**THE MINDFUL UNIVERSE**

**1. SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES.**

This book is about what you are, and how you are connected to what you
are not. It is about the impact of the revolutionary developments in
physics during the twentieth century upon science's idea of you as a
thinking and acting entity, and your linkage to the rest of nature.

These questions might appear to belong more to philosophy, metaphysics,
or religion, rather than to physics, which is usually assumed to deal
only with such tangible items as machines, rockets, transistors, and
atomic bombs. But the radical change in our understanding of the
physical world that occurred during the twentieth century has
transformed connections that formerly had been matters of philosophical
speculation into issues covered by basic physical theory. The aim of
this book is to explain the new idea of the nature of human beings, and
their causal role in the unfolding of reality, to readers with no prior
understanding of the quantum character of the world.

Science has improved our lives in many ways. It has lightened the load
of tedious tasks and expanded our physical powers, and thereby
contributed to a great flowering of human creative energy. On the other
hand, it has also given us the capacity to ravage the environment on an
unprecedented scale and obliterate our species altogether. Yet along
with this fatal power it has provided a further offering which, though
subtle in character and still hardly felt in the minds of men, may
ultimately be its most valuable contribution to human civilization, and
the key to human survival.

Science is not only the enterprise of harnessing nature to serve the
practical needs of humankind. It is also part of man's unending search
for knowledge about the universe and his place within it. This quest is
motivated not solely by idle curiosity. Each of us, when trying to
establish values upon which to base conduct, is inevitably led to the
question of one's place in the greater whole. The linkage of this
philosophical inquiry to the practical question of personal values is no
mere intellectual abstraction. Martyrs in every age are vivid reminders
of the fact that no influence upon human conduct, even the instinct for
self preservation, is stronger than beliefs about one's relationship to
the power that shapes the universe. Such beliefs form the foundation of
a person's self image, and hence, ultimately, of that person\'s values.

It is often claimed that science stands mute on questions of values:
that science can help us to achieve what we value once our priorities
are fixed, but can play no role in fixing these weightings. That claim
is certainly incorrect: science plays a key role in these matters. For
what we value depends on what we believe, and what we believe is
increasingly determined by science.

A striking example of this influence is the impact of science upon the
system of values promulgated by the church during the Middle Ages. That
structure rested on a credo about the nature of the universe, its
creator, and man's connection to that creator. Science, by casting doubt
upon that belief, undermined the system of values erected upon it.
Moreover, it put forth a credo of its own. In that "scientific" vision
we human beings were converted from sparks of divine creative power,
endowed with free will, to automatons\-\--to cogs in a giant machine
that grinds inexorably along a preordained path in the grip of a blind
mechanical process.

Gone from this "scientific" picture of our species is any rational basis
for the notion of a person's responsibility for his own actions. Each of
us is asserted to be a mechanical extension of what existed prior to his
birth. Over that earlier situation one has no control. Hence for what
emerges, preordained, from that prior state one can bear no
responsibility.

Given this conception of man the collapse of moral philosophy is
inevitable. For this notion of the human being provides no rational
basis for any value but self interest: behavior promoting the welfare of
others, including future generations, becomes rational only to the
extent that such behavior serves one's own interests. Hence science
becomes doubly culpable: it not only undermines the foundations of
earlier value systems, but also strips man of any vision of himself and
his place in the universe that could be the rational basis for any
elevated set of values.

This mechanical view of nature and man's place within it dominated
science at the end of the nineteenth century. According to that notion,
the physical universe is composed of tiny bits of matter, and the
unfolding of the observed world over the course of time is completely
fixed by direct contact interactions between these localized microscopic
elements. Human beings, insofar as they are parts of this physically
describable reality, are simply conglomerations of these tiny
components, whose motions are completely fixed at the microlevel.

During the twentieth-century this simple picture of nature was found to
be profoundly wrong. It failed not just in its fine details, but at its
fundamental core. A vastly different conceptual framework was erected by
the atomic physicists Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and
their colleagues. Those scientists were forced to a wholesale revision
of the entire subject matter of physical theory by the strange character
of the new mathematical rules, which were invariably validated by
reliable empirical data.

The earlier "classical" physics arose from the study of motions of the
planets and large terrestrial objects. Rules were found that, as far as
we could detected, controlled the behavior of these entities in ways
that were completely independent of whether we were observing them or
not. Those purported "laws of motion" were formulated in terms of simple
properties that existed and evolved independently of their being
observed by anyone. The "laws" governing their behavior took no special
cognizance of the acts of observation performed upon them by human
beings, or of the knowledge acquired from these observations. However,
the baffling features of the data obtained during the twentieth century
caused the physicists who were studying these phenomena, and were trying
to ascertain the rules that governed them, to turn the whole scientific
enterprise upside down, or perhaps I should say turned *what had been
upside down* rightside up. The word "science" comes the latin "scire,"
to know. So the quantum physicists said, basically, that the proper
subject matter of science is not what may or may not be "out there,"
unobserved and unknown, but is rather what we human beings know. Thus
they formulated their new theory, called quantum theory, around the
*knowledge acquiring activities* of human beings, and around the
knowledge derived from these activities, rather than around some
imagined-to-exist world out there. The whole emphasis and focus of the
theory, at least from a philosophical perspective, was thus shifted from
one that ignored us to one that was about us.

This shift did not amount merely to looking at the same old physical
world from a different point of view. Rather the whole landscape was
transformed into something so strange that it seemed to be
understandable only in terms of how it worked for us.

The new conception of the physical world is vastly different from the
old one in many interesting ways that have excited the interest of
physicists. However, the revised understanding of the basic nature of
human beings, and of their role in nature, is, I believe, the most
interesting or exciting thing of all, and probably, in the final
analysis, the most important.

The new theory, called quantum theory, accounts in a uniform manner for
all the observed successes of the earlier physical theories, plus the
immense accumulation of new data where the earlier methods fail
abysmally. However, it describes a world built not out of bits of
matter, as matter was understood in the nineteenth century, but rather
out of a fundamentally different kind of stuff. According to the revised
notion, physical reality behaves more like *spatially encoded
information* *that governs* *tendencies for experiential events to
occur*, than like anything resembling material substance.

Moreover, according to this new understanding, the natural world is
governed not by one single uniform process, but by *two* very different
processes, only one of which is analogous *to* the laws of classical
physics. This quantum analog of the older classical process is the part
of the new theory of main interest to physicists, engineers, and other
workers *not* concerned with the mental side of reality. But anyone
interested in the role in nature of our conscious thoughts, ideas, and
feelings will want to understand the other process, because it specifies
how our thoughts affect the dynamical evolution of the physical world.

Nothing like this "action-of-mind" process exists in classical physics.
Indeed, there is nothing in the classical concepts or principles that
requires such things as thought, ideas, and feeling to exist at all, and
certainly no rule that dictates how the idea-like aspects of nature
impact upon and change the physical aspects. Indeed, it has been
precisely the absence of any notion of experiential-type realities in
classical physics, or of any job for them to do, or of any possibility
for them to do anything not already done by the tiny mechanical elements
that has been the bane of philosophy for three hundred years. Now,
however, the Newtonian-type conception of nature that has been the basis
of so much philosophical dispute has been found to be fundamentally
false, and has been replaced by a radically different idea that
reproduces all the verified results of the prior theory, and also
correctly accounts for the huge wealth of new data, and moreover put
thoughts, ideas, and feelings into the driver's seat. The new theory,
unlike the old one, rests upon a *causally potent us*, described as we
intuitively understand ourselves.

The original formulation of quantum theory was created by physicists
gather around Niels Bohr, at his institution in Copenhagen, and is
called the Copenhagen interpretation. It remains the official doctrine,
and is what is always used in practice. However, it is formulated as a
set of rules to be used by physicists as they go about their jobs of
collecting data and making predictions. But the eminent mathematician
John von Neumann created an enveloping theory christened "The Orthodox
Interpretation" by his friend and colleague, the Nobel Laureate Eugene
Wigner. Von Neumann's formulation puts the mental and physical aspects
of nature on a more equal footing, and can be regarded as an ontology:
that is, as a theory of nature herself.

Von Neumann's quantum theory is built on *two* processes, Process I and
Process II. The latter is the quantum mechanical analog of the classical
process that generates motions in accordance with the Classical Laws of
Motion," and like its classical cousin is local and deterministic:
Process II is "local" in the sense that it is controlled completely by
"contact" interactions between immediate neighbors, with no effect
propagating faster than the speed of light, and is "deterministic" in
that when acting alone, with no intervention of Process I, it carries
the state of the physical universe from an earlier time to a later time
in a completely determined and unambiguous way.

Process I, on the other hand, is the "action-of-mind" process. It
describes the *causal influence of conscious agents* *upon the physical
world*.

The existence of this dynamical effect of conscious experience upon the
course of physical events is inimical to the precepts that had ruled
science during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that had
become nearly synonymous with the idea of what science is. Accordingly,
some quantum physicists want to replace the Orthodox/Copenhagen
conception, and have worked assiduously to eradicate this contamination
of physics by psychology, on the grounds that it injects subjective
elements in a fundamental way into a discipline that they believe should
be fully objective. However, in spite of intensive efforts, no
rationally coherent way has been found to obtain the predictions of
quantum theory without using von Neumann's Process I, or something that
stands in its place and does its job. Accordingly, I shall accept here
the orthodox quantum theory of von Neumann and its logical developments.
Lacunae in the alternative proposals are described in chapter 9.

This revised conception of the causal connection between your thoughts
and your actions amounts to a new understanding of your intrinsic
nature. However, widespread awareness of this revised conception of the
human person has been effectively excluded from the minds of most
non-physicists by the focus of popular accounts of quantum theory on
features more interesting to physicists, namely the occurrence of a
statistical or random element, and an apparent breakdown of the locality
idea that no influence can propagate faster than light. Those features
are important parts of the full story. But Process I is something else.
It injects into the dynamical process choices that are "free," in the
very specific sense that they *not controlled by any yet-known law or
rule of nature*, statistical or otherwise, and yet can significantly
influence the course of physical events. In orthodox quantum theory
these free choices are made by human beings. Thus, according to orthodox
contemporary physics, as formulated either by the founders or by von
Neumann, your physical actions are in principle determined in part by
conscious choices that *are not governed by any yet-known law of
nature*. This means that your thoughts, ideas, and feelings can, *by
virtue of the basic laws of physics*, influence your actions, without
being themselves controlled by any yet-discovered law.

Von Neumann's formulation not only *accommodates* this causal linkage:
it also explains *how* it works\-\--or at least how it *can* work. It
also explains *why* this influence of mind upon brain vanishes when one
makes the "classical approximation," which eliminates all quantum
effects and reduces the quantum laws to corresponding classical ones.

You might now say: So what's new? I always knew my thoughts influenced
my actions!

You may indeed have always known this. Your knowledge that your mental
efforts can affect your bodily behavior is something you learned in the
first few months after birth, and is fundamental to your dealings with
the world. However, that seemingly obvious truth is incompatible with
the verdict of science that prevailed from the time of Isaac Newton
until 1900. That enduring conflict produced three hundred years of
philosophical turmoil, which has spilt over into the political, social,
legal, educational, and moral arenas, and deeply affected the
intellectual climate in which you are imbedded, and thereby inevitably
influenced also your conception of yourself as part of the culturally
defined universe.

Philosophers tried relentlessly for three centuries to understand the
role of mind in the workings of a brain conceived to function according
to principles of classical physics. We now know no such brain actually
exists: no brain, body, or anything else in the real world is composed
of those tiny bits of matter that Newton imagined the universe to be
made of. Hence it is hardly surprising that those philosophical
endeavors were beset by enormous difficulties, which led to such
positions as that of the \`eliminative materialists\', who hold that our
conscious thoughts do not exist; or of the \`epiphenomenalists\', who
admit that human experiences do exist but claim that they play
absolutely no role in how we behave; or of the \`identity theorists\',
who claim that each conscious feeling is exactly the same thing as a
motion of the particles that nineteenth century science thought brains
and everything else in the universe to be made of, but that we now know
do not exist, at least as they were formerly conceived. The tremendous
difficulty in reconciling causally efficacious thought with the older
physics is dramatized by the fact that for many years the mere mention
of \"consciousness\" was considered evidence of backwardness and bad
taste in most of academia, including, incredibly, even the philosophy of
mind.

What exactly is this conflict between classical physics and the
conviction of most of us that our thoughts and mental efforts make a
difference in how we behave? The problem was apparent already at the
time of Newton. But during the second half of the twentieth century it
has been buried under an avalanche of philosophical argumentation and
counter-argumentation, motivated by the perceived need to rationally
reconcile our understanding of ourselves with the findings of science.
It is not surprising that no consensus emerged from this massive
intellectual effort, for the aim was to reconcile what now appears to be
valid intuition about ourselves with a profoundly false understanding of
the dynamics of the physical world.

The conflict of the idea that our thoughts can influence our actions
with the principles of classical physics arises from the fact that
according to these principles every feature or property of a physical
system is determined by giving the *locations and velocities* of all of
the tiny component parts of these systems. These properties determine
all sorts of functional and behavioral properties of conglomerations of
these elements. But these features that completely specify the
classical-physics conception of physical reality do not rationally
entail the existence of the defining characteristic of an experientially
reality, namely the way it feels. Thus there is no rational need within
classical physics for any experience, say a "pain," to exist at all.
Because there is no necessity within the logical framework of classical
physics for experiential realities ever to exist, there is no way to
account within that framework for the power of our thoughts to influence
anything that the theory by itself does determine.

In quantum theory, on the other hand, the dynamical laws involve
conscious thoughts already from the outset. Hence we are not faced with
the problem of injecting experiential realities into a conceptual
structure that has no rational place for them. The participatory quantum
view of the conscious agent opens up possibilities wholly unlike the
classical image of the human being as a conglomeration of atoms being
mindlessly buffeted about by the chance collisions of atoms.

Although the focus of the above discussion has been on *human* agents,
von Neumann's Process I would function just a well in systems existing
long before Homo sapiens roamed the planet earth, and could be utilized
by simple and complex systems alike to enhance their chances of
survival. This will be discussed.

What impact, if any, can this altered idea of what you are have upon
your life? Does not a completely rational approach still lead you to
value only your own well being? Perhaps so! But this leads to the
further question: What is the self whose well being one values?

Values arise from self-image. Generally one is led by training,
teaching, propaganda, or other forms of indoctrination, to expand one's
conception of the self: one is encouraged to perceive oneself as an
integral part of some social unit such as family, ethnic or religious
group, or nation, and to enlarge one's self-interest to include the
interests of this unit. If this training is successful your enlarged
conception of yourself as good parent, or good son or daughter, or good
Christian, Muslim, or Jew, causes you to give weight to the welfare of
the unit as you would yourself. In fact, if well conditioned you may
give more weight to the interests of the group than to the well-being of
your bodily self.

In the present context it is not relevant whether this human tendency to
enlarge one's self image is a consequence of natural malleability,
instinctual tendency, spiritual insight, or something else. What is
important is that we human beings do in fact have the capacity to expand
our image of \"self\", and that this enlarged concept can become the
basis of a drive so powerful that it becomes the dominant determinant of
human conduct, overwhelming every other factor, including even the
instinct for bodily survival.

But where reason is honored, belief must be reconciled with empirical
evidence. If you seek evidence for your beliefs about what you are, and
how you fit into nature, then science claims jurisdiction, or at least
relevance. Physics presents itself as the basic science, and it is to
physics that you are told to turn. Thus a radical shift in the
physics-based conception of man from that of an isolated mechanical
automaton to that of an integral participant in a nonlocal holistic
process that gives form to the evolving universe is a seismic event of
potentially momentous proportions.

The quantum concept of man, being based on objective science equally
available to all, rather than arising from special personal
circumstances, has the potential of providing a universal system of
values suitable to all people, without regard to the accidents of their
origins. With the diffusion of this Quantum Conception of Human Beings,
science may fulfill itself by adding to the material benefits it has
already provided a philosophical insight of perhaps even greater
ultimate value.

This issue of the connection of science to values can be put into
perspective by seeing it in the context of a thumb-nail sketch of
history that stresses the role of science. For this purpose let human
intellectual history be divided into five periods: traditional, modern,
transitional, post modern, and contemporary.

During the "traditional" era our understanding of ourselves and our
relationship to nature was based on "ancient traditions" handed down
from generation to generation: "Traditions" were the chief source of
wisdom about our connection to nature. The "modern" era began in the
seventeenth century with the rise of what is still called "modern
science". That approach was based on the ideas of Bacon, Descartes,
Galileo and Newton, and it provided a new source of knowledge that came
to be regarded by many thinkers as more reliable than tradition.

The basic idea of modern science was "materialism": the idea that the
physical world is composed basically of tiny bits of matter whose
contact interactions with adjacent bits completely control everything
that is now happening, and that ever will happen. According to these
laws, as they existed in the early twentieth century, a person's
conscious thoughts and efforts can make no difference at all to what his
body/brain does: whatever you do was deemed to be completely fixed by
local interactions between tiny mechanical elements, with your thoughts,
ideas, feelings, and efforts, to the extent that they entered at all,
being simply locally determined high-level consequences of the low-level
mechanical process, and hence basically just elements of a reorganized
way of describing the effects of the microscopic causes.

This materialist conception of reality began to crumble at the beginning
of the twentieth century with Max Planck's discovery of the quantum of
action. Planck announced to his son that he had, on that day, made a
discovery as important as Newton's.

That assessment was certainly correct: the ramifications of Planck's
discovery were eventually to cause Newton's materialist conception of
physical reality to come crashing down. Planck's discovery marks the
beginning of the "transitional" period.

A second important transitional development soon followed:

In 1905 Einstein announced his Special Theory of Relativity. It denied
the validity of our intuitive idea of the instant of time "now", and
promulgated the thesis that even the most basic quantities of physics,
such as the length of a steel rod, and the temporal order of two events,
had no objective "true values", but were well defined only "relative" to
some observer's point of view.

Planck's discovery led by the mid twenties to a complete breakdown, at
the fundamental level, of the material conception of nature. A new basic
physical theory was developed, principally by Werner Heisenberg, Niels
Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Max Born, and it brought "the observer"
explicitly into physics. The earlier idea that the physical world is
composed in part of tiny particles was abandoned in favor of a theory of
natural phenomena in which the consciousness of the human observer is
ascribed an essential role. This successor to classical physical theory
is called "Copenhagen quantum theory".

