Quantum mysticism

What it is

The use of quantum-mechanical vocabulary — observation, entanglement, superposition, the collapse of the wave function, vibration, frequency, the field — to support spiritual and metaphysical claims.

The recurring assertions:

• Observation creates reality, so consciousness determines what exists
• Everything is vibration, so matching your frequency to a desired outcome attracts it
• Entanglement demonstrates that everything is connected, and explains distant healing and telepathy
• Quantum uncertainty leaves room for free will, spirit, or divine action
• The observer effect proves the mind is fundamental

Where it came from

The historical starting point is genuine and this is what makes the whole thing durable: the founders of quantum mechanics really did talk this way.

Erwin Schrödinger read the Upaniṣads and wrote about Vedānta explicitly. Werner Heisenberg wrote about Plato and about the limits of objective description. Wolfgang Pauli collaborated with Jung on synchronicity for years and co-authored a book with him. Eugene Wigner proposed seriously that consciousness causes wave-function collapse. Niels Bohr's complementarity had philosophical ambitions well beyond physics.

These were not cranks. They were the people who built the theory, and they found its interpretation genuinely disturbing.

The popular version came later. Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) drew parallels between quantum theory and Eastern mysticism for a mass audience. Deepak Chopra built a large body of work on "quantum healing" from the late 1980s. What the Bleep Do We Know!? (2004) — a film featuring, among others, a channelled 30,000-year-old entity presented alongside physicists — took it further, and The Secret (2006) attached it to the law of attraction.

How it is used

As the scientific credential for claims that would otherwise have none. The pattern is consistent: an established piece of physics is stated correctly, then a conclusion is drawn that does not follow from it.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the specific claims are wrong, and can say exactly how.

"Observation" in quantum mechanics does not mean a conscious observer. It means interaction with a measuring apparatus — any physical system capable of registering the outcome. A photographic plate, a photon, a stray air molecule will do it. Decoherence, worked out from the 1970s onward, explains how quantum behaviour gives way to classical behaviour through environmental interaction with no mind involved anywhere. This is the load-bearing error in the entire genre.

Entanglement does not allow influence at a distance. Entangled particles show correlated measurement outcomes; the no-communication theorem proves that no information can be transmitted this way. You cannot signal, heal, or influence anything through entanglement, and this is not an open question — it is a theorem.

"Vibration" and "frequency" are not being used in their physical senses. Every particle has an associated wavelength; that is not the same claim as a person having a "high vibration", and the two have nothing to do with each other beyond the word.

Quantum effects at the scale of thoughts and outcomes are not in evidence. Whether quantum processes play a functional role in the brain is a live scientific question — Penrose and Hameroff's orchestrated objective reduction is the serious proposal — and it is a minority view facing a hard decoherence objection. Even if true, it would not licence any of the claims above.

We can say Wigner abandoned his own position. The consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation he proposed in 1961 was withdrawn by him later, partly because it implies solipsistic absurdities. It is now held by very few physicists, and the majority interpretations — decoherence with various readings, many-worlds, pilot-wave, QBism — give consciousness no special role at all.

We can say the interpretation of quantum mechanics is genuinely unsettled, and that this is not the same thing. Physicists disagree, seriously, about what the formalism means. That is a real dispute about measurement, locality and realism, conducted with mathematics. It provides no support for manifestation, healing or telepathy, and pointing at the disagreement as though it were a licence is the move this article exists to identify.

And we can say the underlying instinct is not stupid. People reach for physics because they want their metaphysics to be permitted by the world as science describes it — which is a reasonable want, and is exactly what idealism and panpsychism pursue properly, with argument rather than borrowed vocabulary. Those positions are held by working philosophers and are not embarrassing. Quantum mysticism is what the same impulse looks like when it skips the work.

We cannot say physics has ruled out every metaphysical claim; it has not, and it does not try. What we can say is that the specific inferences drawn in this literature do not follow, that the errors are identifiable rather than matters of taste, and that anyone using "quantum" as an intensifier is telling you something about their argument.

Further reading

• Sean Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden (2019) — on what the interpretations actually say.
• Victor Stenger, Quantum Gods (2009).
• Arthur Fine or David Albert on the measurement problem, for the real version of the puzzle.