Toward a Sensuous, Suffering, and Passionate Materialism
In his 2022 book, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, theoretical physicist and mathematician Leonard Mlodinow argued that “emotion shapes virtually every thought we have.”[1] Antonio Damasio’s neuroscience research, first published in his 1994 book Descartes’ Error and in many books thereafter, has shown that the distinction between feelings and emotions is, fundamentally speaking, not scientifically accurate.[2]
What’s more, turning to Columbia University historian William V. Harris in his 2001 book, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, perpetuating the idea that reason had to control feelings and emotions “was for the most part in the interest of all who benefited from the smooth functioning of the state or the family.”[3] To put it another way, the necessity of supposedly masculine “reason” to control the chaos of “emotion” has been used to justify hetero-patriarchy, class oppression, white supremacy, and colonization for thousands of years.
Surprisingly, those like Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, Clara Zetkin, Abram Leon, and Erich Fromm never referenced Marx on feelings, emotions, passion, or suffering. Fromm actually criticized Marx’s insufficiency in this area, while fundamentally missing what he actually wrote. This is despite the fact that Fromm was the first to publish Marx’s 1844 manuscripts within the US in his 1961 book, Marx’s Concept of Man.[4] Similar to Reich, Fromm relegated feelings, etc. to a position of supposedly necessary subordination to reason. Like settler LIFE, this too must be abolished.
In his 1955 book, The Sane Society, Fromm argued that Marx “did not sufficiently see the passions and strivings which are rooted in man's nature, and in the conditions of his existence, and which are in themselves the most powerful driving force for human development.” Marx had actually called passion our “essential force,” while advancing, at least in this one instance and pretty much abandoned thereafter, a more favorable view than Fromm and Reich themselves. Fromm argued they were simply “irrational forces.”[5] For Reich, fascism itself was an “emotional plague.”[6]
In this same book though, Fromm still asserted that the “fact of suffering” potentially yielded the “striving to overcome” in a chapter titled “The Road to Sanity.”[7] This was less than twenty pages after his assertion on the necessity of something like the Paris Commune of 1871 and soviets in his chapter on “Various Answers” to the “pathology of normalcy” under capitalism. These answers also included Marx’s letter to Vera “Zazulich” based upon what was, back then, Fromm’s “personal communications” with someone named “G. Fuchs.”[8]
Though Fromm never made the connection back to this relatedness between suffering and communes as an alternative “practice of life,” it would still find its way into his 1973 book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Just like the “fact of suffering” potentially catalyzing the “striving to overcome,” the very basis of his notion of “biophilia” was “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive.”[9] This passionate striving thus became, to Fromm, “an inherent impulse in man to fight for freedom.” Freedom is sustained through structures “and any structure requires constraint,” he wrote. Communes and soviets were necessary alternatives. Fromm believed they must be “autonomous – i.e., that it results from the necessities of growth inherent in the structure of the person.”[10]
Alas, Fromm himself would advance a bit of vulgarity in this book, specifically where he briefly analyzed what “Marx has demonstrated in his theory of historical development.” We must remember, as Raya Dunavskaya put it in her eulogy at Fromm’s funeral, he was “coming closer to Marx.”[11] Fromm summarized, writing that “in the attempt to change and improve social conditions man is constantly limited by the material factors of his environment, such as ecological conditions, climate, technique, geographical situation, and cultural traditions.” He continued, arguing that “hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists lived in a relatively well-balanced environment that was conducive to generating constructive rather than destructive passions,” unlike a society descending to fascism, as ours is today.
Here’s where his argument changed. “It was for his very growth in some respects, particularly intellectually, artistically, and scientifically, that man had to create circumstances that crippled him and prevented his growth in other respects, particularly affectively.” Fromm advanced what seemed like the very “historic-philosophical theory of the universal path every people is fated to tread” that Marx rejected late in life. There’s likely no way Fromm could have known this. It was still buried after having been figuratively thrown into the fire.
“This was so,” Fromm continued, “because the productive forces were not sufficiently developed to permit the coexistence of both technical and cultural progress and freedom, to permit uncrippled development for all.” It almost seems like Fromm was trying to justify class oppression, hetero-patriarchy, and white supremacy. If this were actually the case, then the American Holocaust of the Indigenous was somehow necessary “affectively,” but this would be a settler socialism or “white man’s burden” Marxism. It was rather, as Marx put it, resulting from “the deliberate application of force.” Fromm went on to argue that “Marx's concept of socialism…was not considered a utopia by him because he believed that at this point of historical evolution the material conditions for its realization were already present,” citing Dunayevskaya.[12]
But Marx argued against this interpretation, at least the part about the development of the productive forces through capitalism being “universally obligatory.”[13] Therefore, what Fromm referred to as “affectively” could be better understood as conditions of vulnerability. Thus, the historical probabilities of communism have revolved around what Judith Herman referred to as holding traumatic reality in consciousness, not simply the linear development of the productive forces. Though this may seem complicated, it isn’t.
