Quantum Anthropology : Man, Cultures, and Groups in a Quantum Perspective

Quantum Anthropology Man, Cultures, and Groups in a Quantum Perspective Radek Trnka Radmila Lorencová Reviewed by: Karel Balcar František Vrhel Published by Charles University, Karolinum Press Edited by Jana Jindrová Layout by Zdeněk Ziegler Typeset by DTP Karolinum First edition ISBN 978-80-246-3470-8 ISBN 978-80-246-3526-2 (pdf) Charles University Karolinum Press 2016 www.karolinum.cz [email protected] Dedicated to Richard Contents Acknowledgements /9 1. Introduction: Why Quantum Anthropology? /11 2. Empirical and Nonempirical Reality /29 3. Appearance, Frames, Intra-Acting Agencies, and Observer Efect /43 4. Emergence of Man and Culture /49 5. Fields, Groups, Cultures, and Social Complexity /58 6. Man as Embodiment /73 7. Collective Consciousness and Collective Unconscious in Anthropology /81 8. Life Trajectories of Man, Cultures and Societies /91 9. Death and Final Collapses of Cultures and Societies /103 10. Language, Collapse of Wave Function, and Deconstruction /116 11. Myth and Entanglement /124 12. Ritual, Observer Efect, and Collective Consciousness /136 13. Conclusions and Future Directions /146 Glossary /158 References /171 Index /181 About the authors /192 ( 9 ) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, we thank both reviewers, Karel Balcar and František Vrhel, for the energy and keenness that they have invested to the reading of this book and their inspiring suggestions. We thank our families for their unlagging support during the writing of this book. he development of our ideas would not be possible without the openness of the deans of the Faculty of Humanities (Charles University in Prague) – Marie Pětová, and the Prague College of Psychosocial Studies – Jiří Růžička. Both of them have created a free and inspiring academic environment where the birth of new quantum anthropological thinking was possible. We thank Peter Tavel for his long-lasting support of our scientiic work. Many thanks to Oliver Venz and Stanislav Lhota for their kind help during our ield research in Kalimantan, Indonesia, to Eduard Petiška for his online support, to Inna Čábelková for checking some of the chapters, and to Jiří Suchomel for introducing us to special mathematical principles. And we also wish to thank all our academic friends and colleagues for the social environment that has motivated us to stay in the academic sphere. We further give many thanks to Jan Sokol, Zdeněk Pinc, Miloš Havelka, Helena Hudečková, and Luděk Bartoš for their kind support during the initial stage of our scientiic career. Many thanks also to Jan Havlíček and all members of the Prague Human Ethological Research Group for inspiring and thought-provoking ideas related to the interference between sociocultural anthropology and human ethology. ( 16 ) Perhaps surprisingly, quantum theory and quantum philosophy have many contact surfaces with contemporary thinking in sociocultural anthropology. Avoiding the situation where one would get the false impression that quantum logic is implanted into anthropology “forcibly” from the outside, we will present here the evidence that a continuity with the past anthropological tradition exists. We will show that quantum anthropology is not constructed artiicially, but that this new discipline has naturally arisen in the low of the long-lasting development of anthropological discourse. his continuity is very important, and we will therefore pay attention to it in the following text. One can understand the birth of quantum anthropology as a natural outcome of the developments of anthropological discourse in the past century. Eforts to overcome ethnocentrism started at the beginning of twentieth century, which gave way to an increase in the popularity of cultural relativism in anthropology. he relativistic logic of cultural relativism mirrors the changes that occurred several years previously in physics, i.e. after Albert Einstein (1920 [1916]) formulated the irst version of the theory of relativity. We do not want to speculate about the relationship between these two fundamental shifts in both anthropology and in physics, but relativism and the emic/etic perspective have arisen in the discipline and fundamentally shaped the further development of sociocultural anthropology for decades. Another root of quantum anthropology may be seen in the emergence of constructivism in sociocultural anthropology. Very similarly to the key signiicance of the observer efect in quantum mechanics, social and cultural anthropologists have realized that only the researcher plays a key role in the construction of the social reality that he or she observes. Keeping in mind the position of a researcher, many constructivist, and later also deconstructivist, approaches have started to occupy the ield, and we aford to state that these inluences are still present in the discourse of sociocultural anthropology. Also, the postmodern shift in anthropological discourse may be even understood as an extreme application of relativistic logic. he position that “everything is relative” is quite closely related to the idea that “nothing in anthropology can possibly be exactly deined”. Taking a closer look at current inluential ( 17 ) theo ries in anthropology, many traces of quantum and relativistic logic can be distinguished. he very recent “ontological turn” in sociocultural anthropology is mostly based on the relativism that is pronounced in a perspectival and comparative manner in this ield (e.g., Alberti et al., 2011; Paleček and Risjord, 2012; Venkatesen, 2010; Viveiros de Castro, 2004). Allow us to present several, maybe coincidental, parallels between quantum and anthropological thinking in the following text. Postmodern anthropological theory and standpoint theory (Baudrillard, 1995; Derrida, 1997 [1967]; Foucault, 1970; Lyotard, 1984; Rolin, 2009) have highlighted subjectivity, the individual’s perspective, and inter-subjective discourses. his emphasis corresponds well with the observer efect in quantum mechanics. Another mark of the postmodern shift in anthropology was the skepticism targeted at science and at its potential to produce objective and universally valid knowledge. his standpoint also represents a mark of relativistic logic, which is applied in a relatively extreme manner during this period of anthropological inquiry. In a similar vein, postmodern critical theory (Baudrillard, 1995; Foucault, 1970) highlighted the importance of the social construction of reality, and it relativized the stability of meaning over time. Meanings are suggested to be unstable due to the ongoing transformations of social structures. Here, a parallel with relativistic logic is able to be distinguished, as well. he postmodern critical theory further proposes that only local cultural manifestations are available to researchers in a particular time and space. his basal idea is analogical to the moment of observation in quantum theory – the external observer may only observe just the particular manifestation of particles in time and space, i.e. the entities that appear to the observer during their wave function collapses. Furthermore, the concept of ields found in theory of practice (Bourdieu, 1977) is another example of coincidence between quantum and anthropological thinking. Fields such as religion, arts, or education are suggested to be structured social spaces existing in various cultural settings. But, when we are not satisied with the understanding of ields merely as fashionable metaphors inspiring anthropological writings, we must seriously inquire after the real character of these ields. Do these ields have ( 18 ) a quantum nature? Are these ields informational spectra? Are these ields energies? Can material expressions of culture be considered products of the actualized agency of these ields? Such questions elicit new inquiry and conceptual questions. If quantum ield theory currently explains the diference between classic and quantum ields, the ields proposed by theory of practice should somehow be connected with theoretical physics. Otherwise, such anthropological theory would sufer from the disconnection of its theoretical embeddedness from the physical world where man and agency do indeed operate. Furthermore, the relationship between signs and meanings in Derrida’s concept of deconstruction (1997 [1967]) is also an example of, maybe coincidental, emergence of similar thoughts in anthropology and quantum mechanics. his concept supposes that signs exist only in relation to each other. he meaning of one sign exists only in relation to another sign or sings. his contingency is analogical to the efect of quantum entanglement known well in quantum theory. Microparticles do not exist as separate entities, but are always entangled. he quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of other particles. A similar logic is apparent in the relationality of meanings and signs. Many other interesting parallels with quantum thinking can be found in ideas of the current “ontological turn” in sociocultural anthropology, also called ontological perspectivism or perspectival anthropology (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). he studies following the “ontological turn” suggested a shift of the internal logic of an anthropologist to some diferent cultural positionalities (Alberti et al., 2011; Venkatesen, 2010; Viveiros de Castro, 2004). Multiple realities, multiple ontologies, and multiple positions that people are taking are taken into account for the design of anthropological inquiry. his relativistic position is not far from some of the principal ideas of Einstein’s theory of relativity (1920 [1916]). Furthermore, the “ontological turn” also considers some points of probabilistic logic. For example, the self is understood as the nexus of a set of possible relationships (Paleček and Risjord, 2012). his conceptualization implicitly includes the assumption that the self may realize some of its possible connections with certain probabilities. Some connections are more probable and some less. ( 19 ) And inally, the theoretical principles of the “ontological turn” are also closely entangled with the idea of the observer efect in quantum theory. he anthropologist always interacts with the investigated material, i.e. with participants or material entities, and as such, he/she inluences, for example, the participants’ participation in interviews, and possibly also the participants’ experience of alterity (Alberti et al., 2011). Another related example is much more connected to the agency of environment. Paleček and Risjord (2012) pointed out that thinking is partly constituted by interaction with things in the environment. So here we see how the observed (the objects in the environment) inluences the observer (the observer’s thinking). hese examples have showed how the observer efect is included in the multi-layered character of anthropological investigation. All of the aforementioned brief examples are only some of the instances where some parallels between quantum theory and contemporary anthropological theory can be found. It is not an exhaustive account, but these examples show us the underlying substrate from which the new anthropological theory is sprouting. Under the circumstances of anthropological discourse at the end of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that a new wave of anthropologists inspired by quantum thinking has started to emerge in the ield. In the 1990s, the term quantum anthropology (Pownell, 1996) or quantum ethnography (Vann, 1995) were coined, but no clear delineation of this ield has yet occurred. But, after the turn of the century, the discipline of quantum anthropology arose. From this time on, we can recently distinguish several works that may be considered to be quantum anthropological (Barad, 2007; Bergallo, 2002; Kirby, 2011; Russell, 2013; Trnka, 2015a; Wendt, 2006, 2015). Although these works originated from diferent subields and were focused on various issues, they had one thing in common: All of these works integrated quantum principles into various interpretations of man and humanity. To be more speciic, all of them used the probabilistic logic of quantum theory, and all of them also worked with the distinction between the realm of potentiality and actuality. Also, the observer efect was incorporated in most of these works, especially with a focus on agency, or, better said, on the interconnection between agency and the observer efect. Most of ( 20 ) these studies also more or less consistently considered wave-particle duality (complementarity) and wave function collapse for various interpretations of man and humanity. hese publications have indicated the start of a “quantum turn” in sociocultural anthropology, and other related events have also occurred simultaneously. First of all, in 2013, the University of Oxford launched he Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH, www.torch.ox.ac.uk/about), and the main mission of this research center has been the collaboration of scholars in the humanities with researchers from across other disciplines. Encouraging intellectual risk-taking and incubating new ideas are proposed to be some of TORCH’s core values. Just on the university ground of this research center, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, Ian Walmsley, highlighted the importance of quantum mechanics for the further development of the humanities and social sciences during the conference “Randomness and Order” in February 2015. He posited the key question whether the humanities and the social sciences should further persist on the basis of principles of classic materialism and classic physics? his presentation and panel discussion elicited a very extensive follow-up discussion on the anthropological forum Open Anthropology Cooperative (http://openanthcoop.ning.com/). Many anthropologists have started to join the discussion and suggested very inspiring insights in relation to the new, nascent discipline of quantum anthropology. In 2016, quantum anthropology started to be also taught in the academic sphere. he irst series of lessons for Erasmus students, called “Quantum Anthropology and Quantum Cognition”, was given by one of the authors of this book, Radek Trnka, at the Prague College of Psychosocial Studies. All of the aforementioned quantum anthropological publications contributed to the deconstruction of some parts of anthropological theory that were still based on the principles of classic, Newtonian physics. hese deconstructions are very important, because they open new views of otherwise traditional anthropological concerns. For example, Wendt (2006, 2015) highlighted the implications of the ield of quantum consciousness for anthropological theory, whereas Trnka (2015a) developed a quantum model of the collapses of social, cultural, and political systems. In contrast, Barad (2007) and Kirby (2011) worked more ( 21 ) on the discursive practices and boundaries of human concepts, and Bergallo (2002) focused her attention on the quantum interpretation of rituals. hings that previously seemed to be evident have come to be understood diferently in light of the new evidence from research in quantum mechanics. hese deconstructions have elicited many new questions and impulses for some alternative views of man, humanity, and social life. hese new insights and the currently still emerging issues have also inluenced the integral form of quantum anthropology that is introduced in this book. It is necessary to point out that all of the aforementioned attempts shared a cautiousness and vigilance. Formulations and explanations had the character of indications rather than of inal statements, because all of these scholars have kept relexively in mind that this new anthropological discipline is still at its beginning. Also, for this reason, the content of this book has been discussed extensively with many experts from the ield of sociocultural anthropology. One of the serious critical comments we received was the notion that the application of quantum principles in sociocultural anthropology has the character rather of a metaphorical analogy, in other words, that the general patterns found in the research of microparticles cannot be successfully applied to the interpretation of man, culture, and humanity. Indeed, one of authors of this book expressed the same concern in his previous study (Trnka, 2015a). his study focused on collapses of social, cultural, and political systems: “I will especially focus on the relation of the collapse of the wave function from the perspective of quantum theory with collapses in general, that is, in the sense of a sudden and fundamental transformation of the given system. ... We are confronted with the question of whether we can generalize any patterns of the development of systems on various levels of analysis?” (Trnka, 2015a, p. 16) his key question still remains. Is it possible to use some patterns of the behavior of systems on a lower analytical level for the explanation of the behavior of systems on a higher analytical level? In the following text, we will prove that the answer is “yes” due to the legitimacy of isomorphism across diferent analytical frames. ( 22 ) he idea of isomorphism has already been included in the core of the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963). Isomorphic universal structures, called infrastructures, are considered to be a key force for the coordination and regulation of all societies. Structural anthropology sought for invariants that underlie the uniqueness and variability of the observed phenomena. Lévi-Strauss (1963) suggested that common, universal structures can be found behind all cultural patterns, and that universal structures found in one cultural group can be successfully applied for the explanation of cultural patterns of other cultural groups. From this perspective, the idea of isomorphism stays in the center of classic structural anthropology. he ideas of isomorphism and structural uniformity are not to be found only in the ield of sociocultural anthropology, but they are also traditionally accepted by systems theories. One of the main initial ideas of general systems theory has been to investigate the isomorphy of concepts, laws, and models from various ields, and to help in the useful transfers from one ield to another (Hester and Adams, 2014). A suicient level of abstraction is the tool that makes the identiication of isomorphic patterns across diferent levels of analysis possible. Isomorphism is an equivalence of general form. When two systems are isomorphic, the generalized elements and relationships can be placed in one-to-one correspondence with the elements and relationships of the other (Whitchurch and Constantine, 1993). Some general patterns in behavior or structure are suggested to be possibly identiied in systems investigated on diferent analytical levels (Luhmann, 1995). Within the ield of organization research, these general, isomorphic patterns are called “system archetypes”, “generic structures”, or “standard structures” (Mella, 2014). Such patterns are deined as “general and stable models of relations that frequently recur in various situations in any type of organization, public as well as private companies, and in diferent environments” (Mella, 2014, p. 35). But, in spite of diferent terms, the underlying isomorphism is understood in a similar manner. he possibility of identifying isomorphic patterns in various systems and across diferent analytical levels means that the use of quantum principles for the explanation of anthropological issues is not only a metaphor. he isomorphism of systems on a general level justiies the reliable application of quantum princi- ( 23 ) ples in sociocultural anthropology, although we can agree that such an interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge should be very careful and sensitive. he efort to identify general, isomorphic forms across ields and analytical levels may elicit the impression that systems approaches do not consider any speciicity. And what is more important for cultural relativism in the sociocultural anthropology than highlighting the cultural speciicities and uniqueness of cultural ontologies? Paradoxically, this point does not indicate any incongruity between these approaches. he systemic understanding of reality realizes that extracting general, isomorphic patterns does not mean neglecting speciicities. Systems analysts traditionally focused their attention to variations, alterity, and variability (Luhmann, 1995; Mella, 2014). Mella (2014, p. VI) straightforwardly pointed out that “we must not limit our observation to that which appears constant but ‘search for what varies’; the variables are what interest the systems thinker”. And, Whitchurch and Constantine (1993) also suggested that the generalization of patterns of behaviors or structures does not cause mechanical reductionism, because these general patterns do not decompose into fractional and isolated parts. he generalization of patterns also does not constitute any threat for cultural relativism and the consideration of alterity in the ield of sociocultural anthropology. he only thing is to consider the level of abstraction used for extracting general patterns. Let us describe two extreme positions, a more abstract view and a less abstract view. If we work with a high level of abstraction, only generalized forms are available, and we should keep this fact in mind. In a very high level of abstraction, many cultures may share some general invariant patterns, e.g. ideas, rules, or symbols. When we go down to a less abstract level, cultural speciicities arise, and we must conclude that each culture is absolutely unique and that it is not possible to say that they have anything general in common. his “change of optics” allows us to analyze a problem using diferent strategies, and it also enables diferent appearances of the problem to be available to the researcher. Such a pluralistic analytical approach is also in accordance with the complementarity principle (Bohr, 1928). he main idea is that no single perspective or view of a system can provide complete knowledge of the system (Hester and Adams, 2014). An ( 24 ) understanding always improves when additional perspectives are added to it. Each additional perspective or view of a system will reveal additional truths about the issue under investigation. As the time of investigation and the number of perspectives increases, our understanding increases dramatically. hus, the depth of understanding is a function of time and the number of perspectives. As is apparent, this also has a key importance for anthropological inquiry. It seems that when interpreting anthropological observation solely from one perspective, our understanding of the phenomenon is limited. On the contrary, contrasting and switching between diferent perspectives provides us with a deeper understanding of the given phenomenon. he appearance of sociocultural reality is always relative and dependent on the time spent investigating and on the number of perspectives used. For this reason, it is suggested that relexive and relativistic anthropological investigation should be based on contrasting diferent perspectives and on an attempt for achieving a multi-layered approach to the problem. We also adopt this logic when we have conceptualized the new quantum anthropology. Quantum anthropology is not closed to the theory and practice that have originated from other disciplines than sociocultural anthropology. he close relationship between anthropology and philosophy has a long tradition, and may be considered to be almost self-evident. But, we have not shut our eyes to the new indings also in sociology, psychology, and quantum consciousness. All of these disciplines share the same concern, i.e. the investigation of man, sociality, and human action in the world. Although using diferent methods and interpretative perspectives, the object of investigation is the same. herefore, some of the issues included in this book have been inspired by theory or practice arising from other than anthropological discourse. We believe that this interdisciplinarity will help to reinforce the future communication between neighboring disciplines in the ields of social science and the humanities. Also, for this interdisciplinary overlap, we have considered the quantum anthropology introduced in this book to be an integral form of quantum anthropology. Now, however, we should move on to the key questions of how do we interpret the new quantum anthropology, and what ( 25 ) do we understand quantum anthropology to be? Our answer is that it is a perspective. A perspective that aims to look at man through the glasses of quantum theory. In other words, quantum anthropology tries to explore the basic categories of man’s being in the worlds, and for this task, a special quantum meta-ontology has been developed and is introduced in this book. Quantum