister Eckhart tells us in other words, and as it is in Giordano Bruno's thought, where a pantheist unity of thought and matter, of psyche and reality seem to be achieved.

In the end we think it possible that the psyche's evolutive finalism, owing to its very nature and existence, may suggest that the freedom of choice

is most of all inherent in the moral choice.

The space of the liberty seems after all to be the space that a finalism inherent in the psyche and the matter grants to the human beings, a synchronic quantum psychoid finalism that, just in Plotino's vision, finds

its foundation in listening to the messages of the Unus, but most of all in being in the condition of listening to them.

All this seems to foreshadow an evolutive awareness that we think to have the sense of a spiritual consciousness.