Foundations of Science (2006) 11: 249274 DOI 10.

1007/s10699-006-5909-1 WIM CHRISTIAENS

Springer 2006

BASIC ONTOLOGY AND THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL LIFE WORLD: A PROPOSAL

ABSTRACT. The condition of explicit theoretically discursive cognitive performance, as it culminates in scientic activity, is, I claim, the life world. I contrast life world and scientic world and argue that the latter arises from the rst and that contrary to the prevailing views the scientic world (actually, worlds, since the classical world is substantially different from the quantum world) nds its completion in the life world and not the other way around. In other words: the closure we used to search in a complete and comprehensive scientic description of all aspects of experience by referring it back to underlying atoms, genes and other scientic objects and the covering laws ruling them, should be sought in a reintegrating and occasionally dissolving of the abstract scientic model in the self-organizational uidity and superposition-like indeterminateness and non-locality of the life world: We have to acknowledge the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon (Merleau-Ponty in his The Phenomenology of Perception). KEY WORDS:

1. INTRODUCTION

Some wild ideas are going around when it comes to interpreting quantum mechanics (QM). One physicist for example (Dirk Aerts) communicated to me that he is convinced that the world has something like the structure (or the nature if you will) of a Hilbert space. A Hilbert space is the state space used for describing the behavior of quantum mechanical physical systems. In the present paper I develop a view of the scientic world and of the background from which the scientic world arises, that accommodates this claim. Following a number of continental philosophers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular, I reason from the premise
The author is post-doctoral researcher with the Flanders Fund for Scientic Research (F.W.O).

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that besides the scientic world and the world of everyday appearances (the manifest image) there is also a life world. If we conne ourselves to physical theories that are in a more or less invariant theoretical format of laws and principles intersubjectively widely used and accepted, then we can safely say the quantum world is the nal stage of the development of the scientic world. I claim that the quantum world is in some respects the respects that caused and cause such a stir closer to what is called the life world than it is to either the manifest image or the pre-quantum scientic world (which I will refer to as the classical world). I will only be able to present a general idea of my argument. I hope to ll in the gaps and elaborate on certain points in subsequent papers. There are two more important premises. The rst has to do with the fact that there is no such thing as the scientic method. I am here more or less on the grounds of analytical philosophy of science. Values and volitions are not different perspectives from the theoretical perspective, but they are part and parcel of the theoretical perspective: unconscious psychological and sociological factors play their part in the decisions the scientist takes. (In my opinion a good scientist is also guided by his love for the subject and by aesthetic considerations.) Instead of lingering on this too long or saying things that have been said many times before,1 let me take a positive view of this situation. Maybe there is something like a scientic attitude: an inextricably interlocked set of desires, goals, values, norms and beliefs where the desires, goals, etc. are not just founded or dependent on the beliefs, but where everything is dependent on everything else characterizing the scientic way of acting and reacting in the experiential ow. We can now safely ignore this issue and concentrate on the aim I stated above. The second presupposition is derived from continental phenomenological philosophy: I am working from the point of view of a phenomenological reduction. I will not spend any time in tracing this concept through the work of Husserl. I construe and use it to t my own purposes. How do I use reduction? I can dene the naturalistic attitude negatively as everything better: every lived act of consciousness that hides with respect to the manifest world or the scientic world the relevance and constitutive activity of consciousness. The point is that as long as we are in the naturalistic attitude, the world of science (which has the character

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of a thesis, something that is posited as an object in an explicit conscious activity) is experienced as a specialization, a systematic elaboration of (parts of) a world that is always-already-there. This world that is always already there is a more or less consistent spatio-temporal eld of environments of which we and you and all of us and everything we think, feel, desire or do seem to be part. Let us call it the natural world. In a naturalistic reduction I bracket all beliefs about the way we and especially our mental capacities are biologically, chemically and physically as well as psychologically and historically in a scientic or every day sense part of the natural world. For example when I talk about conscience I ignore what anatomy and physiology tell us about the physical nature of the brain. But I do not deny the truth (or falsity) or even just the legitimacy of these theses. Husserl writes: . . . Die Thesis ist Erlebnis, wir machen von ihr aber, keinen Gebrauch . . . (Husserl, 1928, p. 54). In its most austere form we should be able to do what is described in the following passage:
. . . we should not assume any philosophical or scientic theory, and furthermore must avoid deductive reasoning (which presupposed logic) and mathematics as well as any other empirical science or speculative theory of psychology and philosophy, in order to concentrate on describing what is given directly in intuition (Anschauung ) (Moran, 2000, p. 126).

After the process of bracketing I take a maximal inclusive attitude: I take as many aspects of my experience seriously exactly the way they are experienced. But I do it without the metaphysics of the natural attitude and the scientic attitude, which means that I take everything as it comes, i.e., as a phenomenon. I will give an extreme example. If I am abducted by aliens, well then I take this at face value, that is as a phenomenon, without the heavy metaphysical burden of typical believers (or typical disbelievers) in those things. Similarly, when I perceive a projectile ying through the air, I will ignore the equally heavy metaphysics of materialism, reductionism, etc. If I take into account materialism in the second example, it is only as a phenomenon. Instead of taking materialism as the underlying truth of a classical mechanical model i.e., instead of taking the classical mechanical model as a conrmation or implementation of materialism I just witness as phenomenon that there is such a connection

