**Quantum Mechanics and 21^st^ Century Business Management.**

\[Neuroleadership Summit, Asolo, Italy, May 14-16, 2007\]

**Prologue**

This conference was held in Asolo, Italy, at an English-language school
for business management, CIMBA. This school features, in addition to the
standard technical courses, also intensive training in business
*leadership*. The conference was held in connection with the founding of
an institute for neuroleadership, which aims at bringing the relevant
findings of contemporary neuroscience into the practical sphere of
business leadership.

At a pre-conference dinner I mentioned the title of my talk "Quantum
Mechanics and 21^st^ Century Business Management, and expected to get a
response like "How can quantum mechanics, which pertains to tiny atomic
particles, possibly be relevant to business management?" But a bright
young MBA student startled me with a very different question. She asked:
"What is quantum mechanics?"

Recovering from my shock I saw the need to go back to "square one". So I
explained very carefully to her, and to some of the other speakers, the
key relevant points about quantum mechanics, and then, on the basis of
that description, went on to explain why quantum mechanics was deeply
relevant to contemporary business management. My efforts over the course
of that dinner seemed to be so successful that I decided to abandon my
prepared talk, and follow, instead, what I said at the dinner, starting
from the question" What is Quantum Mechanics?"

**Quantum Mechanics and its Relevance to 21^st^ Century Business
Management**.

Quantum Mechanics is currently the *basic scientific theory* of the way
the world works. During the 20^th^ century it replaced its predecessor,
"classical mechanics", which is the theory of nature that stemmed
directly from the 17^th^ century ideas of Galileo and Newton.

The most fundamental difference between quantum mechanics and classical
mechanics is this: Quantum mechanics describes *the dynamics of ideas*,
whereas classical mechanics describes *the dynamics of machines!*

The reason for the relevance of quantum mechanics to 21^st^ century
business management is that businesses today are being driven more by
*rapidly changing* *ideas* than by slowly changing material factors.
Consequently, understanding of the *dynamics of ideas* becomes
essential. Key people in today's companies are better understood and
treated as conscious creators and implementers of ideas, than as
programmable machines. Quantum mechanics is pertinent because it
describes how the structures represented by human ideas, concepts, and
intentions can get injected into a world that is sustained by aspects
that are represented as lawful developments of physically describable
properties.

Historically, the structures of business and of industry, and of social
organizations in general, reflected to a remarkable degree the reigning
scientific conception of their times. Basic science during the late
18^th^ to the late 20^th^ centuries was the deterministic materialism of
Newtonian-type classical mechanics. Those mechanical concepts provided
the appropriate conceptual foundation for industrial age. But now, at
the dawn of the new millennium, we are moving from the age of machines
into the age of ideas. Hence the successful theory of effective
organizations is bound shift from the science of the dynamics of
machines to the science of the dynamics of ideas. The main point, here,
is that this shift converts the role of human beings from that of
mechanical *responders* to that of creators and implementers of
*concepts* that resolve problems that purely mechanical systems cannot
solve.

To appreciate this new way of understanding the world one should have
some idea of how its structure differs from the prior mechanical
understanding.

Classical mechanics was built on the idea of *point particles*. A *point
particle* is supposed to have at each instant a well defined location
and a well defined velocity. So the history of each paricle is
represented by a well-defined "trajectory" in space-time as indicated
here.

**Figure 1. A trajectory in space-time.**

There are some "physical laws" that these trajectories are supposed to
obey. These laws are such that the following property holds:

*The Principle of the Causal Closure of the Physical:*

The values of all the physically described properties existing *prior
to* any given time fix unambiguously the values of all physically
defined properties for all times: *The physical description of past
determines unambiguously the physical description of the future*

To understand the significance of this condition recall that Newton
built his physics upon the earlier work of Rene Descartes. Descartes had
proposed that *all that exists* can be separated, into two realms: the
mental realm, comprising "thoughts, ideas, and feelings" \[the subject
matter of psychology\], and the physical realm, consisting of things,
such as particles, that are described by assigning mathematical
properties to points in space at instants of time.