anthropology is both perspectival and ontological. It is a kind of exploration where the main focus is on man, cultures, social groups, and societies. hese phenomena are investigated in the quantum perspective, taking into account the quantum nature of man’s reality. his new perspective introduced in this book is a perspective that spreads across the disciplines of social sciences and the humanities. Although the scope of the proposed theoretical perspective transcends several other ields than anthropology, such as psychology, philosophy, sociology, and consciousness studies, the main interest is still anthropological, i.e. the exploration of man, cultures, social groups, and societies within a quantum perspective. Just the basic categories of man’s being in the worlds are central points of our inquiry, and, for this reason, we call our analytical framework quantum anthropology. Quantum anthropology is an interdisciplinary approach, already evident from the title of the discipline itself. Integrating empirical indings and theoretical concepts from quantum mechanics, quantum philosophy, sociocultural anthropology, and quantum consciousness makes quantum anthropology an integral interpretative framework. Many syntheses of knowledge from diferent disciplines are included in this book, and therefore, we may consider the version of quantum anthropology introduced here to be an integral form of quantum anthropology. Because the discipline is very young, the present version of quantum anthropology is aimed at providing a starting point for future discussions and reinements. Our book starts with chapters introducing the reader to the basic principles of quantum anthropological thinking. In Chapter 2, we start at the very basis of quantum anthropology, and explore the nature of reality where man lives and acts. We introduce the main diference between the realms of potentiality and actuality, as well as the experience of alterity via a horizontal and vertical shift. he implications of the observer efect for anthropological inquiry are introduced in Chapter 3. hrough ( 32 ) reality is fundamentally based on the conviction in the potent reliability of basic human sensory organs, eyes, ears, taste, smell, and touch, because they are the ordinary modes of our everyday experience. Man perceives the elements of reality by and through sensory inputs. Currently, because of modern technological developments, our senses may be technologically-extended. he experienced “here and now” extends beyond the natural ield of perception by using modern technological devices like binoculars, or various kinds of microscopes. However, at the same time, we have to be aware that such technological devices are also used by humans, who have only the limited capacities of human senses. So, the results of such technologically-extended observations are also distorted by the primary bias given by the limited possibilities of our sensory organs. Technological devices only extend our limited sensory capacities, and, indeed, scientists who use them operate within the standard limits of human sensory organs, eyes, ears, etc. On the other hand, there are modes of human experience that have more direct access to the realm of nonempirical reality. By this, we mean altered states of consciousness that are experienced while dreaming during sleep, in lucid dreaming, in trance states, during hypnosis, in meditation, during sensory deprivation, during clinical death, or during intoxication by psychoactive drugs. hese states also extend our normal sensory experience, but a relationship with some realms of the nonempirical reality is likely to be expected. hrough the altered states of consciousness, we have the opportunity to approach the other wise nonempirical, transcendent parts of reality. We can see, hear, smell, or touch something that is not accessible to us in normal states of consciousness. It is reasonable to believe that we live in a reality that has a quantum nature. Contemporary advances in the ield of quantum consciousness and quantum neurophysiology (e.g., Atmanspacher, 2004; Mensky, 2010; Rosenblum and Kuttner, 2006; Sahu et al., 2013) have enriched our knowledge about the human perception and experience of reality. So, how, indeed, can we understand the human experience and the perception of the quantum reality in which we live? First of all, we should accept that we experience the world in our minds. Our experience of reality is extended into three spa- ( 33 ) tial dimensions during normal states of consciousness (Carter, 2014). We perceive all matter and material entities in the three-dimensional space of normal states of consciousness. his realm of experience of the objective space is called “objective consciousness” (Carter, 2014). hrough objective consciousness, people experience objective space extended into three real dimensions. In contrast, “subjective consciousness” is the experience of subjective space, which is unextended and contains qualia. Qualia are constituents of the experience of our subjective space. hey are products of the cognitive processing of sensory percepts. Qualia may be based on percepts coming from the external environment, but they are always subjective, because they emerge inside an individual. Carter (2014) introduced an analytical approach including three modes of human perception and experience of quantum spacetime (Figure 1). his approach is based on the assumption that our visible reality is settled within a higher-dimensional space, called hyperspace. Under some conditions, subjective consciousness may be extended to higher, extensive dimensions of nonempirical reality. Carter (2014) suggests the existence of a 3-space, 4-space, and 5-space. his brane cosmology suggests that the universe has more dimensions than we expect based on our everyday experience in normal states of consciousness. Some “extra dimensions” are suggested to exist, but may be hidden to our experience in normal states of consciousness. A 3-space has three real dimensions representing our empirical universe experienced through human senses in normal states of consciousness. he visible universe is suggested to be a very large D-brane extending over three spatial dimensions. A 4-space, having three real plus one imaginary dimension, and a 5-space, having three real plus two imaginary dimensions, are spaces where the human mind may touch some areas of nonempirical reality. hese spaces are understood as branes (D-branes) within the framework of string theory (Johnson, 2003). All material objects are bound to the D-brane in a 3-space, and rest within three-dimensional spatial reality. We see material objects and other people in three-dimensional space. However, the human mind may even experience some elements of nonempirical reality through the extension of objective consciousness into extra dimensions (4-space and 5-space). hese extra dimensions ( 34 ) have special qualities, other than those qualities of the common three-dimensional spatial reality. Carter (2014) distinguished two forms of extension of consciousness into nonempirical realities, i.e. extension into 4-brane and 5-brane. As is apparent from Figure 1, 3-space is deined as the physical plane, 4-space as the astral plane and 5-space as the mental plane. A brief outline of these planes will be provided in the following section. he physical plane consists of dense physical matter and etheric-physical matter. Dense physical matter includes all objects or ields that are accessible to our human sensory organs. In contrast, the etheric-physical realm includes ields that are out of the sensory possibilities of human sensory organs, for example, radio waves, Wi-Fi signals, radioactive ields, etc. hese ields, however, can be measured by special technological devices. For this reason, etheric-physical matter is also a part of empirical reality. he astral plane is related to our subconscious mind. It is the human subjective feeling-space, and within it we can feel emotions, pain, experience dreams, visions, illusions, hallucinations, and have the possibility to have long-term memory. he mental plane is closely related to human cognition. It covers all of the functions associated with cognitive abilities, for example, thinking, information processing, deduction, or learning. his is the realm where thoughts are generated in the minds of individuals. Carter (2014) distinguishes the abstract mind (in Figure 1. Three modes of the human experience of quantum spacetime (Source: Carter, 2014) ( 35 ) the sense of Platonic ideas) and the rational (objective) mind (in the sense of Platonic forms). he abstract mind is suggested to be a higher (imaginary) realm and is considered to be formless. In contrast, the lower, rational mind contains forms. Carter (2014) has further developed these ideas into a more comprehensive framework of the interaction between mind and consciousness in quantum spacetime (Figure 2). his framework integrates the previously introduced understandings of reality with other concepts coming from various ields of psychology, anatomy, and cognitive anthropology. he bottom layer of the model, the physical plane, represents the ield where classic physics, anatomy, and physical anthropology operate. his ield is relatively readily accessible to scientiic empirical eforts, because it has the potential to be somehow measured and is embedded within the classic three-dimensional spacetime. he remaining ields involve phenomena that are often not possible to observe directly via our senses nor via various forms Figure 2. Interaction between mind and consciousness in quantum spacetime (Source: Carter, 2014) ( 36 ) of technological devices. he limited empirical observability of these realms for the external observer is given by the requirement of the extension of human experience into other, empirically unobservable dimensions, such as 4-brane and 5-brane. In other words, the experience of the astral plane and the mental plane requires the extension of human consciousness into dimensions that have the character of higher-dimensional branes within the fouror ive-dimensional paradigm (Carter, 2014). he physical plane, the astral plane, and the mental plane are three superimposed (interpenetrating) spaces where man’s perception and experience may operate. his model implies that some dimensions of reality are empirically unobservable and represent hidden structures of spacetime. he concept of extension is very fruitful for the development of the quantum anthropology presented here. he physical, astral, and mental plane are modes of experience of man’s being in the world. he human mind may experience some elements of nonempirical reality through the extension of objective consciousness into some extra dimensions (4-space and 5-space). But, if quantum anthropology aims to be in contact with perspectival anthropology and the “ontological turn” (e.g., Alberti et al., 2011; Paleček and Risjord, 2012; Viveiros de Castro, 2004), we should seriously ask how the extension of consciousness can be understood in this perspective? Ontological perspectivism works with the possibility of shifting between realities (Alberti et al. 2011; Paleček and Risjord, 2012; Viveiros de Castro, 2004). We argue, however, that this experience of alterity is of a diferent quality than experience during the extension of consciousness into higher-dimensional branes. Ontological perspectivism assumes the existence and participation in alternative realities, but these realities are considered to rather have the characters of diferent cultural mentalities. he researcher should “take it on” a diferent culture under investigation (Wagner, 1981) and try to appreciate the internal logic of diferent cultural positionalities (Alberti et al., 2011). We argue that this shift in perspective is horizontal. he researcher shifts their perspective and tries to understand another culture through other people’s worlds. Comparisons between the different spatial or temporal instantiations of given sociocultural forms are made possible by this shift between realities (Viveiros ( 37 ) de Castro, 2004), and create the possibility of new ontoconceptual understandings (Alberti et al., 2011). However, this horizontal change of analytical frames does not require the extension of consciousness into some “extra dimensions”. In contrast, the extension of consciousness during sleep, trance states, meditation, clinical death, or intoxication by psychoactive drugs is another case. We can imagine that both shamans and participants experience trance states and other altered states of consciousness during the course of rituals. hey deinitely experience alterity, but such experiences of alterity are diferent, because they often involve altered states of consciousness, i.e., the extension of consciousness into higher-dimensional branes (Carter, 2014). his experience of alterity is more related to the shift between the realm of the sacred and the realm of the profane than with the horizontal shift between internal logic of two diferent cultures. For this reason, we consider extensions of consciousness to be vertical. So the idea of the possibility of shifting between diferent realities brings together the theory of perspectival anthropology or ontological perspectivism on one hand (Alberti et al., 2011; Paleček and Risjord, 2012; Viveiros de Castro, 2004) with the theory of quantum consciousness on the other (Atmanspacher, 2004; Carter, 2014; Mensky, 2010; Rosenblum and Kuttner, 2006). We preliminarily interpret the perspectival shift between the internal logic of diferent cultures to be a horizontal change of analytical frames, whereas the extension of consciousness during altered states to be a vertical extension of consciousness. Both types of perspectival change enable the experience of alterity, but this distinction requires a more elaborated theoretical conceptualization that is beyond the main scope of this book. hus, at this moment, we accept this preliminary diferentiation in terms of horizontal versus vertical extension. Let us return to the realms of empirical and nonempirical reality. Whereas the impossibility of directly observing nonempirical reality often elicits skepticism in strict positivists and materialists, the nonempirical dimensions of reality are the focus of interest for researchers in the ield of sociocultural anthropology. Indeed, sociocultural anthropology meets the realm of the unobservable in various ways. Almost all research areas of the anthropology of religion (Segal, 2006) more or less interact with human experi- ( 38 ) ences that are found within Carter’s (2014) astral plane. here are many issues exploring the role of myth, mysticism, ritual practices, and magic in relation to human existence within particular cultural systems. he research of rituals includes the study of mind-body relation as practices that make the extension of human experience into some higher-order dimensions of quantum spacetime possible. Various cultural ontologies also difer in the ways that the human body may be understood and represented. Representations of body are diferent in various religious traditions, such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Suism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the contemporary materialist “scientiic” belief system (Roberts, 2006). he research of representations of body in various cultural systems, ethnic groups, or subcultures represents a very inspiring ield for anthropological research nowadays (see, e.g., Belaunde, 2008; Enield, 2005; Neiger, 2003). Another ield of study we can mention is related to the distinction between the spiritual and everyday spheres of people’s lives. Members of cultural systems engage in practices that are a part of their everyday experience and often serve a practical purpose. Food subsistence, production, hunting, gathering, agricultural activities, or shopping are examples of activities that attract researchers moving on the border of two anthropological ields, i.e. ecological anthropology and economic anthropology. People diferentiate between quotidian activities and activities that include some kind of spiritual content. he distinction between the realm of the sacred and the realm of the profane is a classic distinction that also mirrors the distinctions between the physical, astral, and mental planes. Humans are able to well recognize this distinction on a contextual basis, and behave diferently within the everyday and sacred contexts (e.g., Alcorta and Sosis, 2005; Hampton, 1999). A ield related very closely to rituals and magic is focused on the investigation of various healing practices. Currently, more and more attention is paid to the psycho-spiritual healing processes within the ields of medical anthropology and ethno-medicine. he research of psycho-spiritual healers and their clients focuses both on traditional ways of healing as well as on new, emerging psycho-spiritual healing practices. he basis of psycho-spiritual healing is often seen as a connection to a transcendent, nonempirical reality, which enables acquiring a new, trans- ( 39 ) formed life attitude (Stoeckigt et al., 2015). he psycho-somatic complex of some people undergoes a radical change during their life trajectories. Such changes are investigated on the level of the clients of healers, as well as on the level of the life transformations of ordinary people into healers. he present-day psycho-spiritual healer identiies themselves with a similar identity to those of traditional shamans, who functioned as mediators between a nonempirical reality and the people of their tribe with the help of religious magical practices (Özkan, 2012). In a similar manner, both of them heal people who seek guidance from the spiritual world by bringing their minds to some sacred places (Sarsambekova et al., 2015), i.e., into higher-order dimensions of quantum spacetime in terms of quantum anthropology. he research of psycho-spiritual healing processes is often related with the crisis and the re-establishment of order (Stefen, 2013), which also opens another interpretative framework in relation to the broader general question of chaos and order in society. Out-of-body and extra-corporeal experiences represent a very actual and developing interdisciplinary ield that transcends across the borders of anthropology of religion. he experience of “living beyond the body” is not the only focus here, but also the cultural representations of heaven, hell, and the afterlife represent further foci of this ield (Drackle 1999; Paulson et al., 2014). It is apparent that the idea of archetypes as preexisting forms may have serious implications for this realm of anthropological research. In our previous ield research (Balcar et al., 2011), the adherents of the EMO youth subculture were investigated. EMO subculture is typical with its morbid symbolism. he symbols of death, dying, self-injury, or self-mutilation are often the essentials of a subcultural identiication (Figure 3). EMO subculture also holds high acceptance for suicidal behavior and self-destructive behavior, and suicidal tendencies are frequently found in EMO communities. Interestingly, some of the EMO adherents understand the transition from life to death only as a simple move between two diferent dimensions of existence. hey often did not express any fear of death, and they also sometimes even conducted preparatory activities for the move to another dimension. For example, participant Kevin learned that his parents are adoptive when he was thirteen. hen, in his own words, “his life was changed forever”. He described this event as a very trau- ( 40 ) matic experience. He then started to respond aggressively to his father and became an adherent of the EMO subculture. Kevin and his girlfriend Lia (also an adherent of the EMO subculture) both reported experimenting with practices of telepathy and astral traveling. Both have already committed self-injury, and Kevin also thinks about committing suicide in the future. For him, astral traveling is considered to be preparation for real death as a move to another mode of existence. On this example, we can see the parallel with the idea of the extension of consciousness into other possible dimension. Let us leave the areas of anthropology operating with the phenomena rooted in the astral plane, and turn our attention to the human mind, whose research has been traditionally of interest in the ield of psychology. Aside from psychology, the investigation of how the human mind operates in the mental plane is the core focus of cognitive anthropology and of the anthropology of mind. hese ields are focused, for example, on the research Figure 3. The adherents of EMO youth subculture investigated in our field research, Prague, Czech Republic, 2010 (Photo: Radek Trnka) ( 41 ) of the development of knowledge acquisition, i.e. how the mind interprets new information and constructs new ways of understanding (Gelman and Legare, 2011). Without any doubt, culture afects our most fundamental mental experience, or in other words, both cognitive and experiential modalities of knowing (Feinberg and Genz, 2012; Luhrmann, 2011; Marchand, 2010). Our minds re-conigure the boundaries of our thinking and the ways we make sense of our world (Malafouris, 2015). Apparently, this kind of investigation provides us with better insights into the cultural inluences on the process of the construction of reality. Our minds work within various models of knowledge shaped by cultural inluences, and, therefore, this area is not only the domain of cognitive psychology, but also of cognitive anthropology and of the anthropology of mind. As is apparent from this short review, the extension of human consciousness is a central process transcending across the ields and domains of anthropological research. hrough extension, human conscious experience may be shifted into another mode of experience. What we perceive and experience in the physical plane is of a diferent nature than what we perceive and experience during extension into the astral plane. he special characteristics of experiences during sleep, dreaming, trance states, and meditation attract the attention of researchers in some ields, but at the same time, they also elicit some skeptical attitudes in other researchers. Human consciousness extended into 4-brane or 5-brane works within diferent modes of experience, and its empirical investigation is, therefore, very problematic. On the other hand, we do not think that such investigations should be moved to the area of “non-scientiic”. he fact that these kinds of extensions are often beyond the technological possibilities of the technological devices commonly used for various measurements should not discriminate this area of investigation. Such a denial could easily lead to the reduction of the phenomena of human existence within a cultural system, which is, however, a core focus of contemporary anthropology. Current empirical results stemming from quantum mechanics indicate that the microstructure of our world consists of energetic vortices rather than of material microparticles (Rigas et al., 2008). In this situation, it is not reasonable to refuse the existence of nonmaterial phenomena. We argue that the realm of nonempirical reality is ( 48 ) tics highlight various features of the selectivity of framing. he three agencies of the observer, observed, and the apparatus are always intra-acting at the moment of appearance, i.e., when a frame emerges in the consciousness of the observer. herefore, selectivity operates on all three levels, i.e. in the observer, in the observed object, and in the apparatus. he observer selects both consciously and unconsciously what will be observed, and this selection is inluenced by the observer’s cultural determination, unconscious processes, volitional eforts, etc. Furthermore, each apparatus enables just one particular form of observation. Finally, sociocultural reality itself does not provide us with full access to all of its parts at the moment of observation. Some parts are possible to observe, and some parts may be hidden to the apparatus of the observer. he concepts of appearance and framing enable us to view anthropological investigation in a slightly diferent manner. Yet they lead us to the more general question of where are such appearances rooted? Or, where do appearances of both the material and nonmaterial world originate? Indeed, these questions are questions on the possible sources of appearances. One of the possibilities is the exciting hypothesis that all of the variants of the realm of potentiality are found in empty states (Schäfer, 2008; Puthof, 2002). Such virtual empty states are suggested to have the potential to express their logical order in the empirical world as some kind of embodiment, event, human action, or behavior. Virtual empty states are suggested to be a source for the realm of potentiality. Such ways of thinking may imply that the realm of virtual states contains all of the future empirical