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between the constitution of the classical object and materialistic principles: for example I witness that the materialistic principles determine the constitution of the object and have therefore such an implicit but inescapable hold when we are in the naturalistic or scientic attitude. Finally a word about terminology. I use the word entity in a very wide sense. The words object and subject derive their meaning from their mutual correlation. An entity is characterized negatively by the fact that it does not need the correlational structure of subject and object. An entity can become an object, but not all entities are objects. The difference between entity and object will become clear as we proceed. The remainder of this paper is divided in ve sections. In section two I look at how the predicative-attitude/natural-world coordination incorporates the scientic-attitude/scientic-world correlational structure. In section three I look at the double nature of the scientic world: its classical component and its quantum component. Section four is devoted to the life-world/pre-predicative-attitude. I discuss a recent proposal in analytical ontology that incorporatescentralaspectsofquantumtheoriesandseemstobethe underlying ontology of both the life world and the quantum world.
2. THE NATURAL WORLD AND ITS SCIENTIFIC COMPLETION

2.1. The Predicative Attitude and its Worlds Showing the rightful place of the scientic attitude in consciousness will enlighten us immediately as to its nature. Consciousness the ow of mental acts: perception, thought, emotion, volition, remembrance, . . . has two modes: (1) it can be nonpositional, non-thetical, pre-predicative and pre-reexive, (2) it can be positional, reexive, thetical and predicative. The latter is how we usually think about consciousness. These are quite different attitudes. Following the Kantian incentive, more alive than ever in continental philosophy of science (cfr. the work of Bitbol, Petitot), we look for a subjectobject correlational structure. Let us look at the predicative attitude rst. In the rst place, the predicative attitude has a subject object structure. The subjectobject structure is typical for the

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knowledge relation and knowledge and belief is taken to be basic for all other acts: we can only emote, value, desire, . . . something if we know (or think we know) at least something about what it is, where it is, etc. Secondly, in the predicative attitude the naturalistic world appears as the proper world for all objects and even for consciousness itself. We have to evaluate this from the point of view of the naturalistic reduction. The naturalistic reduction allows us to see that within the bounds set by the subject object-correlation natural-attitude/natural-world, conscious acts are objectifying the giveness of certain perceptions into objects and systematically t this into the natural world. The correlation scientic-attitude/scientic-world is a development within the predicative attitude where: (a) consciousness starts as the nonreexive, non-positional, pre-predicative activity without subject or object, and (b) predicative consciousness constantly draws on the life world and is carried by it. This is not however how predicative consciousness sees itself. The correlate of the natural attitude, the natural world, is put forth as the condition of the positional acts of predicative consciousness, it frames them. Instead of seeing itself as constituting the objects of the natural world, it sees itself as discovering them. Furthermore this unconsciousness towards constitution goes even deeper with respect to the natural world as a whole. The natural world is not considered as constituted and not even considered as being discovered, it is the unspoken shared assumption of all acts: ontological realism. So in a sense, the scientic world presupposes what it tries to obtain: the natural attitude and its objective correlate, the natural world. In recent times this has been called the closing of the circle (Abner Shimony), but the idea has been present since Newton and is usually referred to as naturalism. Note the following facts. There is an intrinsic interrelation between materialism, ontological realism, scientic realism and reductionism, and they are all related to naturalism. I will refer to this conceptual eld as naturalism-etc. Up until now when we refer to the scientic world, we generally read this as the world of classical physics: the world where there is no superposition typical of QM. Only in the next section the dual nature of the scientic world will be introduced. The predicative attitude can have the natural world, the classical world or the quantum world as object.

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Following (1) above one could think pre-predicative-attitude/life-world is a subjectobject correlation, but that is incorrect. In fact there is no subject and no object and no correlation. Process and product ow together, are indistinguishable. I will return to this in the next section. In this section I will take a closer look at the relation between natural world and scientic world. 2.2. The central feature of naturalism-etc. Let me give a short overview of the closing of the circle. I distinguish three stages. In the rst stage of the predicative mode consciousness is a ray of light, thrown on an entity that in the process is lifted out of its place and put in the foreground as an object. In a certain context, with respect to a specic problem, we distinguish foreground and background, we direct our attention and in so doing create an object. Entities are posited for me (the subject) as substances bearing properties and standing in denite relations. How do physicists see this? Some approaches in physics only concentrate on producing models, building theories. Other approaches, most of them in the foundations of fundamental theories like QM or quantum eld theory, are more self-reective, more attentive to their own presuppositions and open towards the explicit theoretical incorporation of their principled presuppositions into physical theory. In other words, they are attentive to the systematic role of consciousness in the production of the model and incorporate this aspect into the physical theory. One such approach is operational quantum logic in the Genevan tradition of Jauch, Piron, Aerts and Coecke (see Coecke et al., 2000). In his 1982 and 1983 Aerts describes a rudimentary operational way of building physical models. He says that the world is the collection of phenomena: rain, tree, electron . . . He does not dene this crucial concept. Just like anybody else the physicist is caught up in the hustle and bustle of the world. Aerts says that the scientic mode is initiated by picking out certain facts that draw our attention, facts that strike us in a certain way. Because of this i.e. because we can experience some facts relatively separated from ambient facts we are entitled to attribute properties to the phenomenon.

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The description of a phenomenon is not exhaustive, it is a perspective. Aerts calls the locus of the properties an entity: We shall study the set of properties that we want to attribute in this way to a certain phenomenon. The thing described by this set of properties, and which is an idealization of the phenomenon in the sense explained above, we shall call an entity (Aerts, 1982, p. 1134). There are some differences in the use of words between me and Aerts. What he calls a phenomenon is more along the lines of what I call an entity. What he calls an entity, I call an object. From my reduced perspective everything is a phenomenon! From now on I will use my terminology. Separability is the condition for being an object. A specic physical system is
some part of the ostensively external phenomenal world, supposed separated from its surroundings in the sense that its interactions with the environment can either be ignored or effectively modelled in a simple way (Moore, 1999, p. 64).

