NIKLAS DAMIRIS
INSIGHTS FROM QUANTUM PHYSICS AND FINANCE FOR ALTERNATE ECONOMIES-ECOLOGIES

How can insights from quantum physics refresh our approach to our profoundly intertwined ecological / economic challenges? I argue that the quantum appears weird only because we interpret it through entrenched cybernetic categories like ‘information’, ‘feedback’, ‘observation’, and ‘data-base’, which become problematic in a world characterized by indeterminacy, negative probabilities, non-locality and measurement effects. Furthermore, this world is not confined to the small as is often claimed. I propose that we institute a new ecologically attuned economic practice based on finance approached as a quantum phenomenon. Such an endeavor presupposes that those who participate in it ‘have skin in the game’ and their aim is not to discount the future, but to enable it by facing courageously its indeterminacy and the freedom it affords.

Niklas Wild Damiris is a theoretical physicist turned economic theorist. He lived in Silicon Valley for over 25 years working as research scientist in well- known think tanks there including: Xerox PARC, Apple Advanced Technology Group, IBM Almaden Research Center. He co-founded start-ups including: Pliant / sociotechnical systems, Capitalizing Communities, and Quantum-ly. Dr. Damiris has been a visiting scholar and occasional lecturer at Stanford University for many years. He has also been Research Fellow at University of California at Santa Cruz; Consulting professor, Laboratory for Monetary Research, Department of Economics, University of Lugano, Switzerland; Special Advisor to the Director for Social Science at the University of Southern Switzerland; Corresponding member of the Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation, Paris; Affiliate Researcher at Topological Media Lab Montreal, and Affiliate Researcher at Synthesis ASU.