**1. SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES.**

This book is about what you are, and how you are connected to that which
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 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
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 of 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 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 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 physical
describable reality, are simply conglomerations of these tiny
components.

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 new theory, quantum theory, accounts in a uniform manner for all the
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,
basic reality behaves more like *mathematically encoded information*
that governs *tendencies for experiential events to occur*, than like
anything resembling material substance. The new mathematics converts
what the previous theory took to be *numbers* describing material
properties into *actions and knowledge*: it converts *being* into
*doing* and *knowing.* Moreover, according to this new understanding,
the natural world is governed not by one single locally deterministic
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 aspect of the new theory of main interest
to physicists, engineers, and other workers not concerned with the
psychological 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. It is an essential feature of the
structure created by the founders of quantum theory, and is called
"Process I" in the rigorous formulation of the theory constructed by the
eminent mathematician John von Neumann in his seminal book *The
Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory*. Process I describes a
*causal influence of conscious human 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,
many quantum physicists have worked assiduously to eradicate this
contamination of the physics by psychology, on the grounds that it
injects subjective elements in a fundamental way into a discipline that
they believe should be basically objective. However, in spite of massive
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.

This revised conception of the causal connection between your thoughts
and your actions amounts to a new understanding of your intrinsic
nature. Widespread awareness of this revised conception of the human
person has been effectively excluded from the minds of non-physicists by
the focus of popular accounts of quantum theory on another novel
feature: the occurrence of a statistical or random element. But Process
I is something else. It pertains to choices that are *not controlled by
any known law or rule of nature*, statistical or otherwise. It involves,
in this very specific sense, *efficacious* *free choices*: choices that
can significantly influence the course of physical events, but are not
controlled either deterministically or statistically by any known law.
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 vanishes when one goes over to the
classical approximation to the quantum laws.

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
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 have been beset by enormous difficulties, which have 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, erected, in desperation, upon 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 false belief in the
causal completeness of the physical world.

The conflict of intuition with classical physics can be illustrated by
comparing a body/brain to a locomotive. The locomotive, with its pistons
and rods etc., are "emergent phenomena": locomotives have not always
been around, and their coming into being is not a rational consequence
of the laws of classical physics. But if a locomotive does come into
being, then, according to classical physics, its physical properties
(together with those of its physical environment) are, in principle,
sufficient to determine its future physical behavior. And the same goes
for the body/brain of a person. These purportedly dynamically complete
features are specified by the *geometric properties* of the *locations
and velocities* of all of the tiny component parts of these systems.
These properties entail all sorts of geometric properties of
conglomerations of these elements, and, by virtue of the dynamical laws,
all sorts of behavioral and functional properties. But these geometric
properties do not entail the existence of any psychological quality,
such as a painful feeling or a colorful percept. That is because the
concepts and laws of classical physics, although dynamically complete,
do not contain any link to the defining characteristics of experiential
feelings, namely the way they feel, But, as every mathematician and
logician knows, no proof or deduction can ever get out more than what is
put in. Because the existence of experiential qualities is not
*entailed* by the dynamically complete concepts and laws of classical
physics (and the geometric structure of the body/brain) they cannot be
parts of the dynamically complete causal description provided by
classical physics. Hence they are at best redundant. Yet they are not
even redundant, in the sense of giving an alternative rationally
entailed cause of physical effects. That is because their defining
characteristics\-\--*namely the ways that they feel*\-\--are not
expressible in terms of the geometric concepts, and hence there can be
no rational way to tie them into the geometrical structure of classical
physics: there is a complete rational disconnect between our consciously
experienced feelings and the concepts of classical physics, and hence no
rational way within classical physics to account for either the power of
our thoughts to influence our actions, or for the illusion of the
existence of this power.

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 inserting known experiential realities into a conceptual
structure that has no rational place for them. Indeed, the problem with
quantum theory is not an *over* determination that leaves no rational
place for mind. It is rather an *under* determination that leaves many
possibilities open. I shall not attempt to describe all the
possibilities, but will be content to present what appears to me to be
the most reasonable way of filling in some of the unspecified details of
von Neumann's Process I. Other options may be available. But, in any
case, the participatory quantum view of the conscious human agent opens
up possibilities wholly unlike the classical image of the human person
as a conglomeration of atoms being mindlessly buffeted about by the
chance collisions of atoms.

The way I shall fill in certain details of von Neumann's Process I
allows it to function naturally in systems existing long before
creatures such as ourselves roamed the planet. It also allows this
process to be utilized by simple and complex systems alike to enhance
their chances of survival.

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 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 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 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
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 late nineteenth 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 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 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. KNOWINGS.**

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 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 and their parts 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 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\' 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\'. \'\'

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.\'\'

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.

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 effect science's conception of the human person?