Finding the Hidden Key (pt 3)

This is the sixth of my posts reviewing Dr Wolfgang Smith's 2019 monograph: Physics & Vertical Causation, the End of Quantum Reality. (Angelico Press, 2019, also available on Amazon Kindle)

For further reading on this and related material, see the Philos-Sophia Initiative website.

We had reached the point in Chapter three where Smith, having introduced the notion of ''verticality'' in the mutual relationship between materia prima, the physical world and the corporeal world, reminds his readers of the categorical distinction between qualities and quantities. Quantities, he maintains, derive from below and qualities from above, the latter transmitting supernal essences into this nether world. In the Cartesian bifurcation, however, the res extensae correspond to the quantitative (physical) domain which means that qualities are perforce relegated to the entirely subjective domain of res cogitantes. This relegation has the effect in practice of casting out the very essence of the everyday world in which we live and move and have our being. At this point, Smith makes an astonishing but very cogent claim:

The crucial and almost universally undiscerned fact is that the Cartesian reduction of the corporeal world to “matter”—the denial, thus, of its “formal” component, its inherent morphe—has seemingly emptied the world of everything that answers to the higher cravings of the human heart. And of all that has thus been forfeited, the loss of the sacred is beyond doubt the most tragic of all: for that proves to be the privation we cannot ultimately survive.

René Descartes.

The Cartesian weltanschaung continued its victorious march right up to the twentieth century and then something utterly unexpected occurred. The discoveries consequent upon the investigations of the ''quantum world'' revealed that within it there is no substance and thus no being whatsoever.

By 1925, it had become clear that there is no such thing as a ''fundamental particle'' and no such thing as res extensae at all. The Cartesian world-view collapses like a house of cards.

After Frans Hals [Public domain] circa 1649-1700. Louvre Museum.



Smith concludes this chapter with another bold line of enquiry. The rediscovery of the corporeal world, he argues, is only the first step in the resolution of the quantum quandary. The ''supra-physical'' or corporeal world requires a ''supra-physical'' mode of causation. He uses the word ''horizontal'' to describe the modes of causality familiar to physical science, operating in time. In contradistinction, the mode of causality operating in the corporeal world acts instantaneously and ''above time'' and this supra-physical causality may fittingly be called ''vertical'' causality.

In a neat piece of reasoning, Smith argues as follows. Horizontal causation can operate only within its own (physical) ontological plane. But, an act of measurement entails an interaction between the physical plane and a corporeal instrument, from a different ontological plane. Therefore, the act of measurement cannot be attributed to horizontal causation. It must be attributed to vertical causality (VC). Acts of VC appear to be occurring ubiquitously, involving the vertical action of a corporeal object ''X'' on a physicsal object ''SX''. The physical object SX is invariably constrained by its corporeal counterpart to exclude superpositions incompatible with the corporeal nature of X. This explains why cricket balls cannot bi-locate and cats cannot be both dead and alive (the ''Schrödinger paradox'').

The most profoundly significant fact of all, however, is reserved by Smith for a fitting finale to this remarkable chapter.

...the effect of vertical causation emanating from a corporeal object X is by no means limited to the immediate vicinity of X, but can in principle encompass all of space!

This gives to VC a ''well-nigh miraculous efficacy'': it is ubiquitous, it acts instantaneously and its effect is not diminished by spatial separation. VC proves to be not only higher but incomparably more powerful than the modes of causality hitherto known to physics which stem from the lower, sub-corporeal domain.

In the next post, we shall move on to Chapter 4: Three Vertical Powers of the Soul. Smith invites us ''to shift our attention, from fundamental physics to the opposite end of the scala naturae, to investigate the active and cognitive faculties of mankind, in the expectation that these will prove in fact to be vertical, that is to say, supra-temporal in their mode of action.''


To be continued.