Space-time relations play a central role in separating an entity from its surrounding, making it into an object. When the physicist decides to study a phenomenon he does not study all the properties of the phenomenon in one model. He selects a particular subset and constructs an object from this subset. Which properties are selected depends on the problem he is trying to solve. If you want to study the kinematics of the collision of two billiard balls, then you are usually not concerned with the color or the temperature of the billiard balls (Aerts, 1983). Following Van Fraassen 1991 I believe that objectifying an entity, bringing it on a predicative level, means for the physicist constructing a state space. Typical for the scientic stance is the introduction of mathematical structures. Arithmetic, classical logic, . . . are the simplest examples of such structures. Hilbert space, relativistic space-time, . . . are examples of very complex, highly developed mathematical structures. They are the typical end product of the cleansing of the messiness of the life world initiated in the predicative attitude (see the nal paragraph of Section 4). In the second stage the subjectobject correlation is extended considerably. The scientic object can, in principle, be tted into a world : a stable, well-structured intricate but transparent container-like all encompassing structure called space-time; each

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thing or event in this structure is separated from each and every other thing or event, and is as such the subject of properties and the relata of relations, all of them built on the spatio-temporal relation; covering laws complete this picture: all behavior, all change or movement is determined by invariant laws ruling the things and events. This is what I already referred to earlier as the scientic world. The nal stage of the closing of the circle is tting the subject into the world of the object (see Hooker, 1995 for example). Human knowledge self-reexively sees itself as a natural phenomenon to be studied as any other natural phenomenon. The scientic image shows us as one species among many, recently evolved etc. In this view cognition involves the active construction of some kind of model in our heads. This construction involves elementary sensory-motor coordinations and elaborations on these. The basic referents of these constructions are situations in our external world that are causally mediated to us. Science is an aspect or dimensions of a highly complex, highly interactive dynamic system of nested subsystems ranging all the way from internal neural organization to social institutions. (Here the mind-body problem enters.) It would seem that we start in the natural world, go through the three stages and end up with a more rened version of the natural world: the classical world. In the denition of physical system the concept of natural world is presupposed. After going through the three stages the world comes out a lot more consistent and mathematical, but essentially the same in nature: it is a spatio-temporal structure with ud-localization as condition for existence and individuality. Is this entirely true? Theoretical physics is the highlight of the Western tendency towards abstraction and idealization. One could think that the difference between classical world and natural world is just a matter of degree, i.e., the degree of abstraction and mathematization. Yet I believe the difference between the predicative attitude and the scientic stance is not just a matter of degree. Most phenomena have a process-product duality. I want to draw attention to the philosophers xation on the nished product: the scientic theory. Actually the xation on one specic scientic theory: classical physics. This was true of Descartes,

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Hume, Kant, . . . It is still true for most philosophers today: either you explicitly or implicitly adhere to this ideal or you resent this ideal and react against it. In both cases you accept the relevance of the ideal. It nds expression in ghts over naturalism-etc. Our current age suffers from too great a xation on theoretical physics, on theoretical knowledge idealized after the image of theoretical physics. Strangely enough many theoretical physicists believe in fallibilism. They are not afraid to abandon cherished theories. Fallibilism is something widely divergent views in analytical philosophy of science will agree upon (as Van Fraassen notices in his 2002). In Buttereld 1998 examples are given of situations where scientists were prepared to give up one of the most fundamental law of physics, the laws of conservation of energy, if it would solve a problem satisfactorily. Apparently the physicists themselves (at least some of them that determine the course physics takes) are fundamentally fallibilist: they are prepared to give up anything given enough reason to do so. Scientic practice in general is actually quite explicit and very careful in always contextualizing its own claims: experiments, statistical research and theoretical models have most of the conditions that constitute their perspective and their constructive aspects spelled out. When you open a handbook of physics, models are presented in such a way that it is quite clear that they are a very specic way of dealing with phenomena. But all of this intellectual hygiene is during the scientic activity, during the process. Outside of the practice of science, what was the specic constitution of one object (and possibly also the extrapolation of this object into a world) is dogmatically posited as the condition for any subjectobject relation and for consciousness itself. Can fallibilism go hand in hand with conservatism in and about science? I do not see how. The question then becomes: is the scientic attitude characterized by its striving for a deductively closed system of the world, or is it rather more prone towards fallibilism? I propose a solution inspired by Van Fraassen (2002). We have to distinguish the scientic stance from the stance towards science. Fallibilism is part of the scientic attitude. The dogmatic closing of the circle is part of the attitude towards science and based on science. It is not because the scientic attitude uses the natural attitude that it also believes

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to be part of the natural world, i.e., that it endorses naturalism-etc. The closing of the circle is a perspective on science, it is not per se part of science. I am not arguing against the attempts at naturalism-etc. ; I am arguing that naturalism-etc. is an attitude to be distinguished from the scientic stance. Actually the fact that naturalism-etc. would work (which was and is the prejudice of Western intellectual culture) would be close to a miracle. Imagine: a perspective with a particular way of constituting objects, which is then further developed into a complete world, is nally posited as the background for every possible object of consciousness, and in the end for consciousness itself. Nowhere underway the fact that we are dealing with a perspective is overcome, it is only forgotten or we were not conscious of it in the rst place (which as we know is typical for the natural attitude). The manifest image is a concept introduced by Wilfried Sellars and is used sometimes by analytical philosophers of science (like Van Fraassen) instead of life world or pre-predicative consciousness (which is more the parlance of continental philosophy). It is best illustrated by using an example along the lines of Eddingtons (Eddington, 1928, pp. ixx): the coffee cup of the manifest image is a materially continuous substance within its physical boundaries with certain properties like being white, the coffee cup of the scientic image however is mostly empty space and atoms. One would expect the manifest image to be closer to the life world than to the natural world, because it is used as a contrast with the scientic world. Actually it is closer to the natural world, than it is to the life world: the subject-predicate structuring has already a strong hold and every object is ud-localized (uniquely and determinately localized) in space and time. The manifest image is part of the object-correlate of the predicative attitude. The natural world is initially a pre-scientic world. The manifest image is that part of the natural world that is substituted by the scientic world. Eventually the whole natural world can be substituted by the physicists space-time manifold. So we should not confuse the concept of manifest image (which is mostly used in analytical philosophy) with the concept of life world from continental philosophy. The latter concept is as far as I know completely absent from analytical philosophy. The idea of manifest image as a contrast