Descartes proposed that these two parts interact inside human brains,
and only inside human brains.

Newton's Laws, however, dealt only with the physically defined
properties, and they entailed the principle of the causal closure of the
physical mentioned above. That means, in particular, that the mental
properties can have no described causal role in the determination of our
physically described actions: we are, according to the ideas of
classical mechanics, causally equivalent to mechanical automata. Our
thoughts are treated as not parts of the causal structure.

A corollary of this conclusion is that a "scientific" understanding of a
person's behavior must be, *fundamentally*, a mechanical understanding.

During the early years of the twentieth century it became clear that the
precepts of classical mechanics could not actually be true: the
theoretical predictions failed to accord with experimental results. No
mere tinkering with details could ever fix the difficulties; some basic
changes were needed, and there was a huge endeavor to find an adequate
replacement.

The breakthrough came in 1925, when Werner Heisenberg discovered that
agreement with key experiments could be explained if one gave up the
idea of point particles\-\--if one rejected the notion that a particle
could have, simultaneously, a well-defined location and velocity. The
notion of a "particle" was now to be associated, not with the notion of
a tiny bit of "matter" that has a well defined location, but rather with
the notion of a *continuous smear of possible locations and possible
velocities.* This smear *normally* develops in time in accordance with
laws that are direct generalizations of the laws of the earlier
classical mechanics.

If one considers the structure of human brains one finds that the
effects of these quantum uncertainties become non-negligble in the
neural dynamics at the microscopic level of the ions that flow in and
out of the nerve cells. These effects tend to get magnified, as one
moves up to the macroscopic level, by the "butterfly effect": small
initial differences at the ionic level tend to expand into huge effects
in the macroscopic behavior of the whole brain.

**Figure 2. The Uncertainty Principle converts a linear trajectory into
a quantum smear of possibilities\-\--the oval\-\--. which expands in
space with the passage of time.**

The immediate problem is that empirically *our brains are not smeared
out over the huge range of possibilities that the purely mechanical
theory predicts*. Hence some cutting-back of the large continuous smear
of possibilities must occur. This is the famous "collapse of the wave
function": the expanded smear of possible brains collapse is supposed
(by the theory) to collapse back down to a reduced form. This collapse
is supposed to occur in association with a human experience. This
experience constitutes an increase in "our knowledge", and the collapse
of the physical state is supposed to be to a physical form that is
compatible with the new increased knowledge. Thus the collapse reduces
the state to one that is compatible with the new empirical facts.

The essential point here is that in order to produce a theory that
accords with general properties of the observed physical world the
founders of quantum theory took the "radical" step of re-introducing the
conscious thoughts of human beings back into the causal structure. But
these conscious thought were introduced in a such a way as to allow them
both to influence our actions in the way that our thoughts seem to us to
influence our actions, and also to keep the lawfully evolving state of
observed systems in accord with the empirical facts

Heisenberg suggested that in order to understand what was actually going
on one should interpret the continuous smear of possibilities as a
*potentiality* for an *event* to occur.

A *potentiality* (or potentia) means an *objective ten*dency.

And the *event* is a *psychophysical* event. It is a *happening* that
has both an idea-like aspect (or more generally a *conceptual* aspect)
and also an associated physical aspect. This physical aspect reduces the
prior potentialities to a restricted set of possibilities *compatible
with the* *concept*.

Thus science's image of the physical world is changed from that of a
machine, grinding out its mechanically pre-ordained behavior, to that of
a set of potentialities for *events* to occur.

Each event is a "node" in the growing web of potentialities. At each
node a *concept* is imposed, and the set of potentialities is *reduced*
to a new set that is compatible with the newly imposed concept. A
typical "concept" is a *mental image* of some possible or intended
action.