possibilities. All of these exciting ideas elicit many insistent questions. As we will see later, many of them oscillate around the issue of a starting point and are concerned with the moment of the genesis and emergence of appearances, entities, ields, and processes in the world. herefore, a broader quantum anthropological exploration of this issue is provided in the following chapter. So, let us turn our attention to the moment of beginning, i.e. to the origin of man, cultures, and societies. ( 49 ) Chapter 4 Emergence of Man and Culture When starting to think about “something that is only beginning to exist”, we should consider the instance of a hypothetical state where an entity in question is not yet in a state of being. We may imagine something as in a state of “pre-being”, “pre-existence”, or in a “pre-existing state”. When an entity does not yet exist, it means that its existence is not yet here. Indeed, we can understand this state to be a zero state. Zero state is a very important mathematical formalism, because it indicates an absence. An entity does not exist yet. here is an empty space instead. Zero state and empty space are instances of primary undiferentiatedness. hese instances constitute the initial conditions before an existence starts. herefore, we should take them into account before proceeding further to the idea that something is emerging. Quantum systems behave in accordance with the Parmenidian principle, which posits that a system needs empty states in order to be able to change (Schäfer, 2006). In contrast, the imagery situation, when all of the states of all of the systems in the universe would be occupied and completely illed, would cause the end of perpetual changes in all of systems in time and space. herefore, when searching for a primary source for possible actualizations of quantum potentiality, one may think of the idea of an all-pervasive set of quantum possibilities. One of the concepts attempting to hypothesize such a set is Puthof’s quantum sea of zero-point luctuations (2002). In physics, Puthof’s quantum sea (2002) is a single underlying substructure that is common for the entire universe, and represents a source for all actualizations in time and space. It is a quantum ield of potentiality. his underlying substructure consists of so-called zero-point luctuations of ields, like the electromagnetic ield. he all-pervasive energetic ield called quan- ( 50 ) tum vacuum energy, or zero-point energy, is a random, ambient luctuating energy that exists even in so-called empty space. he sustainment of zero-point energy is continually being absorbed and re-emitted on a dynamic-balance basis. Microparticles have certain qualities when observed under real-life conditions. he observer can determine such qualities of a microparticle as speciic spin, the frequency of oscillation/amplitude, its angular momentum, magnetic moment, and electrical charge at the moment of measurement. Simply said, each microparticle is a very small energetic vortex that has its own qualities. Another situation arises when thinking about zero-point luctuations in a vacuum. A vacuum is never particleor ieldfree, but consists of continuous virtual particle-pair creation and annihilation. here are leeting electromagnetic waves and pairs of microparticles that perpetually come into being and return back again into nonexistence. Energy patterns like material entities or other entities emerge as a result of the patterning of otherwise random, ambient zero-point energy. We understand this dynamic substrate as an overall energy-information potential for any actualization (Trnka, 2015a). When an entity is emerging, it means that a part of the quantum sea has started to be manifested (actualized) in time and space. In our previous anthropological study (Trnka, 2015a), the term “overall, wave-particle energy-information potential” was introduced. he basic idea of the overall energy-information potential is very similar to the idea of Puthof’s quantum sea (2002) emerging in physics. It was also suggested that overall, wave-particle energy-information potential is an underlying all-pervasive substructure that provides energy-information potential for all actualizations in time and space. Such actualizations may be material or nonmaterial entities, and some of them may be observed by human observers whereas others are not. he concept of the overall energy-information potential also accepts that the qualities of microparticles in a vacuum serve as pre-existing information for future actualizations. It other words, zero-point luctuations in the vacuum serve as a primary source for all actualizations in time and space, both material and nonmaterial. When considering material entities, human bodies as well as any other material objects are actualizations of some parts of the overall energy-information potential. herefore, they share a ( 51 ) common source – in other words, they are born from zero-point luctuations in the vacuum. Such ambient zero-point energies are suggested to be random and maybe, because of this, human bodies are so unique that it is almost impossible to ind two people who are absolutely the same in terms of their psyche, anatomy, physiology, or the functioning of their nervous systems. Analogically, it is impossible to ind two absolutely same cultures or societies. his variability is primarily given by the complexity of these systems. Both internal (inside the system) and external (system versus its environment) diferentiation proceeds perpetually in all highly complex systems (Luhmann, 1995). But, aside of changing throughout the life of complex systems, high variability is also related to the initial conditions at the moment of emergence. And, when taking into account the character of overall energy-information potential, we should also ask about the nature of the initial patterning of entities from zero-point luctuations in the vacuum. We argue that there is something, which could be considered to be responsible for the initial variability during the emergence of various entities. he term attractor is widely used within the ield of mathematical modeling, which describes the constellation towards which a system tends to move. In psychology, an attractor is generally deined as an equilibrium state or cycle of states into which a system settles over time (Arrow and Burns, 2004). his understanding implies that the hypothetical assumption of a state that attracts the behavior of a system is responsible for a system’s development and diferentiation in time and space. Here, however, we also extend the role of attractors to the moment of emergence. Before any entity starts to exist, zero-point luctuations in the vacuum are suggested to be random and chaotic. When some entity is coming into being, we argue that some kind of quantum patterning begins to operate. And, such quantum patterning is not supposed to be random, but it is hypothesized to be attracted by some kind of attractor. hus, an attractor is initial information for new, arising form. But here, we may ask ourselves what implications does the consideration of attractors have for sociocultural anthropological theory? he issue of agency has been frequently discussed in the ield of sociocultural anthropology (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977; Holland et al., 2003; Kockelman, 2007) and agency has been ( 52 ) found to be mostly associated with some kind of human action or the action of human products in the world. In contrast, less attention has been paid to the emergence of man, cultures, and social aggregates. However, a better understanding of cultures and social aggregates also requires a better understanding of the initial conditions at the moment of emergence. We argue here that all emergence is related to the operation of various kinds of attractor. And therefore, we also posit the suggestion, that man, cultures, and various forms of social life are attracted by the agency of attractors at the moment of their emergence. We redeine attractors to be agentic constellations that are responsible for the initial variability among individuals as well as among forms of social coherence. When an entity comes into existence from the overall energy-information potential, the agency of some kind of attractor starts to act. It is “agency beyond agency”, because it acts without the agency of human action or the action of human products in the world. A deeper agentic level that operates out of human activity is suggested to exist. But, this deep, underlying agency must be present, because otherwise, the appearance of all entities would be as random as primary zero-point luctuations are. And it is obvious that people, animals, and plants are not absolutely random. Despite the initial variability of quantum sea, the appearances of these are coherent enough that we, external observers, can identify man as man (not as a plant), and animals as animals. For these reasons, we introduce the concept of attractor to sociocultural anthropology here and we will later show in this chapter various instances proving why the consideration of attractors is essential when exploring the emergence of man, cultures, and social aggregates. We argue that the emergence of entities and systems from the quantum sea of possibilities is inluenced by attractors that are responsible for concrete actualizations in time and space. Let us begin at the simplest level of anthropological inquiry, at the stage of the biological conception of a new person. We are aware that this issue falls mostly under the ield of biological anthropology and not sociocultural anthropology, but we do not want to omit it only because of its disciplinary situating. Before the conception of a new human embryo, there are two haploid cells at the beginning, an ovum and a sperm. Both sperms and human ova emerge in the process of oogenesis (to be speciic, ( 53 ) spermatogenesis in males and primordial folliculogenesis in females). It is this very moment when new human reproductive cells emerge as actualizations of some parts of the overall energyinformation potential. We may expect that the genesis of primordial germ cells share similar rules to nonlinear quantum systems in general. Isaeva (2012) suggested that the dynamics of biological systems as nonlinear quantum systems is linked with some kinds of strange attractors. hese strange attractors have a fractal structure, typically include chaotic dynamics, and have sensitive dependence on initial conditions. he self-organization processes of cytoskeleton system play a key role in primordial oogenesis. he cytoskeleton itself is suggested to be a generator of further morphogenesis: “During ooplasmic egg segregation, which is a key process for establishing axis polarity of a new organism, the cytoskeleton of an egg cell functions as the global morphogenetic determinant, which directs and ixes the anisotropy of molecular information distribution in the ooplasm.” (Isaeva, 2012, p. 113) When searching for strange attractors that are responsible for primordial oogenesis, we can explore the initial conditions that inluence the emergence and follow up the development of primordial germ cells. his means topological attractors, physical attractors, and possibly also gene regulatory networks’ attractors (Isaeva, 2012). he topological attractors involve the heterogeneous distribution of structural components, ion lows and electric ields, ields of mechanical tensions, transcellular transport, or intercellular movements, and signaling. hese topological attractors have the character of scalar or vector ields. Furthermore, physical attractors are also physical restrictions, for example, gravitation vectors, physical gradients of the environment, or mechanical stress. It is also possible that extracellular gene regulatory networks may inluence the genesis of new germ cells in oogenesis, at least to some extent. his small excursion into biological anthropology showed us that even with this relatively simple case of emergence, many inluences play a role when trying to understand the constellation of the initial conditions for the emergence of a new person. We can imagine that the aforementioned inluences combined ( 54 ) together may create myriads of variants of initial conditions in time and space. Taken together, all of the above-mentioned attractors may be linked with the emergence of new sperm, of ovarian follicles, but also of primordial cellular consciousness. he question arises whether just one strange attractor consisting of these inluences is responsible for the emergence of a new human reproductive cell, or if more strange attractors may mutually interfere? We leave this question aside for now. Yet we see on this simple example how the emergence of a new entity is attracted from the overall energy-information potential. he moment of emergence is merely the moment when a part of the overall energy-information potential starts to be actualized in the form of a new, arising entity. Both the new sperm and ovarian follicle are the actualizations of pre-existing pre-manifestations of energy from the overall energy-information potential. From this moment, these primordial germ cells exist in their external environments, which immediately starts to inluence them in many ways. But, aside from the inluences of the external environment, the internal environment of the cell also starts to inluence development of the cell. For these reasons, we speak about both the internal and external diferentiation that always proceeds in all kinds of systems (Luhmann, 1995). Now we shift our attention to more complex examples, to the emergence of various forms of social life. Generally, social systems have the character of multilevel complex systems that are guided by some kind of strange attractors (Arrow and Burns, 2004). he emergence of new social systems is rooted in the thoughts and actions of individuals, as well as based on the external forces like material environment or cultural inluences. he birth of a new social system is linked with the emergence of order from nonlinear relationships among multiple interacting units (Casti, 1994), where multiple interacting units are individual thoughts, consciousness, and actions. It is the process of the complexiication of individual thoughts and consciousness. During the emergence of a social system, bottom-up processes prevail in the dynamics of the emerging social aggregate, but also top-down processes start to inluence the social system immediately after its birth. Here, the bidirectional relationship between the social system and its members is constituted. his relationship has the character of autopoietical reproduction in ( 55 ) Luhmann’s sense (1995). Autopoiesis is the function of self-reference. Systems have their own bidirectional function that enables feedback between their internal and external environment. Only because of autopoiesis is the self-organization of the system possible. At the beginning of a new social form, individual thoughts, ideas, actions, and initial beliefs start to interact with each other. he luctuations of thoughts and communication lows have a character similar to the perpetual interactions between microparticles. It is the perpetual vibrating of elements that is permanently creating emergent qualities on a higher level of analysis, e.g. shared cultural standards or norms in the case of social systems. hese initial interactions move toward some kind of strange attractor. he patterns in the distribution of values, preferences, imaginations, and expectations within an emerging social system are the initial conditions also responsible for the future diferentiation of the social aggregate, and these initial conditions represent the basin of attraction (Arrow and Burns, 2004). he pattern in the distribution of values, preferences, imaginations, and expectations, called the basin of attraction, permeates also through the particular social ield (Bourdieu, 1977). Because of the patterned basin of attraction, individuals do not live in a completely unpredictable environment. Field-speciic rules enable individuals to anticipate and predict future tendencies and opportunities with certain probabilities. It is the way of decreasing uncertainty for individuals acting within particular social ields. Although the initial stages of cultural existence are typical by a relatively high uncertainty shared by the members of a culture, the so-called initial collective uncertainty, this uncertainty is gradually lowered as the shared system of ield-speciic rules becomes formed. his does not mean that from this time, the stability of a system is guaranteed, but we can at least say that safety-protecting mechanisms have been developed in a system. It is necessary to emphasize that the qualities of a culture are not the simple sum of thoughts and behaviors of the individuals acting in the social ield. here are also emergent properties that we are not able to extrapolate from the individual actions. Such emergent phenomena are often not possible to be explained using classic causality, i.e. as a linear relationship between some factor and its subsequent efect. ( 56 ) At this moment, it is also problematic to determine what kind of generalized, mathematically-derived strange attractor is responsible for the emergence or further development of particular social systems. his is an open ield for further exploration and we may, therefore, posit: OPEN QUESTION FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 1 What kind of strange attractors are responsible for the emergence and developments of social systems? Let us turn our attention now to the dynamism and development of cultural elements in the time lux. Some of the established cultural norms and standards may become dominant in a given social system and some that are developed may become marginal. his also mirrors the types of memberships in social groups. Prototypical group members share the values, norms, and standards that are dominant in a given cultural system (Trnka, 2011), and they have a strong sense of group identity. On the other hand, peripheral group members may create their own social groups or subcultures with diferent values, norms, and standards (Trnka, 2011). Some of individuals may even become autonomous solitary within the cultural environment without adherence to any cultural values and norms. It is necessary to say that sociocultural systems are perpetually moving and changing; they are in a constantly changing lux, i.e. in the process of lowing movement (Bohm, 1980). Despite this dynamic behavior, sociocultural systems show a historical continuity during their life cycle. For example, collective memory catches the continuity of a culture in the sense that each culture has its origin, development, and its end. Collective memory is the information structure of a culture that is diferent from the individual memories stored in the minds of individuals. he continuity in the life cycles of sociocultural systems is in accordance with the character of transitions between the realm of potentiality and actuality. After each transition from the possible to the actual, the evolution of new tendencies and possibilities for future actualizations starts anew, but from a diferent starting point than before (Heisenberg, 1958; Schäfer, 2008). Schäfer (2008) suggested a continuous lux from the evolution of tendencies to their actualizations – empirical events – and from empir- ( 57 ) ical events to new tendencies. hus, the historical context of a culture is always essential for its further development. As mentioned above, the emergence of man, groups, and cultures is governed by some kind of strange attractor. Chaotic behavior in these nonlinear quantum systems never settles into a predictable pattern in a long-term perspective (Judge, 1993). Periods of stability are always temporary and never permanent. he structures of sociocultural systems begin to break up as soon as they are formed (Judge, 1993). hus, sociocultural systems are dynamic and highly unpredictable systems that are perpetually changing. Perhaps this is the reason why their investigation is so attractive for contemporary anthropologists... ( 64 ) It would be confusing to understand culture as a simple sum of parts. Although we have discussed cultural elements above, we wish to point out that there are also emergent properties that cannot be considered cultural elements. Such types of properties may emerge without any causation. It is diicult to reveal them, and to label them by using concrete terms. Emergent properties make cultural investigation slightly blurred, but it is better to take them into account than to refuse their existence because of their problematic observability. Cultural systems and social systems are quantum systems, and as quantum systems they show various levels of coherence. Hodgson (1991) proposed that the continued relatively stable appearance of macro-objects is caused by continually interacting particles of which they are composed. When applying this assumption to the case of social systems, we may seek the source of their coherent appearance in the perpetual interactions inside their social networks. hus, the pattern of interaction may maintain coherence, but it may also disturb coherence under some circumstances. Some patterns of interaction may destabilize the social system and shift some parts of system into unstable states. In the area of cultural elements, each of the elements of a cultural system has its relative stability over time (resilience to change) and strength (the probability that most of its members will share and accept this cultural standard). We can consider resilience and strength to be qualities of cultural elements that relate to the quantum coherence of cultural systems. As in the case of the boundaries of social systems, it is also very diicult to deine what exactly one cultural element is and what another one is. Cultural elements have plenty of mutual bonds, and it is suggested that they are strongly entangled. herefore, the differentiation between them is considered to be a product of the analytical eforts of researchers rather than the case of objective, sharp boundaries. he elements of a cultural system have various functions. For example, symbol systems and language are patterned symbolic structures that facilitate smooth semantic understanding between the members of a given culture. Aside from this, some of the cultural elements also inluence the preestablished patterns that members of a culture can utilize as models for their behav- ( 65 ) iors. It is considered that the potentiality of human action may be actualized in time and space with certain probability. his potentiality covers both patterns for individuals and patterns for group behavior. Individual patterns are represented as behavioral rules, standards for actions, social interaction scripts, customs, norms for moral judgment, etc. Patterns meeting rather on the group level are sequences of collective actions, like social exchange and economics, various models for distribution, or scripts for collective decision-making (Arrow and Burns, 2004). Culture may manifest itself in various forms. Manifestations of culture are actualizations of potentiality in time and space. Some of the pre-existing possibilities are actualized and some are not. Manifestations of a culture have a key signiicance for anthropology because manifestations are more readily available to our senses and perception, and therefore represent empirical material for anthropological analysis and interpretations. Some forms of manifestation have a material appearance (material culture), whereas others are observable through human action in the world (the behavioral domain of cultural manifestations). Material manifestations are those instances when culture manifests itself in some form of materialization that remains in various forms of relatively permanent matter, i.e. so-called material culture (i.e. Miller, 1998). Material manifestations consist of various forms of the arts, artifacts, practical tools, constructed environments, etc. Behavioral manifestations are very heterogeneous. Such instances are observable if culture manifests itself through human action without any material, relatively permanent output. Rituals, live music, dance, or some types of everyday human actions are examples of transient behavioral manifestations of cultural elements. Interestingly, some manifestations of culture have a transitive nature, and it is very diicult to categorize them other than as transient or as permanent. For example, literature and human writings represent manifestations in both material and nonmaterial reality. Books are real material manifestations, but the stories that are included in them may be passed on by oral transmission. Digital texts found on the internet raise some questions. hese are not an example of materialization, yet these texts are relatively permanent in time in comparison with a dance performance