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to scientic image illustrates to what degree the natural world is different from the scientic world. It is reminiscent of Lockes distinction between primary and secondary properties. The following ideas characterize the scientic world: ud-localizability, locality, separability, countability, consistency, completeness and maybe some others. I think these are the principal ones. These principles already ruled the natural world. However they come in a new guise, generally a mathematization. For example, while consistency has been around as an intellectual principle since Aristotle, the principle of non-contradiction is now part of classical formal logic, a mathematical system. Space and time are now a differentiable manifold with vectors, tensors, wordlines etc. It is similar to the difference between materialism and physicalism. Materialism involves mainly ud-localization, but not per se in some mathematical entity like space-time (we have to realize that the scientists space and time is a differentiable manifold of a specic kind). Physicalism has to do with the mathematical world of theoretical physics: differentiable manifolds, state spaces, molecules, atoms, genes, electricity, gravitation, etc. We have a tendency to equate scientic world with classical world. The classical world and the underlying principles act either as a priori conditions or (weaker) as a criterion for the ontological status of objects. If for example I am presented with an object that is marked by intrinsic vagueness, non-locality, non-separability, non-countability, inconsistency, etc., then this object will not get the label real. It will not do as proper facts. Every time I referred to the scientic world, I actually meant classical world and I am sure that most people understood it that way. However, we can now no longer ignore the fact that the scientic world is ruled by something else besides the classical principles mentioned.

3. THE SCIENTIFIC WORLD FINDS ITS COMPLETION IN A

NON-CLASSICAL WORLD

The physical description of the world is not obvious. The introduction of scientic ideas needed a good deal of convincing, and a long preparatory period preceded the physics of Galileo and Newton.2 Is the development in our past from life world to manifest

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image and from natural to scientic world necessary? I am convinced there were moments of bifurcation. Poppers example of clouds and clocks shows how. Clocks can be built into identical systems from the same building blocks. When we set them running they run the same time. Although clouds are all of them made up of the same stuff, it is impossible to nd two clouds that have even approximately the same shape. The weather is a typical domain where we have non-linearity. This was ignored for a long time because we construed clouds like clocks or as special cases of clocks. The whole idea of hidden variables is nothing else: when we cannot objectify entities into particulars, we suppose that there are hidden variables present that would restore the classicality. The billiard ball world is the paradigm, the preferred model. But, says Popper, we could also take clock-like entities as special cases of cloud-like entities. If you let clocks run a long enough time we will nd that their behavior becomes erratic and unpredictable. Non-linearity and vagueness, usually shunned by scientists, would be paradigm. A science built on such principles would in all probability be quite different from the classical world. I now add a crucial element to my story: quantum theory. I will not get into this too much and just list the three things that set QM apart. First, the indeterminateness of physical variables, especially the variables that carry all the metaphysical weight: position and velocity. Neither CM nor QM describe the measurement interaction and both for a classical and for a quantum system the measurement interaction can change the state of the system (Aerts, 1983). The difference is that for a classical property we know with certainty that if we would carry out the measurement the system would have the property. In a classical context, if we can only predict with probability less than one, then nobody doubts that this probability is just a lack of knowledge about a completely determinate reality. What is special for a quantum system is that (i) the probabilities are not due to a lack of knowledge about reality and (ii) while the measurement is being carried out a new part of reality is created, which did not exist before the measurement was carried out (Aerts in a number of papers: see his 1995, 1998, 1999a and b and other references mentioned there).3 This implies that the variable was

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denitely indeterminate. In QM two kinds of state transitions are described: state transitions according to a deterministic evolution equation and state transitions according to the projection of a state vector on the state space (a Hilbert space). It is the latter kind, also called the jump of the state vector, that is the focus of debate. It is interpreted as the state transition of a quantum entity during or due to a measurement.4 Secondly: quantum entanglement. Most of us have heard about EPR-experiments showing how a quantum physical system compounded from two quantum systems can exhibit behavior that would indicate it is a non-separable whole, even if the two compounds are located in separated regions of space. This continues to be one of the most hotly debated issues in the foundations and philosophy of QM. Thirdly: non-countability. This can be illustrated with an example. Suppose you have a box with two physical entities in it that are moving without colliding. At all times you know that the box can be in one of four possible states: two particles on the left side of the box, two particles on the right side of the box, one particle on the left and one on the right or the state where the particle on the left and the particle on the right switch sides. If we do the same experiment with electrons we get a different situation. There is a state where both electrons are on the right, there is a state where both electrons are on the left and there is a state where there is an electron on the right and an electron on the left. The peculiar thing is that the latter state cannot be further distinguished into two states as we could do for classical particles. This is because of the possibility of superposition states in QM and the fact that electrons have no individual characteristics that allow to distinguish them. I will not go into the matter here and refer the reader to specialized literature: French (1998) and Seibt (1999). While Poppers argument could be swept under the rug by the hidden variables argument, quantum phenomena resist such a solution. These are phenomena not just in our sense, but in the physicists sense! Although we do not need QM to show how the natural attitude is a false consciousness, QM kind of hardens the blow, it gives more punch to it, because it is the apotheosis of science and lies at the heart of science.