In a May 2020 article for Toward Freedom called “Community self-defense, capitalism, and COVID-19,” an emergency room doctor in Mexico wrote of a comrade who had recently died from the disease after trying to get a bed and treatment at 17 different hospitals. “The days to come are days of collective tears. There is a surge of rage through the thick air, a pain shared by so many.” This article expressed a depth of sensuousness, suffering, and passion for revolution. They wrote on the need for an “Insurgent Love,” ending with a quote from their deceased comrade. “After COVID-19, the class struggle will deepen in every corner of the world, and we’ll be there to keep struggling and destroying this system of death.”[14]
Roughly a year and half later, The Atlantic ran an article late December 2021 by an emergency room physician in NYC. They described seeing more death than when fighting Ebola in West Africa in 2014. By this time, “many health-care workers are already in a dark place,” while staring in the face of a “looming tidal wave of Omicron cases.” As such, they have “limited emotional reserves” and that “Exhaustion has crowded out their usual empathy.”[15]
This “exhaustion” and its impact upon empathy can be understood as a microcosm of what Fromm referred to as circumstances of affective crippling. This crippling entails a banishment of empathy as means of limiting the extent to which one feels the depths of traumatic reality, so that the person may themselves endure. This capacity to live in uncrippled fashion does not singularly result from the development of the productive forces, nor through a process where we become human through “developed industry i.e., through the medium of private property,” as Marx put it. Though clearly the productive capacity of a society can help fight against the vulnerability of feeling this suffering and contribute toward the means of fighting for the abolition of its causes, it does not do so alone. The “deliberate application of force,” according to Marx, the cyclical history of threat from human societies as “ingroups” and “outgroups,” and what William H. McNeill referred to as “macroparasitism,” are far more complex.
Human Sensuousness and Quantum Mechanics
In his 2020 book, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, John Bellamy Foster argued in favor of an “emergentist ecological Marxism.” This was based on the idea that “Marx’s conception” was one “involving the human-sensuous interaction with nature via production” or “the need to satisfy human sensuous needs through appropriation from external nature.” It follows Marx’s own equivocation from his 1841 dissertation onward, which we will get to shortly, as well as the vulgar reductionism that Engels, Kautsky, and Plekhanov advanced after his death. As such, Foster equated human sensuousness with being simply of the senses without regard to the felt experience of suffering, which is a capacity we share, in one form or another, with plants and non-human animals as well.[16]
Without a sensuous, suffering, and passionate materialism, what Marx referred to as “social metabolism” has no “moving and generating principle.” It thus cannot actually be metabolic. Furthermore, given the present reality of climate catastrophes on what seems to be a path to apocalypse, suffering is similarly at the core of our “metabolic rift” with the rest of nature. We are, in the words of the late Ernst Bloch, a “suffering Earth” and it’s time we harnessed that infinite power for hopeful imminent communal revolution.[17]
Unlike Walter Benjamin, who took his own life, and Abram Leon, who was murdered in a gas chamber, the German-born Jewish philosopher Ernst Bloch made it out of Europe alive, eventually coming to the US. Given his insufficient allegiance to staying within the bounds of Red Scare Amerikkka though, he wasn’t afforded the opportunities presented to those who, for example, built their careers by “adapting Critical Theory to the American cultural and bureaucratic machine.”[18] As such, after writing what would become three volumes of The Principle of Hope decades later, he moved back to Germany shortly following the end of the war.
Bloch never referenced Marx’s brief articulations on feelings, emotions, passions, and suffering either. Despite this though, it found its way into his thinking too. “The Marxist approach,” Bloch wrote in the second volume, “is consciously to make history and no longer to suffer it passively.”[19] That shift, one from passivity to conscious and collective action, necessitates the passionate striving to overcome. It is cultivated through our emotionality because there is no such thing as reason without it.
In the first volume, Bloch argued that ridding ourselves of the “static concept of being” opens a door to “the real dimension of hope.” This is to a world “full of propensity towards something, tendency towards something, latency of something,” which “means fulfillment of the intending.” As Bloch put it, this takes us to “a world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation, nothingness.”[20] As we will explore later on, he was correct.
Hope is necessary in order to overcome the potential that exists within the felt experience of suffering to degrade our revolutionary capacities.
To put it another way, hope is necessary in order to overcome the potential that exists within the felt experience of suffering to degrade our revolutionary capacities, like Fromm above on circumstances being affectively crippling. There was something more deeply integral to the rest of nature itself though, a “propensity towards something,” that ultimately led Bloch to hope. It was an inherent striving, an imminence.
In his 1959 book, On Karl Marx, Bloch argued that “social revolution will finally remove the darkness of self-alienation from all mankind.” Through this, the growing power of the working class as a class “reaches beyond the radically exploited to all who suffer in common under capitalism.”[21] But this experience of suffering and commonality requires “the most worthy human capacity for comprehension and participation: namely, hope.”[22] In the words of University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum from her 2001 book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions: “The hope of being comforted gives him the courage to suffer.”[23]
Bloch devoted a chapter of his book to “Epicurus and Karl Marx.” This was in reference to Marx’s 1841 doctoral dissertation on two pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. It was titled: “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.” Marx sided more with Epicurus and Bloch believed this contained a “theory of spontaneity.”[24]
Importantly, Democritus (460-370 BCE) was the first, at least in “the west,” to put forth the idea that all matter is made up of atoms. Epicurus agreed, but looked at the world differently. He believed in chance, while Democritus believed everything was determined by a “network of conditions.” Neither were entirely correct. They needed each other.
In his own brief analysis, Bloch looked to Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer of quantum mechanics and famous for his “uncertainty principle,” in order to interpret Marx’s dissertation. To better explain a complicated scientific theorem, we turn to an earlier book by Leonard Mlodinow, one published twelve years before Emotional, titled The Grand Design, and co-authored with the late Stephen Hawking.
