Megascopic Quantum Phenomena
371
Unfortunately Whyte’s book ends up with Freud leaving out Jung, who in his later
life opposed Freud. His primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing conceptions of the unconscious, but also Freud’s anti-religious attitudes mattered. Whereas Freud conceived the unconscious solely as a repository of repressed
emotions and desires, Jung called this limited model “personal unconscious”, and
proposed the existence of a second, far deeper form of the unconscious underlying
the personal one. In his work “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”
Jung explains the difference between personal and collective unconscious [155]: “A
more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it
the “personal unconscious”. But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which
does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is
inborn. This deeper layer I call the “collective unconscious”. I have chosen the term
“collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in
contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more
or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.”
The final definition of the collective unconscious acquiesces from the same work
[155]: “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness,
which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists
a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is
identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can
only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic
contents.”
On one hand the collective unconscious dictates how the structure of the psyche
autonomously organizes experience, and on the other hand the collective unconscious
collects and organizes those personal experiences in a similar way for all members of
a particular species. This finding, due to Jung, appears particularly important for us as
physicists. In addition to the Schrödinger cat paradox, resolved by the introduction of
megascopic quantum jumps, the Copenhagen interpretation suffers from yet another
conundrum—the paradox of Wigner’s friend, see Sect. 6. The Copenhagen view that
the quantum state represents available knowledge to a community of communicating
observers was set ad hoc and does not follow from any of the basic axioms of the
Copenhagen interpretation. We live today in the time of Internet and mobile phones,
and we can be proud of how ingeniously we are all connected. But this is a special type
of connection mediated by the material world. If we accept that we are parts of the
material world and communicate via this world, then Wigner’s conclusion that each
conscious being is able to collapse one single objective quantum state, regardless of
whether the information is actually physically shared, is correct. Therefore Wigner
looked for a way out of the crisis with his “desire for a less solipsistic theory”.
Only if we accept Jung’s concept, we will understand that our conscious minds are
all primarily connected in this Jung-like collective unconscious entirely outside the
external material world, and this explains and provides the legitimacy of the shared
knowledge of a community of communicating observers.
371
Unfortunately Whyte’s book ends up with Freud leaving out Jung, who in his later
life opposed Freud. His primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing conceptions of the unconscious, but also Freud’s anti-religious attitudes mattered. Whereas Freud conceived the unconscious solely as a repository of repressed
emotions and desires, Jung called this limited model “personal unconscious”, and
proposed the existence of a second, far deeper form of the unconscious underlying
the personal one. In his work “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”
Jung explains the difference between personal and collective unconscious [155]: “A
more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it
the “personal unconscious”. But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which
does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is
inborn. This deeper layer I call the “collective unconscious”. I have chosen the term
“collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in
contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more
or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.”
The final definition of the collective unconscious acquiesces from the same work
[155]: “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness,
which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists
a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is
identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can
only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic
contents.”
On one hand the collective unconscious dictates how the structure of the psyche
autonomously organizes experience, and on the other hand the collective unconscious
collects and organizes those personal experiences in a similar way for all members of
a particular species. This finding, due to Jung, appears particularly important for us as
physicists. In addition to the Schrödinger cat paradox, resolved by the introduction of
megascopic quantum jumps, the Copenhagen interpretation suffers from yet another
conundrum—the paradox of Wigner’s friend, see Sect. 6. The Copenhagen view that
the quantum state represents available knowledge to a community of communicating
observers was set ad hoc and does not follow from any of the basic axioms of the
Copenhagen interpretation. We live today in the time of Internet and mobile phones,
and we can be proud of how ingeniously we are all connected. But this is a special type
of connection mediated by the material world. If we accept that we are parts of the
material world and communicate via this world, then Wigner’s conclusion that each
conscious being is able to collapse one single objective quantum state, regardless of
whether the information is actually physically shared, is correct. Therefore Wigner
looked for a way out of the crisis with his “desire for a less solipsistic theory”.
Only if we accept Jung’s concept, we will understand that our conscious minds are
all primarily connected in this Jung-like collective unconscious entirely outside the
external material world, and this explains and provides the legitimacy of the shared
knowledge of a community of communicating observers.