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
sixteenth-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 shearing 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 asserted to described not
the physical system itself, but rather our knowledge of that system.

This original way of understanding and applying the quantum mathematics
was created by a group of physics working closely with the Danish
physicist Niels Bohr, and is called the \"Copenhagen interpretation\".
This understanding was closely tied to the actual experimental
procedures, which involve in the end the human experimenter who design
the experiments with some purpose in mind, and later record and
interpret the results of their investigations. This comprehension of the
theory defines the way the quantum mathematics is used operationally,
and it is the touchstone of all efforts to retain the practical utility
of quantum theory while expanding its scope into the domains of
cosmology and neuro-dynamics.

The foundations of all such efforts to increase the comprehensiveness 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
formulation of quantum theory it will be helpful, and also fascinating,
to appreciate the tremendous change in outlook instituted already by
Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and the other founders. For these
insights into the nature of the new theory are preserved in an altered
form by 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: it is 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
those connections between our experiences that the theory correctly
describes. The following brief collection of quotations by the founders
give 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 fellow scientists and
technicians 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\'\', because of 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 can imagine,
as some do, that a strange confusion has confounded our best minds for
seven decades, and that the strange conclusions of physicists should 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).

Philosophers have tried 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: neither the brain nor the body nor anything else in the world of
nature is composed of those bits of matter that Democritus and Newton
imagined the universe to be made of. Hence it is not surprising that
those endeavors of philosophers 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 to be
made of. The difficulties in reconciling mental realities with
pre-quantum 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.

Given these difficulties with the earlier approach, coupled with the
further fact that human experience now appears to be an important part
of the causal process of nature, the question naturally arises: why not
try to understand the role of mind in a physical world that conforms to
the mathematical rules that work.

Success in this endeavour is augured by the fact that the mathematical
structure uncovered by quantum physics, although highly
counter-intuitive to minds indoctrinated in classical concepts has an
amazing internal logical cohesion, as well as the capacity to correctly
predict numbers that can be measured to accuracies of one part in a
hundred million. This inner consistency combined with that incredible
precision means that quantum theory must embody some deep truth about
the structure of reality. And this truth brings human experiences into
the description even of external atomic processes. Can one then expect
to ignore it in the description of the organ of human experience itself?