What we think of as matter, like the hard surfaces we walk upon, fundamentally exist in states of uncertainty and probability. “The quantum model of nature,” as they put it, “encompasses principles that contradict not only our everyday experience but our intuitive concept of reality.”[25] The particles we rely on in our everyday lives exist as probabilistic “wave functions” in conditions of “superposition” where all possibilities simultaneously exist and then “collapse” into the single objective reality we experience.
This “collapse” or “quantum decoherence” won’t occur, in the words of Mlodinow and Hawking, “unless and until those quantities are measured by an observer.” In their words, this “is an accurate description of nature.”[26] To put it another way, reality becomes the shared objective one we experience together only as a result of our sense perceptions, i.e., our sensuousness.
Bloch looked to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to better understand Marx on Epicurus regarding the “abstract possibility” for “speculative swirls” of emergent self-consciousness. What Bloch missed though was the role played by the felt experience of suffering as passionate catalyst for that self-consciousness, likely because Marx missed it too.[27] Had Bloch followed his own advice at the beginning of the chapter, he would probably have made the connection.
Perhaps it had been too difficult for him to “hold” traumatic reality in consciousness. After all, Bloch had been friends with Walter Benjamin, one of in upwards of 7 million Jewish people to have been exterminated in The Holocaust. In Benjamin’s case though, he took his own life after his hope of finally being free of the Nazi threat was destroyed at the last minute. Here is Bloch’s advice:
“A man cannot be judged solely by the company he keeps. This is often true of young people, who are easily influenced. Indeed, even at a later age, the converse is sometimes true: that no man is responsible for his acquaintances. In true love, however, or in true friendship, the encounter is quite different: the relationship is essentially important for both parties, and characteristic of both. Moreover, an opinion, a doctrine, or a book can also become a friend—and in such cases it is irrelevant whether the bearer thereof is still living or long since dead. The person who meets with such a ‘friend,’ and who goes on with it of his own choice, shows quite clearly what he is, and even more, by the way he goes about things, what he may be capable of objectively.”[28]
Therefore, as a friend and comrade with Walter Benjamin and Abram Leon, among so many more, we must examine Marx’s dissertation through the lens of their suffering. This will show what we “may be capable of objectively.” With Jenny’s help too, we can bring greater clarity to the sensuous materialism contained in its “depths.”
Marx’s first articulation of self-consciousness, found in his dissertation and predating his familiarity with class and labor, was based on Epicurus and the atom. A lack of self-consciousness, what one could perhaps think of as a version of conformity to settler LIFE, was the atom’s “relative existence” moving only in a “straight line.” In contrast, self-consciousness was understood as the “swerving away from pain and confusion, in ataraxy,” which roughly translates into a state of emotional tranquility.
This “abstract possibility” was distinct from Democritus, who believed in no more than a perfunctory or mechanical “network of conditions” from which everything was determined.[29] These “conditions” were what Marx referred to in his first insistence on the revolutionary potential of the proletariat as “real limitations.”
Marx did not make the connection back to this “pain and confusion.” Two pages later, he argued that “Repulsion is the first form of self-consciousness, it corresponds therefore to that self-consciousness which conceives itself as immediate-being, as abstractly individual.” That “repulsion” was away from “pain and confusion” and toward ataraxy, though Marx did not explicitly say so.
What most refer to as Marx’s “materialism” is the idea that everything is made up of matter and only matter exists, which is correct. Here in the dissertation, Marx added a further nuance. “But when I relate myself to myself as to something which is directly another, then my relationship is a material one.”[30] Thus “swerving away from pain and confusion” requires us to experience it ourselves and subsequently recognize the similarity in another person, i.e., our shared sensuousness. To put it another way, our relationship to one another as suffering beings, whether those beings are humans, other non-human animals, non-animal life, etc., “is a material one.”
“Thus, in hearing nature hears itself, in smelling it smells itself, in seeing it sees itself,” as Marx wrote, referring, in the next sentence, to “human sensuousness” as “the medium in which natural processes are reflected as in a focus and ignited into the light of appearance.”[31] But it would be far more accurate to say that the true “medium” is the felt experience of suffering and “ignited” in our passionate, figurative hearts. After all, this is what Marx would refer to less than three years later as our “essential force.” To put it another way, we are part of a process of nature-rendered sensuous and, therefore, suffering and passionate. This is fundamentally more than simply being of the senses.
Quantum mechanics has advanced considerably since Bloch’s brief examination in 1959. When it comes to quantum entanglement, what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” we can better plumb the depths of our humanity at the intersection of objective interconnections and subjective experience. Quantum entanglement refers to particles that, once together in some form, are subsequently bound to one another, even when separated by incomprehensibly vast distances across space and time. A change in one will spontaneously result in a corresponding change in the other, including with regards to their spin, polarization, or vibration, as they are non-locally intertwined, part of the same interconnected quantum dimensions.
The Science of Sensuousness and Quantum Entanglement
The goal is to explore the implications of quantum entanglement toward better understanding the hopeful imminence of communal revolution. Unfortunately, the science of sensuousness, on the one hand, and quantum entanglement, on the other, have yet to sufficiently meet. So, we must examine both sides first to then explore their interrelationship through the felt experience of suffering thereafter.
Published in the December 2020 issue of a physics review journal called PRX Quantum, NASA reported on their successful experiments with entanglement, what’s also referred to as “quantum teleportation.”[32] It’s not really teleportation, per se, at least in the way most people think about it. Similarly, people consider it to be what we thought impossible, i.e., faster than light “travel.” But rather than traveling in the commonplace understanding though, it occurs beyond four dimensional “space-time.”