**Figure 3 A sequence of physical reductions, each followed by an
expansion of the set possibilities, and then a reduction back down to a
reduced set of possibilities compatible with the newly imposed
concept.**

**Figure 4. Quantum theoretical picture of natural process. The downward
arrows represent von Neumann's Process 1: the injection of a concept
into the physically described aspect of nature: A choice of a
conceptually formulated action. The lower oval is the reduced physical
state associated with that concept. The upward arrow represents the
experiential feedback:**

According to contemporary science our human thoughts/concepts enter as
effective "free" agents\-\--where "free" means *only* not fixed by any
known law of physics. Thus the contemporary-science-based conception of
nature is one in which *ideas are both basic realities and causal
drivers*. They are the basic realities because science is recognized as
the human endeavor of creating a theoretical understanding of the
relationships between the action we take and the experiential feedbacks
that we then receive. And they are causal drivers because, within the
theory, our choices are not completely fixed by the description of the
prior states of our brains. *Our choices of how we will act are
explicitly treated* as inputs that we describe in terms of (classical)
*concepts, and that are allowed to be largely controlled by our
conceptually described interests and reasons*.

In classical physics the physical level of description seemed solid and
firm, whereas the entities occurring at the conceptual/idea-like level
seemed vague and vaporous, because they lacked all causal power. But in
quantum physics it is our actual choices of how we will act, and the
experiences that will then causally intrude into our streams of
consciousness, that become the firm foundations of our thinking, and it
is rather the strangely behaving physically described aspects that seem
to lose solidity. In short, the ideas about reality have been turned
upside down.

Of course no sane designer of an idea-based business would adopt the
mechanistic model in preference to a model that rationally accommodates
the effectiveness of ideas. However, we live in a society that is built
largely upon mechanistic ideas: our society has, for the most part,
accepted the principle that any rational approach must be compatible
with the principles and findings of science, and that these scientific
principles and findings essentially deny any fundamental place to
idea-like realities.

This mechanical outlook supports a behaviorist approach to all problems.
That approach still carries great weight, mainly because most
psychologists, philosophers, and analysts of various kinds, want to be
in line with "science", and have yet to appreciate the huge implications
for their work of the replacement of classical science by quantum
science. They fail to recognize that contemporary science *both allows
in principle,* *and demands in practice*, the causal effectiveness of
ideas.

The mechanical conception of nature did provide an appropriate rational
underpinnings for industrial revolution, and indeed for 18^th^ ,19^th^,
and 20^th^ social structures of all kinds. The Harvard historian of
science, I. Bernard Cohen, authored a book "Science and the Founding
Fathers: Science in the political thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin
Franklin, John Adams & James Madison". It describes the important
influence of the Newtonian mechanistic conception of nature upon the
U.S. Constitution, which is a principal source of political ideas for
much of the civilized world. Similarly, most scientific academic
disciplines have sought to "ape" physics, and eventually even psychology
and philosophy of mind tried to ban, or excommunicate, any consideration
of our conscious thoughts. Business management theory and practice fell
into line, with time and motion studies, and the idea of a well-honed
top-down process of command and control, with each worker treated as a
mechanically conditioned cog in a larger machine.

During that relatively slow-moving "Age of Machines", this mechanical
understanding of the world worked. But now, in the 21^st^ century,
*ideas* are becoming the basis of a growing part of the economy. *Ideas*
can develop rapidly, and be deployed rapidly. Hence the efficient
development and deployment of pertinent new ideas are now focal points
of business design. Hence theoretical models that essentially ignore
them, or treat them as causal "zeros", or as mysterious, gratuitous,
causally inert by-products of brain process are inappropriate and
inadequate. Yet any attempt to introduce "science" into the discussion,
must fight the three hundred years of theory and practice that is
imbedded in almost every aspect of contemporary society.

Within this broad context of the quantum conception of nature, I can now
turn to the specific issue of the functioning of our brain's, and in
particular to the pertinent question of the relationship between brain
processes and conscious thoughts.

There is a plethora of experimental data showing strong correlations
between brain processes and associated conscious thoughts. But the
*cause* of these correlations has not been established.

Many older well-established brain researchers are wed to the mechanistic
ideas of classical mechanics, which require the physically described
brain processes to be the sufficient causes of all mental activities.
The *apparent* causal effects of our thoughts and ideas upon our
physical actions are then deemed to be, actually, the causal effects
upon our brain process not our thoughts themselves, but rather of the
brain processes that are generating those thoughts.

