This page in one paragraph
This page asks: does the intermediate structure Dost calls "imagination" (hayal) and "barzakh" and the transition that decoherence describes in physics look at the same question from two different roads? What they share is that on both sides one thinks "there is something between two extremes." Decoherence describes how quantum possibilities, interacting with the environment, take on a classical appearance and lose their interference; the barzakh, in Dost, is a "being in between" that both separates and joins two things, and that has no two faces in itself. The place where they part is very large: decoherence is a process that is calculated and measured in experiments, while the barzakh is a level of being; moreover decoherence does not by itself close the measurement problem. We found no counterpart at the level of experiment or theory, so at most we say "they greet each other from a distance," and that only for the form of the question. The side of this page that concerns Dost and the secondary literature that presents Dost was not compared with the Arabic original.
What do these two words mean?
First let us put the two words in place. This section is not Dost's own word; it is the account given in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ibn Arabi [SEP: Ibn 'Arabi]. The entry is a secondary source; everything we say "according to the entry" below is its report, not something we add.
Imagination (hayal). According to the SEP entry, hayal (hayâl) in Dost carries a meaning close to its everyday use: it means "image" more than "imaginative faculty." The entry says that the word describes not only a faculty of the mind but also the mirror image, the shadow, and what appears in dreams and visions; it adds that later writers mostly chose the word "misal" for this meaning. According to what the entry reports (citing Chittick), an image brings two sides together and is both one with them and distinct from them: the mirror image is both the mirror and the object it reflects, or neither; the dream is both the soul and the thing seen, or neither. Reason sees a proposition as true or false; imagination sees it as both true and false, or neither. The entry also stresses that this imagination is "imaginal," not "imaginary" (made up).
The entry distinguishes three "worlds" of imagination. The first is its widest sense: the whole cosmos, everything other than Allah, is "absolute imagination" in being temporary and perishing. The second is its narrower sense, the world of imagination that Corbin calls "mundus imaginalis": the region between the unseen and the witnessed, in one respect invisible and spiritual, in another visible and corporeal. According to the entry this is where spiritual beings take body and bodies become spiritual; it is described as a real world that lies outside, more real than the visible physical world but less real than the invisible spiritual world. The third is the imagination within the human being: the soul (nafs), where spirit and body meet.
Barzakh. According to the SEP entry, the barzakh (isthmus, barrier, limit) in the Qur'an is what stands between the sweet and the salt sea (25:53, 55:20) and what prevents the soul of the dead person from returning to the world (23:100); the theologians generally understood it as the "place" where the soul stays from death until the Day of Resurrection. According to the entry, Dost uses this word for everything that both separates and joins two things at once but has no two faces itself, like the "line" that separates sunlight from shadow. The "highest barzakh" is synonymous with absolute imagination, that is, the cosmos itself: the "line" that separates the light of infinite being from the darkness of absolute non-being. In a passage the entry reports (in Chittick's translation), the created world is described as a barzakh between light and darkness; in itself it is described neither by darkness nor by light, and it carries a ruling from both sides. The entry also says that each thing is, separately, a barzakh and an imagination, that is, an image of both being and non-being.
The entry's own emphasis is this too: Dost's bringing the "intermediate region" to the fore is one of the factors that kept Islamic philosophy from falling into a dualistic division between soul and body. The entry writes this not as an evaluation but as a historical observation it reports; we relay it the same way.
What does Dost say?
The words below are verified quotations from Dost's own text, taken from the Turkish translation.
«something that separates two states and never exists» (c2k27, p. 419-420)
The barzakh is mentioned here as something that separates two things from each other; but "that never exists" is added. It is said as though the separating thing had no existence of its own.
What to notice: one thing both does work (separates) and has its own existence denied. This is not understood as a third body placed between the two things that are separated.