Physicist David Wineland won a Nobel Prize in 2012 based upon years of research into entangled ions.[33] His tests maxed out the equipment at 10,000 times the speed of light and he’s not the only one.[34] Remarkably, some believe that this “teleportation” occurs via what Stephen Hawking first referred to as a “wormhole” between “black holes,” which scientists are now attempting to test in the lab.[35] Though this is not to suggest that all entanglement occurs via black holes, the idea of being connected beyond “space-time” remains the same.
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to researchers who discovered the specific ion pathways throughout the body and in the brain that are responsible for the human sense of touch and spatial awareness or proprioception, what’s sometimes referred to as our “sixth sense.” These ionic channels are large membrane proteins, “switches” called Piezo1 and Piezo2, which activate by letting individual ions in and subsequently release an electrical pulse informing what one of the researchers referred to as a “spectrum of pleasant touch to noxious to painful.”
However, he continued, “the identity of these ion channels that account for acute pain is still unknown,” referring to the distinction between a pinch or sense of external threat versus what a person would feel as a result of being shot by a gun.[36] Other researchers argue that these Piezo proteins are responsible for a broader range of pain feelings, most bodily systems in fact, while others argue that “we are at the beginning of the Piezo era of biological discovery.”[37]
As for the same institute where researchers first identified these Piezo proteins, they also discovered that they are very unique and specialized proteins that play an essential role not only throughout human and non-human animal life, but also allow plants to sense critical details about soil to optimize their root growth.[38] Molecular geneticist Johnjoe McFadden and theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili heralded what they referred to as “the coming age of quantum biology” in their 2014 book, Life on the Edge.[39] Quantum entanglement is believed to be central to plant photosynthesis, bird navigation, and possibly all human senses.[40] Depending on who one asks, the scientific jury on this is still out though.
Scientists are similarly divided on what many refer to as our “quantum brain,” like a quantum computer, processing information through particles existing as a “wave function” in “superposition” prior to “collapse.” This would be like the psychoanalytic distinction between unconscious and conscious thought, but more complex. Scientists are far from certain though because, unlike quantum computing, plants, non-human animals, and humans don’t exist at or near absolute zero temperature in an otherwise vacuum environment. This is what many believe to be required to maintain “superposition” of all possible outcomes before “quantum decoherence.”
Some theoretical physicists believe this type of quantum processing in the brain could occur within calcium phosphate clusters called “Posner molecules,” which may protect states of superposition from decoherence. Though no one has yet proven this quantum processing takes place, the origin of the research itself was based upon anti-depressant medication working differently depending on the differing spins of neutrons in different lithium isotopes used.[41] Later on, we will examine an alternate framework of quantum consciousness.
Researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School, including the chair of its Anesthesiology Department named George A. Mashour, have shown that various anesthetic drugs work by interfering with entangled photons that are somehow involved in neuron signal processing.[42] Researchers published a 2017 article in a journal called Frontiers in Bioscience Landmark on the potential that these “biophotons” operate within the brain as “optical communication channels,” which would explain how anesthetic drugs induce unconsciousness and hinder memory formation by disentangling photons. They’ve confirmed this occurrence in mice already.[43]
Mashour and colleagues at UofM’s Center for Consciousness Science delved further into “What Happens in the Brain During Unconsciousness,” using anesthesia as a basis for scientific investigation.[44] In a 2018 article in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, they used multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) to better understand the impact of anesthetics on reducing what’s known in “integrated information theory” as the degree of “integrated information in a physical system,” which refers to, in this case, the human brain.[45] As the authors put it, they were using “EEG as a correlate of consciousness,” which they expanded upon in another study published in eLife that explored which parts of the brain recovered after deep anesthesia. The capacity to perceive threat recovered among the earliest.[46]
Back in a 2008 article by Mashour in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association called “Toward a General Theory of Unconscious Processes in Psychoanalysis and Anesthesiology,” he referred to it as a “disintegration of cognitive activity” or “cognitive unbinding.”[47] Notably, though unsurprisingly, Mashour didn’t look to any of the Jewish figures who experienced Nazi fascism first-hand and used psychoanalysis to explain what Marxism could otherwise not. After all, the substantially more conservative psychoanalytic association that publishes this journal had systematically excluded them while they were alive too.
Mashour’s perspective was formed around Wilfred Bion, whose psychoanalytic framework was contained within what Clara Zetkin referred to as the “rotten ground of the bourgeois social system.” Mashour followed Bion’s thinking, in this case relating the function of the unconscious to the purpose of general anesthesia. The unconscious is thus “affective in nature,” that “both in the analytic and the anesthetic manifestations, unconscious processes can be characterized by a common structure of cognitive unbinding and a common function of affective relief.” As Mashour also put it, “one could consider the administration of an anesthetic a preemptive attack on the links that would result in intolerable pain and psychological trauma.”[48]
Mashour expanded his 2008 attempt at a theory of the unconsciousness, now in a 2011 article for Consciousness and Cognition titled “Schizophrenia, dissociation, and consciousness.” He, like Judith Herman, recognized that trauma was at the root of these “disorders,” which he then argued “could be related to underlying disruptions of connectivity patterns and neural integration.”[49] And, like Herman, the origin of his framework on trauma can be traced back to Pierre Janet, who worked under Jean-Martin Charcot of the Salpetriere hospital and asylum in Paris.
