Step 4: first glimpses beyond Newton
Step 4 is going to make a start on looking beyond an exclusively Newtonian paradigm. It’s quite safe: Newton’s apple will still reliably fall! But Newton’s apple fallling will no longer be the only thing that happens.
In the contemporary West, we can have a tendency to think of the world as if it was a predictable set of billiard balls: there’s a cause, and then there is an effect, and then maybe there is a knock-on effect. Anything less clear-cut than that, we can sometimes struggle with.
Away from the contemporary West, not everyone thinks of the world like that. That means we can sometimes struggle to understand each other.
—> In step 3, Narayan and Harding’s edited volume came up with some generalised prerequisites to successful knowledge transfer between paradigms.
Can you say in your own words what they were, and why?
One of them - respectful dialogue - sounded straightforward at first, but there was a hitch. Can you remember how Leroy Little Bear got around that?
In step 4, Viola Cordova - the Indigenous philosopher we met right at the beginning - throws us in at the deep end. She tells us that we are co-creators of the universe.
—> Can you remember where to go if you want detailed references? Step 1 and step 2 can tell you where to find them if you need them.
Viola Cordova thinks that living in the world is like rolling a snowball. Its inner layers lay the groundwork for what shape tomorrow’s outer layers are likely to be. Then, it gets more complicated: we are not the only ones involved in rolling our snowball! There are going to be some more intricate analogies to talk about that in a little while.
For now, rolling our snowball means responsibility: if we want tomorrow’s outer layers to be good, we are going to want to pay attention to how we roll today’s inner ones.
Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism makes a similar point: we are not just witnesses to what is going on in the world, writing lab reports from a position of being outsiders, although we can do that too. What matters, for Karen Barad, is that we are at the same time part of what happens in the lab! The way we set up an experiment can make a difference to what happens next. Then, she moves on to talk about responsibility, as Viola Cordova’s snowball analogy did, too.
Karen Barad has a PhD in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. She worked as a professor of physics for a number of years, and later became a philosopher. Arguing from contemporary Western science, she has just made a similar point to Viola Cordova’s, whose PhD thesis in Philosophy is written from a Navajo point of view.
With this in mind, it is no wonder that Indigenous academics and Western quantum physicists became interested in each other. In the early 1990s, Leroy Little Bear and some colleagues invited David Peat and David Bohm to a first academic conference to see if there was any shared ground between their ideas. It turned out that there was - enough for what then became a ten-year series of conferences now known as the Dialogues.
4.1. A few words about quantum theory
We are going to need a bit of quantum theory here to make sense of all that. It can feel hard going, but that is ok:
Richard Feynman himself, one of quantum theory’s founding fathers, said quantum theory is impossible to understand!
We are only going to need the very basics. Beyond those basics, the only thing that matters here is that we don’t take things out of context and come up with exotic theories that don’t wash (some New-Agers have been accused of that; John Polkinghorne calls it “quantum hype”).
So, let’s look at these basics.
When Niels Bohr shot electrons through a screen with two slits in it and onto a photographic plate behind this screen (the “double-slit experiment”), everyone thought he was going to see two stripes where the electrons had landed. Instead, the photographic plate ended up with a diffraction pattern on it - the kind of pattern that waves, not particles, would make. With hindsight, it sort of made sense, because Albert Einstein had previously used light (waves!) to shoot electrons out of a metal surface - so Einstein’s experiment, going the other way, had already shown that the boundary between matter and energy is fuzzier than everyone thought. At the time, though, Bohr’s diffraction pattern took everyone by surprise. It can seem strange even now. Perhaps more than anything, that strangeness comes from the fact that even one electron, on its own, turned out to make a diffraction pattern - meaning it showed every sign of having gone through both slits. The technical term for this is now “superposition”; John Polkinghorne calls it “a middle term undreamed of by Aristotle.” In other words, a conventional “either-or” logic simply doesn’t cover it.
What matters, in the context of step 4, is that it was not some intrinsic quality of either being a particle or a wave that made an entity “be” a particle or a wave in Einstein’s and Bohr’s experiments. The outcome was tied up with the way that Einstein and Bohr set their experiments up. The entities that they used carried the potential to “be” either particles or waves, and then the context that they found themselves in played a part in what they became. John Polkinghorne sums up why this matters here: “One can take with absolute seriousness all that physics actually can tell us, and still believe in a world of true becoming, in which the future is not just an inevitable consequence of the past.”
Polkinghorne says this with his eyes wide open: remember, he is also the one who warned us about “quantum hype” at the start.
One thing to be particularly wary of in the context of “quantum hype” are some misinterpretations of a phenomenon called “quantum entanglement” which have been doing the rounds.