«The barzakh is the mirror of the two extremes; whoever sees the barzakh sees the two extremes» (c11k141, p. 307)
Here the barzakh is a mirror: whoever looks into it sees both extremes at once. Once it is a mirror, the two extremes are spread out before the one who looks, but the mirror itself is not one of the two extremes.
What to notice: the intermediate place is described not as a thing in itself but as what shows the two extremes. Knowledge passes through the intermediate place.
«Imagination means the coming-out of meanings in sensible molds» (c11k135, p. 53)
Imagination here is the name of an event more than the name of a faculty: a meaning (mana), that is, a sense not seen by the eye, appears in a mold perceptible to the senses. In the same place it is also said that the world of the unseen is perceived with the eye of the heart and the world of the witnessed with the eye, and that the station born of the union of the two is the station of imagination.
What to notice: imagination appears not as a third mode between two different modes of perception (the eye of the heart, the eye) but as the place where the two meet.
«The level of imagination is the intermediate level between the extremes of the senses and of meaning» (c13k150, p. 164)
Here imagination is named an intermediate level: at one end the senses, at the other meaning.
What to notice: the word "intermediate" is said openly in this sentence. In a side-by-side reading, it is this word that determines what is compared with what.
«Sleep is a state that carries the servant from seeing the world of the senses to seeing the world of the barzakh.» (c7k97, p. 213-214)
Sleep is spoken of here as a state of passage from the world of the senses to the world of the barzakh.
What to notice: the barzakh is mentioned here like a place, but together with a state of arriving at it, that is, with sleep. In the same work, elsewhere, it is also said that the world is "a sleep within a sleep" with respect to the barzakh; we did not take that quotation onto this page.
What is there in physics?
For this page the physics side is decoherence. We rely on four sources: Zurek 2003 [Zurek 2003], Schlosshauer 2005 [Schlosshauer 2005], Schlosshauer 2019 [Schlosshauer 2019] and the decoherence entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [SEP: Decoherence]. We added no new source.
First the question that stands in the middle. According to quantum theory a system, before it is measured, can be in a state in which several possibilities enter the calculation together; this is called superposition. In the everyday world, though, we always see the table in a single place. And when we measure we get a single result. This mismatch is called the measurement problem.
Decoherence is a well-understood phenomenon that answers a part of this problem. A small system inevitably interacts with its environment, that is, with air, light, heat. The environment carries a kind of trace about the system. For this reason the interference between the possibilities, that is, the visible mark of their being together, is erased very quickly and the system begins to look like something classical. Zurek's work adds one more thing to this: a few stable states remain that the environment does not disturb, and these look like the states we see in our classical world; Zurek calls this "einselection" (selection made by the environment) [Zurek 2003]. This part, the part that has calculation and measurement, is not disputed.
What is disputed is whether this explains why a single result comes out in a measurement. Schlosshauer's 2005 paper asks exactly this question and examines the main interpretations (Copenhagen, many worlds, hidden variables and others) within this frame. The point he reaches: decoherence explains why the results look classical, but does not by itself close the question "why only one"; that part depends on interpretation [Schlosshauer 2005]. The 2019 review speaks of the same limit openly: decoherence can be calculated and has been measured in experiments, but according to most authors it does not by itself explain why a measurement gives a single result; it only explains why interference is not seen [Schlosshauer 2019]. The SEP entry makes the same distinction: that environmental interaction practically destroys interference has been shown in experiments; whether this is a solution of the measurement problem is disputed, because according to most authors the result is still an "all at once" state [SEP: Decoherence].
In short: what is certain? The existence and the speed of decoherence. What is disputed? Whether it closes the measurement problem.
Looking side by side
What they share is this: on both sides, in passing from one extreme to the other, it is thought that there is something in the middle. In Dost this thing is the barzakh, that is, a "being in between" that both separates and shows the two extremes and has no two faces in itself. In physics it is decoherence, a part of the road from the being-together of possibilities to the classical appearance. Both can be seen as the answer to a part of the question "how does one pass from one extreme to the other?"