Herman, at least, acknowledged the broader class oppressive and patriarchal context. That asylum locked away, in her words, “the most wretched of the Parisian proletariat: beggars, prostitutes, and the insane.” These male psychiatrists like Charcot, Janet, Freud, and others “saw themselves as benevolent rescuers, uplifting women from their degraded condition.” She also rightly pointed out that these men “never for a moment envisioned a condition of social equality between women and men.” So their supposedly “enlightened view” was also one against “the admission of women in higher education or the professions” at the same time as they “adamantly opposed female suffrage.”[50]
Unfortunately, Herman’s perspective would constitute what historian Carolyn J. Eichner referred to as “existing within the boundaries of bourgeois liberalism,” what she goes on to describe as “bourgeois, or republican, feminism.”[51] In her 2004 book, Surmounting the Barricades, Eichner examined the role of women, their “revolutionary passions,” their socialist feminisms, and the Paris Commune of 1871.[52] Roughly a year after Charcot began his work at the Salpetriere on what was, at that time, still called “hysteria,” the Commune forcefully shut the asylum down, everyone was freed, and he had to discontinue his work.[53]
While Charcot was forced to discontinue his study of women who’d been imprisoned at this asylum, countless other women, as Eichner put it, “possessed the will to ‘surmount the barricades’ circumscribing women’s lives, whether the economic, political, and social barricades of gender and class, or the literal barricades of a street-fought civil war.”[54] Charcot, Janet, and the rest of these supposed scientists recognized that trauma was at the core of what Mashour would go on to refer to as dissociation and schizophrenia, but they entirely failed to go beyond the bounds of this bourgeois society. The fundamentally horrific reality that was exposed and overthrown by the Paris Commune was thus banished by violence after it amounted to a seventy-two-day victory for mental health.
Therefore, if, as Mashour argued, the unconscious is affective and cognitive unbinding serves a similar purpose to help us survive traumatic conditions, any such experimentation is compromised by the inability to establish actual objective control. For instance, to what extent were those conditions of dissociation and schizophrenia caused by the very systems of oppression that forced women into that asylum and men like Janet and Charcot as supposedly caretaking doctors?
How could they be scientifically sure that surmounting the figurative and/or literal barricades, as Eichner put it, wasn’t the path to mental health today? Indeed, those like Fromm built such things into his framework, so Mashour and others actually assume the “pathology of normalcy” Fromm rejected and call it objective science today. This does not mean, however, that their work has to be thrown out. It just has to be re-interpreted past the “fetish” that Ernest Becker would see it as, that we must see beyond the systems of oppression that sustain these “hordes of busy scientists.”
Feeling, Suffering, and Passion in Quantum Consciousness
Rather than searching for the specific particles responsible for quantum calculations in states of superposition within the brain, a theoretical physicist named Henry Strapp proposed a different framework back in 2007. In his article, “Quantum Approaches to Consciousness” from The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, he proposed that we view the entire brain as “an expanding cloudlike structure in a high-dimensional space.” This begins like a pure “wave function” then from unconscious to conscious thought through a process like the “collapse,” “integration,” or “binding” together of systems within the brain.
His point was that the brain does not necessarily have to maintain superposition, at least not in the same way as a quantum computer. Given the quantum nature of what constitutes the brain itself and remains at the core of its processes, it exists as a whole in a form of superposition anyway. For example, there are roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain with about 100 trillion existing connections, which is 1015. This is about the same as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.[55] As far as possible synaptic connections between those same 100 billion neurons, that’s more than the likely 1024 stars that are in the universe.[56]
“It is evident that a scientific approach to brain dynamics must in principle,” Strapp argued, “use quantum theory in order to deal properly with brain processes that depend heavily on chemical and ionic processes.” He would refer to these as “ion dynamics” a few sentences later and then “ion channels” closer to the end.[57] Importantly, this was fourteen years before researchers would win a Nobel Price for identifying the specific ion channels in the brain responsible for the sense of spatial awareness or “sixth sense” and the “spectrum of pleasant touch to noxious to painful.”
To Strapp, what ultimately emerges as consciousness goes from the superposition of all possibilities (greater than 1024 at least) that then collapses into a definitive “course of action.” This then operates based upon “quantum mechanical rules” amounting to “quantum jumps that, on the psychological side,” are “new experiences.” These “jumps” could be thought of as cognitive binding or integration, whether conscious thought itself or “associated with a newly chosen course of action.” The experiences themselves become part of “the stream of consciousness of the human agent” who “actualize brain states that contain the neural correlates of those experiences.”[58] As we will examine shortly, we can actually see this using EEG.
To further explain his views, Strapp provided a critical analysis of John von Neumann, considered among the originators of quantum mechanics. Through a three-step process, Neumann “converted” quantum theory “into a form in which the entire physical universe, including the brain of each agent, is represented in one basic quantum state, which is called the state of the universe.” We have to subsequently articulate the role played by the felt experience of suffering as unique to each of us and the broader relational web of life though.
The first process is a “free choice,” one “controlled in practice by the conscious intentions of the experimenter/participant,” what he otherwise refers to as “the thoughts, ideas, and feelings of the agent.” The second process is that which is caused by or results from this choice. We can think of it like a wave function that, if left unchecked, would spread throughout the universe, affecting everything. It “generates a continuous infinity,” in Strapp’s words. This then results in the third process, that of “Nature’s answer” to the first process, collapsing the emergent infinite possibilities of the second process into the realm of classical physics that we experience. It is not simply what we passively experience it though because, remember, we cause the collapse from wave function to particle-based reality with our sensuousness in the first place.[59]
Strapp pointed out that von Neumann et al failed to attribute any sort of “causal origins” to the first process, or to human beings generally, as in we supposedly lack conscious thought. “However,” he went on, “if willful effort can control the rate at which a sequence of similar Process 1 events occur,” then “by virtue of the quantum laws themselves,” this sequence from the first to third process would “hold a particular pattern of neurological activity in place, against the physical forces that would, both in the absence of such pairs, and also in classical physics, tend quickly to disrupt it.”[60] This is what he referred to as a “mathematical and logical foundation of a pragmatic quantum approach to neuropsychology.”[61] This is what it means to hold traumatic reality in consciousness and be quantumly entangled with one another.
