**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. 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 mathematical 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 wavelike 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 wave-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 organization and separating it from the prior
state S. 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 organized state of equilibrium, 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. Some physicists find this
conclusion 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.

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 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.

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. Thus 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 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. Mental effort can make a big difference in brain activity!
And the dynamical equations that allow mental effort to make this big
difference lie at the core of quantum theory.