Quantum Adam Theory: What’s in a Name?

I named them, as they passed, and understood
Their Nature, with such knowledge God endued
My sudden apprehension: but in these
I wound not what methought I wanted still
John Milton, Paradise Lost 1667 (Book VIII, lines 338-354)

In our last posts we discussed Adam’s role in tending and keeping the garden and the prohibition against the tree of knowledge. As we move towards the end of Genesis 2 we are seeing the Garden become fleshed out. The world we are presented with in Genesis becomes increasingly higher resolution. There is a sort of undifferentiated potential at the beginning of time, the tohu va bohu, the void, the abyss from which God creates habitable order. Then he creates a garden which is properly understood in balance and then in the garden he puts a gardener, Adam.

It is here that “out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them.” Further, “whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all the cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field” (Gen 2:19-20)

This section always struck me as odd. I think the obvious question that is begged by Genesis 2:19-20 is “what in the world does God care what Adam calls the animals?” It is this question that I want to focus on for today’s Main Project post.

In order to get to the bottom of why God cares what Adam calls the animals we will need to take a detour through a

some of the subfields of Quantum Mechanics: specifically quantum entanglement and its counterpart implicate order. Quantum Entanglement is something that Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” in a thought experiment with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen  in 1935.

To begin with, quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in quantum mechanics where two or more particles become correlated in such a way that their quantum states are interdependent, regardless of the how far apart they are. Before you get into thinking this is all smoke and mirrors there is a ton of experimentation and practical application.

Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen’s thought experiment yielded some predictions about the way the quantum world worked. The paradox brought up some incompleteness in quantum mechanics owing to how entangled particles

played off of one another. John Stewart Bell, in his paper “on Einstein Podolosky Rosen (EPR) Paradox” (1964), published what is now known as Bell’s Theorem which introduced quantum entanglement as a resolution to the EPR paradox. Bell developed his famous inequalities to test whether the correlations predicted by quantum entanglement could be explained by local hidden variables (as Einstein predicted) or required the non-local behavior of quantum mechanics. With this mathematical framework experimentally testing the EPR argument he confirmed quantum entanglement and contradicted Einstein’s local hidden variable hypothesis. This led to Einstein’s famous quote that “God does not play dice,” but after decades of repeated testing it turns out it was just sour grapes from Einstein whose theoretical framework just did not match up with the experimentation.

Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon whereby two or more particles become correlated in such a way that the state of one particle instantly influences the state of the other, regardless of the distance separating them. In a nutshell, two things which exist galaxies apart can instantaneously affect one another owing to the entangled nature of particles. Extensive experimentation and testing has been done on quantum entanglement since the 1930s. This has led to fields such as quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum communication and Quantum imaging which IBM, Google and Quantinuum are currently working on. Quantum entanglement has come out of the classroom and is producing the most cutting edge communications and computing technology right now.

More than communication there are experiments which have been going on since 1997 on quantum teleportation and, at least for particles, there has been repeated success in sending objects through space instantaneously with a recent breakthrough, just this year, in data encryption and transmission.

Born of quantum entanglement is American scientist David Bohm’s idea of implicate order. Implicate order is a

concept stemming from his theoretical framework, introduced in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980). It describes a fundamental, hidden level of reality where everything is interconnected and enfolded into a single, undivided whole which stands in stark contrast to the apparent separateness we observe in the physical world.

For Bohm, coming out of the idea of quantum entanglement, the world exists and operates on two levels. The first level is the explicit order. The explicate order is the observable world where there are separate objects and events. The other, deeper, level is the implicate order which is the underlying reality where everything is interconnected and enfolded into a unified whole.

Bohm uses the example of waves emerging in an ocean which appear as two separate things, but in reality are just

part of a whole which only appears separate to the observer. In the implicate order, time, space and matter are not separate but are “enfolded” into a single structure. This means that any given particle’s properties are not isolated but arise from a whole system (the totality of the universe).

Bohm uses the analogy of the hologram to explain this. In a hologram, each part of the image contains information

about the entire object. Similarly, in the implicate order, every part of the universe reflects the whole which suggests

a deep interconnectedness. Reality, as it is for us, is merely a constant emerging from the implicate order into the explicate order and a folding back, like a flowing stream. This recalls John Wheeler’s concept of the participatory universe and the it from bit theory.

Bohm’s ideas challenge reductionist views and emphasize wholeness over fragmentation at the deepest and most fundamental levels of reality as well as collapsing the mind body problem by suggesting that mind and matter are interconnected aspects of the same underlying reality.

John Wheeler’s “it from bit” theory compliments and intersects with David Bohm’s “implicate order” quite nicely. In Bohm’s framework, the implicate order is a hidden, enfolded reality where everything is interconnected, and the explicate order (the perceived physical world) unfolds from it like a hologram projecting an image. Wheeler’s “it from bit” similarly suggests that physical entities emerge from informational processes. The “bit” can be seen as analogous to the enfolded information in Bohm’s implicate order, where quantum potential carries holistic data about the entire system.

For instance, the implicate order’s dynamic enfolding/unfolding process provides a mechanism for how “it” (explicate reality) arises from “bit” (implicate information), generating space-time and matter through what some describe as “quantum epiontic”(epistemology-ontology interplay) mechanism.