This entire three process approach, Strapp pointed out, “is completely compatible with there being very strong interactions between the brain and its environment.”[62] Rather than viewing the brain as conducting quantum computations like an advanced computer utilizing superposition and avoiding decoherence in a vacuum held at or near absolute zero, the entanglement is occurring and maintained through conscious or willful actions, the “rate” of going through the three processes themselves. “Conscious experiences,” Strapp concludes, “have a quality of ‘feelingness’ about them,” which is how we can get back to where we began this exploration.[63]
Let’s briefly reinterpret Strapp through the lens of a sensuous, suffering, and passionate materialism. “To be sensuous is to suffer,” Marx wrote in 1844, adding that “Man as an objective, sensuous being, is therefore a suffering being – and because he feels what he suffers, a passionate being,” referring to passion as “the essential force of man energetically bent on its object.”[64]
Therefore, in order for Strapp’s argument about the more or less continuous “rate” of collapsing a probabilistic reality into the objective one we experience together, this requires passion, the “essential force” at the core of Strapp’s “causal origins” of the first process, that of our sensuousness itself. It turns out that, in addition to passion in 1844, while looking to Epicurus on the atom “swerving away from pain and confusion, toward atarxia” as the first argument regarding consciousness, Marx also briefly mentioned what Strapp called the “willful effort” at the core of our quantum consciousness.
At the end of his 1841 dissertation, Marx briefly outlined “a psychological law.” More specifically, he was referring to “the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself.” In his words, it “turns into practical energy, and, leaving the shadowy empire of Amenthes as will, turns itself against the reality of the world existing without it.”[65] This “shadowy empire” was a mythological Egyptian land of the dead. Therefore, this “law” was that of human life striving as “practical energy,” the power of human will.
Though Marx was in no way referring to quantum mechanics, the world existing without this human “practical energy” would be one existing as “wave functions,” nothing more than probabilities in superposition without sensuousness collapsing it into the objective reality we experience. Passion as the “essential force” ultimately “bent on its object” would be an accurate way to describe Strapp’s three processes. Reality becomes one of definitive objects only through our sensuousness.
It is through the felt experience of suffering that we can potentially cultivate and sustain the passion for revolution.
No doubt, it is through the felt experience of suffering that we can potentially cultivate and sustain the passion for revolution. It is as Fromm put it, that the “fact of suffering” yields the “striving to overcome.” Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, a Marxist and one time student of Georg Lukacs, wrote a book in 1979 called A Theory of Feelings. She regarded feelings as essential to maintaining a “homeostasis” or “equilibrium.”[66] In terms of “circumstances threatening” this “biological homeostasis,” she argued that “feeling signals precisely this threat,” informing “us that something is ‘out of order’ in our system.”[67]
In her two-page epilogue on “Human Suffering,” she distinguished it from pain in the way that the unconscious is differentiated from consciousness. “Pain is a negative feeling,” she argued, that it “develops precisely when action or refraining from action has been tied together to intention.” We understand it as being somehow caused. “Suffering, on the other hand, is a kind of pain that falls on me completely from the outside.” She goes on to argue that it “does not signal ‘help yourself, help others,’ because suffering is a kind of pain that cannot be helped. Suffering can at most be suffered.”[68]
At the end of the second page, she offers up the book’s conclusion: “To feel means to be involved in something,” she argued, which entails an inherent condition of vulnerability “Because never has danger been so great.” Unfortunately, this danger has only increased since then. For many, it is overwhelming. “Suffering must be converted into pain,” she continued, “in order for us to become involved in the cause of mankind.” This conversion of suffering into pain entails the signal to inform both its cause and means of abolition.[69]
As a pertinent example of this, think back on the seventy-two days of the Paris Commune. Where did that reality go? To many, it never existed. Try to imagine what it could have been like to be one of the women imprisoned in the asylum, struggling against the cognitive unbinding of a fundamentally traumatic reality where those who held power over you denied the existence of the systems of oppression that caused your pain in the first place. Considering what Herman referred to as the “central dialectic of psychological trauma,” would not banishing that pain from consciousness, thus rending it into suffering, be necessary to endure such harsh conditions?
Now, try to imagine being freed from that prison, finding yourself in an emergent communal world. Those systems of oppression were thus brought out in the open, at least to an extent, in that particular time and place. In a quantum sense, the nature of reality fundamentally changed. It was no longer the reality of a dictatorial regime enforcing horrific conditions of hetero-patriarchy and class oppression. But in order to sustain that new reality, it took a passionate uprising and defense against monarchical forces seeking a return to an even harsher reality.
That passionate defense was not just against the Paris Commune being violently destroyed and the restoration of a brutal monarchic dictatorship. Their “revolutionary passions,” as Eichner put it, was the same “willful effort” as the “causal origins” of the three processes that Henry Strapp outlined at the core of our quantum consciousness. It’s what sustained the “rate” of quantum decoherence and thus into the objective reality of the commune itself. Similarly, this is another way to understand Fromm on historical conditions of affective crippling.