This turning away by science itself from the tenets of the objective
materialist philosophy lent support to Post-Modernism. That view, which
emerged during the second half of the twentieth century, promulgated, in
essence, the idea that all "truths" were relative to one's point of
view, and were mere artifacts of some particular social group's struggle
for power over competing groups. Thus each social movement was entitled
to its own "truth", which was viewed simply as a socially created pawn
in the power game.

The connection of Post-Modern thought to science is that both Copenhagen
Quantum Theory and Relativity Theory had retreated from the idea of
observer-independent objective truth: science in the first quarter of
the twentieth century had not only eliminated materialism as a possible
foundation for objective truth, but had discredited the very idea of
objective truth in science. Yet if the community of scientists have
renounced the idea of objective truth in favor of the pragmatic idea
that "what is true for us is what works for us," then every group
becomes licensed to do the same, and the hope evaporates that science
might provide objective criteria for resolving contentious social
issues.

This philosophical shift has had profound social ramifications. But the
physicists who initiated this mischief were generally too interested in
practical developments in their own field to get involved in these
philosophical issues. Thus they failed to broadcast an important fact:
already by mid-century, a development in physics had occurred that
provides an effective antidote to both the 'materialism' of the modern
era, and the 'relativism' and 'social constructionism' of the
post-modern period. In particular, John von Neumann developed, during
the early thirties, a form of quantum theory that brought the physical
and mental aspects of nature together as two aspects of a rationally
coherent whole. This theory was elevated, during the forties\-\--by the
work of Tomonaga and Schwinger\-\--to a form compatible with the
physical requirements of the Theory of Relativity.

Von Neumann's theory, unlike the transitional ones, succeeded in
integrating into one coherent idea of reality the empirical data
residing in subjective experience with the basic mathematical structure
of theoretical physics. Von Neumann's formulation of quantum theory is
the starting point of all efforts by physicists to go beyond the
pragmatically magnificent but ontologically incomplete Copenhagen form
of quantum theory.

Von Neumann capitalized upon the key Copenhagen move of bringing human
knowings into the theory of physical reality. But, whereas the
Copenhagen approach excluded the bodies and brains of the human
observers from the physical world that they sought to describe, and
renounced the aim of describing reality itself, von Neumann demanded
logical cohesion and mathematical precision, and was willing to follow
where this rational approach led. Being a mathematician, fortified by
the rigor and precision of his thought, he seemed less intimidated than
his physicist brethren by the sharp contrast between the nature of the
world called for by the new mathematics and nature of the world that the
genius of Isaac Newton had concocted.

The common core feature of Copenhagen and von Neumann quantum theory is
the incorporation of human knowings and actions into the structure of
basic physical theory. How this is done, and what the consequences are,
is the subject of this book. The first step is to leave no doubt about
the primary fact that orthodox quantum theory does in fact bring the
knowledge of human beings into the essential core of the physical
theory.

**2. REALITY AS KNOWLEDGE.**

What are you made of? What is reality made of? What does intuition say
about this? What does science say?

The deliverance of intuition on these matters is not unambiguous.
Western science and philosophy begins with Thales of Miletus, who
proclaimed \"All is Water!\". Other Greeks believed the primordial stuff
to be \"Air\", or \"Earth\", or \"Fire\", and Empedocles settled on all
four. On the other hand, Leucippus and Democritus thought everything was
composed of tiny invisible, immutable atoms. Two millennia later, it
looked like the two atomists had gotten it right: Isaac Newton built his
seventeenth-century theory of the universe on the idea of enduring
miniscule particles, and John Dalton\'s atomic hypothesis explained many
facts of chemistry.

This notion that everything is composed of small bits of matter
encountered, however, a serious difficulty. The earlier idea that
\"air\" was a primary ingredient allowed soul or spirit to be construed
as constructed out of one of the primitive substances. But it was hard
to see how such a thing as a sensation of the color \"red\" or
\"green\", or a feeling of \'\'pain\" or \"joy\" could be fully
described in terms of a collection of tiny immutable bits of matter
careening through space. Given even supreme knowledge and comprehension,
how could the motions of billions of particles in a person\'s brain/body
be understood to be the very same thing as a conscious sensation, or the
*feeling* associated with the grasping of an idea? One can understand
all manner of motions of objects, and of their changing shapes, in terms
of the motions of their constituent parts, but there is a rationally
unbridgeable gap between the purely geometrical concepts of motions of
particles in space and the psychological realities of conscious
sensations, feelings, and ideas.

Isaac Newton built his theory upon the ideas of the French philosopher
Rene Descartes, who resolved this dilemma concerning the psychological
realities by conceiving nature to be built out of two sorts of
substances: \"matter\", which was located in and occupied space, and the
\"mental stuff\" that our thoughts, sensations, and feelings are made
of.

This sundering of nature worked well in science for more than two
hundred years, but was abandoned by physicists during the twentieth
century. The old idea that the material part of nature is made out of
tiny bits of reality whose changes are completely fixed by the prior
state of the nearby physical stuff\-\--independently of mind\-\--was
replaced by a very different picture. Once it became clear that the old
notions could not account for the growing mountain of data concerning
the properties of the atoms the focus shifted to what the experiments
were actually telling us. This opened the door to a new approach that
dealt directly with *what we could find* *out* about the systems being
examined, rather than with the system itself. An incredibly beautiful
and rationally coherent new kind of mathematical structure eventually
revealed itself, but this new mathematics was understood to describe not
a self-sufficient physical reality that can exist independently of all
minds, but rather our human knowledge of a reality in which our mental
activities reside, and which our conscious actions influence.

This original way of conceiving and applying the quantum mathematics was
created by a group of physicists working closely with the Danish
physicist Niels Bohr, and is called the \"Copenhagen interpretation\".
This approach was closely tied to actual experimental procedures, which
involve in the end the human experimenters who design the experiments
with some purpose in mind, and later record and interpret the results of
their investigations. This practical formulation of the theory defines
the way the mathematical structure is used operationally, and is the
touchstone of all later efforts to retain the original predictive power
of the quantum rules, while expanding their scope into the domains of
cosmology and neuro-dynamics.

The foundation of all attempts to increase the scope of the theory is
the work of the great Hungarian mathematician and logician John von
Neumann. But before going on to describe von Neumann\'s contribution it
will be helpful, and also fascinating, to appreciate the tremendous
change in outlook instituted already by Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr,
Wolfgang Pauli, and the other founders. For their insights are preserved
and expanded in the work of von Neumann.

In the introduction to his book \"Quantum theory and reality\'\' the
philosopher of science Mario Bunge (1967) said:

\"The physicist of the latest generation is operationalist all right,
but usually he does not know, and refuses to believe, that the original
Copenhagen interpretation\-\--which he thinks he supports\-\--was
squarely subjectivist, i.e., nonphysical.\'\'

Let there be no doubt about this point. The original form of quantum
theory, which is still alive today, is subjective, in the sense that it
is forthrightly about relationships among conscious human experiences,
and it expressly recommends to scientists that they resist the
temptation to try to understand the underlying processes of nature that
are responsible for the connections between our experiences that the
theory correctly describes. The following brief collection of quotations
by the founders gives a conspectus of the Copenhagen philosophy:

Heisenberg (1958a): \"The conception of objective reality of the
elementary particles has thus evaporated not into the cloud of some
obscure new reality concept but into the transparent clarity of a
mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but
rather our knowledge of this behavior.\'\'

Heisenberg (1958b): \"\...the act of registration of the result in the
mind of the observer. The discontinuous change in the probability
function...takes place with the act of registration, because it is the
discontinuous change in our knowledge in the instant of registration
that has its image in the discontinuous change of the probability
function.\'\'

Heisenberg (1958b :) \"When the old adage \`Natura non facit saltus\'
(Nature makes no jumps) is used as a basis of a criticism of quantum
theory, we can reply that certainly our knowledge can change suddenly,
and that this fact justifies the use of the term \`quantum jump\'. \'\'

\[Note: The interventions of Process I are expressed as abrupt changes
in *the physical world*, which is construed to be a representation of
'our knowledge.'\]

Wigner (1961): \"the laws of quantum mechanics cannot be
formulated\...without recourse to the concept of consciousness.\'\'

Bohr (1934): \"In our description of nature the purpose is not to
disclose the real essence of phenomena but only to track down as far as
possible relations between the multifold aspects of our experience.\'\'

Bohr (1963): \"Strictly speaking, the mathematical formalism of quantum
mechanics merely offers rules of calculation for the deduction of
expectations about observations obtained under well-defined classical
concepts.\'\'

Bohr (1958): \"\...the appropriate physical interpretation of the
symbolic quantum mechanical formalism amounts only to prediction of
determinate or statistical character, pertaining to individual phenomena
appearing under conditions defined by classical physics concepts.\'\'

The references to \`\"classical physics concepts\'\' is explained in
Bohr (1958): \"\...it is imperative to realize that in every account of
physical experience one must describe both experimental conditions and
observations by the same means of communication as the one used in
classical physics.\'\'

Bohr (1958) \"\...we must recognize above all that, even when phenomena
transcend the scope of classical physical theories, the account of the
experimental arrangement and the recording of observations must be given
in plain language supplemented by technical physical terminology.\"

Bohr is saying that scientists do in fact use, and must use, the
concepts of classical physics in communicating to colleagues the
specifications on how the experiment is to be set up, and what will
constitute a certain type of outcome. He in no way claims or admits that
there is an actual reality out there that conforms to the precepts of
classical physics.

In his book \"The creation of quantum mechanics and the Bohr-Pauli
dialogue\'\' (Hendry, 1984) the historian John Hendry gives a detailed
account of the fierce struggles by such eminent thinkers as Hilbert,
Jordan, Weyl, von Neumann, Born, Einstein, Sommerfeld, Pauli,
Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Dirac, Bohr and others, to come up with a
rational way of comprehending the data from atomic experiments. Each man
had his own bias and intuitions, but in spite of intense effort no
rational comprehension was forthcoming. Finally, at the 1927 Solvay
conference a group including Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, and Born
come into concordance on a solution that came to be called \"The
Copenhagen Interpretation\'\', due to the central role of Bohr and those
working with him at his institute in Denmark.

Hendry says: \"Dirac, in discussion, insisted on the restriction of the
theory\'s application to our knowledge of a system, and on its lack of
ontological content.\'\' Hendry summarized the concordance by saying:
\"On this interpretation it was agreed that, as Dirac explained, the
wave function represented our knowledge of the system, and the reduced
wave packets our more precise knowledge after measurement.\'\'

These quotes make it clear that, in direct contrast to the ideas of
classical physical theory, quantum theory is about "our knowledge." We,
and in particular our mental lives, have entered into the structure of
basic physical theory.

Certainly this profound shift in physicists' conception of the basic
nature of their endeavor, and the meanings of their formulas, was not a
frivolous move: it was a last resort. The very idea that in order to
comprehend atomic phenomena one must abandon physical ontology, and
construe the mathematical formulas to be directly about the knowledge of
human observers, rather than about the external real events themselves,
is so seemingly preposterous that no group of eminent and renowned
scientists would ever embrace it except as an extreme last measure.
Consequently, it would be frivolous of us simply to ignore a conclusion
so hard won and profound, and of such apparent direct bearing on our
effort to understand the connection of our knowings to our bodies.

\[Von Neumann subsequently rescued physical ontology, and integrated
into it the knowledge aspect stressed by the founders: he created a form
of quantum theory that incorporates the mental without abandoning the
physical.\]

Einstein never accepted the Copenhagen interpretation. He said: \"What
does not satisfy me, from the standpoint of principle, is its attitude
toward what seems to me to be the programmatic aim of all physics: the
complete description of any (individual) real situation (as it
supposedly exists irrespective of any act of observation or
substantiation).\'\' (Einstein, 1951, p.667: the parenthetical word and
phrase are part of Einstein\'s statement.);

and "What I dislike in this kind of argumentation is the basic
positivistic attitude, which from my view is untenable, and which seems
to me to come to the same thing as Berkeley\'s principle, {\\it esse est
percipi}. (Einstein, 1951, p. 669). \[Transl: To be is to be perceived\]

Einstein struggled until the end of his life to get the observer's
knowledge back out of physics. But he did not succeed! Rather he
admitted that: \"It is my opinion that the contemporary quantum theory
constitutes an optimum formulation of the \[statistical\]
connections.\'\' (ibid. p. 87).

He also referred to: \"the most successful physical theory of our
period, viz., the statistical quantum theory which, about twenty-five
years ago took on a logically consistent form. This is the only theory
at present which permits a unitary grasp of experiences concerning the
quantum character of micro-mechanical events.\'\' (ibid p. 81).

One can adopt the cavalier attitude that these profound difficulties
with the classical conception of nature are just some temporary
retrograde aberration in the forward march of science: one may imagine,
as some do, that a strange confusion has confounded our best minds for
seven decades, and that the weird conclusions of physicists can be
ignored because they do not fit our classical-physics-based intuitions.
Or one can try to claim that these problems concern only atoms and
molecules, but not the big things built out of them. In this connection
Einstein said: \"But the \`macroscopic\' and \`microscopic\' are so
inter-related that it appears impracticable to give up this program \[of
basing physics on the \`real\'\] in the \`microscopic\' domain
alone.\'\' (ibid, p.674).

The foregoing quotations document the assertion that the original
Copenhagen formulation of quantum theory brought the consciousness of
the human observer into physical theory in an essential way. The
question before us is this: How does this radical change in basic
physics affect science's conception of the human person?

**3. HOW YOUR FREE CHOICES INFLUENCE YOUR BRAIN.**

[The Anti-Newtonian Revolution]{.underline}

From the time of Isaac Newton to the beginning of the twentieth century
science relegated consciousness to the role of passive viewer: our
thoughts, ideas, and feelings were treated as impotent bystanders to a
march of events controlled wholly by contact interactions between tiny
mechanical elements. Conscious experiences, insofar as they had any
influences at all on what happens in the world, were believed to be
completely determined by the motions of miniscule entities, and the
behaviors of these minute parts were assumed to be fixed by laws that
acted exclusively at the microscopic level. Hence the experiential
*felt* *realities* that make up our streams of consciousness were
regarded as either irrelevant to physics or redundant, and were denied
fundamental status in basic physical theory.

The founders of quantum mechanics made the revolutionary move of
bringing conscious human experiences into the basic theory of physics in
a fundamental way. In the words of Niels Bohr the key innovation was to
recognize that \"in the drama of existence we ourselves are both actors
and spectators.\" \[Bohr, Essays 1958/1962 on Atomic Physics and Human
Knowledge\]. After two hundred years of neglect, our thoughts were
suddenly thrust into the limelight. This was an astonishing reversal of
precedent because the enormous successes of the prior physics were due
in large measure to the policy of excluding all mention of idea-like
qualities in the formulation of the laws of nature.

What sort of crisis could have forced the creators of quantum theory to
make this radical change of injecting mind into the scientific
description of Nature? The answer to this question begins with a
discovery that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century. In
the year 1900 Max Planck discovered and measured the \"quantum of
action." Its measured value is called \"Planck\'s Constant.\" This
constant specifies one of three basic quantities that are built into the
fundamental fabric of the physical universe. The other two are the
gravitational constant, which fixes the strength of the force that pulls
every bit of matter in the universe toward every other bit, and the
speed of light, which controls the response of every particle to this
force, and to every other force. The integration into physics of each of
these three basic quantities generated a monumental shift in our
conception of nature.

Isaac Newton discovered the gravitational constant, which linked our
understanding of celestial and terrestrial dynamics. It connected the
motions of the planets and their moons to the trajectories of cannon
balls here on earth, and to the rising and falling of the tides. Insofar
as his laws are complete the *entire physical universe* is governed by
mathematical equations that link every bit of matter to every other bit,
and that moreover fix the complete course of history for all times from
conditions prevailing in the primordial past.

Einstein recognized that the \"speed of light\" is not just the rate of
propagation of some special kind of wave-like disturbance, namely
\"light\". It is rather a fundamental number that enters into the
equations of motion of every kind of material substance, and that, among
other things, prevents any piece of matter from traveling faster than
this universal limiting value. Like Newton\'s gravitational constant it
is a number that enters ubiquitously into the basic structure of Nature.
But important as the effects of these two quantities are, they are, in
terms of profundity, like child\'s play compared to the consequences of
Planck\'s discovery.

Planck\'s \"quantum of action\" revealed itself first in the study of
light, or, more generally, of electromagnetic radiation. The radiant
energy emerging from a tiny hole in a heated hollow container can be
decomposed into its various frequency components. Classical nineteenth
century physics gave a clean prediction about how that energy should be
distributed among the frequencies, but the empirical facts did not fit
that theory. Eventually, Planck discovered that the correct formula
could be obtained by assuming that the energy was concentrated in finite
packets, with the amount of energy in each such unit being directly
proportional to the frequency of the radiation that was carrying it. The
ratio of energy to frequency is called \"Planck\'s constant\". Its value
is extremely small on the scale of normal human activity, but becomes
significant when we come to the behavior of the atomic particles and
fields out of which our bodies, brains, and all large physical objects
are made.

Planck's discovery shattered the classical laws that had been the
foundation of the scientific world view. During the years that followed
many experiments were performed on atomic particles and it was
repeatedly found that the classical laws did not work: they gave well
defined predictions that turned out to be flat out wrong when confronted
be the experimental evidence. The fundamental laws of physics that every
physics student had been taught, and upon much of the industrial and
technological world was based, were not correct. But more importantly
and surprisingly, they were failing in such a way that no mere tinkering
could ever fix. There was something fundamentally amiss. No one could
say how these laws, which were so important, and had seemed so perfect,
could be fixed. No one could foresee whether a new theory could be
constructed that would explain these strange and unexpected results, and
restore rational order to the cosmos. But one thing was clear to those
working feverishly on the problem: Planck's constant was somehow at the
center of it all.

[Quantum Theory]{.underline}

Werner Heisenberg was one of a band of young physicists assembled by
Niels Bohr at his institute in Copenhagen for the purpose of solving
this riddle of the breakdown of the principles underlying classical
physics. In 1925 he discovered the completely amazing and wholly
unprecedented solution to the puzzle: the quantities that classical
physical theory was based upon, and which were thought to be numbers,
*are not numbers at all* ! Ordinary numbers, such as 2 and 3, have the
property that the product of any two of them does not depend on the
order of the factors: 2 times 3 is the same as 3 times 2. But Heisenberg
discovered that one could get the correct answers out of the old
classical laws if one decreed that the *order in which one multiplies*
certain quantities matters!