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4. WORLD NOT WORLD

4.1. Consciousness (of) Self and Perception I want to explore the nature of the life world and of the pre-predicative attitude. Predicative thought exists against a background that supports it and from which it springs forth. Because we are working within a naturalistic reduction the phenomenological mode of making a purely descriptive observation of the pure workings of all consciousness (i.e., the act of observing the stream of acts that takes its course) we observe that explicit predicative mental acts exist, not against a spatio-temporal container-like worldly background of the natural world or classical world, but against a pre-predicative Gestaltlike complexity of forces: the life world. I use forces here in the sense of tendencies or liabilities rather than in the sense of vectors. I liken them to forces for a reason: I want to draw attention to their autonomous productive nature. I start with some negative statements: what the life world is not. First, it has nothing to do with the unconscious in a psychological sense. Secondly, there is no correlational structure. One could think that pre-predicative consciousness is the subject and the life world is the object, but that would be a mistake. I infer these facts from a combination of Sartres phenomenological observation of consciousness and Merleau-Pontys phenomenological observation of perception. The transition from pre-predicative to predicative consciousness is described by Sartre:
Consciousness and the world are given in one blow: essentially external to consciousness the world is essentially relative to it . . . Being is exploding into the world, going from a nothingness of consciousness and the world, and then suddenly bursting out as consciousness-in-the-world.5

The key phrase is here: un n eant de monde et de conscience. Nothingness should be understood in contradistinction with the thingness of the natural and classical world. After bursting out into the world, consciousness apprehends itself as permanently bursting out: it the nature of consciousness, referred to as intentionality, to be this constant and continuous series of eclatements. Sartre thinks that the condition of intentionality (perceiving something, thinking something, . . . ) is a

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self-consciousness of a specic kind: a consciousness of self that no longer has a subject-object structure because it is not a knowledge relation. To emphasize this he writes, consciousness (of) self (conscience (de) soi). For example, my pre-reexive consciousness of perceiving and the perceiving are one and indivisible. It is pure activity pure existence supporting itself: There is being indivisible and indissoluble not a substance supporting properties that are somehow less real than it [the substance], but existence through and through.6 Normally one would expect an activity like consciousness to be supported by a substance: the body, the brain, the ego, . . . 7 As before (see Section 1 and the way I treated Husserl) I just pick out the elements that interest me to make my own construction, so I will not pursue a correct critical discussion of Sartres philosophy. Although it has been noted that Sartres consciousness (of) self is already a departure from the usual view of consciousness (which is much more reexive, clear, entertaining distinct ideas in a discursive, predicative manner), it does not go far enough. Sartre pursues the ideas touched on here in the direction of a strongly dualistic ontology: consciousness is pour-soi and the world is en-soi. The rst is qualied by nonidentity, pure movement, refus de substance, . . . , the second by complete identity, inertness, . . . What I retain from Sartre is (1) the initial nothingness of consciousness and world, (2) the existence of a consciousness (of) self that has the characteristics of a pure process. Now I would like to add elements from Maurice Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of perception. We have to resist the urge of looking only for the pure clarity of thought as the paradigm of conscious activity. We have to go back to the beginning, and the beginning is perception: a process free from the thinglike substantiality and nomological relatedness of the natural and especially the scientic world. Following Merleau-Ponty I note that we generally do not perceive isolated objects in our environment, but a structural and changing net of relations, a perceptual eld as he calls it. Two examples. First, the color red is different when it is the red of the uffy sweater of that young girl crossing the street than when it is the red of my dreary plastic coffee cup. Secondly, it happens that even though the girl crossing the street drew my attention, afterwards I cannot tell you

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what color her hair was. Examples like these show the following facts about perception in its pre-predicative mode:
It is now the adherence of what is perceived to the context and something like its viscosity, now the presence in it of a positive indeterminateness that prohibits the spatial, temporal and numerical ensembles to articulate themselves in terms that can be handled, that are distinct and identiable.8

Merleau-Ponty shows that we cannot analyze the perceptual eld into a nomologically linked collection of spatially, temporally and numerically distinct completely determinate things (where things = substances supporting properties). Furthermore, the perceiver himself is also a structural net of relations dynamically changing in a dynamically changing environment. At this stage, we cannot distinguish in any unambiguous manner subject from object, not even in an ontological sense of pour-soi and en-soi. The perceiver is always already actively implicated in the structural net of relations. Determinate objects with denite properties and a lucid structure called the subject are constructed from Gestaltlike dynamic structures of perception.9 Subject and object, space, time, numerical identity, etc. are potentially there within the life world. They are an implicate order, whereas the natural/classical world is an explicate order (both concept were introduced by David Bohm in the context of his interpretation of QM). Merleau-Ponty writes: We have to acknowledge the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon.10 This means that the determinate obtained from the indeterminate the natural/classical-world obtained from the life world is just that: obtained from the indeterminate. The determinate does not destroy or replace the indeterminate, it cannot be substituted for the indeterminate after having been obtained from it, as if the determinate were primordial, and we have discovered it behind the veil, the mere appearance which would be the indeterminate. To mark the difference between the classical world and the life world, I will also refer to the latter as (the) world or (a) world. This is not just a syntactical gadget. The function of the words the and a is to singularize the words they precede. They localize them into something you can point to, into countable units, particulars as I will call them. In any case the brackets are just