or a carried-out ritual, for example. he digital environment is ( 66 ) virtual and has a very special character. It represents a very inspiring issue for future discussions. Let us turn our attention to the relation between culture and the agency of the members of a social system. Culture inluences its members and members of a culture inluence the culture retrospectively. hus, there are generally two opposite directions of inluences, top-down transmission and bottom-up change: “Newcomers conform to group norms by observing and copying regularities in the way other members behave, and in this process we see the classic topdown transmission of culture from a higher level (the group) to a lower level (individual). Dynamic instabilities at the local level of a complex system can also create spontaneous change even after the system appears to have ‘settled’ into a persistent structure. ... his is bottom-up change.” (Arrow and Burns, 2004, p. 181) he situation is more complicated when considering that each social system may, but also may not be linked to just one single cultural system. Indeed, a social system may be linked with one cultural system that most its members share, but some members may also accept elements of other cultural systems. It is also inconceivable that a social system of, for example, national states is internally unsegmented. Internal alterity in the social system often creates distinctive subcultural social systems with speciic cultural norms and values that often difer from dominant cultural norms and values (Arrow and Burns, 2004). Barth (1969) speaks about the subdivision and multiplication of units. Music subcultures, alternatives, marginal ethnic groups, or marginal religious groups are examples of such subdivisions of social systems. As we have argued above, a cultural system is an informational spectrum shared by elements of a given social system. We understand information as Weiner does (1961), that it is merely information, not energy or matter. Bateson (1972, p. XXV–XXVI) deines information as “the diference that makes a diference”, it means something “which changes us”. And furthermore, information is also considered to be a “function of the observer” (von Foerster, 1988 [1973]), which is important to keep in mind when we speak about culture as a form of informational spectrum. In a quantum world, particles are sensitive to gradients of information, as was proven in particle interference experiments ( 67 ) (Davisson and Germer, 1927). According to Schäfer (2006), in our ordinary world, our mind is the only thing (as we know) that can react to the low of information. Social interactions and communication between individuals and various groups maintain information transfer and interference among the elements of a social system. What is more important, however, is that this social interaction also includes energies, i.e. emotional arousal. Social interactions between individuals and various groups are constitutive forces of the dynamics of each social system. Most social interactions involve some kind of emotional arousal, and it is the emotional content itself that represents the energetic dimension of a social system. he exchange of emotional energies between individuals and groups on one hand and information exchange on the other causes a social system to have the characteristics of an energy-information ield. Emotional energies or emotional arousal emerge during the course of interactions, and they further constitute interpersonal, intergroup, and interinstitutional relationships, e.g. the perpetual deinition of ethnic or subcultural group boundaries, the identiication of group membership, etc. For example, a shared fear of aliens helps to create bonds among members of the group, strengthen the group boundaries, increase willingness to ight for group values, reinvent roots (historical, literal, etc.) of the social or ethnic group, etc. he emotional arousal of individuals is often entangled, because they are the functional elements of a quantum system. In such cases, the entanglement of emotional energies is observable as collective emotions, for example, mass panic, collective hysteria, or collective fears. Under these circumstances, the entanglement of emotional energies creates a “group mind” that is one of the forms of manifestation of collective consciousness (Wegner, 1987). Unlike other forms, it is possible to empirically observe and analyze this form of manifestation of collective consciousness. Emotional arousal often happens through a trigger, which appears through one of our senses. hus, for example, arousal can happen through touch (a punch, a kiss, or a caress), vision (seeing something shocking or desirable), hearing (a sudden noise, somebody saying something, music), smell (an evocative odor that triggers powerful memories), or taste (of wonderful or dis- ( 68 ) gusting food). Emotions with an overpowering intensity stimulate people to act, often also in a non-rational way (Berger, 2011). States of arousal can be positively or negative valenced, but it is not currently clear how many dimensions is optimal for the adequate description of subjective emotional experience (Trnka, 2013; Trnka et al., 2016). Our previous empirical study (Trnka et al., 2016) provided evidence that the use of several general dimensions for the measurement of subjective emotional experience is reductionistic. We argue that subjective emotional experience is multidimensional (Trnka, 2013; Trnka et al., 2016), and also that the quality of experience in terms of the number of experiential dimensions may vary according to the speciic relational and situational coniguration, i.e. the context. he current theory of multidimensional emotional experience (Trnka, 2013) works with this kind of logic and also elicits some similarities with the idea of Hilbert space. In the Hilbert space, it is possible to think of any inite or ininite number of dimensions. Similarly, for subjective experience, any number of experiential dimensions can be theoretically hypothesized. his parallel is preliminary and, therefore, we posit a future question: OPEN QUESTION FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 2 Does man’s subjective experience have the character of the Hilbert space? Emotions can be also transmitted from one person to another person or persons. Emotional transfer is possible through the processes called afective resonance (Mühlhof, 2015), or emotional contagion (Hatield et al., 1994). hese processes enable the collective sharing of emotions and we may even think about the possibility that afective resonance and emotional contagion are observable expressions of the quantum entanglement of emotional energies between people (compare with Mühlhof, 2015). Emotions have energetic qualities and inluence the behavior of man within both the individual and the collective perspective. It is diicult to measure emotions empirically, but we may consider a hypothetical possibility that emotions, as energies, have their speciic frequency (similarly as electricity, light, or nuclear energy). here are individuals that are more inclined to emotional “infections”, and then there are individuals who are rath- ( 69 ) er strong emitters of emotional feelings – they are charismatic individuals (Bhullar, 2012; Hatield et al., 1994; Neumann and Strack, 2000). hus, a charismatic person emits particular emotional frequency very strongly and becomes a sort of attractor for others, who, in turn, become attracted to this person. his is evident in many cultural and social activities. Participants of rituals, of pop concerts, or of a demonstration or speech of a political leader may share an emotional arousal and the same frequency of emotional energy. hey experience a deep-rooted feeling of sharing and solidarity that fortiies the boundaries of the group, as well as their mutual bonds. People who share the same emotional vibrations (they are on the same wavelength) have stronger bonds between them. he same is applicable in physics – particles that have the same vibrations are mutually attracted to each other. Short-term emotional arousal is used, for example, in shamanic rituals primarily focused on healing a sick individual. Some African tribes even use rhythmic group dancing – vibrations – to renew the rhythm (frequency) of the entire group (Penniman, 2002). Repeating these short-term experiences of shared emotional arousal leads to a continuous maintenance of the whole sociocultural system. he Dayak Benuaq people investigated in our ield research upheld their group boundaries and its continuity through speciic funeral rituals (Figure 4). Traditional dual funerals are a characteristic mark of the Benuaq identity. To be a proper member of Benuaq society, one must properly organize this ritual. No matter how devote a Muslim or Christian the Benuaq was in life, very probably they shall desire this traditional animistic ritual at the end of their life’s journey, so that they and their families may conirm and strengthen their group solidarity, including with their group of forebears (Lorencova, 2008). Schiller (1997) noted a similar trend with the Ngadju people of Borneo. Bacigalupo (1998) describes a similar process with the Mapuche in Latin America. Similar processes are described by the research of other anthropologists in other ethnic groups all around the world. Emotional arousal, however, does not necessarily have to be shared only by individuals that personally know each other or are (physically) present together in one place, as is generally the case in rituals. he presently often-discussed issue of collective ( 70 ) fear, which basically applies to all of western civilization, is an example of a “transnationally” shared collective emotion. he emotions of collective fear are not transmitted from one detectable center, nor are the individuals sharing this emotion in any acute danger. On the contrary, they emerge as waves from the energy-information ield of collective consciousness or unconscious. In this case, these strong emotions are evoked by the fear of death encoded in each living being (we relexively try to avoid death). Despite of the fact that there is a very small chance that the individual in question is actually in danger, they are exposed to conscious and unconscious triggers of fear thanks to the continuous repetition of media news containing key words such as terrorist, crisis, disaster, etc. he emotional energy (vibrations) of individuals and groups spreads through space and time. Vibrations of a similar character Figure 4. Dayak women dancing ngerankau during kuangkai, the second funeral ritual, Damai, East Kalimantan, 2005 (Photo: Radmila Lorencová) ( 71 ) evoked by individuals are mutually strengthened. Although the individuals do not mutually know each other nor do they see each other, they share the same emotional arousal on the basis of the informational interference. As philosopher Bertrand Russel (2009) pointedly noted in his Unpopular Essays written already at the beginning of the last century, “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd”. On one hand, then, fear strengthen the bonds among the members of a society (even though they do no know each other), on the other hand, it produces a mistrust among them and enables the auto-destabilization of the whole system. he situation of mistrust in the elements of the system, whether they be people or institutions (e.g. the church, science, the political or economical system, etc.), is usually designated as a social crisis. Just as an individual is not constantly in a state of intense emotional arousal, then not even society is constantly in a state of collective emotional arousal. Despite of this, however, the sharing of emotions, a sort of emotional solidarity, occurs constantly. In the case of long-term and less marked emotions, we usually designate them as moods, emotional atmosphere, or emotional climate (Harrison, 2004). For example, in the Czech Republic, there was a strong collective euphoria (enthusiasm, joy after the fall of the Communist regime) in the period after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 (Kuška et al., 2013). After several years of building the new system, a decrease in activities and interest came about, and so the intensity of positive collective emotions also decreased. Society gradually “sobered up” from being inebriated by positive emotions, and on the contrary, began to notice the deiciencies of the new system, which was especially apparent in the distrust of politicians (many of which were even the leaders of the Velvet Revolution itself). he term “bad mood” was coined in 1997 irst in the media, and then in society itself, and it became widely used; it was ascribed to then-president Václav Havel, who used it to apply describe the current situation. he expression became so popular that it became a part of common discourse. he “bad mood” did not describe any unexpected or short-term emotional arousal, but a long-term emotional mood shared by most of the members of society. ( 72 ) Emotions are also closely related to beliefs. hese beliefs vary in diferent cultures and societies. A deep-rooted shared emotional energy can create such a strong belief that it can also change the everyday physical reality (e.g. through the ritual behavior that shall be discussed in more detail in Chapter 12). In the sociocultural meta-system, then, we ind building blocks such as mass, information, and energy, which are also fundamental categories in quantum physics. Cliford Geertz (1973) compared culture and its symbols to a web. We can also understand relationships between people as a web, as well as the organization of neurons in the brain. his is, however, only one part of reality as a whole, and the other parts are created by unobserved processes that take place within this web. he sociocultural meta-system carries in itself both elements that are observed and that are not observed. Observed elements are often the results of unobserved processes and the potentialities that occur in the nonempirical sphere. Just as matter emerges at the peak of colliding waves, then so do the elements of a cultural system become visible. he sociocultural meta-system is thus comprised of both potentialities and actualizations. ( 73 ) Chapter 6 Man as Embodiment he understanding of man in quantum anthropology deserves special attention. Quantum mechanics has undermined the classic, Newtonian understanding of materiality, and since the human body is made of matter, it is legitimate to ask how such mattering can be understood? he quantum view of the world calls for a new deinition of man within sociocultural anthropology. If man is a central object of anthropological inquiry, we should try to deconstruct the classic, Newtonian view of man. Everyday concepts of the human body suggest that human bodies end at their skin, but currently, there are also eforts to relativize this classic view, especially within the “ontological turn” in sociocultural anthropology (e.g. Harris and Robb, 2012). For example, Barad (2007) has questioned the ambiguity of bodily boundaries. he identiication of a concrete person is not suggested to be objective, but always inluenced by sensing. he seemingly self-evident nature of bodily boundaries is, indeed, the result of speciic actions of seeing, touching, etc. It implies that the identiication of a concrete person thus depends on previous bodily engagements with the world, and on the repetition of culturally and historically speciic bodily performance. “... the body is always ontologically multimodal. In all societies, people understand it and experience it according to several sets of foundational principles that come into play in diferent circumstances and that sometimes exist in tension. hese contexts are neither simply social nor material but, rather, always already both.” (Harris and Robb, 2012, p. 676) On a more general level, material objects are not already there, but they emerge through speciic practices (Barad, 2007). hus, ( 80 ) So, it is suggested that it is not possible that the overall complexity would be revealed in a single anthropological investigation. Instead, the continuity in anthropological inquiry creates a more reliable picture about sociocultural phenomena. More views, more perspectives, and more interpretations may help overcome the burden of subjectivity in anthropological research. And again, the key importance of the complementarity principle (Bohr, 1928) for sociocultural anthropology is apparent here. We can conclude that, on the general level, man and culture both share the character of the actualization of potential possibilities in time and space. Similarly, ethnic groups, subcultures or various communities are the temporal constellations of social relations that have been actualized from the overall pool of possibilities. From this point of view, man, cultures, and social units share the similar characteristics of actualization in time and space. Both cultures and social units exist, at least in our minds, but the diference is that the appearance of man shows a higher material coherence than that of cultures and social units. Whereas man is a material whole with their own anatomy, physiology, and sensory qualities, cultures and social units do not have such a degree of materialization. Both cultures and social groups also show quantum coherence over time, but their coherence is virtual, and it is not possible to observe it directly using our senses. We can observe the behavior of people or of their products, but not the cultures themselves. hus, cultures, ethnic groups, subcultures or various communities are actualizations, but not embodiments in a material sense. herefore, our knowledge about cultural elements is always vicarious and not direct. his should not be frustrating for us, but this diference should be kept in mind when conducting any anthropological investigation focusing on culture or social life. On the other hand, the same limitation is true also for a big part of psychological research. Cognition, reasoning, or motivation are also nonmaterial phenomena and they cannot be measured directly. Such impossibility brings some limitations to a deeper understanding of social and cultural phenomena. However, we should like to end this chapter with the optimistic claim that this limitation should be accepted as a stimulating incentive rather than as some trap of hopelessness. ( 81 ) Chapter 7 Collective Consciousness and Collective Unconscious in Anthropology he beginning of the new millennium was marked by a massive wave of studies focused on human consciousness. Many researchers have been fascinated by various quantum explanations of human consciousness, and these interests have spread across diferent disciplines. his ield, which was previously considered to be problematic and often shifted into the area of things that are “not possible to be investigated”, has started to become one of the most quickly accelerating scientiic ields. More importantly, this common interest has also uniied researchers from philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience in their eforts to interconnect individual consciousness, collective consciousness, culture, and collective agency. hese eforts have gone across diferent scientiic ields and approached human consciousness on various levels of analysis. Currently, the research and theory in the ield of quantum consciousness is so extensive that it is above the capabilities of one book chapter to summarize all of the main areas (but see e.g. Atmanspacher, 2004; Mensky, 2010; Rosenblum and Kuttner, 2006). For the purpose of building a new quantum anthropology, we have selected only some areas that will be briely touched upon later in this chapter. We aim to especially introduce the collective level of consciousness, because it is closely related to human culture, agency, collective action, and collective behavior. Furthermore, we will also briely outline the main features of collective unconscious because of its relationship with ritual practices and myth. A strong wave of interest about human consciousness has emerged in current sociocultural anthropology, but the understanding of collective consciousness is slightly luid and unanchored at this time. Aside from issues like historical con- ( 82 ) sciousness, historicity, or collective memory, there are also current anthropological concerns focusing on religious life, transcendence, and rituals. For example, in the study of Holmberg (2006), consciousness is discussed in relation to the production of magical or symbolic power and to the processes of transcendence. Here, attention was focused on the way rituals seek to transform afected subjects into active agents. he processes of symbolic transcendence are suggested to be possible through ritual practices. During the ritual, and through the shamans’ transcendent moves, social orders are deconstructed, and through the exposition to the constructedness or the arbitrariness of those orders, the afected subjects are stirred to agential states both individually and collectively. he study of Bacigalupo (2014) focuses on the way oral shamanic biographies and performances contribute to the formation of historical collective consciousness. By textualizing shamanic power in the form of “bibles”, shamanic literacies may speak to a broader audience and play, therefore, a central role in the production of the historical collective consciousness. he process of textualizing itself is considered to contribute to shamanic rebirth. Roberts (2012) has diferent interpretative insights, and turns his attention to the dynamics of collective consciousness in time, and especially to the production of secular truths about religion by colonial forces. his work links the ield of collective consciousness with the framework of postcolonialism and postcolonial studies. he native collective consciousness is supposed to be shaped by the power of colonialism, and conversion to other than native religion is understood as a type of conquest. he author calls this process a “colonization of consciousness” or “mental colonization”. All of the aforementioned interesting anthropological works direct our attention to the fundamental question of what human collective consciousness really is? As is apparent from the nature of this ield, this question cannot be answered simply. Vice versa, some ambiguous answers can be expected. here is currently a high number of diferent deinitions and explanations of the phenomenon of collective consciousness. Some of these explanations have mutual contact surfaces and some do not. We do not dare choose or reject any of the explanations here. he ( 83 ) discussion in the discourse of consciousness research is actually so tempestuous that it indicates the mainstream opinion is still in the process of formation. herefore, we will adopt the pluralistic approach, and shall introduce the main explanations seeking the nature of collective consciousness in the following section. Ideas about the nature of consciousness have some principles in common. Generally, collective consciousness is not idealized as separate units of entities, but rather as a ield. When we think about human collective consciousness, we probably think about some kind of quantum ield, because of the quantum nature of the deep microstructure of our world. It is too early to try to provide the detailed characteristics of such a ield here. A ield may be generally conceptualized as a space in which interactions occur (Combs and Krippner, 2008), but the character of it is still unknown. Aside from Durkheim’s classic original meaning (1997 [1893]) and from Murphy’s (1945) theory of an interpersonal ields, there are currently several hypotheses in question. We may consider Roll’s (1965) psi ield theory, Laszlo’s (1995) cosmic plenum, Eccles’ (1994) quantum level synaptic events, Grandpierre’s (1997) collective biological ields, Hamerof and Penrose’s (1996) ields composed of entangled vibrations of neural microtubules, or Combs and Krippner’s (2008) resonance of micro-level dendritic and synaptic ields of separate nervous systems. his high variability of explanations mirrors the complexity of this issue well. Although no general acceptance of one of explanation’s idea has been found in this ield, most of the aforementioned theories suppose some kind of binding. Collective consciousness is suggested to be ield that emerges based on some process of quantum binding (e.g. quantum entanglement). It is the extension of individual consciousness into a higher, collective level. During such quantum binding, the ields of individual consciousness transcend the borders of the organism and interfere with the consciousness of another person or persons. Maybe it is only a game with words, but the central idea is similar. Despite of the physical character of such quantum binding, it is suggested that conscious activities of individuals interfere and the ield of collective consciousness