Most people will say, “oh, the world is interdependent. Isn’t it that cool?”
But they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, frankly.
Or “it’s all organic.”
They don’t know what that means.
But you can write down a mathematical equation now and do an experiment– and I’ve done such experiments, even with undergraduates– which demonstrate the impossibility of taking things apart into pieces and have those pieces be explanatory of the whole that comes together once you’ve entangled them, interacted those two particles together.
The wholes and the parts aren’t the way we thought they were.
The whole truly is more than the sum of the parts and can’t be decomposed into parts. You can even measure the degree of entangledness, how much wholeness there is.
Arthur Zajonc, President, Mind & Life Institute,
on his work on quantum physics, mindfulness, and neuroscience