This \"solution\" may sound absurd or insane. But mathematicians had
already discovered that many completely coherent and logically
consistent generalizations of ordinary mathematics exist in which the
order in which one multiplies quantities matters. Ordinary numbers that
we use for everyday things like buying a loaf of bread or paying taxes
are just a very special case from among all of the allowed mathematical
possibilities. In this simplest case, A times B happens to be the same
as B times A. But here is no logical reason why Nature should not
exploit one of the more general cases, and there is no compelling reason
why our physical theories must be based exclusively on ordinary numbers.
Heisenberg's theory, which became Quantum Theory, exploits the more
general logical possibility.

Now all this may sound like a lot of mathematical tomfoolery, but the
key point is that it led to a revision of the scientific conception of
nature of reality that is so profound that impacts upon the lives of
ordinary people.

An example of the change introduced by Heisenberg may be helpful.

In classical physics the center-point of each object has, at each
instant, a well defined location, which can be specified by giving its
three coordinates *(x, y, z)* relative to some coordinate system. For
example, the location of a spider dangling in a room can be specified by
letting *z* be its distance from the floor, and letting *x* and y be its
distances from two intersecting walls. Similarly, the *velocity* of that
dangling spider, as she drops to the floor, blown by a gust of wind, can
be specified by giving *the rate of change* of these three coordinates
(x, y, z). If each of these three rates of change, which together
specify the velocity, are multiplied by the weight (=mass) of the
spider, then one gets three numbers, say (p, q, r), that define the
\"momentum\" of the spider. So in classical physics you might use the
set of three numbers called (x,y,z) to represent the position of the
center point of an object, and the set of three numbers called (p,q,r)
to represent the momentum of that object. These are just ordinary
numbers that obey the commutative property of multiplication that we
all, hopefully, learned in 3^rd^ or 4^th^ grade: x\*p equals p\*x, where
\* means multiply.

Heisenberg\'s analysis showed that in order to make the formulas of
classical physics describe quantum phenomena, x\*p must be different
from p\*x. Moreover, he found that the difference between these two
products must be Planck\'s constant. \[Actually, the difference is
Planck\'s constant multiplied by the imaginary unit *i,* which is a
number such that *i* times *i* is minus one. Hey, no one said quantum
mechanics was going to be easy.\] Thus quantum theory was born by
recognizing, or declaring, that the symbols used in classical physical
theory to represent ordinary numbers actually represented mathematical
objects such that their ordering in a product is important. The
procedure of creating the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics
from classical physics by replacing ordinary numbers by these more
complex objects is called \"quantization.\"

This idea of replacing the numbers that specify where a particle is, and
how fast it is moving, by mathematical quantities that violate the
simple laws of arithmetic may strike you\-\--if this is the first you've
heard about it\-\--as a giant step in the wrong direction. You might
mutter that scientists should try to make things simpler, rather than
abandoning one of the things we really know for sure, namely that the
order in which one multiplies factors does not matter. But against that
intuition you should bear in mind that this change works beautifully in
practice: all of the tested predictions of Quantum Theory are borne out,
and these include predictions that are correct to the incredible
accuracy of one part in a hundred million. There is something very very
right about quantum theory. But what is important in the larger context
of human life is that, as we shall discuss later , it disrupts old laws
of physics in just such a way as to bring your conscious thoughts into
physics as causal agents with "free choices": choices that can influence
your behavior but are controlled neither by the deterministic laws that
fix the motions of the elementary particles, nor by any other known law.
This revision of the physics severs in one stroke the logical chain that
had perplexed and hobbled philosophy for two and a half centuries. It
converts the physical world from a collection of tiny material particles
and local fields to a mathematical structure that represents *knowledge
or information,* and also *tendencies for future knowings to occur.*
Classical-type matter does not exist: it has been replaced by idea-like
realities, which, however, have enough matter-like properties to ensure
all of the empirically validated consequences of classical physics.

[Matrix Mechanics]{.underline}

The idea that the product AB of two quantities, A and B, is different
from BA may seem weird, or impossible. But this property is completely
understandable if A and B are "matrices." Quantum mechanics is sometimes
called "matrix mechanics" because it can be understood as a consequence
of replacing ordinary numbers by matrices. But what are "matrices?"

An N-by-N matrix is a square array of numbers arranged in N rows each
having N numbers. Or one can think of it as consisting of N columns each
having N numbers. So it is a square array of numbers with N rows and N
columns. If M is a matrix then mathematicians label the individual
number that lies in row number i and column number j by M(i,j). Thus
M(2,3) is the number that lies in the second row and the third column of
the matrix M. If you abhor math you can ignore these details, but you do
need to know that matrices are well defined mathematical objects: there
is no vagueness about them. Moreover, the product C=AB is well defined.
The rule is C(i,j)=A(i,k)B(k,j) summed over all N values of k. By using
this rule one can easily verify, already for N=2, that AB is usually
different from BA.

I shall not use these formulas in any explicit way. But it is important
to recognize that AB and BA are both well defined, and are generally
different.

In quantum theory each physical system, from an individual electron, to
a small device, to a human brain, and to still larger systems, is
represented by an N-by-N square matrix S called a density matrix.

One technical problem is the fact that the number N is generally
infinite. Much of von Neumann's mathematical work in quantum theory was
devoted to the resolution of possible ambiguities arising from this
fact. Thanks to von Neumann's work we can, for our purposes, gloss over
the mathematical subtleties and simply imagine matrices whose rows and
columns are both labeled by a set *l* of continuous variables*,* such as
the set of variables (x,y,z) that label the location *of the center
point* of a classically conceived particle or object. This means that
each possible location *l* of the center point of a classically
conceived particle or object occurs twice in the quantum description of
the state S of that system, once as a label on the *rows* of the matrix
S that specifies the state of the object and once as the label on the
columns of S. The so-called "diagonal" elements S(*l,l*) in which the
row and column both correspond to the *same* location *l* of the
classically conceived particle or object are the elements of S most
closely connected to classical physics. However, the "off-diagonal"
elements, which would correspond to the center of the classically
conceived object's being in two different locations at the same time,
also contribute to the quantum dynamics.

[The Cloud-Like Forms]{.underline}

A crucial feature of matrix mechanics is that, even if we consider only
the diagonal elements S(*I,l*) of S, which are the elements most closely
connected to classical ideas, no object, large or small, has a well
defined location: every object, and combination of objects, is
represented by a density matrix S that has "large" values on a set of
diagonal elements S(*l,l*) such that *l* covers some finite region: the
*center* of the physical system, as represented by the corresponding
matrix S, is not confined to a point, but is a smeared out cloud-like
structure that extends over some finite region. Moreover, this cloud
tends to expand with the passage of time under the action of the
equations of motion that are generated by the "quantization" procedure.
This conversion of the location of the center point of an object from a
moving point into an expanding cloud is a key feature of quantum theory.

[The Problem With Experience]{.underline}

This expanding cloudlike character of physical systems produces a very
serious problem when it comes to relating the mathematical description
given by quantum theory to human experience. Each of us experiences any
visible physical object as having a fairly well defined location: its
center is not experienced as being ambiguously smeared out over several
centimeters, or perhaps even meters or kilometers. In classical physics
this experiencing of definite locations is easy to understand. Each
small object has a well defined position at each moment, and one can
imagine bouncing light off the object, then following the reflected
light from the object to some particular small region of the retina. The
excitation of the nerves in this portion of the retina could cause the
brain to evolve into a state that would depend upon where the light hit
the retina. That location on the retina would depend upon where the
object was located. Hence the ensuing visual experience could easily
depend upon where the object was located: the person could "see where
the object is situated" because the state of his brain would depend upon
where the object was located.

But if one tries to follow the same reasoning in quantum theory then the
cloudlike character of an object causes a problem: it would lead to a
corresponding cloudlike state of the brain. The brain would evolve into
a smeared-out structure in which *all* of the possible locations of the
object are represented: no single location of the object would be
singled out and distinguished from many neighboring locations. Thus the
experience of the observer would, it would seem, contain components
corresponding to a whole set of different locations of the object. But
only one of these possibilities is experienced by us. The problem then
is: How does one particular experienced location of the (center-point of
the) observed object get singled out from all the others that occur,
undifferentiated, in the cloudlike structure that represents, in the
theory, *the center point* of the observed object. Because there is
nothing in the physical state S of the object itself that singles out
one location in the cloud from all the others the founders of quantum
theory turned to the other part of nature that is involved in the
experiencing of a definite location, namely the experiencing agent.

The basic problem, therefore, is that the replacement of simple numbers
by matrices\-\--i.e., by huge arrays of numbers\-\--tends to smear
everything out, including the states of the brains of the observers.
Consequentially, it would seem that, according to the theory, each
physical object should appear to be everywhere, rather than somewhere.
This disparity between the raw theory and ordinary experience is the
fundamental problem that was resolved by the founders of quantum theory
by bringing the actions of human experimenters into the dynamics in an
essential way.

[The Copenhagen Solution: Bring In "The Observer"]{.underline}

In both the original Copenhagen quantum theory and von Neumann's
reformulation of it the dynamical rules involve an effect of an action
by a human agent upon the state of an observed physical system. But this
agent is treated differently in these two versions. In particular, "The
Observer\" in the Copenhagen version differs greatly from what is
normally meant by this term: it involves an extension of the human
observer outside his physical body.

Bohr mentioned several times the example of a man with a cane: if he
holds the cane loosely he feels himself to extend only to his hand. But
if he grips the cane firmly then the outer world seems to begin at the
tip of his probing cane. Correspondingly, \"The Observer\" in Copenhagen
quantum theory includes not only the body and mind of the experimenter
himself, but also the measuring devices that he uses to probe some
"observed system" that lies outside of his extended \"self\". Thus
nature is imagined to be cleaved into two parts, which are described in
different ways. The outer \"observed system\" is described in terms of
quantum mathematics, whereas the inner \"observing system\'\' is
described in terms of experiential facts.

Because Copenhagen quantum theory treats the measuring instruments as
part of the observer these devices are described in terms of our
experiences of them, not in terms of their atomic constituents. Thus the
dynamics becomes an interaction between this extended observer, which is
described in experiential terms, and the reality that he is probing,
which is described by an evolving matrix. The laws of physics must
therefore be expanded from laws that govern simply the physical world
alone to laws governing the dynamical interplay between an experiencing
agent and an external-to-himself system that he is probing.

But how does one enlarge physical theory to encompass a dynamical
interplay between an experientially/psychologically described agent and
the physically/geometrically described object he is studying?

The Copenhagen solution exploits the apparently innocent fact that in
order to extract precise information from nature the experimenter has to
put in place an appropriate measuring device. Thus his action results in
the coming into being of some particular experimental set-up that probes
nature in some particular way. The essential feature of these devices is
that they never give answers to questions of the form "What is the value
of X?" where X ranges over a continuous set of values. Rather they
answer questions with a discrete set of possible answers: Does the
set-in-place Geiger counter give an audible click or not?

What actually happens in the scientific experiment is that the
experimenter performs the intentional act of structuring the world
(i.e., setting up the experimental arrangement) in such a way as to
cause the world either to return a certain recognizable response, or
fail to return that response. Thus the experimenter, by his intentional
act, structures the part of nature under his control in a way that
poses, or puts to nature, a question that has a discrete answer, 'Yes'
or 'No'. In other words, the agent acts in such a way that the devices
that are considered to be extensions of his own body are positioned in
such a way that if he experiences a response\-\--hears the Geiger
counter click\-\-- then he will know something about the external system
that he is studying: he will have acquired one bit of information.

But this essentially psychological process, which is based on the
agent's particular intentions and actions, is not described by the
quantum generalization of the classical laws of motion. Indeed, if the
only process in Nature were that latter process, which would then govern
also the experimenter himself, then the experimenter and his devices
would be smeared out clouds generated by the evolution of the universe
since the big bang. There would be no particular locations of devices
singled out from a continuous background of possibilities. This is
because that dynamical process is essentially continuous in both time
and space, and generates only smeared out locations that generally
expand with time. The founders of quantum theory thus introduced the
actions of the agents into the theory in order to extract an element of
definiteness or discreteness from an otherwise completely amorphous
structure.

Copenhagen quantum theory is thus formulated in a realistic and
practical way. It is structured around the activities of human agents,
who can freely elect to probe nature in any one of many possible
definite ways. Bohr emphasized the freedom of the experimenters in
passages such as:

\"The freedom of experimentation, presupposed in

classical physics, is of course retained and corresponds

to the free choice of experimental arrangement for which

the mathematical structure of the quantum mechanical

formalism offers the appropriate latitude.\"

This freedom of the agent stems from the fact that in Copenhagen quantum
theory the human experimenter stands outside the system to which the
quantum laws are applied. Those quantum laws are the only precise laws
of nature recognized by that theory. Thus, according to the Copenhagen
philosophy, there are no presently known laws that govern the choices
made by the agent/experimenter/observer about how the observed system is
to be probed. This choice is, in this very specific sense, a "free
choice."

[The Von Neumann Solution: Bring in The Brains]{.underline}

This Copenhagen solution involves separating the dynamically unified
physical world into two parts, the observing system and the observed
system, that are described in very different ways. The agent's
intentional act of performing a measurement causes a sudden discrete
change in the state of the observed system. This formulation works
beautifully in practice, but the severing of the unified physical world
into two parts that are described in different ways, and the unexplained
disruption of the normal physical laws produced by the proximity of the
measuring device to the observed system, is a source of great
dissatisfaction among those who seek a rationally and dynamically
coherent understanding of what is actually going on.

Von Neumann circumvented this unnatural bifurcation of the physical
world by devising a rigorous formulation of quantum theory that treats
the entire physical world, including the bodies and brain of the human
agents, as belonging to the physical part of reality that is uniformly
described by the quantum mathematics. Then the brain of the agent
becomes the observed system, and the intentional act of the agent
produces a change in the physical state his brain. However, the
intentional act involves the free choice of which particular measurement
act to perform, and this discrete choice must still be made by some
process other than the continuous dynamical process that arises from the
quantization of the classical laws.

[Process I and Process II]{.underline}

This process of "measurement" is of such essential importance to quantum
theory that von Neumann calls it Process I. He calls the quantized
version of the classical dynamical process Process II. Thus, according
to both the Copenhagen and von Neumann formulations, the quantum
dynamics involves *two* *processes*. One of them is analogous to the
local deterministic process of classical physics. This process, Process
II, applied to the brain, is a "bottom up" process, in the sense that,
like the dynamical process of classical physics, it is expressed in
terms of contact interactions between local properties and, like its
classical analog, is deterministic. However, the other process, Process
I, is "top down." It is a volitionally controlled action that produces a
specific sort of effect on the brain of the agent whose volition is
guiding the action.

The relationship between the mind and the brain of the agent is
therefore specified in von Neumann quantum theory not by some abstract
metaphysical correspondence that is *added onto* the already complete
dynamical theory in order to link a dynamically irrelevant mind to the
physical universe. Rather, this relationship is a *dynamical* process
that is a necessary feature of the physical theory itself. It consists
of a causal effect of a conscious intentional action of an agent upon
his own brain: an action of mind on brain.

Von Neumann pushed the physical world out to include the brain of the
agent, but gave no prescription for specifying how the choice of action
associated with Process I is made. Thus at this stage of the
developments of physical theory the choice on the part of the agent that
specifies which of the possible Process I events actually occurs remains
a "free choice," in the specific sense that it is not fixed either
statistically or deterministically by the laws of contemporary physical
theory.

The Process-I connection between intentional thoughts and the physical
brain is, within the von Neumann ontology, the foundation of human
personhood. Hence I must describe it here in a way that general readers
can understand. Physicists have their own relevant jargon for describing
Process I, and rather than giving vague restatements I shall, instead,
describe the process in the language used by physicists, and explain the
meaning of the relevant terms.

[Process I]{.underline}

Quantum theory, as already noted, replaces numbers by matrices. This
complexity permits the entry of new conceptions that escape the narrow
bounds of what classical physics allows. This shift to matrix mechanics
is a wonderful boon to humankind, for it allows us to reconcile our
intuitive idea of what we are with the basic laws of science.

The complexity of these huge infinite-dimensional matrices actually
engenders a certain conceptual simplicity. The entire brain of the agent
is represented by an infinite-dimensional matrix. Hence, conceptually,
the same matrix idea applies just as well to a whole brain as to a
single coordinate x of single particle.

Suppose the infinite-dimensional matrix that represents the entire brain
of the agent (or perhaps the portion of that brain that is associated
with a conscious experience) is called S. Then the key question is: What
happens to S when a Process I event occurs? This action constitutes the
effect of mind on brain.

This action involves "projection operators." A matrix P is a projection
operator if and only if PP = P: i.e., if P times P is P itself. There
are exactly two ordinary numbers that have this property, zero and one:
zero times zero is zero, and one times one is one. No other numbers have
this property, But for any number N greater than 1 here are an infinite
number of matrices P such that P is an N dimensional square matrix, and
P times P is P.

The von Neumann Process I describes the encoding in the brain of an
agent of an intentional act by that agent. This encoding is specified by
a projection operator P, which acts as a whole on the entire state S of
the brain. The action of Process I is this: If the symbol "I" stands for
the matrix that has one (unity) in every diagonal location (i.e., I(i,i)
= 1 for every value of i) and zero in every other location (i.e., I(i,j)
= 0 for i different from j) then the effect of Process I is to replace S
by S'= PSP + (I-P)S(I-P).

The two terms PSP and (I-P)S(I-P) are called the "branches" of the new
state S'. The branches PSP and (I-P)S(I-P) correspond to the
experiential answers 'Yes' and 'No', respectively, to the probing
question. This Process I specifies the mind-brain connection in von
Neumann quantum theory.

[The Action of Mind on Brain]{.underline}

To complete the general picture I must explain the connection between
the intentional action, considered as a mental act, and the associated
projection operator P, which acts upon the state S of the brain of the
agent.

Quantum theory provides a conceptual framework that, unlike classical
physics, brings mental intentional actions into the dynamics in
fundamental way. Process I specifies that the intentional mental effort
to act in some particular way produces the effect SS' = PSP +
(I-P)S(I-P) on the state S of (some pertinent aspect of) the brain. The
action of the projection operator P is to select out and actualize, from
among all of the possible patterns of brain activity, some particular
subset of patterns. If the actualization of this particular pattern is
to bring about the intended physical action then the actualization of
this brain pattern must, evidently, if sustained, tend to cause the
intended action to occur.