then emerges based on this interference. his process has a character of coupling between the diferent-level processes called local-global coupling (Grandpierre, 1997). It is a kind of ( 84 ) coupling between the local level of individual consciousness and the global level of collective consciousness. We may imagine a type of connectivity between individual minds whose activities interfere and thus form the ield of collective consciousness. For example, Combs and Krippner (2008) assumed the form of connectivity through subtle, very low levels of energy: “What seems to be needed, at least as a starting point, is a way to understand how the brain can be responsive to patterns of stimulation carried by ‘subtle’, very low levels of energy. he importance of low energy stimulation of some type is suggested by the fact that experiences of collective consciousness seem to occur most often during alternative states of consciousness such as trance or sleep states, as would seem to be the case with the African San peoples and Australian Aborigines, or during a silencing of the ordinary chatter between individuals and within the individual mind.” (Combs and Krippner, 2008, p. 5) his claim is also in accordance with Grandpierre (1997), who worked with the idea of collective consciousness as a kind of collective biological ield. He hypothesized that human consciousness ields interact primarily at the α-level in frequencies around 7.5 Hz. Based on binding interactions and the resonance of consciousness ields, the ield of collective consciousness emerges. Alpha-level interactions also support the idea of a subtle level of connectivity between the brains of individuals who share a particular ield of collective consciousness. It is a kind of quantum entanglement that is supposed to be responsible for such invisible connection. Combs and Krippner (2008) explained connectivity by amplifying micro-level events in dendritic ields and near synapses into macro-level process. he process of amplifying micro-level events may be understood as the underlying substrate for the idea of the macro-level extension of the individual activities of consciousness into a higher level of activity of collective consciousness. Given this mode of connectivity between individual minds, collective emotions may be experienced in individuals who interfere with a particular ield of collective consciousness. he emotional arousal of individuals interacts within entangled collective consciousness, and collective emotions such as mass ( 85 ) panic, collective hysteria, or collective fears may occur due to induction efect (Grandpierre, 1997). Collective emotions can be experienced also during rituals or trance states, e.g. in collective dance parties. Here, we can posit that the interference between individual minds can create a ield that is of a diferent quality than the primary emotional arousal of individuals. We interpret this by quantum entanglement between individual minds in moments when collective emotions occur. he emotional arousal of individuals interferes under certain circumstances and creates a kind of a collective emotional arousal that is of diferent quality than the initial sum of initial individual arousal. hus, quantum interference is proposed here as being responsible for the speciic nature of collective emotions. We argue that the experience of collective emotions is not of the same quality as the experience of collectively shared social identity. he “we feeling” or the “sense of us” may be present in some cultures, ethnic groups, or subcultures. Wendt (2015) considers the collective sharing of social identity in members of a group to be a group-level feeling. By the collective sharing of social identity, individuals may experience social unity or social belonging. It is a mode of relating to each other, or collective self-awareness. Wendt (2015) understands it as a social wave function that is present either in co-presence in a speciic situation, or also non-locally by virtue of the entanglement of the “we feeling” between individuals. he collective sharing of social identity is also closely related to collective agency and to shared motivations involved in working towards a common goal. he question is whether we may fathom a kind of quantum connectivity in the case of the collective sharing of social identity? During mass panic, collective hysteria, or trance states during rituals or dance parties, individuals are involved in sharing the special shared emotional arousal and genius loci of time and space. In the case of the collective sharing of social identity, we may consider a kind of opinion or belief transfer that may be motivated by previous socialization within a particular cultural or ethnic group. herefore, it is questionable if we are speaking about comparable experiences. Individual opinions or beliefs do not necessarily require quantum entanglement, because we may imagine that information about social belonging can be trans- ( 86 ) mitted via communication, e.g. from parents and group members to ofspring and descendants. hus, the “we feeling” may be a relatively strong emotion experienced in the consciousness of individuals, but such an emotion can be simply elicited by the minds of individuals who have fully accepted a group identity. So, although very important issue for anthropologists, we leave the question about the nature of the “we feeling” open to further investigation. OPEN QUESTION FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 3 Can the experience of collective social identity require quantum interference within the ield of collective consciousness? Let us now turn our attention to the area that carries a seemingly similarly title, but is of a quite diferent nature, indeed. It is the realm of collective unconscious. On the general level, Wendt (2006) deines collective unconscious as the background knowledge we have and of which we are not aware when we are in normal states of consciousness. In Jung’s tradition, Schäfer (2008) follows the deinition of collective unconscious as a “psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals and that consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily”. he Jungian collective unconscious is a system that is understood to be structured by a set of primary, unobservable, and irreducible elements called archetypes. Archetypes are suggested to be completely invisible and appear only symbolically in dreams, fantasies, and altered states of consciousness in the form of primordial archetypical images. It means that archetypes may be actualized in time and space in the form of primordial images through the mediation of human agency. We understand such instances to be a manifestation of the collective unconscious in empirical reality. hus, the collective unconscious is a transcendental dimension of our reality common for all cultural groups, but the particular observable expressions of collective unconscious depend also on the cultural context and tradition. “he structure of the collective unconscious is given by archetypes, whereas its content is given by the archetypical (or primordial) images, which never have an individual character but rather have a collective nature. he arche- ( 87 ) typical images are a type of ‘historical precipitate’ of the collective memory whose existence is suggested to us, inter alia, by the recurrent mythological themes that are likely common to every race and all epochs. he archetypes express themselves by means of symbols or images; they are the same for every person on the planet. ... Depending upon adaptation, the social environment, and enculturation, some archetypes develop, while others languish in a relatively undeveloped state; when archetypes develop into more elaborated structures, they are called complexes.” (Iurato, 2015, p. 64) he main implication of the concept of collective unconscious for e.g. the theory of practice (Bourdieu, 1977) is that every mythology and archaic practice is peculiar to any human being of any time, and that such practices thus have an ahistorical and an atemporal structural nature, regardless of culture (Iurato, 2015). he collective unconscious is a primary source for mythology and religious symbolism. It informs an agent’s actions and thoughts, especially in ields such as religion, the arts, etc. It is possible to approach the realm of the collective unconscious in dreams, in fantasies, and in altered states of consciousness, however, this unconscious source itself always remains to be outside of individual cognition. In anthropology, the idea of collective unconscious is distinguishable in the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss (1963). LéviStrauss understands the structural unconscious to be the universal basis for every human thought of every epoch and every civilization, based on which the common laws of social systems emerge. he Lévi-Straussian unconscious is understood to be a metastructure categorized into pure free-content forms with a universal, atemporal, and formal character. It is something that can be called the universal mind. Such a universal mind is supposed to include the inite number of the possible variants of logic with which it operates. Only the common logic structures the realm of collective unconscious, and this logic may allow various symbolic thoughts to emerge. hus, the collective unconscious is a source of the transindividual symbolic order. he Lévi-Straussian unconscious model works with the possibility of the transposition of every individual consciousness towards a higher plane. his idea is closely related to the concept of extension proposed by the quantum anthropology we are introducing here. ( 88 ) Iurato (2015) compares the Jungian and Lévi-Straussian understanding of collective unconscious. he main diference has been found in the appreciation of stability of content of the collective unconscious. he Jungian collective unconscious may undergo changes in terms of their dependence on the phylogenetic or cultural evolution. hus, the collective unconscious is an objective structural entity conceived of as universal sediments of past experiences. In contrast, the Lévi-Straussian collective unconscious is primarily characterized by the absolute and full predetermination of its structural forms. Such elementary and irreducible structures are suggested to be of an omnitemporal nature, and they are supposed to be independent of the time lux. he concept of archetypes as being the basic constituents of collective unconscious is interesting, but it also brings about several diiculties. For example, we do not know how archetypes come into being from the basic level of potentiality. In previous chapters, we argued that the emergence of any system must be based on some set of underlying zero states. Trnka (2015a) uses the term “overall, wave-particle energy-information potential”, denoting an underlying all-pervasive substructure of zero states that provide energy-information potential for all actualizations in time and space. his concept supposes that the energetic properties of individual microparticles serve as a pre-existing source of information for future actualizations. In physics, Puthof’s (2002) quantum sea of zero-point luctuations is a candidate for explaining the physical nature of the overall, wave-particle energy-information potential with which we work here. Simply stated, the constellation of qualities of microparticles in a vacuum, i.e. quantum vacuum energies, represents the underlying all-pervasive substructure of zero states for all future possible actualizations. he idea of overall, wave-particle energy-information potential shares the same hypothetical foundation with the understanding of archetypes, because both are predicted to be a set of primary, unobservable, and irreducible elements. Yet they are not the same. On one hand, there are zero-point luctuations as a random, luctuating energies in the vacuum, and patterned, more complex elements called archetypes on the other. Both zeropoint luctuations and archetypes represent the realm of potentiality, but the complexities of these potentials are diferent. hus, ( 89 ) we argue that the vacuum energies of microparticles and archetypes are not of the same nature. Whereas microparticles in the vacuum are random energetic vortices, archetypes are some kind of patterns, or patterned structures. If archetypes are more complex phenomena than zero-point luctuations in the vacuum, it is not likely that the generation of archetypes precedes the potentiality of continuous virtual particle-pair creation and annihilation in the vacuum. We consider vacuum processes of the overall, wave-particle energy-information potential to truly be the primary substrate of the realm of potentiality. By and through patterning, archetypes are supposed to be formed from the initial quantum vacuum energies. hus, archetypes are suggested to emerge secondarily, as a result of quantum patterning based on primary chaotic processes in the vacuum. We can theoretically compare the patterning of archetypes to some kind of intermediate state between the realm of initial potentiality, i.e. quantum vacuum energies, and the manifestation of archetypes in the world, i.e. primordial images. his hypothetical prediction is preliminary, and we do not yet have suicient evidence to support our idea now. Some interesting insights supporting the aforementioned idea of a hypothetical intermediate state are provided by Merrell (2009). Merrell’s study is primarily focused on the general process of semiosis (Figure 5), not on patterning of archetypes, but we introduce First degree degeneracy: = symbolization indexicalization Second degree degeneracy: = indexicalization iconization Generacy: Degeneracy: Figure 5 . Sign generacy and degeneracy (Source: Merrell, 2009) ( 96 ) diferentiation, diversity, and multiplicity. It is a primary source of alterity in the world. Heterogeneous inner dynamics stimulates change and the creation of various things, it stimulates production. It disrupts sameness. In contrast and thirdly, a neuterogeneous inner dynamics maintains harmony, order, and basically serves to protect the existence and the stability of the system. It ensures an equilibrium between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous dynamics. hus, neuterogeneous inner dynamics may be considered to be a preserver of life, i.e. it preserves quantum coherence in various existing systems. As apparent from this general outline, the actuations of heterogeneous inner dynamics have an opposite force to that of homogeneous inner dynamics. he overgrow of homogeneous or heterogeneous inner dynamics causes the destabilization of system. If one or the other prevails too much, the system is destabilized and has the tendency to collapse. We may understand homogeneous and heterogeneous inner dynamics as two complementary, uncollapsed waves that are in a dialectic relationship. One dynamics actuates the processes that are opposite to the other dynamics. he homogeneous and heterogeneous complementary waves underlie the processes that are observed during the life trajectories of man, cultures and societies. Although complementary, absolute harmony between them is very rarely observed and is always only temporary. Further along in the text, we turn our attention to speciic examples of instances where homogeneous and heterogeneous inner dynamics are suggested to potentiate various kinds of processes. When thinking about real, observable situations and dimensions of development, we should irst admit that various types of dynamics have their speciic properties. he general deinition of homogeneous, heterogeneous, and neuterogeneous inner dynamics may seem too vague to conjunct it with speciic observed instances in anthropological research. herefore, we aim to introduce here a preliminary categorization of processes with prevailing homogeneous, heterogeneous, or neuterogeneous inner dynamics. At the beginning, it is necessary to highlight that this typology is only preliminary, and we do not claim that this typology is exhaustive. We are far from maintaining this position. Rather, we aim to provide something that could be a starting ( 97 ) point for follow-up discussions and developments. he typology provided here is not complete and should be elaborated and supplemented with new instances and examples in the future. For the purpose of our current analysis we posit the following types of agentic states that also underlie various processes in social aggregates. he following categories are only idealized constructions for the general forms of development. Some types often have overlapping meanings given the limitation of the terminological linguistic possibilities of scientiic language. So, these types are not meant to be sharply deined, but together, they rather indicate the space that the given inner dynamics occupies. here are three bigger groups of processes and states: States and processes with prevailing homogeneous inner dynamics: • coherence • homeostasis • recurrence • simpliication • degeneration • deceleration States and processes with prevailing heterogeneous inner dynamics: • expansion • acceleration • uniication • separation • emergence of irregularities • emergence of instabilities States with prevailing neuterogeneous inner dynamics: • primary chaos • primary undiferentiatedness • primary unordinariness • harmonic coexistence Let us briely introduce several ad hoc examples that help us to imagine various instances within the ield of anthropological inquiry. As apparent at the beginning of this chapter, coherence ( 98 ) is a basic characteristic that enables us to distinguish man, culture, or society as systems with some sort of continuity in time. Without suicient coherence, no entity could be distinguished and analyzed. But, when going into a lower, more speciic level of analysis of processes with prevailing homogeneous inner dynamics, we can also ind other realms where coherence occurs. Beginning with the basic forces maintaining any culture, coherence secures the maintenance of existing rules, norms, standards, customs, symbols, social scripts, ceremonies, and rituals in the cultural systems. he traditions in cultural systems exist because of homogeneous agency of coherence. Without any coherence, no traditions or other forms of repeated behaviors could be distinguished in cultures. Also, the use of a shared language that is understandable to most of members of an ethnic group is related to the agency of coherence in terms of the shared use of a coherent symbolic system of signs. Homeostasis is very similar category to coherence, but it is much more related to the state of relative equilibrium in the inner environment of system. Homeostasis observed in human circulatory system is a typical example. In a similar vein, we may analyze the internal processes in towns and cities, which is an important issue within urban anthropology. Such processes may include the food supply for inhabitants, transport of people, or waste management. hese processes of urban metabolism may or may not be in a relative equilibrium based on the operation of homogeneous inner dynamics with the character of homeostasis. Recurrence frames the group of processes that share the feature of “something that is repeating”. We may imagine various forms of recurrences, such as recurrences of very similar historical events in diferent historical periods. Historians sometimes say “history always repeats itself”, and comparisons of historical events from diferent historical periods also support this thesis (e.g., Turchin, 2003). Also, religious practices such as rituals are repeated because of the homogeneous agency of recurrence. In contrast, simpliication means that some bigger system is decomposed into several lesser parts. Here, we can mention the dissolution of the Soviet Union. he uniied republics of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics broke away between years 1989–1992, and became independent post-Soviet states. ( 99 ) his dissolution inside the USSR is an example of a process that can be categorized as simpliication. Degeneration has not only the character of splitting, but is much more related with the aging of subsystems or its functions. Degeneration may include dissociation, but the movement towards the decomposition of a system is key. However, such decomposition is not rapid, but gradual. he decimation of aboriginal Tasmanians by colonial pressures between 1804 and 1847 is an example of a gradual process leading to the end of this ethnic group. hanks to the colonial power from another territory, this native ethnic group started to degenerate until it inally disappeared. he case of aboriginal Tasmanians is a typical example of the unequal relationships between a colonial power and an indigenous people. But it is also a good example of the opposing agencies of homogeneous and heterogeneous dynamics. Deceleration has the dimension of velocity. In contrast to degeneration, deceleration does not necessarily imply moving towards a inal collapse. It only means that something decreases its speed and moves slower. As an example, we can imagine the deceleration of economics during stages of stagnation. Such a stage shows the temporal deceleration of sectoral growth, but it will start to accelerate again when the stage of expansion returns. Kondratiev waves (Kondratiev, 1935) in economics show the dialectic between the opposing agencies of homogeneous and heterogeneous dynamical principles very well. Two opposing forces are always in the conlict, and the domination of homogeneous or heterogeneous dynamics is only temporal. After some period of the domination of homogeneous dynamics, heterogeneous dynamics begins to dominate again. So, economical development is suggested to be a constant process of dialectic clash, similarly to historical development as proposed by Yolles et al. (2008). When turning our attention to processes with prevailing heterogeneous inner dynamics, in some cases, it is easy to merely switch the aforementioned examples. For example, it is simple to see the case of acceleration in the stage of the expansion of economics during Kondratiev waves as an example of prevailing heterogeneous inner dynamics. Furthermore, we can also return to the case of the decimation of aboriginal Tasmanians and analyze the example from the view of colonists. From this viewpoint, ( 100 ) the decimation of the aboriginal ethnic group was forced by the heterogeneous inner dynamics underlying the behavior of colonists. Colonists were motivated to expand to another territory, and this is a typical example of expansion by the force of heterogeneous inner dynamics. he category of expansion generally implies a quantitative increase in size or an extension of existing system. Undoubtedly, colonialism has much to do with intercultural processes. Acculturation is a process that has attracted the attention of anthropologists for many decades. During acculturation, one culture expands across its borders and changes another culture. his process may be accompanied by the transfer of ideas, technologies, customs, etc. It is apparent, then, that acculturation processes are potentiated by prevailing backwards heterogeneous inner dynamics. In contrast, the emergence of resistance groups within the population is a process of maintaining coherence. Members of resistance groups reject the acceptation of new cultural standards in attempt to preserve their culture of origin. Again, the dialectic between opposing agencies of homogeneous and heterogeneous dynamics is apparent. he process of uniication can be demonstrated on the example of emergence of the European Union. European states have started to share the market, some legislation, and in part, governance. hese changes are understood as to be uniication, and they are in contrast to the process of separation. We used the case of the dissolution of the Soviet Union as an example of simpliication that is a process with prevailing homogeneous inner dynamics. But, when we switch the perspective, we may also detect the processes of the emergence of instabilities in the same case. he particular separatist movements inside the former states of USSR were potentiated by the prevailing heterogeneous inner dynamics, and they can be considered to be a case of the emergence of instabilities in systems inally leading to the process of separation. his example also shows the interrelation between two consequent processes in social aggregates. First, the instabilities that emerged in the systems, and consequently, some of the states of the former USSR started with the separatist movements. Generally, many processes of any kind of change are considered to be processes with prevailing heterogeneous inner dynam- ( 101 ) ics. Stages where the behavior of systems show prevailing heterogeneous inner dynamics are stages when systems may grow, evolve, and also diferentiate themselves. However, diferentiation itself is also a key principle