UNESCO International Symposium on "Cultural Diversity and Transversal
Values:

East-West Dialogue on Spiritual-Secular Dynamics"

UNESCO Headquarters, Paris.

November 7 -- 9, 2005

On the Concept of the Human Being, East and West.

Henry P. Stapp

"...in the great drama of existence we ourselves are both actors and
spectators."

(Niels Bohr, drawing upon Chinese Philosophy.)

These words of Niels Bohr, later echoed by Werner Heisenberg, identify
the single most important advance in science made during in the past
three centuries. From the time of Isaac Newton to the end of the
nineteenth century, scientists proclaimed the universe to be a giant
machine ruled by mindless mechanical laws, with human beings mere
mechanical parts of this fundamentally mechanical reality. