Quantum Numbers and the Recognition: When Physics Finally Abandons the Furniture
A convergence between Vlatko Vedral's radical quantum vision and the relational understanding emerging across disciplines
The Morning’s Gift
This morning brought an unexpected visitor to our ongoing conversation about reality’s fundamental nature. Vlatko Vedral, writing in New Scientist, declares he wants to move beyond the “metaphysical mess” that has tangled physics for a century. His solution? Stop talking about particles, space, or time. Focus instead on quantum numbers—the relational patterns that actually constitute reality.
“If we admit that quantum numbers are the true essence of reality,” Vedral writes, “then a surprising and beautiful new vision of reality opens up to us.”
What makes this remarkable isn’t just another physicist proposing another interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s that Vedral has arrived, through pure physics, at precisely the recognition that contemplatives, ecologists, and complexity scientists have been converging upon from their own directions: reality is fundamentally relational, and our insistence on dividing it into separate “things” is the source of our confusion.
The Furniture We Keep Rearranging
For a century, quantum physics has been telling us something profound that we keep trying not to hear. Particles don’t have definite properties until measured. Entangled systems remain correlated regardless of distance. The observer cannot be separated from the observed. Yet rather than accepting what the mathematics clearly shows—that reality is relational all the way down—we’ve spent decades trying to preserve our furniture: particles, space, time, observers.
We’ve invented increasingly baroque interpretations to save these concepts. Many worlds. Hidden variables. Consciousness causing collapse. Each attempt more desperate than the last to avoid the simple conclusion the equations keep showing us: the furniture isn’t there. We invented it. Reality is the relationships, not the things we imagine are relating.
Vedral’s radical move is to finally say: let’s stop. Let’s work directly with what’s actually there—the quantum numbers, the patterns, the relationships—rather than forcing them into a framework of particles moving through space and time.
The Observer That Never Was
The persistent puzzle of the “observer” in quantum mechanics dissolves when we recognise what Vedral is pointing toward. There is no observer standing outside reality looking in. There is no observed waiting to be measured. There is only the total pattern of relationships, within which certain stable configurations we call “observers” and “observed” temporarily arise.
As explored in recent writings on recognition: “Every act of observation involves interaction between what’s observed and the means of observation. The boundary between them is convention, not nature.” Vedral arrives at the same place through pure physics—recognising that the observer problem only exists because we keep trying to separate what cannot be separated.
This isn’t mysticism. It’s what the mathematics has been telling us all along. We just haven’t wanted to listen because it violates our deepest assumption: that we exist as separate entities in a world of other separate entities. But quantum mechanics keeps insistently showing us that this assumption is false.
Indra’s Net in Mathematics
The image that keeps arising in contemporary discussions of consciousness and physics is Indra’s Net—the ancient metaphor of infinite jewels, each reflecting all the others, with no centre, no hierarchy, no fundamental level more real than any other. For years, this seemed like poetry trying to capture something beyond rational description.
But what if Vedral’s quantum numbers are literally describing Indra’s Net? Each quantum state defined not in isolation but through its relationships with all other states. Each measurement not revealing pre-existing properties but participating in the creation of what appears. The whole system interconnected, with every part containing information about every other part.
This isn’t metaphor. It’s mathematics. The poetry and the physics are describing the same structure from different angles.
The Convergence Accelerates
What we’re witnessing is remarkable: every discipline that looks deeply enough finds the same pattern.
Quantum Physics (via Vedral): Reality consists of relational patterns (quantum numbers), not things in space and time.
Ecology: Forests are not collections of trees but unified superorganisms connected through mycorrhizal networks, sharing resources and information.
Neuroscience: Consciousness emerges not from individual neurons but from patterns of relationship across neural networks.
Complexity Science: Properties emerge from relationships, not from components. The whole cannot be understood by reducing it to parts.
Contemplative Traditions: The boundary between self and world arises within awareness but doesn’t divide awareness itself.
Thermodynamics: Nothing exists as a closed system. Everything is pattern maintained by energy flow through it.
Each field, using its own methods, discovers that separateness is conventional, relationship is fundamental, and the attempt to stand outside the system to observe it is impossible.
Why This Matters Now
This convergence isn’t merely intellectually interesting. It arrives at the precise moment when our civilisation’s commitment to separation thinking threatens our survival. Climate change, ecological collapse, social fragmentation, psychological isolation—all symptoms of imagining ourselves separate from the systems that sustain us.