Our enemies, today just as yesterday, not only seek our defeat, but the annihilation of our capacity to conceive of an alternative. Their power is fundamentally based on ensuring the perpetuation of cognitive unbinding. They wish to destroy the possibility of any other objective reality. We can think of this in terms of the women freed from the asylum and the prospect of any who potentially ended up back in that prison after the commune was defeated.
The inherently traumatic reality of experiencing those systems of oppression would be thus denied yet again, in favor of the rotten hetero-patriarchal ground of the bourgeois social system enforced through brutal monarchic dictatorship. Whereas what had been “revolutionary passions” sustaining a sufficient “rate” among countless people creating the reality of the Paris Commune, that subsequently re-imprisoned woman was fundamentally isolated. She lacked that alliance that affirms and protects.
Thus, her capacity for holding traumatic reality in consciousness, recognizing the systems of oppression for what they were, fighting for herself with “willful effort” at the level of quantum consciousness and/or “revolutionary passion” against barricades in the asylum, was fundamentally more difficult. Try to imagine staying “sane” and “whole” then. Alas, “insanity” until death sounds far easier. This brings us back to Clara Zetkin on the need to bring forth “the entire noble inner substance of communism,” now against resurgent fascism today. This is necessary to sustain our quantum consciousness, strengthening our entanglement through revolutionary passions on the path of hopeful imminent communal revolution.
NOTES
[1] Leonard Mlodinow, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, (New York: Pantheon Books, 2022); Ibid, “What We Get Wrong About Emotions,” The Atlantic, January 4th, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/01/emotion-isnt-the-enemy-of-reason/621148/
[2] Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).
[3] William V. Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). P. 407.
[4] Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, (New York City, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1965).
[5] Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, (New York: Routledge Classics, 2008). P. 256.
[6] Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 360 and 393.
[7] Fromm, The Sane Society, 267.
[8] Ibid, 259.
[9] Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973). P. 365.
[10] Ibid, 199.
[11] Raya Dunayevskaya, “In Memoriam” in The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, Edited by Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, (New York: Lexington Books, 2012). P. 237.
[12] Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 261-262.
[13] James D. White, Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism, 240-244.
[14] Mandeep Dhillon, “Community self-defense, capitalism and COVID-19,” Toward Freedom, May 18th, 2020. https://towardfreedom.org/story/community-self-defense-capitalism-and-covid-19/
[15] Craig Spencer, “Omicron Will Overwhelm America’s Emergency Rooms,” The Atlantic, December 21st, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/our-emergency-rooms-arent-ready-for-omicron/621080/
[16] John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020); Peter Wohlleben, “Plants Feel Pain and Might Even See,” Nautilus, July 21st, 2021. https://nautil.us/issue/104/harmony/plants-feel-pain-and-might-even-see ; Nicoletta Lanses, “Plants 'Scream' in the Face of Stress,” LiveScience, December 6th, 2019. https://www.livescience.com/plants-squeal-when-stressed.html
[17] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope: Volume 2, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). P. 495
[18] Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kircheimer, Secrets Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, edited by Raffaele Laudani, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013). P. 8.
[19] Bloch, The Principle of Hope: Volume 2, 470.
[20] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope: Volume 1, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). P. 18.
[21] Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx, (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971). P. 22.
[22] Ibid, 38.
[23] Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). P. 175-176.
[24] Bloch, On Karl Marx, 157.
[25] Stephen W. Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, “Alternative Histories” in The Grand Design, (New York, Bantam Books, 2010). Ebook Edition.
[26] Ibid, “What is Reality” in The Grand Design. Ebook Edition.
[27] Bloch, On Karl Marx, 155-156.
[28] Ibid, 153.
[29] Paul M. Schafer, The First Writings of Karl Marx, (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2006). P. 115 and 104.
[30] Ibid, 117.
[31] Ibid, 135.
