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

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

It may seem to you that the gap between quantum mechanics and business
management is so huge that no discussion of the former could possibly be
relevant to the latter.

That assessment fails in at least 5 ways, which I shall describe
presently! But all 5 are connected to one single point: in today's
business setting, which is driven increasingly more by *rapidly
changing* *ideas* than by slowly changing material factors, an
understanding of the *dynamics of ideas* becomes important. Key people
in today's workforce are creators and implementers of ideas, rather than
pre-programmed cogs in giant machines. Quantum mechanics is therefore
uniquely pertinent, because it is fundamentally *the science of the*
*dynamics of ideas*. Consequently, it is the appropriate scientific
framework for the analysis and development of business organizations
that depend upon the creation and rapid utilization of new ideas.

Historically, the structures of business and of industry, and of social
organizations in general, reflect to a remarkable degree the reigning
scientific conception of its day. 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 the
machine into the age of ideas. Hence the theory of effective
organizations is bound shift from machine- oriented classical science to
idea-oriented quantum science, which converts the role of human beings
from automatic responders to creators, within a structured context, of
*concepts* that resolve issues that the purely mechanical rules cannot
manage.

I will now briefly describe the 5 points mentioned above:

1\. The first concerns downfall during the 20^th^ century of the
principle of "The causal closure of the physical." The precepts of
classical mechanics entailed that the physical world works like giant
machine, with its future completely fixed by its past, and with no
causal input from anything that is not completely described in purely
physical terms. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, contains *two
causal gaps*. Those gaps render the purely physical description of the
world causally incomplete!

2\. The second point is this: One of the two causal gaps is partially
filled by a statistical rule. However, the other gap is filled, in
actual practice, by the *injection of concepts into the causal
structure*. Thus the science-based picture of nature has shifted from
that of a giant machine, in which human beings enter as mechanical
automata, to that of an evolving field of *potentialities* for *events*
to occur. These *events* are the new basic actualities! The way nature
works is this: Each event resolves uncertainties *by injecting a
concept* *in the form of a yes-or-no question*. This question is
answered by nature in accordance with the afore-mentioned statistical
rule. A 'Yes' answer incorporates the associated *concept* into the
structure of reality.

3\. The third point is this: The quantum mechanical laws permit mental
effort to activate a well-known quantum effect, called the *quantum Zeno
effect,* in order to hold in place the pattern of brain activity that
initiates a conceived pattern of physical action.

4\. The fourth point is that this same quantum mechanism mediates also a
*quantum veto effect*, which negates a potential course of action that
fails to meet *conceptual standards*.

5\. The fifth point is that the contemporary scientific conception both
of *nature as a whole*, and of *each of its subsystems*, is no longer
that of a machine. It is, instead, that of an evolving web of
*potentialities* connected at *nodes*. Each node represents the
*injection of a concept* that partially resolves uncertainties inhering
in the confluence potentialities upon which it acts. This contemporary
science-based idea of the world, and of the role of human beings within
it, is the appropriate and useful foundation for the scientific analysis
and design of 21^st^ century idea-based businesses than the mechanistic
concept invented during the 17^th^ century.

Of course no sane designer of an idea-based business would consciously
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: a 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 comprehend the huge implications
for their work of the replacement of classical science by quantum
science. They fail to appreciate that contemporary science *both allows
in principle,* *and demands in practice*, the causal effectiveness of
ideas. However, ingrained mental habits generally persist unchecked,
until a rationally coherent alternative is recognized.

I shall now fill in some of the details.

As we all know, Rene Descartes proposed, during the first half of the
17^th^ century, the idea that nature was divided into two realms, mind
and matter, which are roughly the things studied in psychology and
physics, respectively. He claimed that these two parts interact inside
human brains, but only inside human brains.

During the second half of the 17^th^ century Isaac Newton created the
foundations of what is now called "classical mechanics". The main idea
is that the physical or "material" universe is, *by itself*, causally
closed: the course of the physical universe for all times is
mechanically determined by mathematical laws involving physical
properties *alone*, with no reference to, or dependence upon, anything
in the mental realm.