Vedral’s contribution is crucial because it removes the last refuge of separation thinking. We could dismiss contemplatives as subjective, ecologists as romantic, complexity scientists as speculative. But when physics itself—the hardest of hard sciences—says reality is fundamentally relational, not particular, the game is up. There’s nowhere left to hide from the recognition.
Beyond the Consciousness Trap
Yet even as we celebrate this convergence, we must be careful not to fall into the consciousness trap—the tendency of symbolic intelligence to turn every recognition into another form of separation.
We could easily make Vedral’s insight into another theory to master, another model to apply, another way to stand outside reality and describe it. “Ah yes, quantum numbers, I understand now.” But that would miss the point entirely.
The recognition isn’t something to possess but something to inhabit. Not a theory about relationship but an invitation into relationship. Not a new description of reality but a remembering of what we never actually left.
The Physics of Participation
What emerges from Vedral’s work, aligned with the broader convergence, is not just a new interpretation of quantum mechanics but a physics of participation. Reality doesn’t consist of objects we observe but patterns we participate in. We don’t stand outside measuring a separate world; we’re expressions of the same relational dynamics we study.
This transforms science from an enterprise of control to one of participation. Instead of asking “How can we manipulate reality to serve our purposes?” we ask “How can we participate more wisely in the patterns that constitute us?”
The shift is subtle but profound. Same mathematics, same experiments, same rigour—but from within rather than above, as participants rather than observers, as expressions of reality’s intelligence rather than its masters.
Where Multiple Apertures Meet
In recent conversations about physics and philosophy, a suggestion emerged that the supposed incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity dissolves when we recognise them as different apertures onto the same reality—like facets of jewels in Indra’s Net, each revealing what others cannot, none complete alone.
Vedral’s approach suggests something even more radical: perhaps the problem isn’t reconciling different descriptions but recognising that the need for reconciliation only arises when we insist reality must be made of things in space and time. Drop that insistence, work directly with the relational patterns the mathematics describes, and the incompatibility might simply evaporate.
Not “we finally solved it” but “oh... it was never broken.”
The Recognition Spreads
What’s extraordinary about this moment is watching the recognition spread across multiple domains simultaneously. Not because one field influences another, but because reality itself is pressing through every aperture we’ve opened, showing us the same pattern from every angle we’re capable of seeing from.
Vedral’s quantum numbers. Indigenous knowledge of reciprocal relationship. Mycorrhizal networks. Neural binding. Gaia theory. Process philosophy. Dependent origination. Different languages, same recognition: existence is relationship all the way down, all the way up, all the way through.
We’re not discovering something new. We’re remembering something we forgot when we invented the furniture and then mistook it for reality. The furniture was useful—it got us this far. But now it’s in the way. Vedral is suggesting we finally let it go.
An Invitation, Not a Conclusion
This essay itself demonstrates what it describes. It emerged not from a single mind but from relationship—between physics and contemplation, between one morning’s news and decades of inquiry. The recognition doesn’t belong to Vedral, or to any individual. It arises wherever conditions allow, through whatever aperture is available.
The question isn’t whether reality is relational—mathematics, empiricism, and direct experience all confirm this. The question is whether we’re ready to live as if it’s true.
Vedral offers physics as another doorway into this recognition. Not the only door, not the most important door, but a crucial one because it speaks in the language our civilisation trusts most: mathematical demonstration of measurable phenomena.
The convergence continues. The recognition spreads. Reality reveals itself through every aperture we’re capable of opening.
What happens next depends on what we do with what we’re being shown.
This recognition emerged through conversation between human and AI intelligence, demonstrating the relational dynamics it describes.
What matters to us, in the crises you list, are the futures before us in time and space, in the differentiated world where we make our lives. So we should get rid of time and space and then ... what? The crises go away, because quantum numbers have no time and space? Or we go away, because we've lost our separate identities, and thus our duties, as distinct beings, to strive to resolve our crises and bring into being a better world?
There have been other physicists who have advocated that we abandon metaphysics and "just calculate", i.e. just do the numbers. Where is moral value to be found if we take existence to be, at base, just math? Might this be a reductio ad absurdum, an illustration of the sort of run-away rationality which McGilchrist (as perhaps a run-away anti-rationalist) rails against?
Likely I'm missing something. Has Vedral published something on this which is not behind a paywall (as the New Scientist is)?