Descartes himself allowed mind to act on brain in some such way. It was
the philosophers and scientists who followed him who insisted that the
geometric conceptualization of the physical world introduced by
Descartes, and utilized by Newton, was so complete as leave no room for
any causally potent thing other than conglomerations of the
micro-elements that classical physics describes. But the loosening of
the classical determinism expressed in the cloudlike character of the
quantum physical world, coupled with the explicit introduction of agents
that are not governed by the known laws, but perform intentional acts
represented explicitly by Process I, changes the situation completely.

The fact that the felt effort is linked to just the right sort of effect
on the brain, namely the very effect that will tend to cause the
intended action to occur, might seem at first mysterious. But it has a
naturalistic explanation. We see at work, particularly in the infant,
but also throughout life, the trial-and-error process of discovering
what kind of experiential effort tends to produce what kind of
experiential feedback. So if there exists the general sort of Process I
mind-brain connection called for by von Neumann quantum theory then it
is no deep mystery that biological organisms should develop in ways that
would exploit it, and that human beings should be able to learn by trial
and error which sorts of efforts tend to produce which sorts of
feedbacks.

I shall elaborate upon the efficacy of this Process I intervention. But
the essential point of this book has now been made. According to
classical mechanics, everything that happens in the physical world is
determined by a single *bottom up* local deterministic physical process,
and we ourselves are, consequently, robotic automata. This does not mean
that in classical physics high-level processes have no effect on
low-level processes. Macroscopic entities such as wheels, pistons, and
weather patterns can cause things to happen, and can causally influence
the course of low-level events. But those top down classical processes
are merely partial and approximate re-expressions of the bottom up
micro-process, which is itself dynamically complete. But in quantum
theory, in its von Neumann formulation, the human agents are governed by
*two* processes. One of them, Process II, is a bottom up local
deterministic process that is specified by quantizing the classical law.
But this Process II by itself does not yield any explanation of, or
predictions concerning, relationships between our human experiences.
Another process, Process I, is needed to complete the theory, and it is
a genuine top down process in the sense that it expresses causal effects
of experientially felt intentions upon the brain/body of the
experiencing agent, and it involves choices that are not controlled or
determined by any known law or rule of nature.

**4. Double Slits, Nerve Terminals, and the Need to Use Quantum Brain
Dynamics.**

Most neuroscientists and philosophers who ponder the relationship of
consciousness to brain process want to believe that classical physics
will do. That belief would have been reasonable during the nineteenth
century, but now, in the twenty-first, it is rationally untenable. The
general dynamical reason why quantum theory must be used when the
effects of consciousness are involved was described in the preceding
chapters: brains are the arena of where the crucial Process I acts. This
process specifies the interaction between a person's stream of
consciousness and the activity in his brain, and it drops out when one
goes over to the classical approximation. So ignoring quantum effects in
the study of the mind-brain connection would, from the perspective of
von Neumann quantum theory, be totally unjustified.

But the further question is a quantitative one: How important are the
quantum (i.e., cloudlike) properties of, say, ions in brain dynamics?
That these properties are very important is made particularly evident by
an examination of the dynamics of nerve terminals.

Nerve terminals lie at the junctions between two nerves, and mediate the
connection between them. The way they work is this. Each "firing" of a
nerve sends an electrical signal along that fiber. When this signal
reaches the nerve terminal it opens up tiny holes in the terminal
membrane, through which calcium ions flow into the interior of the
terminal. Within the terminal are "vesicles", which are small sacks
containing chemicals called neurotransmitters. The calcium ions migrate
from their entry holes to special sites, where they trigger the release
of the contents of a vesicle into a gap between the terminal and a
neighboring nerve. The released chemicals influence the tendency of the
neighboring nerve to fire. Thus the nerve terminals, as connecting links
between nerves, are basic elements in brain dynamics.

The holes through which the calcium ions enter the nerve terminal are
called "ion channels." At their narrowest points they are not much
larger than the calcium ions themselves. This extreme smallness of the
opening in the ion channels has profound quantum mechanical import. The
consequence is essentially the same as the consequence of the narrowness
of the slits in the famous double-slit experiments, which prove the wave
nature of photons, electrons, and ions.

In all these cases the smallness of the hole or slit restricts the
lateral dimension of the beam. Consequently, the lateral velocity is
forced by the *quantum uncertainty principle* to become large. This
causes the cloud (or wave packet) associated with the particle to
balloon out over an increasing area as it moves from the tiny hole or
slit to the target where it will be absorbed on some small site.

This spreading of the ion wave packet means that the ion may or may not
be absorbed on the triggering site. Accordingly, the vesicle may or may
not release its contents. Consequently, the quantum state of the vesicle
becomes a quantum superposition consisting of a state where the
neurotransmitter is released and a state where the neurotransmitter is
not released. This quantum splitting occurs at every one of the
trillions of nerve terminals.

What is the effect of this *necessary* incursion of the cloud-like
nature of matter into the evolving state of the brain?

A principal function of the brain is to receive clues from the
environment, form an appropriate plan of action, and direct the
body/brain action specified by the selected plan of action. The exact
details of the plan will, for a classical model, obviously depend upon
the exact values of many noisy and uncontrolled variables. In cases
close to a bifurcation point of the dynamics the effects of noise might
even tip the balance between two very different responses to the given
clues: e.g., tip the balance between the 'fight' or 'flight' response to
some shadowy form.

The effect of the independent superpositions of the "release" or "don't
release" options at each of the trillions of nerve terminals will be to
cause the quantum mechanical state of the brain to become a collection
of different states representing different alternative possible plans of
action. As long as the brain dynamics is controlled wholly by
ProcessII\-\--which is the quantum generalization of the Newtonian laws
of motion in classical physics\-\--all of the various alternative
possible plans of action exist in parallel, with no one plan of action
singled out as the one that will actually occur. Some other process,
beyond the local deterministic Process II, is required to select some
particular real course of physical events from the smeared out mass of
possibilities generated by all of the alternative possible combinations
of vesicle releases at all of the trillions of nerve terminals.

But what is this other process that selects distinct alternatives with
well defined probabilities from the amorphous conglomeration of
overlapping possibilities. According to both the Copenhagen and von
Neumann formulations of quantum theory it is Process I.

Curiously, those physicists who attempt to improve upon these orthodox
formulations of quantum theory see the problem with these mainline views
as this intrusion of the observer into physics: their aim is to try to
rid quantum theory of "the observer", who by virtue of his subjective
nature, must, in their opinion, be excluded from science.. This stance
is maintained in direct opposition to what would seem to be the most
profound advance in physics in three hundred years, namely the
overcoming of the most glaring failure of classical physics, its
inability to accommodate us, its creators. The most remarkable and
salient feature of quantum theory is that the mathematics has a
dynamical gap that, by virtue of its intrinsic form, provides a perfect
place for Homo sapiens as we know and experience ourselves. That was the
conclusion recognized by the founders of quantum theory already in 1926,
and clarified by von Neumann in 1932. In view of the severe
philosophical difficulties with the classical mechanical conception of
man it is odd that anyone would want to revert to it.

**5. Agents and Evolution.**

Human beings play a singular role in Copenhagen quantum theory: within
that scheme science is viewed as a human endeavor, performed by human
beings for human beings. Still, most scientists believe that *something*
was going on before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene, and many hold
that the task of science will not be finished until we have a
science-based idea of what that something was, and how our species
emerged from it.

My intention here is to find the place of human beings in a broader
non-anthropocentric setting, and I believe that this can be done by
building upon the foundation laid by the creators of quantum theory,
rather than by retreating to a mechanistic conception of man that
ignores consciousness, or tries to replace it by something else, such as
classically describable brain processes. Indeed, the approach of
scientists and philosophers who base their thinking on the classical
conceptualization of human brains depends on a promissory note that can
never be redeemed.

That promise, or completely unsupported hope, is that *someday* we shall
be able to understand how a conscious experience\-\--a feeling or
knowing\-\--can either ***be***, or *be a necessary consequence of*, a
structure built exclusively out of the elements specified by classical
mechanics. However, as already noted in Chapter 1, the classical
concepts and laws entail all kinds of microscopic and macroscopic
geometric, behavioral, and functional properties, but nothing in those
concepts and principles can *ensure* or *dictate* that some changing
arrangements of numbers assigned to space-time points, which is
basically all that classical physics can ever provide, will
*necessarily* be accompanied by, say, a "painful feeling".

Thus feelings can be only gratuitous\-\--not rationally
entailed\-\--add-ons to any structure built solely from entities
possessing only the properties specified by the classical concepts. Such
supernumeraries, being non-entailed either rationally, dynamically, or
logically, can be stripped away without effecting the course of physical
events prescribed by the theory, and hence are devoid of survival value.
Nor can it be argued that feelings *must* emerge from such systems
because we ourselves are the living proof. For we ourselves are
certainly not built out of elements that conform to the idealized
unphysical concepts that are the basis of classical physics. We, insofar
as contemporary science has correctly informed us, are built out a very
different kind of stuff that is more like information and tendencies for
experiences to occur, than like classical matter.

In short: in order to get something like consciousness out of a theory
one must put something like consciousness in. Orthodox quantum theory
already requires, in order to yield well defined predictions, the
existence of Process I, which by its intrinsic nature is both a
dynamically efficacious element of the theory and a link between the
experiential and physical aspects of the theory. Thus quantum physics
already provides, *as an essential feature of the dynamics,* what was
formerly provided by metaphysics, namely a link between the physical
attributes of an agent, which are described in geometrical terms, and
the experiential aspects that are described in psychological terms?

So far I have restricted myself to the orthodox framework created by the
founders of quantum theory, and developed by John von Neumann. The focus
of those works was on *human* agents, and on intentional actions that
created scientific experiments. I shall apply the same equations and
ideas more generally.

So how does the evolutionary scenario work?

According to this theory, the universe initially evolves under the
governance of Process II alone. All possibilities are mechanically
generated by this evolving cloud-like state. Given the nature of the
laws implemented by these laws\-\--which support, among other things,
the possibility of the formation of organic molecules\-\--the set of all
possibilities will eventually lead to the formation of potential agents,
which are simply mechanical subsystems that exist for a time in
equilibrium with their environment, as (perhaps rudimentary)
stimulus-response (input-output) system. These systems can be roughly
conceived of as smeared out cloudlike *collections* of classical states
that tend to endure for intervals of time in communication with their
environments.

Each of these quasi-stable subsystems has, due to its wave-like
(cloudlike) nature a tendency to degenerate into less cohesive states.
However, nature has armed all potential agents with a counter-weapon:
access to Process I, which is able by means of the Quantum Zeno Effect
(to be described presently) to preserve over extended periods, in the
face of all sorts of disruptive processes, the physical integrity of the
agent.

We have as our building blocks the assumed existence of Processes I and
II, and the known existence of feelings. This brings us to the critical
questions: (1) What determines when a Process I event occurs? (2) What
determines the specific form of that event? And (3) How is that event
related to the "feeling" aspect of nature?

Due to the inherently cloud-like quality of physical systems the quantum
state of a potential agent will tend to evolve into a collection of
states that represent alternative possible courses of action. Within
that collection there may be a maximal state of high organization (low
entropy) in which various modules\-\--partially autonomous
subsystems\-\--within the agent act together in mutual support to form a
state of quasi-stable equilibrium. This state will extend over a large
region, and hence cannot be grasped or identified as a whole by the
dynamically local Process II. But it can be specified by a projection
operator P acting on some slowly changing degrees of freedom of the
agent. The feel associated with Process I can be identified as the
grasping of this state of non-discordant organization. This enduring
state of quasi-stable equilibrium is the state PSP specified by Process
I.

One might object that if the effect of this "feel" is precisely
definable in terms of the mathematically defined projection operator P,
then the "feels" could, just as in the classical case, be eliminated
from the dynamics, rendering the feels superfluous and without causal
efficacy. But the situation in this regard is very different from the
classical one. In the classical case an ontology (i.e., reality) is
specified that has no hint of the existence of anything like a
"feeling." And there is nothing physical for a feeling to do that is not
already done by the classical physical process. But in quantum theory
the physically described Process II, does not by itself lead to a well
defined predictive theory, or to any understanding of the structure of
our human experiences. Thus orthodox quantum theory introduces Process I
not to link consciousness to a theory that is already dynamically
complete, but rather to complete the dynamics in a way that will bring
the theory into concordance with our conscious experience. This process
must involve "feelings," if, following William James, we recognize all
experiential happenings to be feelings of one kind or another.

This grasping event is represented in the mathematics by a von Neumann
Process I event. Each such event separates the prior physical reality
into two independent branches, 'Yes' and 'No'. The 'Yes' branch, PSP,
contains the non-discordant state of organization, which persists long
enough for its physical traces to be etched into the physical structure
of the agent, and for the action that it specifies to be initiated. The
left-over 'No' branch (I-P)S(I-P) would not in general be associated
with a quasi-stable state of equilibrium, and hence should not be
directly connected to a (recollected) experience. However, subsequent
Process I events can occur in either one of the two branches, and this
would allow experiences to become associated eventually with either
branch.

The theory assigns a statistical weight to each branch. The weights
associated with the 'Yes' and 'No' branches are given by the formulas Tr
PSP/Tr S and Tr (I-P)S(I-P)/Tr S, respectively, where for any matrix M
the expression Tr M represents the sum of all of the 'diagonal elements'
M(i,i) of M. (You need not understand these formulas, but should know
that such probability formulas exist.)

Subjectively, these statistical weights determine the "probabilities"
that the agent will experience the 'Yes' feeling or will not experience
that feeling. They determine also the probability that another agent who
is observing first agent will observe his actions to accord with the
state PSP or (I-P)S(I-P).

The simplest explanation of these empirical facts is that "Nature
chooses" either the state PSP or the state (I-P)S(I-P) in accordance
with a "propensity" or "objective tendency" specified by the above
formulas. However, this idea of a real objective eradication of one
branch or the other leads to the conclusion that Process I events
occurring in distant parts of the universe are linked together by
"instantaneous" action-at-a-distance effects.

The argument that establishes the need for faster-than-light influences
is too technical to be included in the body of this text. I have put it
into an appendix, for those willing to work a bit harder.

Some physicists find faster-than-light action-at-a-distance
unacceptable, even though it generates no conflict with experience, and
prefer to believe that no real objective choice is made between the two
states, but rather that *it only seems like that*. Von Neumann makes no
commitment as to whether there is or is not a real objective eradication
of branches, and I shall follow his lead of not becoming embroiled here
in that controversy. Process I merely separates the state of the brain
(and therefore the universe) into two distinct branches for the ongoing
physical process: it does not choose between them.

The really important fact is this: If the rapidity of nearly identical
Process I events in a chain of 'Yes' choices is sufficiently great then,
a straightforward application of the probability formulas given above
shows that, the probability associated with this evolving 'Yes' state
will not decrease as quickly as it otherwise would. Thus this state of
organization can sustain itself by means of this "Quantum Zeno Effect"
in the face of mechanical processes that tend to destroy it. This means
that agents that have structures that tend to produce suitable sequences
of Process I events would enjoy a survival advantage over competitors
that lack such structures. Our own large capacity to use Process I would
then be an example of the adaptive tendency of living organisms to
exploit the intricacies of the laws of nature. The main point is that
the evolution of mind would be tied into the evolutionary process by
virtue of the mind's dynamical effects on the behavior of the organism
with which it is associated.

It is important that the Quantum Zeno Effect of a rapid sequence of
Process I events associated with a projection operator P would tend to
keep the original state PSP confined to states of the form PXP, but that
the factor X would evolve in a normal way. In other words, within the
branch of the universe picked out by the constant or slowly changing
sequence of projection operators P the normal laws of motion would tend
to operate, apart from the fixed (or slowly changing) constraint that
keeps the idea (focus of attention) associated with P on place. Without
the Quantum Zeno Effect, which is a strictly quantum effect having no
classical analog, the system would tend to evolve in a very different
way: there would be rapid transitions from the part of the space of
possibilities associated with the state of attention associated with P,
to the complementary part of the space of possibilities. Thus, by virtue
of the Quantum Zeno Effect, a focus of attention associated with a
projection operator P could be sustained in the face of strong
mechanical disruptive tendencies while the mechanical processing
*within* the subspace specified by that fixed focus of attention
proceeds rather normally

This capacity of mental intention to keep attention focused in the face
of natural distractions could produce large deviations in the behavior
of a quantum agent from his classical zombie (i.e., nonconscious)
counterpart. If by mental effort the "free choices" associated Process I
can be caused to produce a rapid repetition of the Process I
interventions with the same or slowly changing P, then the activity of
the brain activity would be channeled by this mental effort!

It is worth mentioning that the Quantum Zeno Effect applies even to a
state S that is completely diagonal (i.e., whose off-diagonal elements
S(i,j), for i different from j, are all zero). This is important because
there is a very powerful effect called "environmental decoherence" that
tends to reduce S to nearly diagonal form; that is, to a form where
S(*l,l'*) is appreciable only if the two location variables *l* and *l'*
are nearly equal. This makes the state closer to a classical kind of
state. But the state still retains its smeared-out cloudlike quality
along the diagonal, and this cloud normally moves around. Even though
the state has become, by virtue of the environmental decoherence effect,
somewhat closer to classical, the Quantum Zeno Effect holds with
unabated strength: the transitions out of the 'Yes' subspace of states
into the 'No' subspace are still inhibited by a rapid sequence of
similar Process I events .

**6. Knowledge, Information, and Entropy**

The book *John von Neumann and the Foundations of Quantum Physics*
contains a fascinating and informative article written by Eckehart
Kohler entitled "Why von Neumann Rejected Carnap's Dualism of
Information Concept." The topic is precisely the core issue before us:
How is knowledge connected to physics? Kohler illuminates von Neumann's
views on this subject by contrasting them to those of Carnap.

Rudolph Carnap was a distinguished philosopher, and member of the Vienna
Circle. He was in some sense a dualist. He had studied one of the
central problems of philosophy, namely the distinction between
*analytic* statements and *synthetic* statements. (The former are true
or false by virtue of a specified set of rules held in our minds,
whereas the latter are true or false by virtue their concordance with
physical or empirical facts.) His conclusions had led him to the idea
that there are two different domains of truth, one pertaining to logic
and mathematics and the other to physics and the natural sciences. This
led to the claim that there are "Two Concepts of Probability," one
logical the other physical. That conclusion was in line with the fact
that philosophers were then divided between two main schools as to
whether probability should be understood in terms of abstract
idealizations or physical sequences of outcomes of measurements.
Carnap's bifurcations implied a similar division between two different
concepts of information, and of entropy.