- What they share: the form "there is something between one extreme and the other." Dost's sentence: «The level of imagination is the intermediate level between the extremes of the senses and of meaning» (c13k150). In physics: the transition between superposition and classical appearance is brought about by environmental interaction [Schlosshauer 2005; Zurek 2003].
- Where they part: a lot. Decoherence is a process; its calculation is done, its speed is measured, it arises from a system's interaction with its environment. The barzakh, in Dost, is a level of being and a kind of mirror; not something measured. The two extremes of decoherence are both physical states: superposition and classical appearance. The extremes of the barzakh are being and non-being, light and darkness, the senses and meaning. Moreover decoherence does not describe "an intermediate place": it describes a fine coherence that slips away over time; there is no stopping place in it. And one more thing: decoherence does not by itself solve the measurement problem [Schlosshauer 2019; SEP: Decoherence]; that is, behind something we could understand as an "intermediate place," the question itself still stays open. For this reason we do not venture to put the "intermediate structure" of the two sides into the same category.
- Where one who looks might notice something: there seems to be an echo in sound between Dost's describing the barzakh as "not existing in itself" and decoherence's being "a process, not a state in itself." We do not write this as a similarity, because the entry's description "that separates and joins, with no two faces" and the word "process" on the physics side come from two different categories. One who looks might check whether these two "not-being-in-itself" touch each other in meaning. We could not say that they touch.
- Open question: does saying "something between two extremes" give two answers to the same question in two fields, or is it only the same word (between) being used for two different things?
What word shall we give to this closeness? On the physics side we found no counterpart at the level of experiment or theory for Dost's sentences; in the draft readings we made earlier (on the barzakh and imagination, and on self-disclosure) we came to the same result. For this reason at most we say "they greet each other from a distance," and we say it only in this narrow sense: both sides ask whether, in passing from one extreme to the other, there is something in the middle. The "where they part" paragraph above weighs more than this; we could not find a sufficient basis to say "they stand close."
In the same study we had earlier deliberately declined three tempting matches, and let us recall them here: the barzakh's having one direction toward being and one toward non-being, and superposition's being "both this and that," is only a similarity of words; the barzakh's perceiving what reason deems impossible and the counterintuitive results in physics are also too general as a form; and Dost's opposite-direction description of the horn across two volumes and the holographic boundary cannot be compared. These three did not enter this page.
Questions we are left with
- Is the word "between" used for the same thing in Dost's barzakh and in decoherence, or do they answer two separate questions?
- Since decoherence does not close the measurement problem, is the question of an "intermediate structure" a finished question in physics, or an open one?
- Is the form the SEP entry reports as "imagination is both true and false, or neither" and the "both this and that" form of superposition a commonality of the same specificity, or is it just every strange thing resembling every strange thing?
- How should one read in the Arabic original the passage between the Qur'anic and theological meanings the entry reports for the barzakh (the two seas, after death) and the meaning "highest barzakh" that Dost gives to the cosmos itself?
- Where is the difference between what the secondary entry (SEP) relates and Dost's own sentence, and does this difference change the reading on this page?
What did we not do?
We did not compare Dost's words with the Arabic original; the quotations are from the site's Turkish translation and the section summaries there. The "What do these two words mean?" section is not Dost's own word but the account in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ibn Arabi; we added nothing to that entry, and we did not compare it with Dost's original either. We did not look separately at the books of Chittick and Corbin that the entry mentions. On the physics side we relied on only four sources and added no new source; we did not go into the calculations themselves or the details of experiments.
We did not tie decoherence to an interpretation: on this page we did not choose the stance of many worlds, Copenhagen or any other interpretation toward decoherence. We also did not take onto this page the "horn" description of the barzakh (the form Dost describes in opposite directions across two volumes) and made no choice between them.
This is not a reading summary but our own reading frame; we do not understand Dost, and we do not give up trying to understand.