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meant to symbolize (and constantly remind the reader of) the distinction I want to make. As I mentioned before, on the side of the natural and classical world we have principle of non-contradiction, principle of excluded third, ud-localization, separability, locality, countability. (The) world does not endorse the negation of principle of non-contradiction, etc. as a principle, the way the classical world endorses principle of non-contradiction, etc. It just denies that they are principles. These principles impose rational order, in the life world this order is implicit (or implicate). Remark that a principle is something that conditions, and is thus universal. The principles mentioned here are constitutive for the possibility of any object of the natural and classical world. The only a priori of prereexive consciousness is the absence of any denite a prioris except the natural life driven openness towards (the) world. The idea of self-organization comes close, but is still to much biased by the distinction between inside and outside, subject and object. The above does not mean that everything is free-oating in (the) world. It just means that the way entities are related to each other is not a space-time structure, and although it is not chaos, i.e., it has some invariance, (the) world cannot be called a structure in the usual sense. It is almost impossible to describe pre-reexive consciousness. But that does not mean it is not there, that does not mean it should not determine our reexive theoretical views on what there is. In particular it should put boundaries on the strong metaphysical claims like materialism, physicalism and scientic realism. 4.2. Free Process Theory I will now try and make the difference between classical world and life world more precise in yet another way. It is based on work done in analytical ontology by Johanna Seibt: free process theory (FPT). I can see from my reduced point of view that without the pressure of the natural attitude so many entities can become objects of consciousness. I can see how the pressure of the natural attitude makes it so that the predicative attitude enforces certain habits of thought. What is a typical object? What kind of examples do we

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give, when we engage the topic of possible objects of consciousness? Let us rst look at examples that are typically not given: love, anger, music, Nine Inch Nails The Fragile, clouds, rainbows, running, moving, the singlet state of a compound entity in an EPR-experiment, a free quantum eld described by a superposition state in a Fock space, . . . What we like to use as examples is coffee cups, pens, chairs and tables, or billiard balls, genes and H2 O-molecules. There is nothing innocent in choosing the latter examples. It goes easy enough. You take the cup that is in front of you as the nearest and seemingly innocent example. The point is that coffee cups are ud-localized and thus quickly and without discussion amenable to the countable, separable, local, determinate etc. schema that typies the predicative attitude and even more the scientic attitude. I will call these objects particulars. Ud-localization and countability are the basic features of particulars. The natural and the classical world alike are also very much particulars. This becomes clear when we look at possible worlds semantics and the metaphysics associated with it. Possible worlds are a popular formal tool in analytical philosophy of science, used to analyze and dene concepts like determinism, causality, physicalism, etc. I can think of this world and then I will picture the classical world of the scientic attitude or the natural world supplemented with elements from the scientic world and I can think of worlds different from this one by changing characteristics in the present world. For example I could think of a world where kangeroos have no tails, worlds where Newtons force law is a rst order differential equation, a world where the IMF does not impose deregulation on Third World countries, etc. These worlds that we are considering: they are completely determinate worlds, total universes; ours is one of them, contingently or necessarily (that does not matter very much here) the real one. They are not ud-localized, but each of them is internally completely determinate (especially spatio-temporally), consistent, local, separable, etc. We can differentiate them from each other: this one and that one, and another one, which allows to count them: the rst, the second and third, etc. They t perfectly in a subjectobject correlational structure. As objects of consciousness they are basically the same as coffee cups, billiard balls and molecules (although with molecules we are on dangerous ground).11

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FPT is rapidly becoming a sophisticated and multi-dimensional philosophy under the supervision of its originator J. Seibt. It introduces the idea of a free process: which is the opposite of a particular. Let me give an example. One running, two running, . . . That does not work. Neither does: one water, two water, . . . One chairs, two chairs, . . . That does work. Also, running added to running gives running. Chair added to chair gives two chairs. Of course one can take amounts of running, but then we have already localized running into something else that allows us to measure it. The point is that coffee cups, billiard balls, chairs, etc. are always already countable units, while activities (like running) and stuffs (like water) are not. Cassirer quotes Natorp who says that deriving numbers from things is circular, since the concept of a thing has the concept of number as a necessary component (Cassirer, 1955, p. 226). That is the only way they can exist or can be thought of. Classical ontology is based on the combination of a substance with properties and relations: the rst is concrete (i.e., ud-localized), properties and relations are universals and are not ud-localized. Free processes have this in common with universals that they are not ud-localized, they have in common with particulars that they do not need something else to subsist, they are themselves the substances. In FPT all free processes are on the same ontological level: they have the same characteristic free process quality of not being ud-localized, of being non-countables, while having the potentiality of becoming ud-localized/countables. Entities are individuated by their descriptive properties: when we encounter the same descriptive properties then we have the same individual. For example, every amount of water has descriptive properties in common with every other amount of water. Water is the individual identied by the descriptive properties of water: transparency, uidity, etc. Although amounts of water are countable, the individual water is not countable. Neither is it uniquely localized. So water is a multiply localized and non-countable entity. Free processes are therefore also referred to as non-countables. For a better understanding we can take our cue from the following fact. We constantly say denite things about entities without having to specify what we say in terms of space-time localization. For example when we say: There is a lot of violence in the