This mechanical conception of nature provided the 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 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 was appropriate. 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, and hence
the efficient development and deployment of pertinent new ideas are now
focal points of business design. Hence mechanistic models that
essentially ignore them, or treat them as causal "zeros", or as
mysterious, gratuitous, causally inert by-products of brain process that
are too complex to understand, are inappropriate and inadequate.

Business designers and managers, while of course recognizing the need to
shift from the science of machines to science of ideas, must fight the
three hundred years of theory and practice that is imbedded in almost
every aspect of contemporary society, and the pervasive attitude that
proclaims that a "rational scientific approach" must be the mechanistic
one, which essentially ignores the proper object of interest: *the
dynamics* *of ideas*.

Quantum mechanics has a radically different structure: it converts the
physically described world of classical mechanics into a world of
mathematically described potentialities. But what are these
potentialities *potentialities for*? The answer is this: these
potentialities are potentialities for *events* to occur! Each such event
represents a selection of concept that divides the existing
potentialities into a Yes-part and a No-part, followed by an
*actualization* of either the Yes-part or the No-part, and the
*elimination* of the other part. This is the famous *collapse* of the
physical state of the system to a new state compatible with some
selected concept.

Each such event has both a conceptual aspect and a physical aspect.
Neither the *potential* nor the *event* makes sense by itself: the
*potentia* is the potential for *an event* to happen, and the *event* is
a reduction of the existing *potentia* to a conceptually specified
subset. Thus neither aspect is a "substance" according to the meaning
used by Descartes when he claimed that the totally was separated into
mental and physical "substances".

Quantum mechanics describes the rules of the interplay of conceptual
forms, within the bounds specified by the physically described
potentialities, which the concepts themselves shape.

In the context of business design the quantum model applies at many
levels:

1.  At the level of the interplay of the concepts that drive the
    company, and that are generated by it, with physical representations
    and propagation of these concepts within the world of commerce.

2.  At the level of the interplay of concepts that drive the individuals
    in the company, and that are generated by them, with the physical
    representation and propagation of these concepts within the company.

3.  At the level of the interplay between concepts aspects of the
    individual worker in the company and his own brain.

> In all cases, the concepts are treated as the palpable realities, with
> the physical manifestations treated as the representations and
> propagators of these conceptually characterized realities.
>
> That shift in perspective is the bottom line of the quantum approach,
> and it is applicable to all aspects of life. Indeed, it provides a
> possibly adequate foundation for moral and ethical behavior, which the
> classical mechanical model surely does not!

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.

Most older well-established brain researchers are wed to the mechanistic
ideas of classical mechanics, which require the physically described
brain processes, together with outside physically described processes,
to be the sufficient causes of all brain activities. The *apparent*
causal effects of our thoughts and ideas upon our actions are then
deemed to be, in truth, the causal effects upon our brain process not of
our thoughts themselves, but rather of the brain processes that are
generating our 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 the 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 intuitive understanding
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?

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 gathers *part* of the continuous quantum smear into one
conceptually characterized unit. A subsequent process then either
accepts (actualizes) this conceptually characterized unit or rejects it,
in accordance with a certain statistical rule. Then the process repeats,
thereby repeatedly infusing the physical situation with conceptual
structure.

Thus quantum mechanics involves first injecting into the physical world
certain uncertainties that the mechanical laws cannot cope with, and
then introducing new processes that repeatedly trim back the expanding
uncertainties in a way that infuses concepts into the physically
described part. Some typical concepts would be an image of one's arm
rising in some particular way, or of oneself articulating some new idea.
These processes that inject 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 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.

This look at the radical innovations introduced by the transition from
classical science suggests that the connections between neural processes
and mental processes that lie at the root of this meeting may, for the
purposes at hand, be better understood, within science, in terms of the
quantum model, in which our thoughts *per se* are the central causal
agents of progress, rather than in terms of the mechanistic ideas of
classical physics, in which our thoughts are mere causally inert
excretions of our conditioned brains.