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 entity, and your linkage to 'the other'.

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 converted
connections that formerly had been matters of pure philosophical
speculation into causal properties dealt with by basic physical theory.

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 man. 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 man's role in nature. 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 his 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 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,
emasculated the system of values erected upon it. Moreover, it put forth
a credo of its own. In that "scientific" vision 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 over what
emerges, preordained, from that prior state one can bear no
responsibility.

Given this conception of man, the collapse of moral philosophy is
inevitable. This notion of human beings 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 picture of man is the image created by the science that
reigned early in the twentieth century. According to that view the
physical universe is composed of tiny separate bits of reality, and the
unfolding, or evolution in time, of nature is completely fixed by direct
contact interaction between these localized microscopic parts. Human
beings, insofar as they belong to this physical aspect of nature, are
simply conglomerations of these elemental material bits.

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. In place of the old idea Heisenberg, Bohr, and their
companions erected a vastly different conceptual framework. They were
forced to a radical alteration of the very subject matter of physical
theory itself by the strange character of the new mathematical rules,
which were invariably validated by reliable empirical data.

The new theory accounts in a uniform manner for all the successes of the
earlier physical theories, plus the immense amount of newer 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 bits information. Straightforwardly
interpreted, the quantum rules describe a universe built out of *a new
kind of stuff* whose properties combine features formerly conceived to
be imbedded in the physical world with aspects that belong to our
streams of conscious thoughts.

The laws that govern the evolution of the world over the course of time
differ significantly from the pre-twentieth century idea of these rules.
According to the new physics, this evolution is specified not by a
single causal process but rather by an interplay between two very
different ones. The first of these is analogous to the operation that
fixes the development of the material world in classical physics, and it
is "locally deterministic": what occurs at any point is completely fixed
by what has just happened at nearby points. But that local rule is not
the whole story. At certain instants *second kind of process*
intervenes: a "quantum jump" occurs. This intervention is highly
non-local: it involves, in a well specified way, coordinated changes in
regions that can lie far apart. The structure of these abrupt changes
are mathematically similar to sudden increases in knowledge or
information. Indeed, the original, and still orthodox, "Copenhagen"
interpretation of quantum theory associates each quantum jump with an
actual increase in somebody's knowledge. Thus our basic scientific
theory of the physical world, in its orthodox formulation, has become
intrinsically entwined with our streams of conscious knowings.

The existence of this "second process" provides a reprieve from the
classical-physics verdict that human thoughts and feelings can make no
difference in the flow of physical events. The new theory involves
choices that are not determined by any currently known law of nature,
but that can nevertheless strongly influence the course of physical
events. This means that contemporary science accommodates causally
efficacious free will. The new physics allows, and in fact demands, the
occurrence of happenings that, on the one hand, are fixed by no known
law, statistical or otherwise, yet, on the other hand, can influence in
mathematically determined ways, the flow of our experiences about the
physical world. The details of how this influence works match
beautifully with the empirical findings that have accumulated over the
past few decades in the field of the psychology of attention.

The potency and novelty of the new dynamics both stem directly from the
property of "quantum entanglement", and the closely related feature
called "quantum nonlocality". Entanglement is the property of two (or
more) systems that have strongly interacted with each other but then
moved far apart, to become, according to the theory, a single unified
entity until observations are made that re-establish independent
properties for the spatially separated parts.

This entanglement feature leads to the truly remarkable property of
non-locality: in certain cases the behavior of the faraway partner of an
entangled pair of objects or systems depends upon **what you decide to
do** to its mate. Moreover, the behavior of that faraway system is
influenced **before** the information about what you do to its mate can
arrive\-\--traveling at the speed of light.

These strange features of the quantum world need to be thoroughly
comprehended before any real grasp of your role in nature is possible.
Accordingly, those oddities will later be described in detail. But the
upshot of these radical changes is this: Taken at face value, the new
mathematical description of the universe portrays you as an integral
aspect of a partially thought-like, and malleable, nonlocal world that
is not identical to your body/brain; but that can, by free-willed
actions, influence what happens in your body/brain. This participatory
view contrasts starkly with the earlier science-based image of the human
person as a disconnected and accidental conglomeration of atoms being
mindlessly buffeted about by the chance collisions of atoms.

But what impact, if any, does 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 well-being of the group than to that 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 humans beings do in fact have the capacity to
expand our image of \"self\", and an 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 to survive.

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 the nonlocal process
that gives form to the evolving universe is a seismic event of
potentially momentous proportions.

The quantum concept, being based on objective science equally available
to, and applicable to, all men, 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 Man
science may fulfill itself by adding to the material benefits it has
already provided a philosophical insight of perhaps 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 very brief historical
account. 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
relation 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 reality 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.

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 break-down, 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 of describing reality
completely in terms of tiny bits of matter was abandoned, and science
was construed to be a human endeavor to understand the structure of
human experience, rather than a quest to discover the form of nature
herself. 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 of
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 incoherent 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 into the structure of basic physical
theory. How this is done, and what the consequences of doing it are, is
the subject of this whole book. I begin by sketching out a little bit of
the historical background.