In 1952 Carnap was working at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton and about to publish a work on his dualistic theory of
information, according to which epistemological concepts like
information should be treated separately from physics. Von Neumann, in
private discussion, raised objections, and Pauli later wrote a forceful
letter, asserting that "I am quite strongly opposed to the position you
take." Later he adds "I am indeed concerned that the confusion in the
area of the foundations of statistical mechanics not grow further (and I
fear very much that a publication of your work in its present form would
have this effect)."

Carnap's view was in line with the Cartesian separation between a domain
of real objective physical facts and a domain of ideas and concepts. But
von Neumann's view, and also Pauli's, linked the probability that
occurred in physics, in connection with entropy, to *knowledge*, in
direct opposition to Carnap's view that epistemology (considerations
pertaining to knowledge) should be separated from physics. The
opposition of von Neumann and Pauli significantly influenced the
publication of Carnap's book.

This issue of the relationship of knowledge to physics is the central
question before us, and is in fact the core problem of all philosophy
and science. In the earlier chapters I relied upon the basic insight of
the founders of quantum theory, and upon the character of quantum theory
as it is used in actual practice, to justify the key postulate that
Process I is associated with knowing, or feeling. But there is also an
entirely different line of justification of that connection developed in
von Neumann's book, *Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics*.
This consideration, which strongly influenced his thinking for the
remainder of his life, pertains to the second law of thermodynamics,
which is the assertion that entropy (disorder, defined in a precise way)
never decreases.

There are huge differences in the quantum and classical workings of the
second law. Von Neumann's book discusses in detail the quantum case, and
some of those differences. In one sense there is no nontrivial objective
second law in classical physics: a classical state is supposed to be
objectively well defined, and hence it always has probability one.
Consequently, the entropy is zero at the outset and remains so
forevermore. Normally, however, one adopts some rule of "coarse
graining" that destroys information and hence allows probabilities to be
different from unity, and then embarks upon an endeavor to deduce the
laws of thermodynamics from statistical considerations. Of course, it
can be objected that the subjective act of choosing some particular
coarse graining renders the treatment not completely objective, but that
limited subjective input seems insufficient to warrant the claim that
physical probability is closely tied to knowledge.

The question of the connection of entropy to the *knowledge and actions
of an intelligent being* was, however, raised in a more incisive form by
Maxwell, who imagined a tiny "demon" to be stationed at a small doorway
between two large rooms filled with gas. If this agent could distinguish
different species of gas molecules, or their energies and locations, and
slide a frictionless door open or closed according to which type of
molecule was about to pass, he could easily cause a decrease in entropy
that could be used to do work, and hence to power a perpetual motion
machine, in violation of the second law.

This paradox was examined Leo Szilard, who replaced Maxwell's
intelligent "demon" by a simple idealized (classical) physical mechanism
that consumed no energy beyond the apparent minimum needed to 'recognize
and responded differently to' a two-valued property of the gas molecule.
He found that this rudimentary process of merely 'coming to know and
respond to' the two-valued property transferred entropy from heat baths
to the gaseous system in just the amount needed to preserve the second
law. Evidently nature is arranged so that what we conceive to be the
purely intellectual process of coming to know something, and acting on
the basis of that knowledge, is closely linked to the probabilities that
enter into the constraints upon physical processes associated with
entropy.

Von Neumann describes a version of this idealized experiment. Suppose a
single molecule is contained in a volume V. Suppose an agent comes to
know whether the molecule lies to the left or to the right of the center
line. He is then in the state of being able to order the placement of a
partition/piston at that line and to switch a lever either to the right
or to the left, which restricts the direction in which the piston can
move. This causes the molecule to drive the piston slowly to the right
or to the left, and transfer some of its thermal energy to it. If the
system is in a heat bath then this process extracts from the heat bath
an amount 'log 2' of entropy (in natural units). Thus the *knowledge* of
which half of the volume the molecule was in is converted into a
decrement of "log 2' units of entropy. In von Neumann's words, "we have
exchanged our knowledge for the entropy decrease k log 2." (k is the
natural unit of entropy.)

What this means is this: When we conceive of an increase in the
"knowledge possessed by some agent" we must not imagine that this
knowledge exists in some ethereal kingdom, apart from its physical
representation in the body of the agent. Von Neumann's analysis shows
that the change in knowledge represented by Process I is quantitatively
tied to the probabilities associated with entropy.

Among the many things shown by von Neumann are these two:

(1) The entropy of a system is unaltered when the state of that system
    is evolving solely under the governance of Process II.

(2) The entropy of a system is never decreased by any Process I event.

The first result is analogous to the classical result that if an
objective "probability" were to be assigned to each of a countable set
of possible classical states, and the system were allowed to evolve in
accordance with the classical laws of motion then the entropy of that
system would remain fixed.

The second result is a nontrivial quantum second law of thermodynamics.
Instead of coarse graining one has Process I, which in the simple
'Yes-No' case converts the prior system into one where the question
associated with the projection operator P has a definite answer, but
only the *probability* associated with each possible answer is
specified, not an answer itself.

One sees, therefore, why von Neumann rejected Carnap's attempt to
divorce knowledge from physics: large tracts in his book were devoted to
establishing their marriage. That work demonstrates the quantitative
link between the increment of knowledge or information associated with a
Process I event and the probabilities connected to entropy. This focus
on Process I allowed him to formulate and prove a quantum version of the
second law. In the quantum universe the rate of increase of entropy
would be determined not by some imaginary and arbitrary coarse graining
rule, but by the number and nature of objectively real Process I events.

Kohler discusses another outstanding problem: the nature of mathematics.
At one time mathematics was imagined to be an abstract resident of some
immaterial Platonic realm, independent in principle from the brains and
activities of those who do it. But many mathematicians and philosophers
now believe that the process of doing mathematics rests in the end on
mathematical intuitions, which are essentially aesthetic evaluations.

Kohler argues that von Neumann held this view. But what is the origin or
source of such aesthetic judgments?

Roger Penrose based his theory of consciousness on the idea that
mathematical insight comes from a Platonic realm. But according to the
present account each such illumination, like any other experience, is
represented in the quantum description of nature as a picking out of an
organized state in which diverse brain processes act together in an
harmonious state of mutual support. A mathematical illumination is a
grasping of an *aesthetic* quality of order in the quantum state of the
agent's brain/body. But apparently every experience of any kind is
fundamentally like this: it is a Process I grasping of a state of order.

This notion that each Process I event is a felt grasping of a state in
which various sub-processes act in concert provides a foundation for
answering in a uniform way many outstanding philosophical and scientific
problems. For example, it provides a foundation for a solution to a
basic issue of neuroscience, the so-called "binding problem". It is
known that diverse features of a visual scene, such as color, location,
size, shape, etc. are processed by separate modules located in different
regions of the brain. This understanding of the Process I event makes
the felt experience a grasping of a non-discordant quasi-stable mutually
supportive combination of these diverse elements as a unified whole. To
achieve maximal organizational impact this event should provide the
conditions for a rapid sequence of re-enactments of itself. Then this
conception of the operation of von Neumann's process I provides also an
understanding of the capacity of an agent's thoughts to control its
bodily behavior. The same conception of Process I provides also a basis
for understanding both artistic and mathematical creativity, and the
evolution of consciousness in step with the biological evolution of our
species. These issues all come down to the problem of the connection of
knowings to physics, which von Neumann's treatment of entropy ties to
Process I.

Kohler quotes an interesting statement of von Neumann, but then draws
from it conclusions about von Neumann's views that go far beyond what
von Neumann actually said.

Von Neumann points out that in classical mechanics one can solve the
problem of motion either by solving differential equations (the local
causal mechanistic approach) or by using a global least action (or some
other similar) approach. This latter method can be viewed as
"teleological" in the sense that if initial and final conditions are
specified then the principle of least action specifies the path between
them. He goes on to say that he is:

"not trying to be facetious about the importance of keeping teleological
principles in mind when dealing with biology; but I think one hasn't
started to understand the problem of their role in biology until one
realizes that in mechanics, if you are just a little bit clever
mathematically, your problem disappears and becomes meaningless. And it
is perfectly possible that if one understood another area then the same
thing might happen."

The pertinent "other area" is psychology, or the problem of mind.

The first point is that von Neumann's statement is very cautious: he
says that it is "perfectly *possible* that *if* one understood another
area the same thing *might* happen." There are three weak links:
"possible","if", and "might."

Kohler's conclusion is far less cautious. He follows the above quotation
with the assertion:

"Here von Neumann warns biologists against overstressing goal-directed
activity since this can always be reformulated *causally*."

Von Neumann said no such thing. He merely points out that in classical
mechanics certain global least action principles are equivalent to local
causal mechanistic rules. That falls far short of claiming that *all*
goal-directed activity can be expressed in least-action terms, or that
in *non-classical* cases such a least-action formulation would
necessarily be equivalent to a local causal mechanism. Von Neumann
recognizes this as a possibility, not a necessity.

In quantum physics the Process II part of the dynamics is derived from
the quantization of the classical law. Hence it might be contended that
*for this Process II part of the dynamics* an equivalence holds between
"teleological" and "causal" formulations. But the connection to mind
involves Process I. It is far from obvious that the equivalence found in
classical mechanics will carry over to Process I. In the first place,
Process I involves non-local operators P, and that alone would appear to
block reduction to local causation. In the second place, Process I drops
out of the dynamics when one goes to the classical limit, which is the
limit in which all effects involving Planck's constant are neglected.
Hence Process I is, in this sense, non classical or anti-classical.
Hence there is no reason to believe that equivalences occurring in
classical physics will carry over to Process I. Such a connection "might
possibly" hold, but it is surely not required to hold by anything we
know today.

Kohler goes on to state that:

"Based on his general approach, one may say von Neumann was a
psycho-physical reductionist who thought human intelligence could in
principle be presented and explained on a physical level \-\-- in
particular, neurologically, in terms of nerve nets. Between the
physiology of nerves and the physics of computer devices von Neumann
recognized no difference in functional capacity."

That last statement seems tremendously at odds with the conclusions of
von Neumann's final work, "The Computer and the Brain," which emphasized
the huge differences between brains and computers. But, that point
aside, the fact that von Neumann did much work on classically
describable computers does not imply that he was committed to the view
that *human intelligence* could be understood in classical terms. Von
Neumann may indeed have not excluded that possibility, but I doubt that
any statement of his shows him to be committed to the position that
human intelligence, and, more importantly, his Process I, can be
explained in local mechanistic terms. The statement quoted above
certainly fails to justify such a conclusion.

**7. RECENT VIEWS.**

A tremendous burgeoning of interest in the problem of consciousness has
occurred during the past few years. The grip of the behaviorists who
sought to banish consciousness from science has finally been broken.
This shift is ratified by the recent appearance of a special issue of
Scientific American entitled "The Hidden Mind." The lead article,
written by Antonio Damasio, begins with the assertion: "At the start of
the new millennium, it is apparent that one question towers above all
others in the life sciences: How does the set of processes we call mind
emerge from the activity of the organ we call brain?" He notes that some
thinkers "believe the question to be unanswerable in principle'' while
"For others, the relentless and exponential increase in knowledge may
give rise to the vertiginous feeling that no problem can resist the
assault of science if *only the science is right* and the techniques are
powerful enough." (my emphasis) He notes that "The naysayers argue that
exhaustive compilation of all these data (of neuroscience) adds up to
*correlates* of mental states but to nothing resembling *an actual
mental state.*" (his emphasis) He adds that: "In fact, the explanation
of the physics related to biological events is still incomplete" and
states that "the finest level of description of mind ... might require
explanation at the quantum level." Damasio makes his own position clear:
"I contend that the biological processes now presumed to correspond to
mind in fact *are* mind processes and will be seen to be so when
understood in sufficient detail."

With "biological processes" understood to be quantum processes,
including the key Process I, I agree that mind processes are biological
brain processes. The point is that biological brain processes demand,
for the reasons described in Chapter 4, the application of quantum
physics, and that makes feelings, for the reasons explained in Chapters
5 and 6, critical and non-redundant components of brain dynamics.

The possibility that quantum physics might be relevant to the connection
between conscious process and brain process was raised also by Dave
Chalmers, in his article *The Puzzle of Consciousness*, However, he
effectively tied that possibility to a proposal put forth by Roger
Penrose, and, faulting that particular approach, rejected the general
idea.

The deficiency of Penrose's approach identified by Chalmers is that it
fails to bring in consciousness: it is about certain brain processes
that may be related to consciousness, but "...the theory is silent about
how these processes might give rise to conscious experience. Indeed, the
same problem arises with any theory of consciousness based only on
physical processing." That final conclusion is based, however, on the
presumption that physical brain processes can be described in a way that
leaves experiences out. But, for the reasons described, Process I, hence
experiences, plays an irreplaceable dynamical role in physical brain
processing.

Chalmers goes on to expound upon the "explanatory gap" between
theoretical understanding of the behavioral and functional aspects of
brain process and an explanation of how and why the performance of those
functions should be accompanied by conscious experience. However, the
notion that such a "gap" exists depends upon the presumption that a
valid understanding or conception of physical brain behavior can be
divorced from its connection to the associated conscious experiences.
But the notion that such a separation is possible arises only from the
inadequate-in-this-regard classical model.

The confounding of reality itself with the caricature of it suggested by
the work of Descartes and Newton has derailed the philosophy of science,
the philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and aesthetics for more than
three centuries, by presenting it with an irresolvable dilemma based on
a conception of nature that is profoundly wrong at precisely the
critical point. This flawed view still retains its blinding effect on
the thinking of even those philosophers who absolutely reject that
dualistic view. For example, Daniel Dennett, one of the most out-spoken
critics of classical Cartesian dualism, says that his own thinking
rested on the idea that "a brain was always going to do what it was
caused to do by current, local, mechanical circumstances." But by making
that judgment he tied his thinking to *the physical half of
Cartesian/Newtonian dualism*, or its child, classical physics, and thus
was forced in his book "Explaining Consciousness" to leave consciousness
out, as he himself admits, but tries to justify, at the end. By thus
accepting the fundamentally erroneous classical-physics understanding of
brain processes, instead of the view offered by modern science, Dennett
cuts himself off from any possibility of validly explaining
consciousness.

Many important features of the von Neumann approach being described here
can be brought out by contrasting them with the contrary properties of
Penrose's proposal. The first key difference is that Penrose does not
introduce the von Neumann Process I, which is essential to von Neumann
quantum theory. Penrose uses instead the Process III: the eradication of
one or the other of the two branches; State Vector Reduction, which he
calls R. This difference is crucial! State Vector Reduction, which
Penrose *does* use, brings in the perhaps unnecessary global
non-locality, whereas Process I, which he *does not* use, at least
explicitly, accounts for the causal effect of the intentional effort of
the agent upon on his brain.

A second essential difference between the present proposal and that of
Penrose, and his collaborator Stuart Hameroff, is that their theory
depends on establishing macroscopic quantum coherence over an extended
portion of the brain, whereas the theory being described here does not.
Most physicists deem it highly unlikely that such large-scale coherence
could be sustained in a warm, wet, living brain.

A third difference is that their theory depends on the complex question
of quantum gravity, which is currently not under good theoretical
control, whereas the theoretical ideas that are the basis of the present
approach are the fundamental mathematical principles of quantum theory,
which, thanks to the work of John von Neumann, are under much better
control.

The fourth difference is that the justification that Penrose gives for
believing that quantum theory has something to do with human
consciousness is a very much disputed argument that claims to deduce
from (1), the fact that mathematicians construct proofs that they
believe to be valid, and (2), some deep mathematical results due to Kurt
Godel, the conclusion that conscious thought must involve quantum
theory. But in the von Neumann approach the relevance of consciousness
arises not from any such complex argument, but rather directly from its
connection to Process I, which is a basic feature of orthodox quantum
theory.

The fifth difference is the fact, already emphasized by Chalmers, that
Penrose's theory of consciousness turns out to be about a conceivable
neural correlate of consciousness, but is silent about how that brain
activity might give rise to conscious experiences, whereas the present
work is directly about the relationship of brain processes to conscious
experiences.

Francis Crick and Christof Koch begin their essay *The Problem of
Consciousness* with the assertion: "The overwhelming question in
neurobiology today is the relationship between the mind and the brain."
But after a brief survey of the difficulties in getting an answer they
conclude that "Radically new concepts may indeed be needed\-\--recall
the modifications in scientific thinking forced on us by quantum
mechanics. The only sensible approach is to press the experimental
attack until we are confronted with dilemmas that call for new ways of
thinking."

However, the two cases are extremely dissimilar. The switch to quantum
theory was forced upon us by the fact that we had a very simple system,
consisting of one proton and one electron, that was so simple that it
could be exactly solved by the methods of classical physics, but the
calculated answer did not agree with the empirical results. There was no
conceptual problem. It was rather that precise computations were
possible, but gave wrong answers. Here the problem is reversed: precise
calculations of the dynamical processes associated with conscious
experiences are not yet possible, and hence have not revealed any
mismatch between theory and experiment, but the *concepts of classical
physics* that most neurobiologists want to use are clearly inadequate:
they lack the conceptual ingredients needed to account for conscious
experience. Dave Chalmers recognizes this conceptual difficulty, and
concludes that experimental work by neurobiologists is not by itself
sufficient to resolve of *The Puzzle of Conscious Experience*: also
needed are better concepts. He suggests that the stuff of the universe
might be *information*, but then rejects the replacement of classical
physical theory, which is based on material substance, by quantum
theory, which builds (its conception of) nature out of a non-substantive
stuff that can be characterized as information encoded in a space-time
non-material structure.

John Searle is perhaps the strongest contemporary voice calling for a
forthright acknowledgement of both the existence of the subjective
realities that *are* the experiential qualities, and also the need to
explain them, rather than trying to explain them away. His most recent
views mesh well with the quantum approach developed here.

I shall use as my source Searle's article in the Journal of
Consciousness Studies, which is based on his talk at the Tucson 2000
conference on Consciousness. This presentation seems to me to represent
his best effort to come to grips with the problem.