All of this said, what does this have to do with the topic at hand?

Well, let’s say you want to explain all of this and let’s also say it is three thousand years before the scientific method is invented and you are at the tail end of a ten thousand year post ice age oral tradition which lends your thinking to short, memorable and narrative based expression. Further,  while you are in the early stages of the literate period of human history, very few people can write and writing requires massive expense so brevity is important. How could you go about saying all of this? Well, “out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, there was its name” would be pretty damn good.

The biblical narrative is reintroducing the magic of speech. The word (logos) that God speaks into the chaotic abyss at the beginning of time creating habitable order is being replicated by Adam with the animals. Adam is acting like a little God here. The idea is that, like the universe before God extracts order out of it, the garden is sort of undifferentiated…like Bohm’s implicate order.

Remember, for God, all of creation is a matter of differentiation from the undifferentiated. An example is, whatever existed before light and darkness were separated was someone that contained both light and dark. It says specifically that “God divided the light from the darkness: (Gen. 1:4) and so on and so forth. Creation, in Genesis, is always presented as a whole which is differentiated which corresponds perfectly to the ideas of quantum entanglement.

Adam is looking at whatever it is God brings over and saying “cow” and BANG now its a cow. The implicate, self-contained, unified, entangled mess of things becomes the discrete, explicit, particular cow as Adam names it in the same way that, for Wheeler, things become an “it” from their undifferentiated potential as a result of participation on the part of conscious beings.

Before Adam names the animals they are presented as part of God’s undifferentiated, holistic “whole” without assigned identities. This is akin to a quantum system in superposition, where positivities exist in an entangled, interconnected state without definite boundaries. Just as entangled particles share a single wave function and behave as one unified system (regardless of distance), the pre-naming world world represents a primordial unity, much like the ocean where the waves are indistinguishable from the whole body of water.

This echoes quantum field theory, where particles are excitations in underlying fields that permeate everything, suggesting fundamental interconnectedness.

When Adam names the animals, he imposes categories, identities and separations. He transforms the

undifferentiated into the distinct. This is likened to the wave function collapse in quantum mechanics, where observation or measurement forces a system from probabilistic superposition into a definite state. For instance, you could say that Adam’s observation and naming act as the catalysts for collapsing the infinite potential of creation into the material, shifting quantum-like unity to the classical individuality.

The Hebrews are not the only ones in the ancient world to hypothesize that the naming of something makes it real. In the Mesopotamian Enuma Elis the naming of both gods and places establish their reality in the cosmic order and in Egyptian mythology, the god Ptah created the world by speaking names aloud, giving form and existence to objects and beings. The idea that things exist in some form of undifferentiated potential before they are named and the act of naming them brings their existence into sharper focus is one that shapes the traditions leading up to the Genesis account which, in turn, shapes the tradition which leads up to the scientific revolution which, in turn, paves the way for quantum mechanics..

Quantum entanglement is a testable and provable phenomenon in nature. While the methods didn’t exist in the ancient world to articulate it the way we do today, the world was still like this. It is not like the ancient Hebrews had the same understanding and ability to articulate this phenomenon as we do today. Rather, we can think of the the phenomenon itself as producing a dream and the Genesis story is the articulation of that dream in historical context and with reference to the cognitive framework, tools and methods of articulation of the day. The dream is a dream about the fundamental reality of the universe that man has been having for millions of years and explaining as best he could with reference to his particular epistemological epoch.

Amongst everything else it is, Genesis is the product of some ten thousand years of people trying to figure out what was going on with man and his world. While the modern atheist points to Genesis as primitive in favor of a more scientific explanation, we can see here that our most cutting edge modern physics corresponds well to the insights of the biblical authors and the account in Genesis. That they read differently is merely a product of what I have been calling epistemic epochs and is at the core of the project at hand.

Finally, this is a good time for me to revisit the idea of the epistemic epochs that I’ve been arguing that man finds himself embedded in. If there is a single underlying idea which ties the extensive scope of this project together it is this: we humans have been telling a story about who we are for as long as we have existed. The story has not changed, only the tools by which we interact with the world and their impact on our epistemic framework has changed. As such, it is the same story told in different ways which means that there is no fundamental rift between accounts that can’t be explained and understood through proper a hermeneutics. The idea that science and religion are in conflict is simply not true. They do not compete with one another, they are merely different ways of telling the same story and when properly understood they stack up quite neatly onto one another.

The biologists and the physicists who are exploring the substructure of reality are up to the exact same things that their ancient ancestors in the tree were up to as well as the ten millennia of post ice age preliterate people we up to with their oral traditions as well as the what the biblical authors were up to in Genesis. They are standing in a very complicated world and asking what the hell is up with it. The interesting thing is that despite wildly different tools and technologies and wildly different epistemic frameworks, their answers have been roughly the same and that is because they were investigating the same universe and articulating it differently not unlike a single book translated into many different languages.

That we can see an alignment with the earlier biblical texts which came out of the oral tradition in the ancient world and the absolute most cutting edge of quantum mechanics is of utmost importance to this project. Man is the animal that explains himself and we have been at it for a very long time. While we have found different methods, technologies and ways to express ourselves the fundamental story has always remains the same and that, dear reader, is “what’s in a name.”