An electron has four quantum numbers, and they can’t all four of them be the same. One of the four is an electron’s spin. That means if the first three quantum numbers are the same for two electrons, then they are going to have opposite spins. Quantum entanglement means that one of the two electrons’ spin will change as (not after!) the other electron’s does, and this will happen across distances too great for any signal to travel in the time that it happens in. Because it is as (and not after), it is an example of what is called an “acausal relationship”. Step 6 is going to say more about those. For now, what matters is that entanglement can’t be used to “prove” telepathy, no matter what some enthusiasts may say, because entanglement has nothing to do with a signal that travels. That is just what Polkinghorne would call “quantum hype”, and we don’t have any use for that here.
David Bohm summed up four points about quantum theory that were relevant as quantum physicists and Indigenous academics set about finding shared ground: the indivisibility of quantum action, wave/particle duality, the fact of properties of matter being about statistically revealed probabilities rather than about individual certainties, and the existence of acausal relationships.
With this in mind, what we can take away at the end of this subsection is, most of all, what Polkinghorne said before: “One can take with absolute seriousness all that physics actually can tell us, and still believe in a world of true becoming, in which the future is not just an inevitable consequence of the past.”
4.2. A few words about Leroy Little Bear’s thinking
When Indigenous academics and Western quantum physicists came together for the first of the series of conferences now known as the Dialogues, Leroy Little Bear put forward a cluster of three elements of unity in diversity between Indigenous worldviews.
This doesn’t mean all Indigenous worldviews are the same! They can’t be, because they are formed in relationship on and with the land. What Little Bear is suggesting is that there is shared ground as well as difference between them. He then split up this shared ground into three elements to make it easier to understand for people who were new to it. In his own writing, away from the Dialogues, he treats the three as one interwoven dynamic. An example of this is in a volume edited by Marie Battiste, listed here.
Little Bear’s list of three may well appear unusual at first glance when we look at it in a minute. When you first see it, try and look at it as one thing (even though each of the three is also interesting in its own right), and try and find the red thread in there that has kept coming up in steps 1 to 4 so far: the red thread of things maybe not being mutually exclusive in Indigenous worldviews that a contemporary Western worldview would tend to understand to be in a relationship of binary dualism. For example, Indigenous academics said they felt they were “coming home” when they talked to David Peat and David Bohm about wave/particle duality (in Niels Bohr’s double-slit experiment above).
Little Bear’s three elements of philosophical unity in diversity between Indigenous worldviews were these:
that nature is alive and imbued with spirit,
that humans are co-participants in continuously creating the world (and, relatedly, that the world shows patterns rather than following laws),
that the world is less static than the contemporary West tends to think: there is a manifesting as well as a manifest, and the manifesting can be understood to relate to the spiritual, while the manifest can be understood to relate to the physical. (Little Bear and others mention in this context that Indigenous languages tend to be far more verb-based than Western ones, so that the focus stays on becoming. They place less emphasis on the static snapshot that a noun would provide in a Western language.)
—> In your own words, before you read any of the following steps, can you say how you think Little Bear’s cluster of three is going to relate to the red thread of Indigenous worldviews tending to see fewer relationships of mutual exclusion in the world than Western ones do?
It might be interesting to come back to your answer to this question after the end of step 20.
Before wrapping up this first encounter with Leroy Little Bear’s thinking, it is worth noting that a number of Indigenous philosophers draw upon the findings of quantum theory in their work. Viola Cordova, for example, writes about a Navajo conception of “matter-energy” in this context. Gregory Cajete thinks Indigenous languages - mostly due to their greater reliance on verbs - tend to be better suited to talking about quantum theory than Western ones. Shay Welch’s work draws on quantum theory, too, and both she and Anne Waters link the dynamics of co-creative relationships to the sacred. Conceptions of the sacred are something that later chapters are going to come back to.
Something that already matters for now, though, is where the sacred is experienced: in Indigenous worldviews, it tends to be in this world. It is in our relationships here that we can interact with the sacred.
With this in mind, it becomes easier to understand that some Indigenous languages don’t have a word for “religion”, and that some just use one word to talk about what, in English, would be described as “ritual” and as “labour” respectively.
—> Can you remember where to go if you need detailed references? Step 1 and step 2 can tell you where to find them.
Step 4.2 is also a first example of why step 3’s generalised thoughts on knowledge transfer between paradigms are not going to be enough. When Indigenous and contemporary Western worldviews try to understand each other, specific stumbling blocks are going to come up: for example, the above difficulty of the sacred tending to be in this world in one of them and in the next world in another.
Step 5 is going to look at some of these specific difficulties. This is going to be useful groundwork for some further discussion of Indigenous worldviews in step 6 and beyond.