that is suggested to be responsible for the emergence of social inequalities in social aggregates. Intergroup alterity especially is a case when one group has diferentiated itself from another group. When one group gains more power, it usually starts to favor the ingroup and to diferentiate the ingroup’s image from the relevant outgroups. he emergence of social inequalities and stereotypes towards marginal groups is often present during this process. We do not want to go into more detail here, but on the general level, the diferentiation between two social groups can be understood as a source for the emergence of alterity in the social system. Here, we shift out attention to the key question of processes with prevailing neuterogeneous inner dynamics. As stated above, neuterogeneous inner dynamics maintains harmony, order, and equilibrium between the opposing agencies of homogeneous and heterogeneous dynamics. Neuterogeneous dynamics is neutral in terms of homogeneous and heterogeneous agencies, but it has the agency to stabilize both opposing agencies. We argue that instances where neuterogeneous inner dynamics would be prevailing are really very rare, and that some of them are rather hypothetical instances. For example, harmonic coexistence is considered to be a hypothetical instance. When social systems are still existing, it is highly unlikely that they would stop their diferentiation for a longer period of time. Sometimes, we may distinguish that some social aggregates are temporarily in relative harmony in terms of the powers of social groups, the absence of intergroup conlicts, etc. But, this state is always temporal. Agencies of either homogeneous or heterogeneous dynamics start to inluence the inner dynamics of a social system after the short lash of inner equilibrium. So, even though the state of harmonic coexistence is alluring for many social scientists, many decades of anthropological and sociological investigation throw us back into the rough reality of perpetual dialectic clash between agencies of homogeneous or heterogeneous dynamics. Other cases are those instances when the order of a social system has still not been established. hese instances are situations at the beginning of existence. In these situations, we can ( 102 ) observe primary chaos, primary undiferentiatedness, or primary unordinariness. All three states are relatively similar and describe the initial states of existence. he term primary chaos highlights the chaotic behavior of possibilities or potentialities at the beginning, i.e, “when something is coming into being”. Primary undifferentiatedness and primary unordinariness include the absence of order and diference. No kind of diference is present when things are at the initial state of primary undiferentiatedness. Similarly, no order can be found when things are at the state of primary unordinariness. All three of these states are unique and unrepeatable. hey are states that can be considered as initial conditions in the ield of chaos theory (Kiel and Elliot, 2004). In the previous text, we briely outlined the main forms of the life trajectories of man, cultures, and societies. Of course, our categories do not mean that just one type of process always underlies the processes observed in man, cultures, or societies. he ideal types are not mutually exclusive, but combinations and mixed types are rather suggested to occur. his fact complicates anthropological inquiry, but we should keep such hypothetical mixing in mind if we do not want to reduce such complex phenomena, i.e. cultures and social aggregates. hus, it may be reasonable to expect the various combinations of these pure prototypical forms in highly complex nonlinear quantum systems, such as cultures, groups, and societies. hese highly complex systems are attracted by strange attractors, and therefore, it is dificult to make strict deinitions of the ideal types of their internal processes. he typology is thus rather indicative. here are also some questions that are very diicult to answer at this moment. For example, the role of attractors in guiding life trajectories of cultures and social aggregates is not clear. OPEN QUESTION FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 7 What function do strange attractors have in guiding the life trajectories of man, cultures, and societies? his question transcends our current scientiic knowledge; we believe, however, that we should not fear to posit such types of questions, since they can fruitfully stimulate future research, as well as future theory development. ( 103 ) Chapter 9 Death and Final Collapses of Cultures and Societies As we observe the existence of man and social units in time, we can also distinguish that neither man nor social aggregates remain permanently over time. Life as an equivalent of quantum coherence (Wendt, 2015) can be maintained only under speciic conditions in both external and internal environment of a system. hese conditions under which life is possible mean those conditions under which the system is stable enough to maintain its existence (as a coherent manifestation in time and space). he system dies when these conditions change over the frontier limits that are indispensable for the perseverance of the existence of the actualized potentiality. At this moment, the continuity of quantum coherence is broken, and the radical transformation of matter and energy often follows. After some time, each man dies and each social unit undergoes the radical transformation that can be called inal collapse. here is no permanency that can be found in the lives of man and social aggregates. Man and social units represent two diferent levels of anthropological inquiry, and therefore, this chapter also will start discussing the case of death at the individual level, and only then we will shift to the case of the radical transformations of societies, groups, and cultures. During life, the human body undergoes series of changes with episodes of destabilization of the inner environment of the body with impact on the whole system. his means that the coniguration of the basic particles of the system is broken. As the collapse is approaching, the frequency of crises increases, and the range of changes in the coniguration accumulates. his is true even in case of sudden death, e.g. a car accident or a heart attack. In this case, collapses of the system’s elements happen in very short time interval, so they may not be easily recognized. Still, however, ( 104 ) crises and partial (“small”) collapses of elements or subsystems precede the “big”, inal collapse of the whole system. According to many folk religious and spiritual beliefs, there is still something that survives this inal collapse of the human body. Man is believed to be an aggregate of a material body and a nonmaterial self. While the material body is mortal, nonmaterial self (“soul”) is suggested to be eternal, and thus survives the death of the body. What is fundamental to many religious and folk ideas about life after death is cyclicity. Cyclicity is one of the fundamental laws of nature often expressed in cultural symbolism. For example, the wreaths that we place on graves even today on All Souls’ Day are symbols of eternal life. he image of the Phoenix, who after his death in a ire is born again, can be another nice example of nonlinear thoughts about life and death. In folk ideas about death, earthbound life is then perceived as just a part of the “whole” life, as just one sequence of a longer process. Death is perceived as the inal collapse for the material body, but a transformation for the eternal soul, which can remain in the realm of eternity or be born again within the body. he western concept of soul is rather complicated. It is often, in the religious, in the philosophical, or in the psychological tradition, somehow connected to individuality. So, the eternal life of a soul indicates the eternal continuation of an individual with a particular identity. Subjective individual identity is given by the “I” sense generated by the subjective mind. In many non-literate traditions, the notion of soul is not strictly bounded, there are also concepts of multilateral souls. During our stay among the Benuaq people of Kalimantan, where we conducted research on their rituals, we encountered special performances oriented to various souls. To put it simply, we can say that the Benuaqs distinguish a soul connected with the body, which stays in the “village of dead” that mirrors the world of the living. his soul needs to eat, drink, etc., and can feel joy or sorrow or other emotions in the same way that a living person does. It is the duty of living descendants to provide this soul with everything that a soul needs in the afterworld. It can also trouble the living people if it feels joyless. he second soul, connected to the head, is formless and resides in the realm of heaven. he Benuaq concept of soul fuses individual (emotional) soul with ( 105 ) the formless “something” that outlives the body (Lorencova, 2008; for a detailed discussion, see also Venz, 2013, 2014). All of these examples show man’s attempts to deal with an idea of a nonempirical dimension. here are many notions and concepts, and it is not the task of this chapter to prove or to reject them. Rather, we aim to show how diferent conceptualizations of the world around us can shift the concept of the invisible realm. We also wish to show how concepts of quantum anthropology could be applied to this issue. We can state that death and dying is the most controversial process in an individual’s life. here are many interested groups and individuals who propose diferent suggestions, from the notion that death is ultimate to the notion it is just crossing over to other realms of (eternal) life. For materialists considering matter to be the fundamental element of reality, the death of the body is a inal point of a life trajectory. Of course, the individual body with a particular identity no longer exists after death. However, this does not mean that the matter that constitutes a human body disappears. Rather, the basic particles which constitute the body are re-involved in the whole matter potentia. With new actualization (materialization), particles are rearranged into other forms and structures. It is likely that just because of our limited senses; we often conceptualize man as a materially bounded body. According to this common concept, self is matter-dependent. his would mean that self ends with the visible surface of our body. However if we accept that human body has also quantum character (Wendt, 2015; Barad, 2007), as mentioned in the chapter on embodiment, it is not only matter that we are dealing with. We can see the human body as an actualization, a speciic form spreading out of energy-information potential. Furthermore, as suggested by Barad (2007), it is presumable that the human body does not end at its skin, the surface being the object of our empirical experience. Most likely we may consider the human body to be a matter-energy-information complex. Since the time when Moody (1975) introduced the concept of near-death (and out-of-body) experience to the western world, there have been many records and much research carried out about how individuals feel their self. Whatever people experienced during their physical collapse (cerebral death), they al- ( 112 ) ous chapter). If the homogeneous and the heterogeneous inner dynamics are in a relative equilibrium, movement along the trajectory is stabilized in an even helical shape orbiting around its central axis shaped in a straight line. If, on the other hand, the system reaches an unstable phase, the regular spiral movement is disrupted, and the spiral movement now has an either ascending or descending tendency. In this case, the individual threads of the helix either continuously grow or continuously shrink, creating the shape of a conical helix. he central axis can either be straight or however curved. For example, we can witness such types of movements in the macroworld with whirlpools, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. We believe that this parallel is inspiring for the concept of the course of the collapses of social aggregates and cultures. Bárta (2013) pointed out that the frequency of individual crises increases and the intervals between them decrease with the approach of the impending moment of inal collapse. his type of development mirrors the shape of a funnel, or of a circular cone with a convex wall whose surface narrows up towards its peak. his idea has also inspired Trnka’s (2015a) spiral model of collapses in social and cultural systems (Figure 6). he spiral model of crisis leading to the inal collapse is supported also by some mathematical models describing the behavFigure 6 . The spiral model of collapses in social and cultural systems (according to Trnka, 2015a) ( 113 ) ior of collective systems. For example, Bhattacharya et al. (2009) provide such a mathematical model (Figure 7). In this case, the cone is an attractor for the convergent spiral trajectories coming from the external environment of the system. Such trajectories are constitutive for the system from the moment they begin to collect in the space and create a cone. his moment mirrors the initial conditions for the inal collapse. hese trajectories emerge from the uncertain chaotic possibilities and when coming into the cone, they acquire certain position. his model shows very well the importance of the sensitivity for the initial condition. he period when inal collapse begins is thus of key importance for the determination of the further development of social unit that is approaching inal collapse. After trajectories in the model enter the cone, they started to twist towards the narrowest part of the cone. Bhattacharya et al. (2009) point out that they are conFigure 7 . Bhattacharya’s model of the dynamic behavior of collective systems (Source: Bhattacharya et al., 2009) ( 114 ) verging towards their origin, and when we look at their graph, the origin is just zero, i.e. nonexistence. Bhattacharya’s model indicates that the inal collapse is attracted by a single point attractor. It is in contrast to the emergence of cultures and social aggregates that have been suggested to be attracted by some kind of strange attractors in Chapter 4. he inal collapse is a process that ends existence. It is the move from existence to the zero state, i.e. to nonexistence. Bhattacharya’s graph is inite, when trajectories reach the zero point, they end; they have disappeared. On the other hand, however, Trnka’s (2015a) spiral model of collapses (see Figure 6) also considers the possibility of returning to the realm of zero states, i.e. to the realm of potentiality. he moment of collapse is represented by the narrowest part of the conical helix, and after a speciic entity or system decays, the existing manifestation of the energy-information ield passes with the help of topological inversion back into the overall, wave-particle energy-information potential (see Trnka, 2015a, for more details). he given part of the energy-information ield then again becomes a part of the realm of potentiality, i.e. the quantum potentiality ield in terms of Puthof’s quantum sea of zero-point luctuations in the vacuum (2002). he consideration of returning to the realm of zero states enables us to accept the possible continuity between systems that have already died and systems that shall emerge in the future. he previously actualized part of the energy-information ield becomes a part of the realm of potentiality again, so it is also possible that some of this constellation may be again manifested in the form of future actualizations. As we have mentioned above, when the existence of a social group ends, no direct continuity can be found with any future emerging social group. Also, the agency of a new group is diferent from that of the agency of the former group. We are, however, speaking about material bodies of group members here, and not about their individual consciousness. And this is the point. Even if material bodies die and the individual consciousness of group members return back to the realm of potentiality, similar patterns may emerge in the future both on the individual, as well as collective, level. his continuity between those systems that have already died and systems that will emerge in the future is indirect. Such type ( 115 ) of continuity is speciic, because it includes return to the realm of zero states, i.e. to the realm of nonexistence. his realm is not the realm of actuality, but it is the source of emerging patterns. And, as we have mentioned earlier in this book, the emergence of individuals or social groups depends on the type of strange attractor that is responsible for a given actualization. We can say that a strange attractor “selects” a part of the realm of potentiality that is proceeding to manifest itself as some kind of material or nonmaterial actualization in time and space. he role of strange attractors is very important for sociocultural anthropology, because strange attractors predetermine agencies of individuals, and therefore, also the agency of any kind of social group. If we speak about agency, we should keep in mind that the strange attractor itself is an agency underlying the agency of any kind of social group that is already a manifestation of a part of the overall, wave-particle energy-information potential. It is an “agency beyond agency”, and it is also a source of diversity and variability between people, national cultures, ethnic groups, subcultures, etc. Another question is how the selectivity of strange attractors works? Why are emerging systems attracted only by some types of strange attractors? Is this process random, or not? Here, we are afraid that this problem extends beyond the possibilities of currently available scientiic knowledge. Further development of this reasoning would be speculative at this moment, but it provides promising incentive for research in this area for future. ( 116 ) Chapter 10 Language, Collapse of Wave Function, and Deconstruction In the eighties, Derrida’s concept of deconstruction (1997 [1967]) inluenced the writings of some social and cultural anthropologists. Textuality, textual reading, and the relationship between text and meaning represented one of the key concerns of postmodernism in this period. Deconstructive reading makes revealing hidden meanings in the text possible, and again underlines the relativity of anthropological methods. A question that has been so far is what qualities does the process of deconstruction have? Here, we attempt to provide an interpretation inspired by the quantum anthropological thinking. It seems that the deconstructive reading of texts has a character similar to one phase of wave function collapse. How does a wave function collapse proceed? Before wave function collapses occur, the wave function spreads out over the entire space (Pusey et al., 2012). Each constituent of matter or energy does not have a clearly deined position in this phase. All things have the properties of a wave under the situation of non-collapsed wave function. At the moment that an external observer observes the wave, it peaks and the wave collapses in the sense that it actually has null values in all other places of the space where the given entity was not observed (Pusey et al., 2012). At the same moment, the observer starts to perceive the observed, e.g. the human body. he chain of wave function collapses ends at the moment when the observer stops their observations and turns his/her attention to another part of reality. After that, the wave function spreads out over the entire space again. We argue that the process of deconstruction works in the same way. Meanings stay in the superposition state before the deconstructive reading of an anthropologist. In this phase, meanings of the text cannot be completely known. We may characterize ( 117 ) this situation by the multiplicity of possible meanings. Before carrying out a deconstructive reading, the text may convey several possible meanings, and each of these meanings has a certain probability of coming into being. When the text is critically read, some of the possibilities are actualized, and an anthropologist pursues some of possible meanings of the text. It is due to reader’s agency that only some of the possible meanings are appearing to his/her consciousness. After a deconstructive reading, the text returns back to the state before the reading, and the possible meanings remain in the superposition state again. Indeed, these fundamental characteristics of the process of deconstruction explain why textual and literary analysis is often declared to be irreducible and unstable. Each researcher may get diferent meanings from the text, and thus the subjectivity of a researcher plays a central role in the textual and literary analysis. he acquired meanings are, therefore, always relative and depending on the subject, i.e. the researcher in this case. he idea that meanings stay in the superposition state before the act of reading interferes well with Ingarden’s theory of reader experience (1973a, 1973b). It assumes that texts only represent incompletely determined states of afairs, and that “places of indeterminacy” are always present in texts (Bundgaard, 2013; Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, 2015). he concretization of text, or “gap-illing”, always depends on a reader’s action. It is apparent that Ingarden’s conceptualization of the relationship between meanings and texts supports the quantum anthropological interpretation of meanings staying in the superposition state before the reading of a text, as is proposed above. Derrida’s (1997 [1967]) contribution highlighted the role of mutual relations between words, and pointed out that it is the network of these structures that makes language a language. Allow us to make several remarks on the nature of language here. Human language is suggested to be an informational system that has the character of a symbolic system (Patee, 2013), i.e. abstract system of signs. It consists of a relatively stable set of basic elements, signs/letters/words, and rules about their use, for example, codes or grammar. his does mean that signs have stable meanings over space, time, and contexts. Words are understood to be symbolic vehicles that acquire meaning in the process of communication or textual analysis. Human language ( 118 ) is such a complex system that it enables us to express all varieties of thought, with the exception of some extraordinary states of consciousness like peak experiences. Peak experiences are experienced often in altered states of consciousness, and individuals have reported it is not possible to provide an exhaustive description of them when using a common language. In contrast to thoughts, meaning is an emergent quality that is generated in the process of communication or textual analysis. Whereas thoughts are virtual and belong, therefore, to the realm of potentiality, their expression in a sentence is an actualization in time and space (Schäfer, 2008). A thought exists in the mind of a sending actor long before it is expressed in a form of sentence. When unexpressed, a thought is a part of a nonempirical reality, but when expressed in words, it is a part of the empirical world (Schäfer, 2008). We argue that emergence of meaning in communication share some similarities with the probabilistic logic of quantum theory, more speciically with the theory of superposition. Many words have more than one ixed meaning. Linguists speak about denotations and connotations, or about explicit and literal meanings. During the speech act, the actual meaning of word emerges when a speaker conveys a message, e.g. speaks a sentence to a listener, or to more listeners. We argue that the emergence of meaning has a character of actualization in time and space. When words/ signs are chained and sent to a listener in a form of a code, the actual meaning emerges with respect to a given situation or context. We suggest that the multiplicity of meanings in some words is given by the superposition of meanings that a given word may be linked with. Before the actual message is generated, the word may convey several meanings, and each of these meanings has a certain probability to be actualized. When a message is generated, one of the word’s meaning is actualized (depending on the context that the word appears in), whereas other meanings are not actualized. From this perspective, the denotative meaning is the meaning that has the highest probability to be realized in comparison to connotative meanings in a given culture. In a similar vein, Wendt (2015) suggested that the ground state of a concept is represented as a superposition of potential meanings. Concepts shared in a given culture are understood as vectors within their wave functions. hese vectors are in super- ( 119 ) position, being entangled quantum mechanically. hey have different