Searle reiterates his longtime themes:

1.  Consciousness is a real biological phenomenon.

> 2\. It consists of inner, qualitative, subjective, unified states of
> sentience, awareness, thoughts and feelings.
>
> 3\. This unified field of conscious subjective awareness is not
> reducible to any third-person phenomena.
>
> 4\. All of our conscious states are caused by lower-level neuronal
> processes in the brain.
>
> 5\. All of our conscious states are themselves features of the brain.

If one were to accept the classical-physics conception of the brain then
there would appear to be a conflict between claims 3 and 5. For if a
brain were a conglomeration of particles, which, as the objective
elements of nature are third-person entities, and conscious states are
features of these conglomerations, as asserted by claim 5, then
consciousness seems to be reduced to third-person phenomena, in
violation of claim 3. However, if one accepts the quantum idea that the
states of consciousness characterized in properties 1, 2, and 3, above,
are first-person subjective features of the brain, which is an
informational structure that combines distinct first-person and
third-person informational features, then this conflict is resolved.
Searle's position needs quantum theory in order to become internally
consistent.

Later on, Searle introduces "psychological processes" by observing that
people sometimes give 'reasons' for acting as they do. But he notes that
these 'reasons' are not always conclusive, or sufficient to entail the
actions they promote. He wishes to consider the possibility that
although the psychological processes may be indeterministic, the
underlying "neurobiological process" is deterministic. He then says that
psychological indeterminism with neurobiological determinism\-\--

"is intellectually unsatisfying because it is a modified form of
epiphenomenalism. It says that the psychological processes of decision
making really do not matter. The entire process is deterministic at the
bottom level, and the idea that the top level has an element of freedom
is simply a systematic illusion. ... The bodily movements would be
exactly the same regardless of how these processes occurred.

"Maybe that is how it will turn out, but if so the hypothesis seems to
me to run against everything we know about evolution. It would have the
consequence that the incredibly elaborate, complex, sensitive and
\-\--above all\-\--biologically expensive system of human and animal
conscious rational decision-making would actually make no difference
whatever to the life and survival of the organism. Epiphenomenalism is a
possible thesis, but it is absolutely incredible, and if we seriously
accept it, it would make a change in our world view, that is, in our
conception of our relations to the world, more radical than any previous
change, including the Copernican Revolution, Einsteinian relativity
theory and quantum theory."

The sort of epiphenomenal consciousness that Searle is considering, and
finds incredible, is what necessarily arises from a classical-physics
conception of the brain. But quantum theory gives consciousness a causal
power that is outside the control of the bottom-level local
deterministic laws that are the quantum counterparts of the classical
laws of motion. The causal power of consciousness arises from the way
that consciousness fills a *causal gap* in those bottom-level laws. This
lacuna is filled in by conscious causal agents, acting via the
'top-down' Process I.

Semir Zeki, a leading neuroscientist in the study of the diverse brain
processes connected to vision, writes about the process of abstraction
associated with the creation of works of art, analyzing the treatments
of "love" in the poetry of Dante, the sculptures of Michelangelo, and
the opera *Tristan and Isolde* by Wagner. He focuses on the abstracting
powers of the various separate processing modules but says: "There must
therefore be some other process that unifies and binds what these
different areas have processed, a problem that is currently under study.
The point that I emphasize here is that the unification and binding come
after the abstractive processes, which constitute the first step in the
knowledge-acquiring system."

This "process that unifies and binds what ... diverse areas have
processed" is an activity that pervades and characterizes our
experiential lives. It can be understood as a sequence of graspings of
brain states having aesthetically felt qualities of coherent harmonious
equilibrium. These graspings produce bindings of the diverse elements of
visual scenes, mathematical intuitions, artistic creativity, the causal
power of mental effort to influence bodily behavior, and the development
of animal consciousness in conjunction with the evolution of species. I
shall consider next some supporting evidence from psychology for the
existence, in human agents, of a process of this kind that conforms to
the features of Process I demanded by orthodox quantum theory.

**8. PSYCHO-PHYSICAL THEORY AND "WILL."**

I have concentrated so far on what is basically new: on the crucial
difference between classical physics and quantum physics that allows our
thoughts to be an essential player in the causal description of brain
process. This new element needs to be placed in the context of what I
take to be otherwise a fairly standard psycho-physical theory, perhaps
the orthodox theory to the extent that any such thing exists.

As already mentioned, I follow William James and take all conscious
experiences to be essentially "feelings" of one kind or another.
Experiencing a major chord "feels different" from experiencing a minor
chord. The exhilarating experiencing of a rapid piano run up the scale
feels different from the tip-toe-y feeling of a lightly fingered
sequence of high notes, or the satisfying feeling of the final chord of
a work of Beethoven or Wagner. Einstein described the feeling of his
theoretical reflections in terms of muscular feelings, and a
mathematician knows his proof is valid because of a deep feeling that
all bases have been well cover: there is no feeling of discord, or
incompleteness, or incursion of doubt.

A person's thoughts are dynamically linked to patterns of brain activity
that are his brain's representations of his physical body and its
relationship to the world around him. Called the body-world schema, this
momentary brain representation is, during wakeful periods being
continually updated by the brain on the basis of its interpretation of
clues provided by the sensory apparatus, and it is closely tied into his
bodily actions and their sensed connections to the outer world. His
actions are controlled by activating patterns in the body-world schema,
and he learns through experience the relationship between his felt
intentions and the subsequent feed-back in terms of sensed experiences.
The body-world schema is the intermediary physical link. The dynamical
interplay between these intentional acts, the body-world schema, and
sensory feedback tunes the connection between mind and brain, and links
the felt quality of the intentional act to a mental image of the
intended consequences.

A person's experiential life is a stream of conscious experiences. The
person's experienced 'self' is *part* of this stream of consciousness:
it is not an extra thing that is outside or apart from the stream. In
James's words "*thought is itself the thinker*, and psychology need not
look beyond." The "self" is a slowly changing "fringe" part of the
stream of consciousness. It provides a background for the central focus.

The physical brain, evolving mechanically in accordance with the local
deterministic Process II does most of the work, without the intervention
of Process I. It does its job of creating, on the basis of its
interpretation of the clues provided by the senses, a suitable response.
But, due to the wave nature of its component parts, the brain
necessarily generates an amorphous mass of overlapping and conflicting
templates for action, formulated in terms of possible structures for the
body-world schema. Process I selects from among these possibilities, on
the basis of high-level coherency and stability criteria that access the
entire structure of the brain *as a whole*, the possible state PSP,
which is the 'Yes' branch of the state S' = PSP + (I-P)(S(I-P) created
by Process I.

Intentionality acts by controlling attention. Intention activates a
Process I event that grasps a state PSP in which attention is focused on
actualizing the intended state. The corresponding physical state is
built around a projected body-world schema. The body-world schema is
created by interaction between intention and feed-back, and a sustained
persistence of a projected body-world schema tends to initiate the
appropriate motor actions, monitoring actions, and follow-up events.

The phenomena of "will" is understood as a condition in which an initial
Process I event leads to the occurrence of a very rapid sequence of
follow-up events defined by very nearly the same P: a "mental effort"
causes a rapid repetition of Process I events with almost identical
projection operators P. Then the quantum equations of motion have the
effect of preventing any transitions of 'Yes' states to 'No' states. The
state is held in a state of the form PXP, with fixed or slowly changing
P, in spite of all sorts of disruptive and distracting mechanical
influences that would otherwise cause a wandering of attention. The
mental effort is thereby causing a large deviation of brain activity
from what it would otherwise be. Mental effort is importantly
influencing brain process.

Does this theory of the connection between mind and brain explain
anything?

This theory was already in place when a colleague, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz,
brought to my attention some passages from \`\`Psychology: The Briefer
Course\'\', written by William James. In the final section of the
chapter on Attention James writes:

\`\`I have spoken as if our attention were wholly

determined by neural conditions. I believe that

the array of things we can attend to is so determined.

No object can catch our attention except by the

neural machinery. But the amount of the attention

which an object receives after it has caught our

attention is another question. It often takes effort

to keep mind upon it. We feel that we can make

more or less of the effort as we choose. If this

feeling be not deceptive, if our effort be a spiritual

force, and an indeterminate one, then of course it

contributes coequally with the cerebral conditions

to the result. Though it introduce no new idea, it

will deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness

of innumerable ideas which else would fade more

quickly away. The delay thus gained might not be

more than a second in duration\-\--but that second

may be critical; for in the rising and falling

considerations in the mind, where two associated

systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is

often a matter of but a second more or less of

attention at the outset, whether one system shall

gain force to occupy the field and develop

itself and exclude the other, or be excluded

itself by the other. When developed it may

make us act, and that act may seal our doom.

When we come to the chapter on the Will

we shall see that the whole drama of the

voluntary life hinges on the attention, slightly

more or slightly less, which rival motor

ideas may receive. \...\'\'

In the chapter on Will, in the section entitled \`\`Volitional effort is
effort of attention\'\' James writes:

\`\`Thus we find that we reach the heart of

our inquiry into volition when we ask by

what process is it that the thought of any

given action comes to prevail stably in the

mind.\'\'

and later

\`\`The essential achievement of the will,

in short, when it is most \`voluntary,\' is to

attend to a difficult object and hold it fast

before the mind. \... Effort of attention is

thus the essential phenomenon of will.\'\'

Still later, James says:

\`\`Consent to the idea\'s undivided presence,

this is effort\'s sole achievement.\'\'\...

\`\`Everywhere, then, the function of effort is

the same: to keep affirming and adopting the

thought which, if left to itself, would slip away.\'\'

This description of the effect of mind on the course of mind-brain
process is remarkably in line with what had been proposed independently
from purely theoretical consideration of the quantum physics of this
process. The connections specified by James are explained on the basis
of the same dynamical principles that had been introduced by physicists
to explain atomic phenomena. Thus the whole range of science, from
atomic physics to mind-brain dynamics, is brought together in a single
rationally coherent theory of an evolving cosmos that consists of a
physical reality that is constituted not of matter but of tendencies for
Process I events to occur.

Much experimental work on attention and effort has occurred since the
time of William James. That work has been hampered by the apparent
nonexistence of any physical theory that rationally explains how our
conscious experiences could influence activities in our brains. The
behaviorist approach, which dominated psychology during the first half
of the twentieth century, and which essentially abolished in this field
the use not only of introspective data but also of the very concept of
consciousness, was surely motivated in part by the fact that
consciousness was excluded from any role in brain dynamics by the
physics of the preceding century

The admitted failure of the behaviorist programs led to the
rehabilitation of \`\`attention\'\' during the early fifties, and many
hundreds of experiments have been performed during the past fifty years
for the purpose of investigating empirically those aspects of human
behavior that we ordinarily link to our consciousness.

Harold Pashler\'s 1998 book \`\`The Psychology of Attention\'\' \[32\]
describes a great deal of this empirical work, and also the intertwined
theoretical efforts to understand the nature of an
information-processing system that could account for the intricate
details of the empirical data. Two key concepts are the notions
\`\`Attention\'\' and of a processing \`\`Capacity\'\'. The former is
associated with an internally directed selection between different
possible allocations of the available processing \`\`Capacity\'\'. A
third concept is \'\'Effort\'\', which is linked to incentives, and to
reports by subjects of \`\`trying harder\'\'.

Pashler organizes his discussion by separating perceptual processing
from post-perceptual processing. The former covers processing that,
first of all, identifies such basic physical properties of stimuli as
location, color, loudness, and pitch, and, secondly, identifies stimuli
in terms of categories of meaning. The post-perceptual process covers
the tasks of producing motor actions and cognitive action beyond mere
categorical identification. Pashler emphasizes \[p. 33\] that \`\`the
empirical findings of attention studies specifically argue for a
distinction between perceptual limitations and more central limitations
involved in thought and the planning of action.\'\' The existence of
these two different processes, with different characteristics, is a
principal theme of Pashler\'s book \[p. 33, 263, 293, 317, 404\].

In the quantum theory of mind-brain being described here there are two
separate processes. First, there is the unconscious mechanical brain
process governed by the Schroedinger equation. As discussed at length in
my earlier book, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, this brain
processing involves dynamical units that are represented by complex
patterns of neural activity (or, more generally, of brain activity) that
are \`\`facilitated\'\' by use, and are such that each unit tends to be
activated as a whole by the activation of several of its parts. The
activation of various of these complex patterns by cross referencing,
coupled to feed-back loops that strengthen or weaken the activities of
appropriate processing centers, appears to explain the essential
features of the mechanical part of the dynamics.

The function of the brain is to create and direct courses of action
appropriate to the circumstances in which the organism finds itself.
Accordingly, the brain ought to create a template for a possible plan of
action. Detailed examination of the quantum uncertainties associated the
motion in nerve terminals of incoming calcium ions from the ion channels
to the triggering sites for the release of vesicles of neurotransmitter
entail \[MM&QM, p.152\] that a host of different possibilities will
emerge. This mechanical phase of the processing already involves some
selectivity, because of the enhancing and inhibiting feedback loops. But
the essential point is that the evolution of the brain according to the
Schroedinger equation *must* generate not just one single template for
action, but a host of alternative possibilities. Hence the action of the
second process, von Neumann\'s Process **I** must come into play in
order to select what actually happens from the continuum of alternative
possibilities generated by the mechanical aspect of the full quantum
dynamics. But Process **I** involves the element of freedom that feeds
into the Quantum Zeno Effect.

This conception of brain dynamics seems to accommodate all of the
perceptual aspects of the data described by Pashler. But it is the
high-level processing, which is more closely linked to our active
mentally controlled conscious thinking, that is of prime interest here.
The data pertaining to this second process is the focus of part II of
Pashler\'s book.

Mental intervention has, according to the quantum-physics-based theory
described here, several distinctive characteristics. It consists of a
sequence of discrete events each of which consents to an integrated
course of action presented by brain. The rapidity of these events can be
increased with effort. Effort-induced speed-up of the rate of occurrence
of these events can, by means of the quantum Zeno effect, keep attention
focussed on a task. Between 100 and 300 msec of consent seem to be
needed to fix a plan of action.

Effort can, by increasing the number of events per second, increase the
mental input into brain activity. Each conscious event picks out from
the multitude of quasi-classical possibilities that comprise the quantum
brain the sub-ensemble that is compatible with the conscious experience.

The correspondence between the mental event and the associated physical
event is this: the physical event reduces the prior physical ensemble of
alternative possibilities to the sub-ensemble compatible with the mental
event. This connection constitutes the core postulate of Copenhagen
quantum theory: the physical event reduces the prior state of the system
to the part of it that is compatible with the experience of the
observer.

Examination of Pashler\'s book shows that this quantum-physics-based
theory accommodates naturally all of the complex structural features of
the empirical data that he describes. He emphasizes \[p. 33\] a specific
finding: strong empirical evidence for what he calls a central
processing bottleneck associated with the attentive selection of a motor
action. This kind of bottleneck is what the quantum-physics-based theory
predicts: the bottleneck is precisely the single linear sequence of
mind-brain quantum events that von Neumann quantum theory is built upon.

Pashler \[p. 279\] describes four empirical signatures for this kind of
bottleneck, and describes the experimental confirmation of each of them.
Much of part II of Pashler\'s book is a massing of evidence that
supports the existence of a central process of this general kind.

This bottleneck is not automatic within classical physics. A classical
model could easily produce simultaneously two responses in different
modalities, say vocal and manual, to two different stimuli arriving via
two different modalities, say auditory and tactile. The two processes
could proceed via dynamically independent routes. Pashler \[p. 308\]
notes that the bottleneck is undiminished in split-brain patients
performing two tasks that, at the level of input and output, seem to be
confined to different hemispheres.

The queuing effect for the mind-controlled motor responses does not
exclude interference between brain processes that are similar to each
other, and hence that use common brain mechanisms. Pashler \[p. 297\]
notes this distinction, and says \`\`the principles governing queuing
seem indifferent to neural overlap of any sort studied so far.\'\'

The important point here is that there is in principle, in the quantum
model, an essential dynamical difference between, on the one hand, the
unconscious processing carried out by the Schroedinger evolution, which
generates via a local process an expanding collection of classically
implementable possible courses of action, and, on the other hand, the
process associated with the sequence of conscious events that
constitutes a stream of consciousness. The former are not limited by the
queuing effect, because all of the possibilities develop in parallel,
whereas the latter do form elements of a single queue. The experiments
cited by Pashler all appear to support this clear prediction of the
quantum approach.

An interesting experiment mentioned by Pashler involves the simultaneous
tasks of doing an IQ test and giving a foot response to rapidly
presented sequences of tones of either 2000 or 250 Hz. The subject\'s
mental age, as measured by the IQ test, was reduced from adult to 8
years. \[p. 299\] This result supports the prediction of quantum theory
that the bottleneck pertains both to \`intelligent\' behavior, which
requires conscious processing, and to selection of motor response.

Another interesting experiment showed that, when performing at maximum
speed, with fixed accuracy, subjects produced responses at the same rate
whether performing one task or two simultaneously: the limited capacity
to produce responses can be divided between two simultaneously performed
tasks. \[p. 301\]

Pashler also notes \[p. 348\] that \`\`Recent results strengthen the
case for central interference even further, concluding that memory
retrieval is subject to the same discrete processing bottleneck that
prevents simultaneous response selection in two speeded choice
tasks.\'\'

In the section on \`\`Mental Effort\'\' Pashler reports that
\`\`incentives to perform especially well lead subjects to improve both
speed and accuracy\'\', and that the motivation had \`\`greater effects
on the more cognitively complex activity\'\'. This is what would be
expected if incentives lead to effort that produces increased rapidity
of the events, each of which injects into the physical process, via
quantum selection and reduction, bits of control information that
reflect mental evaluation.

Studies of sleep-deprived subjects suggest that in these cases
\`\`effort works to counteract low arousal\'\'. If arousal is
essentially the rate of occurrence of conscious events then this result
is what the quantum model would predict.

Pashler notes that \`\`Performing two tasks at the same time, for
example, almost invariably\... produces poorer performance in a task and
increases ratings in effortfulness.\'\' And \`\`Increasing the rate at
which events occur in experimenter-paced tasks often increases effort
ratings without affecting performance\'\'. \`\`Increasing incentives
often raises workload ratings and performance at the same time.\'\' All
of these empirical connections are in line with the general principle
that effort increases the rate of conscious events, each of which inputs
a mental evaluation and a selection or focussing on a course of action,
and that this resource can be divided between tasks.

