Freedom—Embedded In Both Nature And Mind

Letter Response To Dr. Clifford's Questions Concluded

The concepts of position and momentum, at the quantum level,
are intimately bound up with the
idea of what it means to exist. At the atomic particle level, for
instance, we cannot simultaneously determine position and momentum. In
fact, we may have to admit that this thing that we have been calling a
moving particle is not a moving particle at all. If we can't determine
(in our description of a particle) more than one of the two properties
that define existence then how can we be justified in concluding that
the thing under examination is actually a particle? I am suggesting that in the same way it is not possible to separate freedom from consciousness, so too, at the quantum level, freedom is inextricably bound to an "existing particle,"-- the inseparable unity of freedom and negation. That would explain why we never see moving
particles the way they really are. We only see them the way we choose
to see them. Niles Bohr, in his theory of complementarity, addressed
this very issue.

Complementarity is a concept developed to explain the wave particle
duality of light (or the conjugate variables at the heart of all
existence). Wave-like characteristics and particle-like
characteristics, or so the theory goes, are mutually exclusive, yet
complementary aspects of light. Although one of them always excludes
the other, both of them are necessary to understand light. Wave and
particle characteristics exclude each other because light, or anything
else, cannot be both wave like and particle like at the same time.

The almost identical relationship is taking place in what Sartre
calls the dyad of belief-consciousness. By standing off from itself as
it reveals itself, Sartre's pre-reflective cogito structures the
consciousness-belief dyad. According to Sartre, we have consciousness
of an object only through the negation of not being that object, and,
it is that negation that separates me (my consciousness) from my
belief. The pre-reflective cogito cannot be posited as an object of
reflection because it is its own existence; it knows itself only
through the consciousness of existing. For Sartre, the knower in this
knower-known relationship can never be known because it is existence
itself. Because consciousness and belief exist in a cohesive
relationship, each postulating the other, consciousness is necessary
for belief and belief is the being of consciousness. Their meanings
overlap. Thus, a necessary duality shapes our cognitive awareness and
that duality is what constitutes our "freedom to know" the world in
terms of spatiality, quantity, temporality, and instrumentality--to
know everything except the nothingness of the for-itself—to know
everything except the nothingness that binds wave-like characteristics
to particle-like characteristics. Zukav, in his book The Dancing Wu Li
Masters, again identifies the significance of this "common thread"—the
thread of nothingness extending through consciousness, freedom, and
the aesthetic continuum when he says:

Since particle-like behavior and wave-like behavior are the only
properties that we ascribe to light, and since these properties now
are recognized to belong (if complementarity is correct) not to light
itself, but to our interaction with light, then it appears that light
has no properties independent of us! To say that something has no
properties is the same as saying that it does not exist. The next step
in this logic is inescapable. Without us, light does not exist. (p. 118)

To sum up, the aesthetic continuum, --the precondition for anything
whatsoever, and self-consciousness, --the precondition for knowledge
of anything whatsoever, are themselves grounded in the "nothingness of
freedom and self-consciousness"-- the source of all possibilities. It
is this nothingness, the nothingness that is co-dependent with all
interacting relationships on the base level of the aesthetic continuum, and
the nothingness that rests at the heart self-consciousness, which, in
the world that we live in, births our capacity to question, know, and
transform that world—hopefully for the better.