weights, mirroring typicality of meaning, i.e. how typical the meaning of a given concept is. hese weights are related to the probabilities of how likely will the concept collapse into one actual meaning. he speech act is suggested to be what elicits the collapse of a concept’s wave function from potential meanings into one actual meaning. he speech act is thus believed to be analogical to the moment of measurement in quantum mechanics. he collapse of concept begins with the intention and decision of a speaker to communicate some of the meanings to a listener. However, the actual meaning is always produced contextually, i.e. it depends on the context of event and listener. From this view, memory structures and agencies of both speaker and listener are intra-acting in the same way as measurement devices in quantum experiments intra-act with microparticles. he introduction of a new concept in communication has the potential to signiicantly change the follow-up development of a communication episode. Similarly, the change of material or virtual context of communication may have signiicant inluences on meanings that are actualized. here is also some empirical evidence available supporting the notion that quantum entanglement and interference are present in actual language use (Aerts, 2010). We shall continue in this line of thinking and develop this idea further. We argue that the speech act is not the only instance when the collapse of concept’s wave function from potential meanings into actual meaning may occur. At the beginning of this chapter, we focused our attention to the act of reading texts. he intra-action between the agency of a reader and the agency of author by the meaning of the text is present, and therefore, we state that aside from speaker/listener intra-action, reader/ text intra-action should also be taken into account. Although the text is not a living entity, material coniguration is also suggested to be responsible for the generation of meanings (Barad, 2007). From this view, the text can be regarded as an intra-acting counterpart of a reader, and therefore, the collapse of concept’s wave function is suggested to possibly occur by the intra-acting between reader and text. Meanings stay in the superposition state before reading, and collapse into actual meanings when a reader intends to and begins to read. So here, agencies of both the reader and the author of the text are intra-acting in the same ( 120 ) way as agencies of speaker and listener during a speech act. And again, the actual meaning is always produced contextually, not only by the circumstances accompanying the act of reading, but also by the intended meanings and structural unity of a text. hus, pursuing the meaning of a text during textual and literary analysis is related to the concept’s wave function and the act of reading itself. Furthermore, we argue that quantum entanglement exists also in the realm of the mutual relationship of signs and words. Derrida (1997 [1967]) suggested that signs exist only in relation to each other. he meaning of one sign exists only in relation to another sign or sings. Words may obtain meanings only because of contrast between signs. his relationship is similar to the relationship that is supposed to exist between microparticles in quantum mechanics. Microparticles do not exist as separate entities, but are always entangled. he quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of other particles. So, we argue that the emergence of meaning is possible only because of the quantum entanglement of signs in a particular language (for the hypothetical qualities of such quantum entanglement between signs see, e.g., Merrell, 2009). Let us turn our attention to a general relationship between language and thought. he sharing of language by the members of a given cultural group is well-evidenced, but the nature of such cultural sharing is questionable. For example, Wendt (2006) built a maybe too excessively sharp dichotomy between the externalist and internalist view of cultural sharing. He distinguished between the internalist’s “thought precedes language” position and the externalist’s “language precedes thought” position. Individualistic sharing supposes that thoughts are assumed to reside irst inside in the individual’s mind and only then may become common knowledge. In contrast, the holist or externalist view supposes that the meanings of our thoughts are intrinsically social, constituted by thoughts in other people’s minds, i.e. “language precedes thought”. Yet actually, we do not think that either the irst, neither the second relationship should be omitted in the integral concept of quantum anthropology. When viewing them in a dynamic manner, both instances are justiied and may occur in quantum social systems. he quantum anthropological perspective does not reject that various cultur- ( 121 ) al elements may be transferred between individuals, as well as between groups and representatives of institutions. Such types of transfer may be included in the process of learning, for example. If the source of transferred elements is intrinsically cultural, based on actually shared traditions, values, or standards, this is the case of externalistic sharing, and here, “language precedes thought”. On the other hand, when a social actor actively changes or modiies some of the existing cultural standards and transfers it via communication, it is an example of individualistic sharing, and then “thought precedes language”. In that case, the social actor plays an active role in changing the existing cultural standards. To refuse one of these two distinct instances would be reductionistic. If we would strictly refuse the role of externalistic sharing, it may imply that no recognized cultural standards exist or may be distinguished. On the other hand, if we strictly refuse internalistic sharing, social actors would be suggested to play only a passive role in the culture/individual relationship, and also, the instance of inter-individual learning may then be problematic to justify. For these reasons, both instances are very important for a complex understanding of the ongoing process of the diferentiation of social and cultural systems. Moreover, when the relationship between language and thought would be supposed to be unidirectional, such an idea would not meet the complementarity principle, which is one of the basic pillars of quantum logic (Bohr, 1928). hus, we suggest that the relationship between language and thought is bidirectional. Language plays a key role in Foucauldian discourse analysis (Foucault, 1972). Society is being shaped by languages of speciic discourses that relect the existing power relationships. In this theory, discourse is understood to be the totality of language used in a given ield of social or intellectual practice. he social world is supposed to be expressed through language and practices. We argue that speciic forms of patterning may be observed here, because various discourses difer in the structure and language use. Discourses are perpetually diferentiating toward each other, and the term inter-discursivity describes this alterity. We expect that inter-discursivity has also the character of quantum entanglement, similar to the quantum entanglement existing between signs. Similarly to microparticles, discourses also do not exist as separate entities, but are always entangled. ( 128 ) versal structure could be fruitful. It is also questionable what kind of structure could be found in reality. It is probable that we would obtain not a universal structure, but a structure of our own thinking bonded by our own experience, culture, oicial knowledge, personal concepts, beliefs, etc. In this sense, the way to solve the confusion of equivocation could be inspired by the perspectival anthropology of Viveiros de Castro (2004), who stressed that our attempts in anthropological investigation should be focused on these equivocations themselves. hese equivocations emerge when two conceptual languages comes into contact. Equivocations are not what impede the relations, but that which inds and impels them, they are the diferences in perspective. In this sense, multiple realities exist if we accept the notion that an object’s existence is more than a point of view onto reality, but a reality in itself. We can ind these diferences between cultures or species, but also between individuals. From the point of view of quantum anthropology, those who are the observed and those who are the observer (object-subject relationship, or self and other relationship) play a crucial role in the appeared alterity between actualizations. Meanings embraced in myths may be actualized in a similar way as the meanings of words in a sentence (as recognized in previous chapter). he constitutive particles of myths, which Lévi-Strauss (1963) calls mythemes, representing irreducible, unchanging elements, can acquire meaning only in relation to another mytheme or mythemes. Mythemes cannot be described independently of other mythemes because they are entangled in a quantum sense – this means one element has to be interrelated with others. In this quantum perspective, the elements of myth share some similarities with quantum probabilistic logic. We suggest that there is a multiplicity of meanings of single mythical elements given by the superposition of meanings that they may be linked with. In this sense, actualization of meaning may be interpreted as wave function collapse. Before the actual meaning of myth arises, the mythical elements may convey several meanings, and each of these meanings has a certain probability to come into being. he actualized meaning depends on the context of the observer and his agency. he mythopoeic systems are often strongly entangled with the social systems where they are embedded. he symbolic im- ( 129 ) ages used in myths arise from the particular environment being a frame for everyday human experience. For example, animals such as bears, tigers, wolves, or hyenas, or other carnivorous predators, are often used as symbols of some evil or danger. Which type of animal would act in the particular myth depends on the local geographical distribution of the species. he same can be applied to plants and other creations of nature, the landscape (such as a forest, a desert, mountains, the sea, etc.), but also to the particular products of sociocultural order (such as social institutions, social roles, etc.). his entanglement may result in that a big part of the members of these cultures share a similar mythology. We can say that most people accept and participate in accordance with the world view they inherit from their culture. his participation results in real life experience that is, in turn, interpreted in terms of the mythopoeic system serving as the conirmation of the people’s system of knowledge (Laughlin and hroop, 2001). It is diicult to estimate the extent to which myth shapes the scripts for the everyday lives of the members of a culture, but the entanglement between a mythopoeic system and individual minds might be quite strong, as all children are exposed to myths and fairy tales in the course of their early development. hese stories may have a crucial signiicance for the cognitive development of prototypical social scripts, concept formation, and also the formation of identity. hus, the agency of myth starts to inluence the minds of people from a very early age. In this perspective, we can see myth as collectively shared (and thus also accepted) evidence of experience with some special instances that are embedded into collective memory. he experience of the hero in myths, no matter if they are a warrior, holy man, or laundress, resonates with the individual’s experience on the ontological level. his experience can bring us into contact with the essential human dimension and the basic conditions of our lives (e.g. mortality and vulnerability, identity, relations, needs, etc.). he experience embraced in myth is often perceived as our internal experience. his feeling of consonance does not come automatically, but rather if we make (or have personally come to know) such an experience, it means if we are receptive. It means that not all members of the sociocultural group share the same relation to mythical themes. Rather, the process of “ac- ( 130 ) ceptance” is, to a certain extent, selective on the conscious level given by the course of a life trajectory. his is valid, especially, in the case of vertically and horizontally extended experience (see Chapter 2). he power of the myths is grounded in their meaning-creation potential. In this sense, experience in myth serves as the context to give meaning to our experiences. In myth, however, the border between character, notion, and the time-space position is not clear. For example, in ancient Egypt, maat was the term for truth, order, justice, harmony, and stability, but Maat was also a goddess with her own cult and genealogy. So, we are dealing with the principle maintaining and underlying Egyptian society, and simultaneously with the anthropomorphous goddess of this principle. his logic is not only connected with ancient or “savage” ways of thinking, as we can see in the case of Barthes’ chapter Soap-powders and Detergents (1993), where he analyzed the myth of products which became used in (not only French) everyday life. As he says, products based on chlorine and ammonia are the representatives of a kind of absolute ire or blind warrior, while powders, on the contrary, are selective, they just push or drive dirt through the texture of the object, so their function is keeping the public order, not making war. he principle of “negative” evil, violent and dangerous, which we need to be on guard against, and the principle of the “positive” maintenance of order are connected with the speciic objects (products) of the individual brands. he meanings encoded in ancient and traditional, sacred stories, as well as non-spiritual, medially difused stories, shape peoples’ orientation in their everyday lives. he mythopoeia informs the lived experience of people and gives it sense in their lives. he entanglement between experience and myth is apparent. In mythical stories, experience is registered in such a way that the listener lives and conceptualizes the experience vicariously through internally generated feelings, thoughts, and images – through the ostensibly imagined adventures of the hero or sacred being. Moreover, the didactic quality of myth makes it possible for people to share the same body of core symbols and the sacred context in which the symbols are applied (Laughlin and hroop, 2001). As mentioned above, listening to myths and fairy tales is a child’s primary symbolic experience. his experience is indirect, ( 131 ) and it proceeds without actual physical contact with the world. While listening, children identify themselves with the characters, experience the story and events, and learn how to solve prototypical situations. Even though they do not understand the whole depth of wisdom embraced in the story, they absorb it on the unconscious level. his helps for the development of prototypical social scripts and scenarios in their minds. Heroes in fairy tales provide “role models” for children, which enable them to identify with socially accepted social roles and emotional behavior. It is one of the characteristic features of myths that have the unceasing capability to purvey subsequent insights and understandings. As the individual or the whole group grows and gathers experiences, new meanings of the myths actualize. hese actualizations serve for new interpretations and conceptualizations of meaning. Meaning in myth is not objectively given, even though some “oicial” meaning is expected in the sociocultural group. For individuals, however, mythology is a continual source of meanings that appear. In this sense, it can be seen as a sea of potentiality. Even though the human language is such a complex system that it enables us to express all varieties of thoughts, experiences behind the ordinary order can be expressed only to a limited extent. Mythical language can interconnect everyday experience with the experience that transcends it, e.g. with the extraordinary states of consciousness (trance, near-death experiences, dreaming, meditation, etc.). It is the special quality of the myth that the wholeness of reality is recorded so that those states that are ordinarily contradictory states are connected together. he language of myth is mostly metaphorical and symbolic. Metaphors or symbolic expressions are not the intention, however. Rather, metaphors have to be used due to the limitation of our language. And thus, for people without near-death experiences, e.g. the motif of the “loving, all-embracing light”, it is just a metaphor, but for people with near-death or out-of-body experiences, it means a shift to the level of the universal understanding on the totally existential experience. As not everyone has this experience, the symbol of the “loving, all-embracing light”, depicted as radiance, could be understood as just an image or metaphor. ( 132 ) he relation between symbols and the invisible transcendental reality is reversible. his means it is not just that symbols emerge from transcendental reality, but that they also act as a way of connecting with the transcendental realm. he use of symbols or primordial images connects and guides an individual’s or group’s mind to the invisible domain of reality. Every religious tradition has its set of symbols, archetypal in the core, that enables its adherents to reach the transcendental sphere. Numbers, signs, masks, or archaic formulae are believed to be able to change the structure of everyday empirical reality, so the identity (what makes it “it”) or quality of the objects can be changed. It could be, for example, the symbolic sign of the holy cross before the irst slicing of bread, which extends manmade bread to the extended realm of the sacred sphere, or the Christian tradition of writing C+M+B signs supplemented with year (e.g. 20 C+M+B 16) over the doorway of a house, church, or other buildings on January 6, the Epiphany, which also serves as a connection to the sacred sphere (to obtain a blessing). In any case, individuals are not only passive actors in relation to mythopoeic systems. hey can actively modify and change the existing mythology. Upon occasion, it can lead to alterations in interpretations, which in turn can change aspects of the cosmology, and the ritual-mythopoeic relections of that cosmology found in a particular culture (Laughlin and hroop, 2001). he experience of myth goes hand in hand with action – action that is repeated. In this sense, myth is entangled with ritual, drama, performance, or other human action throughout the process of its coming alive. he resurrection or creation of a mythology accompanies the resurrection or creation of a new tradition, which brings new actions, relations, values, meanings, explanations, etc. During our anthropological ield research of the Czech neo-Slavic communities, we have observed a mythical resurrection which enabled adherents to create and understand their identity roots, ritual activities, values, and group relations. he most important neo-Slavic rituals (Figure 8) take place during the transient phases of the year, i.e. solstices and equinoxes. he core of these rituals lies in the experience, which constitutes the basis for the formation of sense in ritual participants. his experience is extended both vertically and horizontally. In the case of ( 133 ) the horizontal extension of experience, we have to stress that the archaic ritual practices of Slavs have not been preserved until the present in Czech culture and written historical records. hus, the neo-Slavic shamans have to be inspired by other Slavic countries where some fragments of myths and practices remain and are still practiced. he recent Czech neo-Slavic shamans resurrect the ancient Slavic symbols and concepts, but their own ritual practices are rather experimental. Shamans play an active role in the construction of practices that are mythology-related. In the course of rituals, they actively explain meanings of the speech, actions, and symbols which are present. hese explanations reconstruct the probable design of rituals and mythology based on indicative fragments from historical records of various Slavic ethnic groups, but the construction is strongly shaped by the shamans’ subjective inluences. Explanations of meanings which Figure 8 . A practicing neo-Slavic shaman during the resurrection of a Slavic ritual during the autumnal equinox, St. Donat, Czech Republic, 2012 (Photo: Radek Trnka) ( 134 ) are declaimed during rituals are the fundamentals of the new emerging “myths of origin”. his efort is understood by adherents of the neo-Slavic cult as ritual and myth resuscitation, but in reality, it is rather a ritualand myth-making process. Myth has the ability to mediate and give higher meaning and signiication to the lives and experiences of the members of the social group. In this way, myths of origin help to objectivize and legalize the emerging subsystem of the sociocultural system. Myths and rituals also have the power to make the sacred from the profane. Myths and mythical sacred symbols also have the power to create and maintain the sense of collective origin, and support the continuity of the social, ethnic, national, or religious group. hus, a national cultures’ mythopoeia always has a historical continuity with the mythopoeic system that shaped the consciousness of individuals for years, but it is also a product of the creative imagination of the members of a particular social system. A cultures’ mythopoeia is an informational spectrum based on both the individual and collective experience. Once created, the myths and symbols circulate among group members, and on the level of sharing, they have the potential to arouse emotions, which reciprocally make the myths and symbols even more sacred or special (Turner and Stets, 2005). In the course of time, the circulation and sharing of symbols becomes the particularized cultural capital of the group that comes through the words, special knowledge, speech patterns, objects, memories, experiences, and other things that are shared only by the members of the group. Once the group is symbolized, the invocation of the symbols alone will arouse emotional energy. It is the strange quality of symbols that they are able to connect people without the need of being co-present. Symbols can arouse the energy as long as individuals are able to recount past collective efervescence in memories (Collins, 2004; Turner and Stets, 2005). his is the case whatever the symbol is, be it a holy cross or a national lag. On the other hand, collective emotions also have the power to generate new myths and symbols, as can be seen in the current migration crisis in Europe. In the contemporary era of the information and communication technology revolution with ( 135 ) global media such as the internet, it is not necessary for people to create a group localized in time and place. Even though they are physically “alone”, they still experience emotional arousal being shared on the collective level of “online”. With the increased mobility and low of information, there are also social systems of local cultures entangled with the mythopoeia of global culture through the virtual “online connection”. ( 136 ) Chapter 12 Ritual, Observer Efect, and Collective Consciousness Ritual occurs on the border of the empirical and nonempirical domain. It enables people to touch the world beyond and to connect both domains into one all-embracing reality. We can understand ritual as a special kind of human behavior oriented on transcending common natural laws and sociocultural order. From this point of view, ritual is a kind of practice which afects appearances and is able to transform them. While ritual is often perceived to be in opposition to everyday reality, in fact, ritual enables the extension of this everyday reality to a broader realm of possibilities, as we will see throughout this chapter. “In a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world” (Geertz, 1973, p. 112). What has been considered to be impossible is becoming possible because of the human ability to act upon and change the world. Berger and Luckmann (1966) argued that our world originates in our thoughts and actions. Changing our thoughts and action is undoubtedly the core of ritual practices. he lived and the imagined are experienced together as one reality during ritual. hings that “could be” are experienced as “they are”. And subsequently, ritual can also cause a signiicant shift in values, social status, but also in physical health or quality of matter. We can consider the ritual to be a gateway from one alterity to another. Everyday human reality is mostly empirical – this means that everything comes to us via our sensory perception. Kant (2006 [1798]) understood objects