Additional supporting evidence comes from the studies of the effect of
the conscious process upon the storage of information in short-term
memory. According to the physics-based theory, the conscious process
merely actualizes a course of action, which then develops automatically,
with perhaps some occasional monitoring. Thus if one sets in place the
activity of retaining in memory a certain sequence of stimuli, then this
activity can persist undiminished while the central processor is engaged
in another task. This is what the data indicate.

Pashler remarks that \'\'These conclusions contradict the remarkably
widespread assumption that short-term memory capacity can be equated
with, or used as a measure of, central resources.\'\'\[p.341\] In the
theory outlined here short-term memory is stored in patterns of brain
activity, whereas consciousness is associated with the selection of a
sub-ensemble of quasi-classical states. This distinction seems to
account for the large amount of detailed data that bears on this
question of the connection of short-term-memory to consciousness.
\[p.337-341\]

Deliberate storage in, or retrieval from, long-term memory requires
focussed attention, and hence conscious effort. These processes should,
according to the theory, use part of the limited processing capacity,
and hence be detrimentally affected by a competing task that makes
sufficient concurrent demands on the central resources. On the other
hand, \`\`perceptual\'\' processing that involves conceptual
categorization and identification without conscious awareness should not
interfere with tasks that do consume central processing capacity. These
expectations are what the evidence appears to confirm: \`\`the entirety
of\...front-end processing are modality specific and operate independent
of the sort of single-channel central processing that limits retrieval
and the control of action. This includes not only perceptual analysis
but also storage in STM (short term memory) and whatever may feed back
to change the allocation of perceptual attention itself.\'\' \[p. 353\]

Pashler describes a result dating from the nineteenth century: mental
exertion reduces the amount of physical force that a person can apply.
He notes that \`\`This puzzling phenomena remains unexplained.\'\' \[p.
387\]. However, it is an automatic consequence of the physics-based
theory: creating physical force by muscle contraction requires an effort
that opposes the physical tendencies generated by the Schroedinger
equation. This opposing tendency is produced by the quantum Zeno effect,
and is roughly proportional to the number of bits per second of central
processing capacity that is devoted to the task. So if part of this
processing capacity is directed to another task, then the applied force
will diminish.

Pashler speculates on the possibility of a neurophysiological
explanation of the facts he describes, but notes that the parallel
versus serial distinction between the two mechanisms leads, in the
classical neurophysiological approach, to the questions of what makes
these two mechanisms so different, and what the connection between them
is. \[p.354-6, 386-7\]

After analyzing various possible mechanisms that could cause the central
bottleneck, Pashler \[p.307-8\] says \`\`the question of why this should
be the case is quite puzzling.\'\' Thus the fact that this bottleneck,
and its basic properties, follow automatically from the same laws that
explain the complex empirical evidence in the fields of classical and
quantum physics means that the theory has significant explanatory power.

Of course, the fact that this theory seems to work so well does not mean
that it is the only theory that can work. But in the past science has
been well served by the endeavor of trying to understand various complex
high-level processes in ways that all fit together coherently with basic
physical theory. The brain is a physio-chemical structure that rests in
principle on quantum processes, and the quantum principles lead in a
completely natural way to a specified kind of dynamical linkage between
the aspects of the mind-brain that are described in psychological and
physical terms. All classically described features are accounted for in
the quantum description, which however provides also a natural dynamical
place for mind whereas classical physics does not.

Quantum theory automatically accounts for all the successes of classical
physical theory. So the fact that classical ideas work well in
neuroanatomy and for other large scale phenomena is not evidence that
classical physics will work in domains where quantum effects ought to
come in, such as the migration of calcium ions inside of nerve
terminals. The quantum description becomes necessary only when treating
subtle dynamical effects, which, however, can have important large scale
effects. The effect of mental effort to hold ideas in place longer than
classical computations would predict seems to be the most crucial
dynamical difference between the classical and quantum models. This
effect could eventually become important in neuroscience. I shall
discuss that in Chapter 10. But in any case it immediately entails a
major revision in the scientific conception of human beings. This all
rests on von Neumann's mathematics.

**9. OTHER INTERPRETATIONS.**

Some physicists are dissatisfied with von Neumann's formulation of
quantum theory, and have put forth alternative proposals. The origin of
their dissatisfaction is the entry of our streams of conscious thoughts
into basic physical theory. However, our conscious thoughts are
certainly parts of reality, and are, indeed, the very parts of reality
whose existence is least in doubt. Every part of reality probably has
some effect upon the whole. Hence it would seen not only natural, but
also imperative, that the laws of nature should provide a way for
mind\-\--for idea-like realities\-\--to influence nature, and, in
particular, the flow of events in our brains. Thus the incorporation by
quantum theory of mental events into brain dynamics would appear to be
an important step in the right direction. Nevertheless, some
conservative scientists believe that science should cling to the
nineteenth century ideal, which specifies that the workings of brains
can be completely described, at least in principle, without considering
idea-like realities, which are deemed to be either redundant
arrangements of mindless realities, or causally inert bystanders.

In this connection Kathryn Blackmond Laskey of George Mason University
wrote:

*I would appreciate your answering a question I have.*

*There is much disagreement in the literature about the reduction
process and how it works, including controversy over whether there is
any such thing as reduction. I have read numerous statements from
physicists that measurement involves inter action of a quantum system
with its environment, and is (it is asserted) therefore \"nothing but\"
Schrodinger evolution on a larger system.*

It has, indeed, been sometimes claimed that the interaction with the
environment solves the measurement problem, However, the principal
protagonists of this notion (e.g., W. Zurek, D. Zeh, & E. Joos) do not,
I believe, claim that all of the essentials of that proposal have really
been worked out. I have argued \[Can. J. Phys. 2002: The basis problem
in many-worlds theories, vol. 80, pp.1043-105\] that important aspects
have *not* been worked out, and that the gaps are sufficiently serious
to block, at the present time, the claim that the Schroedinger equation
alone (and this includes the environmental decoherence) is actually
sufficient, by itself, to tie the theory to well-defined predictions
pertaining to human experiences. Such predictions are required for the
theory to be scientifically meaningful, and they are obtained in the von
Neumann formulation only by introducing the Process I dynamical
interventions, which are explicitly tied to idea-like realities.

The reason, in brief, why an extra dynamical process is needed is this:
If the universe has been evolving since the big bang solely under the
influence of the Schroedinger equation then every object and every human
brain would be by now, due to the uncertainty conditions on the original
positions and velocities, represented in quantum theory by an amorphous
continuum: the center-point each object would not lie at a particular
point, or even be confined to a small region, but would be continuously
spread out over a huge region; and, likewise, the state of the brain
every observer of this object would be a smeared out conglomeration of
many different classical-type brains, one corresponding to each of the
allowed center-points in this big region. That is, if a human person
were observing an object, whose center-point, as specified by its
quantum state, were spread out over a region several meters in diameter,
then the state of the brain of that person would have, for each of these
different locations, a part, corresponding to the observer's seeing the
object in that location. If each of these parts of the brain were
accompanied by the corresponding *experience*, then there would exist
not just one experience corresponding to seeing the object in just one
place, but a *continuous* aggregation of experiences, with one
experience for each of the possible locations in the large region. Thus
this theory is often called, quite rightly, a "many-minds"
interpretation:

John Doe evolves into a smeared out continuum of John Doe's each having
an experience different from every other one.

In order to extract from quantum theory a set of predictions pertaining
to human experiences, and hence to give empirical meaning to the theory,
this smeared out collection of different brain structures must be
resolved in a very special way into a collection of *discrete* parts,
each corresponding to one possible experience. This *discreteness
condition* is a technical point, but it constitutes the essential core
of the measurement problem. Hence I must explain it!

Evolution according to the Schroedinger equation (Process II) generates
in general, as I have just explained, a state of the brain of an
observer that is a smeared out continuum of component parts, each
corresponding to a different possible experience. One cannot assign a
nonzero probability to each one of such a continuum of possibilities,
because the total probability would then be infinity, instead of one
(unity). However, the mathematical rules of quantum theory have a
well-defined way to deal with this situation: they demand that the space
of possibilities be divided in a certain very restrictive way into a
countable set of alternative possibilities, where a *countable* *set* is
a set that can be *numbered* (i.e., placed in one-to-one correspondence
with the integer numbers 1, 2, 3, ... .). The need to specify a
particular *countable set* of parts is *the essential problem* in the
construction of a satisfactory quantum theory. But then the technical
problem that the dissenters face is this: How does one specify a
satisfactory particular *countable* set of *discrete* possibilities from
Process II alone, when Process II is a *continuous* local process that
generates a structure that continuously connects components that
correspond to very different experiences, and hence must belong to
different members of the countable set? The problem is essentially the
same as saying that a process generates only a circle generates also
some particular point on that circle: an extra property is imputed to a
process that lacks that property.

In the Copenhagen formulation of quantum theory this selection of a
preferred set of discrete states is achieved by a *choice on the part of
the experimenter.* The measuring device, set in a particular place by
the experimenter, selects some particular part of the state of the
observed system that corresponds to some particular kind of experience.
In this simple case the countable set has just two elements, one
specified by the projection operator P, the other specified by the
projection operator (I-P). In this way the basic problem of specifying a
countable set of discrete parts is solved by bringing into the theory *a
choice on the part of the experimenter*. Von Neumann solves this
discreteness problem in the same way, and gives this selection process
the name Process I.

Einstein posed essentially the same problem in a clear way. Suppose a
pen that draws a line on a moving scroll is caused to draw a blip when a
radio-active decay is detected by some detector. If the only process in
nature is Process II, then the state of the scroll will be a blurred out
state in which the blip occurs in a continuum of alternative possible
locations. Correspondingly, the brain of a person who is observing the
scroll will be in a smeared out state containing a continuously
connected collection of components, with one component corresponding to
each of the possible locations of the blip on the scroll. But how does
this smeared out continuously connected state of the brain get divided
by Process II alone into distinct components corresponding to different
experiences?

A key feature of the orthodox approach is the "empirical fact" that
experimenters can have definite thoughts, and that they can therefore
place the devices in definite locations. Thus it is the discreteness of
the *choice* made by the experimenter that resolves the discreteness
problem. But an experimenter represented by a state governed solely by
the Schroedinger equation has nothing discrete about him: his brain is a
continuous smear with no dynamically defined dividing lines.

The founders of quantum theory (and von Neumann) recognized this basic
problem of principle, and in order to resolve it went to a radical and
revolutionary extreme: they introduced human experimenters with
efficacious free choices into the physical theory. This was a giant
break from tradition. But the enormity of the problem demanded drastic
measures. Because such powerful thinkers as Wolfgang Pauli and John von
Neumann found it necessary to embrace this revolutionary idea, anyone
who claims that this unprecedented step was wholly unnecessary certainly
needs to carefully explain why. But this has not been done. Rather, the
environmental decoherence effect has been taken to be a panacea.
However, that well understood effect has no significant impact on the
discreteness problem.

The environmental decoherence effect merely reduces the matrices
representing macroscopic systems to *near* diagonal form. \[Recall that
each physical system is represented by a "matrix" S(*l,l'*), where *l*
specifies a location for every "particle" in the classical conception of
the system, and so does *l'*. The "diagonal" elements are those for
which *l* = *l'*, but the slightly off-diagonal elements remain
generally nonzero, and they lock the whole near-diagonal structure
together.\] The region where S(*l,l*) is significantly different from
zero remains large, even after the effects of interaction with the
environment are taken into account. It is not broken up by the
continuous action of Process II into a collection of different, isolated
regions that could be associated with different experiences. But then
the way in which the countable set of discrete states is singled out
evidently depends on something besides Process II, and the quantum state
whose evolution it generates. In any case, the way that particular
experiences are assigned finite probabilities, given only Process II,
needs to be worked out and described in detail by anyone who claims that
the Schroedinger evolution alone is sufficient.

Actually, the problem is technically much more difficult than the above
brief sketch indicates. The real situation involves a space of an
infinite number of dimensions, but the discreteness problem can be
illustrated in a simple model having just two dimensions. Take a sheet
of paper and put a point on it. (Imagine that your pencil is infinitely
sharp, and can draw a true point, and perfectly straight lines of zero
width.) Start drawing straight lines out from the point in different
directions. With an infinitely sharp pencil your could draw lines in
different directions for billions of years, at one line a second, and
not come even close to using up the set of all possible directions.
However, the rules of quantum theory demand in this two dimensional case
that some one particular direction, (together with the one perpendicular
to it) be picked out from this continuous infinity of possible
directions as preferred to all the others. But how is such an incredibly
precise choice determined by this continuous Process II?

This is the famous "basis problem." which was solved by the founders,
and by von Neumann, by invoking the choice on the part of the
experimenter. Although bringing in the human experimenter in this
special way is certainly very contrary to the ideas of classical
physics, the notion that our streams of consciousness play some
important dynamical role in the determination of our behavior is not
outlandish: it is what almost anyone would naturally expect.

This description of the discreteness problem is rather concise, and
perhaps too abstract to really hit home to a non-physicist reader. What
is really wrong, you may still ask, with going along with just the
Process II alone, and the amorphous continuous state S(*l,l'*)? Why is
this choice of a discrete basis so essential? Let me explain this in
more concrete terms.

If you have just a countable set of states then you could, for example,
assign probability ½ to the first state, probability ¼ to the second
state, probability 1/8 to the third, and so on, and the total
probability will add to one (unity), as a sum of probabilities should.
But if S(*l.l*) is a continuous function of *l*, and there were a
distinct experience for each value of l, and S(*l,l*) were non-zero for
some value of *l* , then S(l,l) would necessarily be larger than some
(perhaps very tiny) non-zero number, say e, in some finite region. (This
follows from the continuousness of S(l,l), and the fact that S(l,l) must
be a positive number or zero.) But there is an infinite number of
possible values of l in any finite interval, and if each one represents
a real existing different experience, then the total probability for an
experience to occur would be at least infinity times e, or infinity.

The main idea of quantum theory is to use a generalization of the
theorem of Pythagoras to resolve this problem. That theorem says that
the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides of a right triangle is
equal to the square of the longer side. This rule generalizes to a
figure in a space of an infinite number of dimensions in the following
way: If a displacement of unit length is a sum of a set of displacements
*each perpendicular to every other one*, then the sum of the squares of
the lengths of these displacements is one (unity). Using this law we can
guarantee that probabilities of the different experience possible in any
given situation will add to one (unity) if we assert that the different
possible experiences correspond to *a set of mutually perpendicular
directions in the space of possibilities.* But these preferred
directions are an infinitely small fraction of the set of all
possibilities. So the main problem in principle in the construction of a
satisfactory quantum theory is: How are these special directions in the
space of all possibilities singled out from all the others?

The conclusion of the founders, and of von Neumann, and of myself, is
that these special directions cannot be selected by Process II alone.
Any contrary claim needs to be spelled out in detail.

Kathryn went on to say:

*Bohm and Hiley say this* (that there is no collapse or reduction*) in*

*describing their hidden variable theory.*

Bohm\'s pilot-wave model is another attempt to add onto the raw

theory an extra process, in order to tie the raw theory to human

experiences in a quantitative way.

The main objection to that theory is that, in spite of many years of
intensive effort, it has not been generalized to cover relativistic
cases involving particle creation and annihilation.

I once asked Bohm how he answered Einstein\'s charge that his model was
\"too cheap\". He said that he agreed! And notice that the last two
chapters of his book with Hiley tries to go beyond this model. David
Bohm, like myself, saw the need to deal more adequately with
consciousness, and he wrote several papers on the subject. At the
present time Hiley is working on ideas that go far beyond the concepts
used in the old pilot-wave model. I do not think any physicist actually
working in the area would claim that the pilot-wave model exists today
in the relativistic domain.

Kathryn continued:

*Others also say this, including people who don\'t subscribe to the Bohm
pilot wave + particle ontology, such as Carver Mead in \"Collective
Electrodynamics,\" who gives a fairly well worked-out example of a
quantum oscillator jumping an energy level, and how this can be
explained by systems that briefly cross phases, exchange energy, then go
out of phase again.*

Quantum theory explains very well how information is continuously
transferred to measuring devices. But those beautiful descriptions are
the *basis* of the measurement problem, not the solution. They do not
explain how some object whose location (as represented by the quntum
state) is spread out over meters is experienced as being located close
to a point, and with some well defined probability.

Kathryn continues:

*R. Mirman says \"Wavefunctions don\'t collapse, oversimplifications
do\... Perhaps what collapses is not the statefunction, but common
sense\... Discontinuity cannot be true, and it is not. But carelessness
unfortunately can be true and too often is, and certainly can make
discontinuity appear true.\" He goes on to amplify: \"If for example we
consider an object striking a screen forming a spot, the statefunction
of the system after the formation, the product of that of the struck
atom plus all objects attracted to it and the scattered object, is found
from the initial one using Schrodinger\'s equation, and if so found
would be seen to vary continuously. In principle it is possible to
calculate final (perhaps extremely complicated) statefunctions from
initial ones, and the entire transformation from one statefunction to
another is completely continuous. Never is there a sudden change or
collapse. Any such appearances result from ignoring the (continuous)
intermediate stages by regarding these as happening instantaneously.\"*

Quite true! If process II is the whole story then there never is a
sudden change or collapse! That's the problem! The Schroedinger equation
generates only continuous changes. But the continuousness of that
Process II evolution is closely tied to the fact that in a universe
evolving exclusively via the Schroedinger Equation, (i.e., Process II)
ever since the big bang, the detector is everywhere, instead of
somewhere, and the observer\'s brain is a smeared out continuum
encompassing all possibilities. The continuousness stressed by Mirman is
the problem, not the solution.

Once, long ago, I characterized the many-worlds solution as shifting the
whole measurement problem onto the mind-brain problem, about which it
says nothing. For the theory, to be empirically meaningful it must be
tied to probabilistic statements about alternative possible human
experiences. But the smeared-out state of the brain does not cleanly
separate vectors from other vectors that differ from them by very tiny
amounts. But then what principle, involving nothing but the evolving
amorphous state of the universe, can separate the space of brain states
into othogonal subspaces, such as those defined by P and (I-P),
associable with different experiences?

I do not claim that this problem has no solution. But Mirman\'s
observation that a world evolving according to the Schroedinger equation
alone is evolving continuously does not *solve* the measurement problem:
it *creates* the measurement problem. Certainly, Heisenberg and Pauli,
and von Neumann, understood very well that a world evolving according to
a universally valid Schroedinger equation would evolve continuously. And
they also realized that this did not solve the measurement problem. I
have absolutely no doubt that von Neumann understood very well also the
essential features of environmental decoherence: the basic ideas are all
clearly displayed in his work. Yet in order to get an empirically
meaningful theory he brought in Process I.

