Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

our lives it is difficult not to use all of Aristotle’s definitions. From these we come up with narratives to try to explain the world. Aristotle’s formal, efficient and final causes are all attempts to add a context of meaning to what we observe about the universe.

Science would rather have a ‘nothing’ (at the start of the universe) rather than a ‘something’ — especially an unknown something! In fact, science would rather have just things rather than particular ’somethings’. And science would rather have particles appearing and disappearing into nothing if it could — either it exists or it doesn’t — sorted!

But ‘quantum entanglement’ suggests that some kind of information transfer is possible at faster than light speed — apparently in contradiction to what is so far understood about nature. The idea was first proposed in the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky thought experiment. Since then it has been demonstrated to hold true by actual experiments. Thus, there are some very bizarre explanations of purely physical causes, but the impression of a deeply connected universe is a strong one and not easily dispelled. (Einstein’s own theory of relativity, suggests that particles in an entanglement would have to ‘know’ information ahead of time, not just transfer information instantaneously or faster than light — so the problem is, if anything, even more fraught.) Physics seems disinclined to introduce some new kind of field or force to explain entanglement. But the idea of suggesting consciousness to explain the connection between particles is anathema. ‘Panpsychism’ is the name given to the idea that the universe is

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