[32] Mario Alvaro Limos, “NASA Just Quantum-Teleported Data Faster Than the Speed of Light, Esquire Magazine, December 23rd, 2020. https://www.esquiremag.ph/culture/tech/nasa-just-quantum-teleported-data-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-a00293-20201223
[33] Laura Ost, “NIST Demonstrates 'Teleportation' of Atomic States for Quantum Computing,” National Institute of Standards and Technology, June 16th, 2004. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2004/06/nist-demonstrates-teleportation-atomic-states-quantum-computing
[34] JR Minkel, “Quantum weirdness wins again: Entanglement clocks in at 10,000+ times faster than light,” Scientific American, August 13th, 2008. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/quantum-weirdnes-wins-again-entangl-2008-08-13/
[35] Tom Siegried, “A new ‘Einstein’ equation suggests wormholes hold key to quantum gravity,” Science News, August 17th, 2016. https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/new-einstein-equation-wormholes-quantum-gravity; Ibid, “Modern-day Alice trades looking glass for wormhole to explore quantum wonderland,” Science News, August 2nd, 2017. https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/wormhole-black-hole-quantum-entanglement; Philip Ball, “Wormholes Reveal a Way to Manipulate Black Hole Information in the Lab,” Quanta Magazine, February 27th, 2020. https://www.quantamagazine.org/wormholes-reveal-a-way-to-manipulate-black-hole-information-in-the-lab-20200227/
[36] Brian Resnick, “Our amazing sense of touch, explained by a Nobel laureate,” Vox, October 6th, 2021. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22710533/nobel-prize-2021-ardem-patapoutian-touch; Tim Brinkhof, “Beyond pain and pressure: 2021 Nobel Prize for medicine awards work on sensory perception,” Big Think, October 7th, 2021. https://bigthink.com/hard-science/nobel-prize-2021-medicine/
[37] Xiang-Zhi Fang et al, “Structure, kinetic properties and biological function of mechanosensitive Piezo channels,” Cell & Bioscience, vol. 11,1 13. 9 Jan. 2021, doi:10.1186/s13578-020-00522-z; David J. Beech and Bailong Xiao, “Piezo channel mechanisms in health and disease,” The Journal of Physiology, vol. 596,6 (2018): 965-967. doi:10.1113/JP274395
[38] The Scripps Research Institute, “Force-sensing PIEZO proteins are at work in plants, too,” Science X, May 14th, 2021. https://phys.org/news/2021-05-force-sensing-piezo-proteins.html; Seyed A. R. Mousavi et al, PIEZO ion channel is required for root mechanotransduction in Arabidopsis thaliana, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2102188118
[39] Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili, Life on the Edge: The Coming Age of Quantum Biology, (New York: Crown Publishers, 2014); Ibid, “You’re powered by quantum mechanics. No, really…” The Guardian, October 25th, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/26/youre-powered-by-quantum-mechanics-biology
[40] Brandon Keim, “Everywhere in a Flash: The Quantum Physics of Photosynthesis,” WIRED, February 3rd, 2010. https://www.wired.com/2010/02/quantum-photosynthesis/; Peter J. Hore and Henrik Mouritsen, “How Migrating Birds Use Quantum Effects to Navigate,” Scientific American, April 1st, 2022. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-migrating-birds-use-quantum-effects-to-navigate/; Tim Folger, “How Quantum Mechanics Lets Us See, Smell and Touch,” Discover Magazine, October 23rd, 2018. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-quantum-mechanics-lets-us-see-smell-and-touch
[41] Jennifer Ouelette, “A New Spin on the Quantum Brain,” Quanta Magazine, November 2nd, 2016. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-brain-20161102/
[42] Morgan Sherburne, “The quantum brain: What a laser can tell us about the relationship between entangled photons and neurons,” University of Michigan, August 12th, 2020. https://news.umich.edu/the-quantum-brain-what-a-laser-can-tell-us-about-the-relationship-between-entangled-photons-and-neurons/
[43] Zarkeshian et al, “Are there optical communication channels in the brain?” Frontiers in Bioscience Landmark, Volume 23, Issue 8. DOI: 10.2741/4652
[44] Kylie Urban, “What Happens in the Brain During Unconsciousness?” University of Michigan Health Lab, February 22nd, 2018. https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/lab-report/what-happens-brain-during-unconsciousness
[45] Mashour et al, “Estimating the Integrated Information Measure Phi from High-Density Electroencephalography during States of Consciousness in Humans,” Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, Volume 16, February 2018. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00042
[46] Kelly Malcom, “Escape from Oblivion: How the Brain Reboots after Deep Anesthesia,” University of Michigan Health Lab, May 26th, 2021. https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/lab-report/escape-from-oblivion-how-brain-reboots-after-deep-anesthesia; Mashour et al, “Recovery of consciousness and cognition after general anesthesia in humans,” eLife, May 10th, 2021. https://elifesciences.org/articles/59525
[47] George A. Mashour, “Toward a General Theory of Unconscious Processes in Psychoanalysis and Anesthesiology,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Volume 56, Issue 1, 2008. P. 203.
[48] Ibid, 215.
[49] Petr Bob and George A. Mashour, “Schizophrenia, dissociation, and consciousness,” Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 20, Issue 3, December 2011. P. 1043.
[50] Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 16.
[51] Carolyn J. Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). P. 9.
[52] Ibid, IX and 1.
[53] Olivier Walusinski MD, “Hysteria: The Modern Birth of an Enigma,” in Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, Volume 33, 2014. P. 65-77.
[54] Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades, IX.
[55] Sarah DeWeerdt, “How to map the brain,” Nature, July 24th, 2019. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0
[56] Elizabeth Howell and Ailsa Harvey, “How many stars are in the universe?” Space, February 11th, 2022. https://www.space.com/26078-how-many-stars-are-there.html
[57] Henry Strapp, “Quantum Approaches to Consciousness” in The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). P. 889 and 903.
[58] Ibid, 889.
[59] Ibid, 896.
[60] Ibid, 896-897.
[61] Ibid, 899.
[62] Ibid, 902.
[63] Ibid, 905.
[64] Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 155.
[65] Schafer, The First Writings of Karl Marx, 149.
[66] Agnes Heller, A Theory of Feelings, (Netherlands: Von Gorcum and Company, 1979). P. 34.
[67] Ibid, 51.
[68] Ibid, 243.
[69] Ibid, 244.
Atlee McFellin is a former restaurant worker living in Cleveland, Ohio and originally from Battle Creek, Michigan. He was raised in no small part by his late maternal grandmother who was born into a middle-class Catholic family and grew up in Hitler’s Germany. Atlee’s writings can be found online at rupture.capital.
He is a member of the Cleveland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), DSA’s national Mutual Aid Working Group, and CounterPower, an organization dedicated to, among other things, building a revolutionary commune of communes. Over a decade ago, before becoming disgusted by the non-profit industrial complex, he worked for the Democracy Collaborative on the Evergreen Cooperatives, the American Sustainable Business Council, and Green for All. He was also board co-chair of the New Economy Network and a founding board member of the New Economy Coalition.
