Physics and Vertical Causation: The End of Quantum Reality

THE PRESENT BOOK IS MEANT, IN THE FIRST place, to serve as an introduction to a hitherto unrecognized mode of causation which proves moreover to be ubiquitous: what I refer to, namely, as “vertical causality.” The question that immediately presents itself, of course, is how this newly-discovered causality relates to the causality with which physics has been concerned since the days of Sir Isaac Newton, which I shall refer to as “horizontal”; and suffice it to say, by way of a first orientation, that vertical causality does enter into the purview of physics, but in a manner the physicist as such is in principle unable to comprehend. For as we shall come to see, vertical causality—unlike horizontal—is not something quantitative, not something amenable to description in terms of differential equations. At the risk of producing more consternation than enlightenment, one could say that it is a causality that measures but cannot itself be measured. The crucial point is that even though the existence of vertical causation constitutes one of the two keys that render contemporary physics ontologically comprehensible, VC is something by nature invisible to the physicist, and hence proves to be incurably philosophical. It pertains moreover to a genre of philosophy which, in the post-Kantian era, has been quite out of fashion: to metaphysics. It is thus in a way ironic that this supposedly “outdated” discipline should emerge at the end of the twentieth century as the long sought-after means to understand the latest formulation of physics: that this philosophy should thus live up to its name as constituting indeed a meta-physics.

My second objective is to bring into unity the multiple strands pursued in the books I have written over the years, in a way that manifests what may rightfully be termed “the big picture.”