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world, then we are referring to a multiply or indenitely localized individual violence in the world. Other examples are easy to nd. A language for example has no denite location in space. Naturalism-etc. requirer that it is in principle possible to translate every statement that is not about determinately localized things/events into statements of determinately localized things/events, that such statements are actually covert ways of talking about ud-entities (kind of like a generalized statistical physics of all utterances). From such a point of view water is identical to the spatio-temporally scattered amounts of water: to the water in and on our bodies, the seas and rivers, the lakes and the rain . . . However intricate or difcult, this should be possible. But suppose it is not. We know this cannot be done for the quantum world: the failure of the principles of ud-localizability, locality, separability and countability is intrinsic to the mathematical models for quantum objects and are strongly conrmed by experiments. That might inspire us to take a new look at some entities from the natural world. In FPT we suppose some statements that only vaguely or derivatively relate to space-time things and events, refer just as they are. Those entities are individuated by their descriptive properties not by space-time localization. In a theoretical mode of consciousness we tend to objectify the world into (a building of) things and events, a structure of objects. When we look closer and leave out any a priori restriction on what counts as a theoretical scan of the matter of the world that impresses us (matter here used in a philosophical sense), we see that matter and what we make of it (i.e., knowledge, theories, models and what we make is usually a pattern, structure, invariance, symmetry, objects) that the detail of the pattern is movement. This change of perspective requires us not only to start looking at quantum theories from the inside, but also to stop using the cup of coffee in front of us or the chair we are sitting on, as the paradigm entity for philosophizing. At the very least it requires realizing that the cup and the chair are not necessarily the best instruments in the philosophers laboratory. Metaphors do a lot of the initial work in the introductory phase of some new way of looking at something. (And we are not planning to get beyond an introductory phase in this part of the paper). The world is made of stories, not atoms, the

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American poet Muriel Rukeyser writes. An individual is activity, a quantum of process. The word free indicates that there is nothing underlying processes, it is processes all over the place and all the way down (Bickhard). All structure is part of the movement, is taken up in it, is a moment, a perspective on the individual process (itself part of a process). When you look long enough everything is water, Seibt says. Every reality, every entity is a Fluss des Werden as it were:12 instead of the thing cup of coffee, we have a being-a-cup-of-coffee, etc. 13 Like music, running, time, free processes do not have an interior, neither can you break them into pieces. For free processes is true what Sartre writes about the ontological nature of consciousness: see the quotations from Being and Nothingness above. Consciousness, says Sartre, is like a whirlwind: when you put something in it, it will be thrown out into the world. The difference I make is that while for Sartre the world is just the opposite of consciousness (it is inert, en-soi), I think that many if not most entities in the world are also whirlwinds. The life world is composed of entities that are fuite absolue, refus de substance.14 Although helpful these characteristically continental ways of theorizing can be supplemented with more analytical means. For more details and formal developments I refer the reader to Seibt. The suggestion of such a non-ud-localizable, non-countable, non-separable, pre-predicative consciousness, a n eant de monde et de conscience is not as outlandish as it might seem. In the rst volume of his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer describes the transition of something like the pre-predicative to the predicative and eventually the scientic. In perceptual experience, in close contact with the original perception preceding scientic and even predicative thought, we have the inception and development of the categories of space and time. Subsequently, for the category of number and thing we have to go one step further, we have to posit pure relations, i.e., pure laws of thought according to intellectual principles. The development of geometry, logic, arithmetic and in time more sophisticated mathematical structures is part of this development. Cassirer remarks that originally language had no universal system of numbers as we do now and which can be applied to all kinds of objects to count them:

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in so far as one can speak of number, it appears not in the form of a specic measured magnitude, but as a kind of concrete numerical gestalt, an intuitive quality adhering to a totally unarticulated general imprecision of quantity (Cassirer 1955, p. 233).

Just as the red of the sweater of the girl is different from the red of my plastic coffee cup, ve girls is something different from ve coffee cups: language originally had no universal numerals applicable to all enumerable objects, but used different numerical designations for different classes of objects (Cassirer, p. 233). Cassirer quotes numerous examples of languages of primitive peoples from all over the world to prove his point.
5. FINALLY

We should not confuse tradition (the substance-property thinking of the predicative attitude) with basic ontology. Basic ontology is the ontology of the life world. Tradition is the edication of the structure of reexive consciousness and especially the world that is correlative to the predicative subject. However from a reduced point of view (the) world is the background against which we have objects of consciousness, it is the indenite ow from which subject and object emerge. The mistake we make in the naturalistic attitude is to think that the background against which the objects of consciousness exist is of the same ontic nature as the object we have obtained from it. I want to show now that we have come close to my original aim: substantiating Aerts suggestion that the world has the structure of a Hilbert space. It will be apparent by now for the reader that the transition from pre-predicative to predicative consciousness, has a likeness to what in QM is called the jump of the state vector.15 The natural attitude leads to the scientic attitude, but this process cannot be carried out completely when the scientic world is identied with the classical world. The end-point of the scientic process of idealization while having its beginning in the life world ends in a mathematical structure that is very close to the life world in many respects. (The) world is already non-local,

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non-separable, non-countable, negation-incomplete and inconsistent. Not the naturalistic materialism is the background against which I judge for example quantum mechanical state vector reduction, because then we would end up with all the conundrums of philosophy of QM. I take the life world and the phenomenological view of consciousness as the proper background for both the classical and quantum world. The only reason why QM poses such a problem is because we judge it according to the principles that underly the classical world (and the natural world). If we realize that the life world is the original source of any theory or thesis whatsoever, then there are no quantum paradoxes. I have come close to my original aim: Aerts suggestion about QM and the structure of the world. Some physicists have referred to the strange quantum phenomena as the ghost in the atom (Davies and Brown, 1986). Philosophers have called the mind the ghost in the machine. The ghost in the atom (object-side) and the ghost in the machine (subject-side) are one and the same. They are remnants of the primordial source from which subject and object are borne, they are the background noise of the originary creative Big Bang: the bursting out as consciousness-inthe-world.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Jean-Paul van Bendegem and Bart Vandenabeele for their helpful comments.
NOTES 1. I refer the reader to contemporary introductory texts (like Ladyman, 2001) and anthologies of analytical philosophy of science (like Boyd et al., 1991). There are a number of books that take stock of what has happened in analytical philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century: Giere (1999), Van Fraassen (2002), Hooker (1995) are examples. 2. This macro-history is repeated in our personal development in high school, when we substitute the theoretical world of physics for the manifest image. 3. Other experts in the philosophy and foundations of QM present this differently: see Redhead (1987), Albert (1994), Van Fraassen (1991) and other books.