The Harvard professor Daniel Wegner has written the book "The Illusion
of Conscious Will" defending this thesis, and there is a covey of
prolific writers, including Daniel Dennett, and Paul and Patricia
Churchland, who have made a business of defending this mechanistic view.

Of course, insofar as one accepts classical physics as the final
definitive science their position is indeed demanded by "science", no
matter how non-intuitive it may be. But the replacement of classical
science by quantum science completely frees the idea that our thoughts
can be effective causes of physical actions from the odium of being
contrary to science.

Quantum mechanics injects *concepts* into brain activity? But how does
it do it? And what benefits accrue from understanding how it does it?

From a business standpoint the problem is how to understand in a
rationally coherent way, in order to facilitate its occurrence, the
injection if innovative novel ideas into the lawful physical process
that sustains the development of the company. There seems to be a
logical conflict between lawful development of the physically described
aspects and the intrusion of novelty. The classical solution is to
conceive the person as a machine within the larger machine that is the
universe. But quantum theory provides a different way of resolving the
apparent conflict between lawful development and the incorporation of
innovation.

The first point is that classical mechanics generates observed behavior
at the macroscopic (say visible) level from lawful behavior at
underlying microscopic (say atomic) level. But when one descends to the
level of the atomic constituents of the brain, one finds that the
classical laws are inadequate: one must use the quantum laws. But the
effects of this replacement at the microscopic level percolates up to
the macroscopic level, and produce there the macroscopic brain analogs
of Schroedinger's famous cat, which is in part thoroughly dead and in
part thoroughly alive. The analog of this in the brain will generally be
a *continuous smear* of states, each one being a brain activity that is
preparing for a possible action that is intended to cope in some way
with the current situation in which the person finds himself.

This *continuous smear* of alternative possibilities arises from the
evolution, via the deterministic quantum mechanical laws, from an
earlier brain state that contains inherent quantum uncertainties
stemming from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

The problem, then, is that the mechanical laws, which are the direct
quantum generalizations of the mechanical laws of classical mechanics,
can do no more: they generate a state of the brain that corresponds to a
continuous smear of alternative possible courses for action, rather than
to one single possible course of action. Hence further processing is
needed!

Quantum mechanics deals with this problem by introducing first a process
that basically identifies *part* of the continuous quantum smear as one
conceptually characterized unit. A subsequent process then either
accepts (actualizes) this conceptually characterized unit or rejects it,
in accordance with a certain specified statistical rule. Then the
process repeats, thereby repeatedly infusing conceptually characterized
structure into the physically described world.

Thus quantum mechanics involves first injecting into the physical world
some uncertainties that the mechanical laws cannot cope with, and then
introducing new processes that repeatedly trim back the expanding
uncertainties in a way that introduce the concept- associated concepts
into the physically described world. A typical concept would be an image
of one's arm rising in some particular way, or of oneself articulating
some new idea. The physical counterparts of the concepts act
macroscopically, over large portions of the brain.

The quantum laws allow, and suggest, that a focusing of attention on a
concept will increase the repetition rate of the act of choosing that
concept. If this repetition can be made rapid enough then a well-known
quantum effect called the "quantum Zeno effect" will come into play and
tend to hold the brain pattern associated with this concept in place,
even in the face of strong physical forces that that would otherwise
quickly disrupt it. This provides a contemporary science-based
understanding of the way in which our willful actions can cause our
physical actions to conform to our conceptually formulated intentions.

The bottom line is that although contemporary culture tends to suggest
that a "scientific" understanding of behavior must be a basically
mechanistic understanding, in which the brain controls the mind,
contemporary (quantum) physics entails no such conclusion. On the
contrary, quantum mechanics provides an understanding of the mind-brain
connection that is not only completely in accord with intuition and
common sense, but that also describes the way in which mind-brain
process act to fashion the activities of our brains in the service of
our ideas. All the empirical findings of neuroscience are compatible
with quantum theory, and hence those findings can be used and exploited
without descending to the materialist mind set of some of the
neuroscientist who are producing the data.