Thought is able to unite differences across space and time differences. When we see something green, green can describe leaves on a tree that are spatially separated, or the same leaf in different moments in time. Mind is, like the quantum, able to collapse space and time, in a manner which is analogous to quantum smearing. Furthermore, as Whitehead has argued, all quantum events, because they are ‘uncertain’ to outside observers, have a degree of ‘privacy’ to them – that is, they cannot be predicted, there is what seems to be a fundamental randomness at work here. Whether this is the result of indirect influence of the apprehension of the larger context by a quantum event, or simply a result of limitations of our knowledge, remains the sort of epistemological/ontological distinction we mentioned at the start of this post. But either way, it seems that there is something at least ‘internal’ to each of the most basic objects in the world. That is, there is something ‘like’ mind at work in the most basic objects in existence.
The result is that quantum mechanics does seem to endorse a quasi-Leibnizian view of the world. There is a windowless ‘monad’ or interior privacy within each basic quantum event, one which seems to resonate with the larger world, but which does not touch it directly. What does touch the world directly is, rather, the physical object that corresponds to such a monad (what many commentators on Leibniz have referred to as a monad’s ‘body’, to which it is connected by what Leibniz calls the ‘viniculum’).
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All matter can thus be said, in a sense, to possess something like mind or proto-mind, depending on how you define mind. But it thus becomes much less problematic to wonder how it is that matter ‘emerges’ seemingly spontaneously from mind… That is, there’s something like the potentiality for what we call mind (and perhaps other types of mind as well), all the way down to the very bedrock of what we know as matter, namely, the quantum event.