**10. RAMIFICATIONS IN SCIENCE.**

Scientists are free to choose which concepts they take as basic in their
endeavor to describe the structure of human experience. Isaac Newton
took the point-like idealizations of our visual experiences of distant
planets and small physical objects. This is a highly restrictive choice
because it leaves out most types of human experience, such as colors,
sounds, pains, efforts, evaluations, etc.

Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, and the other founders of quantum theory shook
off the inertia the Newtonian tradition and demonstrated the advantages
of bringing the observing and acting human agents into basic physical
theory. Their formulation is the one used in practical work in physics,
and there is little likelihood that this will change in physics.
However, in other fields, including neuroscience, psychology, and
philosophy of mind, many researchers still use the Newtonian concepts,
even though physicists know them to be inadequate in principle in
systems that depend sensitively on underlying chemical and ionic
processes.

Living systems were explicitly excluded by Bohr from the domain of
applicability of Copenhagen quantum theory. That limitation was removed
by von Neumann's reformulation. All other contenders are, I believe,
plagued with problems that can be interpreted as stemming from the
failure to incorporate into the dynamics a psychological dimension or
aspect that adequately ties the mechanical Process II to the
psychological aspects of reality. Hence only von Neumann's formulation
can, at present, justifiably claim to apply to thinking brains.

The oft-made assertion that the classical approximation is adequate for
brain dynamics needs to be justified by calculations based on the more
accurate quantum theory. Such calculations have been carried out, and
they show just the opposite: they show, as discussed earlier, that
quantum effects inside nerve terminals *can have* important macroscopic
dynamical consequences. Hence quantum theory certainly needs to be used
for a fully adequate treatment of brain processes, and its only
currently available and technically adequate form, namely von Neumann
quantum theory, injects the mind into the dynamical workings of the
brain.

The key practical question is then: Does it make any difference in
evolving scientific practice whether or not we use the apparently
necessary existence of von Neumann's Process I. or can we simply ignore
it?

A first question is: What is current scientific practice, and how is it
evolving?

To get a perspective on this question I shall quote from an article that
just appeared on a respected electronic forum dealing with the
mind-brain problem. The forum is called Psyche-D, and the article is
authored by Eddy A. Nahmias of the Department of Philosophy at Florida
State University. The paper is entitled "Verbal Reports of the Contents
of Consciousness: Reconsidering introspective psychology."

\[http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v8/psyche-8-21-nahmias.html\]

This paper is pertinent because it sketches out, from a philosophical
standpoint, the development of psychology from "introspectionism," to
"behaviorism," to contemporary "cognitive psychology." The author notes
that whereas introspectionism went to the extreme of banning the brain
from psychology, and behaviorism went to the opposite extreme of banning
consciousness, cognitive psychology, though strongly biased by its
behaviorist roots, does use verbal reports, and does sometimes treat
these reports not as mere behavioristic responses, but rather as
indicators of properties of existing experiential states. The author
suggests that the time is now ripe for a limited rehabilitation, with
appropriate care, of some of the methods and goals of introspectionist
psychology, though not their views on the nature of mind. He notes that
cognitive scientist interested in consciousness "avoid flirting with
dualism" and recognize that "denying dualism need not mean denying a
role for introspection." He says that "To approach these questions we
should first avoid several potential roadblocks. First, we should not
assume that the methodology of introspectionism cannot be separated from
its problematic philosophy, such as its inherent dualism ... . "

These words draw attention to a certain incongruity in that approach to
the study of the mind-brain problem: while the rhetoric hews closely to
the behavioristic philosophy of rejecting that "bete noir", *duality*,
actual practice deals with two kinds of data, those arising from
physical measurements of brain process and those arising from verbal
reports that are treated as indicators of states of consciousness. Given
this duality displayed in both contemporary empirical practice, and the
immediate direct theoretical interpretation of verbal reports, what is
the rational basis of hanging onto the philosophical rejection of
duality?

Daniel Dennett put his finger on the reason. His book "Consciousness
Explained" has a chapter "Why Dualism Is Forlorn", which begins with the
words:

"The idea of mind as distinct ...from the brain, composed not of
ordinary matter but of some other special kind of stuff is dualism, and
it is deservedly in disrepute today. ... The prevailing wisdom,
variously expressed and argued for is materialism: there is one sort of
stuff, namely matter\-\--the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and
physiology\-\--and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical
phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain."

Dennett then asks: "What, then, is so wrong with dualism? Why is it in
such disfavor?"

He answers:

"A fundamental principle of physics is that any change in the trajectory
of a particle is an acceleration requiring the expenditure of energy
...this principle of conservation of energy ... is apparently violated
by dualism. This confrontation between standard physics and dualism has
been endless discussed since Descartes's own day, and is widely regarded
as the inescapable flaw in dualism."

This argument depends on identifying "standard physics" with nineteenth
century physics. But the argument collapses when one goes over to
contemporary physics, in which, due the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle, trajectories of particles are replaced by cloud-like
structures, and in which, moreover, consciousness can influence brain
activity without violating the laws of physics. Contemporary physical
theory allows, and in its von Neumann form entails, an interactive
dualism. So there is no good reason to dismiss or rule out the
possibility that a useful science of consciousness could be built on the
idea that mind and brain are two aspects of reality that are most
adequately described in psychological and physical terms, respectively,
and that they interact in the way described by contemporary physical
theory, namely von Neumann quantum theory.

It may be useful to elaborate on this point within the framework of
Nahmias's sketch of the development of psychology during the twentieth
century.

In 1898 the introspectionist E.B. Titchener delineated the proper study
of psychology as the conscious mind, defined as " nothing more than the
whole sum of mental processes experienced in a single lifetime." And:
"We must always remember that, within the sphere of psychology,
introspection is the final and only court of appeal, that psychological
evidence cannot be other than introspective evidence. "

However, the psychologist William James (1892), who used introspection
extensively, but recognized a causal link of consciousness to brain
process, lamented that psychology had not developed any laws: " We do
not even know the terms between which the elementary laws would obtain
if we had them."

J.B. Watson, emphasing the failures of introspection to achieve reliable
results, went to the opposite extreme. He began his 1913 behaviorist
manifesto with the words: "Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a
purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical
goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no
essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data
dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to
interpretation in terms of consciousness."

The behaviorist movement made rapid gains and in 1917 H. W. Chase wrote
a summary of the years work on "Consciouseness and the Unconscious" in
which he reports:

"There can be no question that consciousness is rapidly loosing its

standing as a respectable member of the psychologists vocabulary.
Titchener in the preface of his new book says: I have avoided the use of
the word 'consciousness.' Experimental psychology has made a serious
effort to give it scientific meaning, but the attempt has failed, the
word is too slippery, and so is better discarded."

However, behaviorism began to have increasing technical difficulties
with verbal reports of conscious experiences. Nahmias stresses that when
we use a thermometer to measure the temperature of some system, what is
important is not the point to which the Mercury rises: what is important
is the property of the system that the position of the indicator
reliably reports. Likewise, in verbal reports of conscious experience it
is not the sounds themselves that are important: it is the property of
the human system that the sounds reliably report.

The technical difficulties with behaviorism continued to mount, but, in
Nahmias's words, "It was not until Chomsky's (1959) famous review of
Skinner's ... analysis that the tide fully turned against trying to
treat language, including reports about human experience, just like any
other behavior." But this turning of the tide meant that behaviorism
failed precisely as the point at issue: the connection of physical
process to conscious process. Yet the pariah status that behaviorism had
assigned to dualism continued to persist after the fall of behaviorism,
and it still persists today, as the words of Dennett show, and the
commentary of Nahmias confirms.

Nahmias goes on to laud cognitive science, with its more inclusive
approach of trying to correlate measured brain activity with reports of
consciousness. He argues that these reports, at least in some cases,
seem to be reports *about something*: they are not just sounds to be
interpreted merely as sounds. "They are interpreted as reliable
indicators of experiences." And he goes on to suggest that maybe some of
the ideas of the introspectionists can, under special conditions, be
useful in developing an idea of a structure of consciousness that could
be correlated with the structure of brain activity.

This rehabilitation of consciousness is both reasonable and useful. And
it is in line with the twentieth century developments in physics.

Switching to the quantum model has, in principle, important physical
ramifications. If Process I exists, and is exploited by living systems
in the way I have suggested, via the Quantum Zeno effect, then living
systems would tend to be more stable and goal-directed than a
classically describable system, or a system evolving solely under the
action of the Process II alone, could possibly be. So, at least in
principle, Process I has empirical consequences: the questions involved
here are scientific one, not just matters of words and viewpoints.

The appearance of behavior explainable by a Quantum Zeno Effect does not
imply a necessary incursion into the physical world of some non-physical
agent. The simplest way to activate a Quantum Zeno Effect action would
be for a higher-level subsystem of the brain to monitor a lower-level
subsystem that is more directly connected to motor control. This
circumstance emphasizes the fact that von Neumann's theory brings the
mind-driven Process I into brain dynamics, but leaves open the question
of what causes the mental choices to be just what they are and not
something else.

The brain certainly plays a very important role in those choices. So the
inclusion of Process I in the dynamics is not meant to be, and is not,
an opening to mysticism. It is an acceptance of a conclusion that arose
within science, namely the fact that quantum theory is compatible
with\-\--and in its von Neumann form actually entails\-\--the conclusion
that our streams of consciousness are potent contributors to brain
dynamics. Since our streams of consciousness are also the basis of all
science, it is hardly anti-scientific or mystical to include them in a
scientific account of the world.

The existence Process I entails a failure of the local deterministic
Process II. This means that within von Neumann quantum theory the
classical idea that brain dynamics is controlled basically by a local
mechanical process is false, and that any attempt to force our
understanding of brain process to fit that mold must fail.

Process I involves non-local operators P, which specify the brain
correlates of psychological events. This suggests that an adequate
theory of the activity of a thinking brain ought to be a psycho-physical
theory that includes, irreducibly, both the psychologically and
physically described realities. One would think that this would be
orthodox and main stream view, instead of a fiercely opposed alternative
that in Dennett's words "is deservedly in disrepute today."

This dualistic way of constructing mind-brain dynamics is surely far
more practical and more likely to succeed than the way ordained by
classical physics. That is because it is impossible to get the
information needed to specify the initial classical brain conditions
with enough precision to make the classical equations predictive in the
interesting situations where delicate conscious evaluations play the
decisive role in selecting which course of action will be pursued. Thus
the classicality requirement imposes a very severe conceptual limitation
without achieving any resultant increase in predictive power. Moreover,
the quantum uncertainty principle would render the course of brain
events indeterminate in principle even if the effects of classical noise
could be brought under control.

Once it is appreciated that the local mechanistic classical laws *must
fail*, and that the quantum Process I injects the non-local physical
correlates of *conscious thoughts* into the dynamics of brain processes,
it becomes scientifically reasonable to believe that an adequate theory
of brain dynamics should describe mind-brain process in psycho-physical
terms rather than insisting that the dynamics be described fundamentally
in local mechanistic terms alone. There is no scientific basis for going
either to the extreme of building the basic theory of the mind-brain on
brain alone, as the materialist or physicalists demand, or to the
extreme of building the theory on mind alone, as the idealists and
humanists would have it. Quantum theory provides the basis for a
dynamical middle way that includes in a rationally coherent manner both
the mental and physical aspects of reality without reducing either one
to the other.

**11. VALUES.**

This book began with the observation that what science says about what
you are, and how you are connected to the rest of nature, can affect
your values, and hence your life. It can affect also the values and
attitudes of everyone responsive to the findings of science, and this
includes many influential thinkers, and consequently the social milieu
that undergirds your life.

Our focus so far has been upon the twentieth-century revolution in what
science says about these matters. That century began with science
proclaiming the simple doctrine of a fully mechanical universe; of a
universe consisting of tiny realities whose lawfully specified
interactions with immediate neighbors fix the entire course of history
from primordial initial conditions. Thoughts, ideas, and feelings need
never be considered, because the dynamical rules can be stated\-\--and
their consequences fully determined\-\--without ever acknowledging the
existence of such entities. But that old mechanical picture, however
simple and attractive it was, cannot describe the dynamics of human
brains. In that system, for reasons spelled out in earlier chapters,
quantum effects are important and the only formulation of quantum theory
that seems adequate to deal with a thinking brain is the one devised by
John von Neumann. This theory, like its classical predecessor, has a
causal process that is fully determined by the interactions between tiny
neighboring entities. Von Neumann calls this process Process II.
However, in the quantum case this mechanism by itself it does not yield
a complete physical theory: it is augmented by a second process, called
Process I, which injects effects of our thoughts, ideas, and feelings
directly into workings of the brain. The older classical mechanical laws
can be seen as an approximation to the quantum laws that systematically
excludes all quantum effects. This approximation has the effect of
excluding all of the dynamical effects of mind upon brain that quantum
theory introduces. The classical laws are therefore blinkered: they
systematically cut from view the effects of minds upon the rest of
nature, and in particular upon the brains associated with them.

Having explained in earlier chapters these critical developments in
science we can turn now to the question of their impact upon human
values.

I have already mentioned the question of personal responsibility for
one's acts. This concept has been greatly corroded by the classical
notion that we are simply the product of our genes and our environment,
and hence cannot be responsible for anything we do: that our actions are
just automatic consequences of blind local mechanical processes. The
notion that a person's mental effort can, to a large degree, control his
actions is thus dismissed as an illusion, disproved by "modern science,"
which purportedly reveals us to be mechanical robots deluded by the
absurd belief that such insubstantial and immaterial phantasms as our
thoughts could affect the implacable march of the atoms.

There can be no doubt that this notion of the ineffectualness of our
minds to control our actions has gained great standing and credibility
in our legal, social, intellectual, institutional, and philosophical
systems, and that this idea has drawn immense support from the authority
of science. But the picture of the human agent that emerges from
orthodox quantum theory is much more sophisticated, and not at all in
line with the classical idea of a mechanical automaton. The new
conception of Man entails the effectiveness, at least in principle, of
the action of mind on brain, and, as was discussed in chapter 8, the
structure of the effect seems to be in good agreement with both Jamesian
psychology and the data from the studies of the psychology of attention.
The new physics describes a specific mechanism whereby mental effort can
control brain activity, while leaving open, so far, the cause of this
feeling of effort. However, this mental effort controls an effect that
is capable in principle of overriding the strongest forces arising from
the mechanical side of nature. This development in physics casts serious
doubt upon the verdict of nineteenth century science, and rescues both
the deliverances intuition, and the notion of personal responsibility
based on that intuition.

A second effect pertains to non-locality. I mentioned in connection with
Process I the possibility of including within physics the further
process, Process III, that actually obliterates from the objective real
universe, all but one of the alternative possibilities specified by
Process I. According to that scenario, if you see the Geiger counter
"fire", then there is *no* alternative branch of the universe in which
the "you that existed before looking at the Geiger counter,"
subsequently sees the counter as "not firing."

In order to focus on Process I, I left open the ontological issue of
whether this obliterating Process III, really occurs as an objective
physical process, or merely *seems to you* to occur.

Having upset the claim that the causal efficacy of our thoughts is
necessarily an illusion, we are led to question the idea that the
"collapse" or "reduction" Process III is merely a subjective illusion.
Accepting Process III as an objectively real physical process is the
simplest way, and perhaps the only unambiguous way, of understanding the
probability rules. But the real existence of Process III, would have
profound ontological consequences: it would imply that the stream of
conscious events that defines you as a thinking entity is instantly
connected, causally, to ontologically similar streams of consciousness
occurring all over the universe. The argument for this is technical, and
is given in an appendix.

This placement of yourself in that network of non-local causal
connections gives you an image of yourself that is profoundly different
from the idea of yourself that flows from classical physics. The latter
portrays you as basically as a pile of dirt, or a vehicle constructed by
mindless genes for a purpose they do not know. Those pictures contrast
starkly to the quantum image of yourself as a center of creativity that
gives form to the universe, in coordination with a vast array of similar
centers with which you are instantaneously connected.

This brings us to the basic issue of self image. What are you? What do
you conceive yourself to be? What is the purpose or meaning of your
life? How do go about forming opinions on these matters? Do you simply
accept the pronouncements of an "authority," such a church, or a state,
or some social or political group? All of these entities have agendas of
their own, and they need to make you, or others, believers of their
message. But then where can find unbiased truths?

Science kneels down in the end only to an authority that is beyond the
pettiness of human ambition. It rests, finally, on the stubborn facts of
nature, which reveal something about the nature of a reality that
supports your being. And these stubborn facts uncovered by the labor of
scientists reveal also things about the nature of you yourself as an
observer and participant in the unfolding of reality. It tells you
things about yourself that are deeper and more secure than the tales
created by human beings for human purposes.

Science may not tell you everything you need to know: it is an ongoing
enterprise, which may from time to time even issue false claims, as the
example of classical physics so amply proves. But it is the result of
enormous work by countless investigators, and represents, barring
revelation, the most reliable information available to you. And it feeds
into most of the other information that you receive because the leading
opinion-makers try to espouse views not directly contradicted by the
findings of science.

You may have often found it difficult to believe yourself to be what
classical physics claimed you to be, namely a blob of protoplasm
reacting mechanically to the buffeting of a mindless universe filled
with similar blobs, all constructed by certain protein molecules as a
consequence of some freakish quirks in the laws of nature. But that
bizarre idea, improbable as it might seem, is the picture that is, even
today, being drummed incessantly into the heads of us all, including our
impressionable children. It is promulgated as the scientific word on
high.

This pervasive indoctrination is certainly not devoid of effect. The
behavior that this dreary and debasing self-image tends to promote is
unquestionably vastly different from the behavior powered by an image of
one's self as a center of power in an instantaneously linked network of
mindful and potent agents jointly engaged in a struggle to create a
world measuring up to possibilities formed by our collective ideals.

The destiny of our species will be determined above all by how we view
and understand our potentialities and collective power. Quantum theory
delivers, on that score, a message based on empirical evidence that is
almost diametrically opposed to the pronouncements of classical physics.
Whereas the message of classical physics was that of separation,
competition, and mindless mechanism, the message of quantum physics is
one of unification, collaborative effects, and mindful process. Given
the overriding importance of human ideas upon the fate of man the
importance of the shift of the weight of science from the classical
concepts to the quantum concepts can scarcely be overstated.