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4. In QM when you measure a quantum variable represented by a linear operator Q (the special case where we have discrete values and no degeneracy in the eigenvalues, and a set of eigenstates {|qi }) it is quite common that we measure variables when the entity is in a superposition state | = i ci |qi of the eigenstates of the variable that is being measured (where |ci |2 are the probabilities that we will discover the entity to be in state |qi ). When there is no measurement interaction the state evolution of a classical and a quantum system is perfectly deterministic. The superposition i ci |qi is a description of a real indeterminateness in the value of Q. 5. My translation of: La conscience et le monde sont donn es dun m eme ` la conscience, le monde est, par essence, coup: ext erieur par essence a ` elle (Sartre, 1939, p. 110); and of: Etre, clater dans le relatif a cest e monde, cest partir dun n eant de monde et de conscience pour soudain, s eclater-conscience-dans-le-monde (Sartre, 1939, p. 112). tre indivisible, indissoluble non-point 6. My translation of: Il y a un e tres, mais un une substance soutenant ses qualit es comme de moindres e tre qui est existence de part en part (Sartre, 1943, p. 21). Italics in the e translation were added by me. 7. And then there is the famous quote from Heidegger: The how ((essentia)) of being must, to the extent we can talk about it in general, be conceived from its being ((existentia)). My translation of: Le comment tre doit, pour autant quil est possible en g (essentia) de cet e en eral den tre conc ` partir de son e tre (existentia) (Sartre, 1943, p. 21). parler, e u a ladherence du perc 8. My translation of: Cest tantot u au contexte et com la pr me sa viscosit e, tantot es` ence en lui dun ind etermin e positif qui emp echent les ensembles spatiaux, temporels et num eriques de sarticuler en termes maniables, distincts et identiables (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 19). Italics in the translation were added by me. 9. We could identify what Aerts calls phenomena with the pre-predicative Gestalten or structures. 10. My translation of: Il nous faut reconna itre lind etermin e comme un ph enom` ene positif (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 12). 11. Consciousness is not a thing or event. It is a process: the pure ow of acts, like perceptions, thoughts, remembrances, etc. The acts of predicative consciousness are countable. I can distinguish or separate one act from another act (in principe although not always in practice). This is no longer true for pre-predicative consciousness. 12. The metaphor is from Cassirer. See Bayer (2001, p. 76). 13. Although in our view, the water metaphor, though useful, is detrimental for any kind of individuality concept when we extend its metaphorical impact to a fundamental level. The metaphorical use of water does not convey the intrinsic aspect of activity.

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14. That way the strict distinction Sartre upholds between consciousness and world becomes very hard to make. 15. I want to be absolutely clear that what I claim is that the the jump of the state vector resembles the transition from life world to predicative consciousness, the transition from entity to object, not the other way around. (The phenomenological description of perception and consciousness does not need any scientic theory, and therefore does not want to prot from the prestige of science in general and physics in particular!).

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Eddington, A.: 1928, The Nature of the Physical World. Cambridge University Press. French, S.: 1998, On the Withering Away of Physical Objects. In E. Castellani (ed.), Physical Objects: Identity, Individuality and Constitution of Objects in Physics. Princeton University Press. Giere, R.N.: 1999, Science Without Laws. The University of Chicago Press. Hooker, C.A.: 1995, Reason, Regulation and Realism. Albany, Suny Press. Husserl, E.: 1928, Ideen zu einer reinen Phaenomenologie und Phaenomenologischen Philosophie. Jahrbuch f ur Philosophie und ph anomenologischen Forschung, t. I, Max Niemeyer, Halle. Ladyman, J.: 2001, Understanding Philosophy of Science. Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M.: 1945, Ph enom enologie de la Perception. Gallimard. Moore, D.J.: 1999, On State Space and Property Lattices. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 30: 6183. Moran, D.: 2000, Introduction to Phenomenology. London and New York: Routledge. Redhead, M.: 1987, Incompleteness, Nonlocality and Realism. A Prolegomenon to the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartre, J.P.: 1939, Une id ee fondamentale de la ph enom enologie de Husserl: lintentionalit e. In Situations I, N.R.F., Editions Gallimards. Reprinted in La Transcendance de l ego. Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 1978 (Introduction, notes and appendices by Sylvie Le Bon), 109113. Sartre, J.-P.: 1943, LEtre et le Neant. Essai dontologie Phenomenologique. Gallimard. Seibt, J.: 2001, Formal Process Ontology. In Proceedings of the FOIS 01 Conference, ACM Digital Library, http://www.hum.au.dk/loso/lseibt. Seibt, J.: 2002, Quanta, Tropes, or Processes: On Ontologies for QFT beyond the Myth of Substance. In Meinard Kuhlmann, Holger Lyre and Andrew Wayne (eds.), Ontological Aspects of Quantum Field Theory. Singapore: World Scientic, 145. Van Fraassen, B.: 1992, Quantum Mechanics. An Empiricists View. Clarendon Press. Van Fraassen, B.: 2002, The Empirical Stance. Yale University Press.

Vakgroep Wijsbegeerte en Moraalkwetenschap Universiteit Gent Blandijnberg 2 9000 Gent Belgium E-mail: Wim.Christiaens@UGent.be