perceived by our (external or inner) senses to be appearances. he cognition of the object in appearance is then called experience. ( 137 ) “herefore appearance is that representation through which an object of the sense is given (an object of perception, that is of empirical intuition), but experience or empirical cognition is that representation through which the object as such at the same time is thought. – herefore experience is the activity (of the power of imagination) through which appearances are brought under the concept of one object of experience, and experiences are made by employing observations (internal perceptions) and through relecting (relectirt) about how to unify them under one concept.” (Kant, 2006, p. 31, footnote 24) Entities which appear are experienced and manifested in a such way that they lie in the realm of culturally determined experience and worldview – in concepts. According to Kirby (2011), concepts are ideality, while things are materiality. he human mind interacts with concepts, and therefore, its memory structure is sensitive to them. here are neuronal networks in our brains that are sensitive to potentiality waves. he collapse of a potentiality wave leads to a new empirical structure. Potentiality waves trigger brain states, expressing in this way the concepts in our minds (Schäfer, 2008). Aerts (2010) argued that the nature of quantum entity is conceptual; it interacts with the measuring apparatus or with the material entity. Quantum entities are signs exchanged between measuring apparatuses, or more generally, between entities made of ordinary matter. During the process of cognition, we interact with potentiality waves and choose one of the possibilities of how things could be. We can say that our everyday life lies (mostly automatically) on the reduction and elimination of inconvenient possibilities of how things could be. What possibility we choose depends on our limited receptors, the context of appearance and cognition, on previous experience, knowledge, actual mood, expectations, intentions, or priming. here are, of course, many other factors which could be more or less important in particular situations. Reality as we see it (as it appears to us) when using our limited receptors is divided in accordance with the fundamental wave-particle duality – duality between the localized, visible, measurable, empirically observable reality (particles) and the non-local, invisible, nonmeasurable, and nonempirical reality (wave functions). In this context, concepts such as material and formal, physical and spiritual, or empirical and nonempirical are ( 144 ) limited by time and space. In this “diferently” structured world, the ritual specialist can move without everyday limitations, and can meet things of past or future. Moreover, this structurally changed space-less and time-less alterity is entangled with the space we normally experience. During such rituals, participants of the ritual can see the movements and behaviors of the ritual specialist, which are very similar to the behavior of people with virtual reality glasses in a game arena. he material body of a ritual specialist is located here, but his/her experience of alterity comes from the realm of nonempirical reality. Ritual is efective in the sense that it afects information underlying forms of potentialities. We can understand information as a function of the observer (von Foerster, 1988 [1973]), but also as the “diference which makes the diference” (Bateson, 1972) or “alterity which makes the alterity” (Alberti et al., 2011; Paleček and Risjord, 2012; Viveiros de Castro, 2004). Since it is not possible to separate the observer and observed, the diference/alterity lies in the observation itself. he concept of diference is so itting that Umpleby (2007) believes it is preferable to speak in terms matter, energy, and diference. Diference/alterity is the basis of our cognition and of the concepts created in our mind. he maintenance of borders between these concepts is a crucial condition of our everyday order. Without these concepts and their borders, the world would be a chaotic place, where human beings would be lost. Ritual represents a safe method to overcome the chaos that arises with the fall of borders. Our conscious mind works with actualizations. Actualizations cannot be in a direct contradiction, since our minds work with the diference. We are not able to believe in “A” and “non-A” at the same time. If a person believes, for example, that they can walk on glowing coals without any harm and simultaneously believes they cannot, it is very probable they will be perceived to be crazy in the eyes of other people. Reality should be the irst or the second in a particular moment. If a person would hypothetically believe in both, a “diference” must still remain, because “A” and “not-A” cannot exist together at the same time or in the same location. he diference or alterity is often discovered in social circumstances. However, ritual uses a special framing to evoke the alterity and to extend beyond the borders of everyday experience. During this extended experi- ( 145 ) ence or alterity, what appears to be “A” is possible to experience as “non-A”, too. We can say that both possibilities exist, but in parallel realities. Here, we must accept that parallel realities are an output of the observer efect. As apparent throughout this chapter, human reality emerges from the observation and from practice. Human beings are not just passive observers; they are active, aware, and conscious. Consciousness is a constitutive feature of our life (Wendt, 2015). According to Wendt (2006), consciousness emerges in the collapse of our wave functions. his process happens continually as we interact with the environment, providing a basis for our experience of a “stream” of consciousness. hus, ritual enables the extension of consciousness, and provides a meaningful connection between empirical and nonempirical reality. ( 146 ) Chapter 13 Conclusions and Future Directions his book presents new insights and urges for the further development of anthropological theory. he core of quantum anthropology introduced here consists of the redeinitions of current anthropological concepts in the light of the new indings of quantum mechanics. We are aware that the reformulated issues presented in particular chapters are merely starting points for follow-up discussions rather than inite theoretical suggestions. But, as mentioned in the Introduction of this book, quantum anthropology is a relatively new perspective, and because of this, we have to accept that the conceptualization of the main fundamentals of the quantum anthropological perspective is still at its beginning. Perhaps it could seem to be too early to speak of any basic principles of quantum anthropology at this moment. However, what else can be ofered to the readers of this book as concluding remarks then to briely summarize the main ideas that have emerged throughout the chapters. herefore, we will briely formulate the basic theoretical shifts below. he reader may ind the more detailed conceptualizations of these ideas in the given chapters. If we start with the main concerns of anthropological in quiry, we consider man, cultures, and social aggregates to be the actualizations of potentiality in time and space. All existing material, as well as nonmaterial, phenomena are derived from the fundamental substrate of the realm of potentiality. he realm of potentiality is understood as an overall, wave-particle energy-information potential (Trnka, 2015a) that includes an all-pervasive substrate for all possible actualizations in time and space. It is the source of the entirety of being and existence. Physically, the overall energy-information potential may be explained, for ( 147 ) example, by the idea of the quantum sea (Puthof, 2002), i.e. zero-point luctuations consisting of the continuous creation and annihilation of microparticles in the vacuum. Before any existence starts, zero-point luctuations in the vacuum are suggested to be random and chaotic. We argue that some kind of quantum patterning starts to operate when an entity is coming into being. his patterning is hypothesized to be connected with the agency of attractors, the hypothetical states that have been previously developed in the ield of mathematical modeling and chaos theory. We extend the function of attractors also to the moment of emergence. We argue that quantum patterning is attracted by the agency of some kind of attractor when an entity is coming into being in the initial phase of existence. It is called “agency beyond agency”, because attractors operate without the agency of human actions or the agency of human products in the world. We consider the agency of attractors to be a deeper agentic level that operates out of human actions or the actions of human products. Whereas previous eforts in the ield of quantum consciousness have been mostly focused on individual psyche and the human mind, we have tried to go further and provide a quantum look on various collective phenomena, i.e. cultures, social groups, and collective consciousness. As mentioned throughout the book, all phenomena that man can identify are only appearances that come to man’s perceptual capabilities. From this perspective, we also interpret the quantum nature of cultures and social groups. Such collective phenomena appear to us as if they have some kind of coherence in time and space. Despite that this coherence may be only a product of our minds, most ordinary people share this appearance and are able to reach satisfactory agreement in the identiication of a speciic person, culture, or social group. Here, we intentionally omit the assumption that every moment of reality is an absolutely new, disconnected quantum event, i.e. the lesh of existence (Malin, 2012). We do not refuse this assumption and believe that it can be fruitfully utilized in the ield of quantum logic. In this book, however, we aim to provide a reformulation of the science of man. And this science, anthropology, accepts man’s position in the world as is. In other words, anthropology accepts man with all of their limitations, including the way man is able to perceive and understand reality. ( 148 ) From this position, also accepting the limitations given by the observer efect, we also derived the following quantum conceptualizations of man, cultures, and social groups. As apparent from the whole book, we consider quantum coherence to be the basic condition for the identiication of man, cultures, or groups in time and space (see also Wendt, 2015). hese phenomena are coherent enough to be identiied by most people with satisfactory agreement. Also, the conceptualizations of man, cultures, or social groups accept the hypothesis of quantum coherence, which appears to our streams of consciousness in the form of chained frames. If we start at the individual level, man is understood to be an embodiment of a part of the overall energy-information potential (Russell, 2013; Trnka, 2015a). When a part of the overall energy-information potential is actualized, the external observer is able to identify a speciic anatomical form e.g. the concrete human body in the time-space moment. Back to the moment of emergence, the human body, as well as the mind, is also related with the agencies of attractors that enable the quantum patterning responsible for the appearances of identiiable, coherent forms. In contrast, cultures, groups, and societies do not have their own material bodies, which could be observed directly. Yet they still show certain forms of coherence in delimited time segments. Generally, we understand culture and society as an entangled quantum complex. We speak about the “sociocultural meta-system” or the “sociocultural reality”, not about two simply separable phenomena. In other words, culture and society interact in the perpetual process of entangled mutual construction. his highly complex quantum meta-system can be only artiicially deconstructed for the purpose of easier anthropological analysis. hrough this deconstruction, social aggregate may be understood as a nonlinear, highly complex quantum system composed of the temporary interrelationships between its elements, i.e. individuals and groups. We argue that the interactions within such a system occur similarly to the perpetual interactions of quantum microparticles. Social bonds are perpetually changing in the sense of the ongoing reconiguration of their structure in social systems. Everything in a social system is relative and in the process of permanent change in time and space. he behavior of a social system is not only the simple sum of interactions ( 149 ) between individuals and groups, but there are also emerging actions that cannot be derived from the individual actions of social actors. Quantum anthropology understands individual human beings as the basic elements of a social system. And, it is the very interaction of individual agencies that is responsible for social dynamics, i.e. the perpetual creation, maintenance, or untangling of social bonds. Some patterns of quantum accumulation create a quantum coherence that appears to us in the forms that can be called ethnic group, subculture, community, or family. But the behaviors of such quantum systems are also productive. Human minds produce various thoughts, incentives, and emotions. Human bodies produce various actions. We can observe that man acts in the world and changes matter through various practices. he results of such types of actions appear as material products. he activity of the human body itself is also productive, i.e. it is a behavioral manifestation of man in the world. Culture belongs to one of most complex products of human minds and bodies. We understand culture as an informational spectrum created and shared by some of the members of a given social system. For better analytical purposes, we can deconstruct culture to include various cultural elements, e.g. beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, preferences, values, standards, interpretations, behavioral rules, norms, social scripts, prototypical actions, customs, habits, practices, ceremonies, and rituals. But, at the same time, we should also keep in mind the mutual entanglement of these elements. Cultural elements are not separate phenomena, but they are deeply interconnected. Let us turn our attention to a more speculative issue, to the issue of collective consciousness. We suggest that collective consciousness is also a product of human minds and human bodies. here is a high number of diferent deinitions and explanations of collective consciousness (see the chapter on collective consciousness – Chapter 7), but most of them share some general assumptions. Collective consciousness is hypothesized to be a kind of a ield that emerges based on the processes of quantum binding, e.g. quantum entanglement. It is the extension of individual consciousness into a higher, collective level. During such quantum binding, the ield of individual consciousness transcends the borders of the organism and interferes with the consciousness of ( 150 ) another person or persons. hus, some kind of connectivity between individual minds is supposed. hese processes are diicult to imagine, but anthropologists often encounter them, at least in the case of rituals and other collective events. he quantum coherence of man, cultures, and social groups does not ensure the absolute stability of these systems over time. External factors or the interaction of elements and subsystems inside the system often lead to decoherence, i.e. to the destabilization of the whole system. Such destabilizations are related to the agency of some kind of underlying dynamics. In the chapter about life trajectories (Chapter 8), three general forms of dynamics were proposed. Following the Hegelian dialectic, the conceptualization of homogeneous, heterogeneous, and neutrogeneous inner dynamics has been introduced (Trnka, 2015b). hese three general forms of inner dynamics are suggested to potentiate and afect the functioning of systems in speciic directions. hey are not considered to be causal factors, but rather the inner characteristics of various developments and transitional states during the course of the life trajectories of nonlinear quantum systems. Homogeneous inner dynamics is generally characterized by an invariance and a tendency to return things to their original state of order, i.e. to the very beginning of their existence. Heterogeneous dynamics is, in contrast, a source of alterity, diferentiation, diversity, and multiplicity. Heterogeneous inner dynamics stimulates change and the creation of various things; it stimulates production. And inally and thirdly, neuterogeneous inner dynamics regulate the opposing forces of homogeneous and heterogeneous dynamics. It serves to protect the existence and the stability of a system. Despite the agency of neuterogeneous inner dynamics, the absolute harmony between homogeneous and heterogeneous dynamics can only be very rarely observed in sociocultural reality, and if it is observed, it always lasts only temporarily. he overgrow of homogeneous or heterogeneous inner dynamics may cause the destabilization of a system. If one or the other dynamics prevails too much, the system is destabilized and has the tendency to collapse. In such cases, it depends on resilience of the system, i.e. the efectiveness of safety mechanisms if the destabilization will lead to the inal collapse or not. ( 151 ) Neither man, nor cultures, nor groups exist eternally. If the destabilization causes an overrun of conditions that are indispensable for the preservation of quantum coherence, the continuity of quantum coherence is broken, and the radical transformation of matter and energy often follows. We call this moment inal collapse. Particular embodiment, i.e. a human body, is terminated at this moment. Similarly, when the existence of social group ends, no “direct” continuity can be found with the emerging social groups in future. he existence of the former social group often leaves a heritage for subsequent social forms, but such continuity can be rather considered to have the character of, for example, collective memory. However, collective memory is not able to ensure a “direct” continuity between the antecedent and the following social group. he inal collapse in the sense of the radical transformation of a social system means that the newly emerged form of social life is not the same system as the antecedent social group, ethnic group, or community. We have provided a very brief outline of the fundamentals of the quantum understanding of man, cultures, and social groups. here are many questions that arise. For example, it is not clear what efects the extension of individual consciousness into a collective level for the subjectivity of an individual may have? During rituals, mass panic, collective hysteria, or collective trance states, the ields of individual consciousness interfere and are extended because of speciic kind of quantum entanglement. But what happens with the subjectivity of an individual in these situations? Wendt (2015) deined subjectivity in terms of cognition, experience, and will. Will is suggested to be the “mental causation” of human action in the world. Cognition and experience are supposed to be passive and reactive, because they relect rather than create reality, while will is understood to be active and purposeful. Will is considered to be responsible for causal powers, like the ability to cause physical movement (Wendt, 2015). However, if will is responsible for the activity and the productivity of human body, what happens to subjectivity in states when an individual’s consciousness is extended into collective consciousness? Is it possible to expect that individual’s will lose its autonomy when the individual’s consciousness is entangled within the ield of collective consciousness? And generally, how can the subjec- ( 152 ) tivity, will, and human ability to act during the extension of individual consciousness into collective consciousness be changed? Furthermore, another related problem is that the ield of collective consciousness often arises based on the interference between individuals’ emotional experiences. Wendt (2015) considered emotional experience to have only a passive role in man’s subjectivity, but if we consider the case of the emergence of collective emotions, one can question this assumption. Despite of the fact that collective emotions are not suggested to be created consciously, by volitional efort, the roles of an individuals’ emotional experience cannot be considered to be passive. We argue that without the interference of individuals’ emotions, no ield that we call collective consciousness is meaningful. his area is very rarely empirically investigated, and therefore, we may ask what is the causal role of individuals’ emotional experiences for the emergence of collective consciousness? Not so far from this question is the issue of the experience of alterity during altered states of consciousness, e.g. trance states during rituals, dreaming during sleep, meditation, clinical death, or intoxication by psychoactive drugs. Perceptual abilities are changed in these states in comparison to normal states of consciousness, but what about subjective experience? he experience of alterity is present without any doubt, but how can such a form of alterity be understood? One opinion may be that experience in altered states of consciousness is artiicially built based on hallucinations or altered percepts. But, for example, dreaming is a natural process that does not need to be triggered by any psychoactive substance or by the volitional performance of special practices like hypnosis or meditation. So, we can also posit the idea that a normal state of consciousness is only the product of historical discursive practices and the discursively-formed knowledge of the world-consciousness relationship. If we deconstruct the classic idea about the normality and the givenness of “normal” states of consciousness, we can consider a more relativistic view of experience of alterity during altered states of consciousness. In Carter’s (2014) framework (see the chapter on empirical and nonempirical reality – Chapter 2), we may see such a relativistic view of subjectivity and individual experience. Subjective experience may not be evaluated according to any discursive no- ( 153 ) tion about normality, but it can be simply seen as to have multiple layers and the potential to be possibly extended into diferent experiential realms. he multiplicity of experiential planes can be understood in a pluralistic manner. We may simply accept the fact that various people can experience alternative realities, and that the possibility of shifting between realities exists (Alberti et al., 2011) – both horizontally, as a perspectival shift between the internal logic of two diferent cultures, and vertically, as the extension of consciousness into higher-dimensional branes (Carter, 2014). Such types of thinking may contribute to a higher pluralization of our worlds and support a symmetrical understanding of various cultures as well as alternative states of consciousness. From this perspectival view, altered states of consciousness may not be seen as something pathological, but rather as an experience of alterity and as participation in alternative realities. We suggest that it is this very perspectival anthropology (e.g., Alberti et al., 2011; Paleček and Risjord, 2012; Viveiros de Castro, 2004) that may beneit from considering both the horizontal and vertical shifts of perspectives in the future investigation of man. he main building blocks of the theory of quantum anthropology introduced in this book are based on the interplay between the realms of potentiality and actuality. Simply put, things that can be observed empirically are things that constitute the realm of actuality. However, what is more problematic is the key question of how to understand randomness versus patterning when an entity is emerging from the realm of potentiality? We will explain this problem in more detail below. Undoubtedly, alterity exists in the world and is expressed via the enormous variability of human bodies, minds, and ontologies (Alberti et al., 2011; Paleček and Risjord, 2012; Viveiros de Castro, 2004). his variability is not ininite, however. Across time and space, it is possible to identify some occurrences of similar patterns appearing in the realm of actuality. By this, we mean the similar personalities of two people, similar cultural elements, similar ontologies, similar social ields, or similar human practices across diferent cultures. We do not argue that absolute sameness can be found, and we rather speak about “relatively similar” and not absolutely the same patterns. But, on the other hand, there is an overall potentiality that we call the overall, wave-particle energy-information potential (Trnka, 2015a), and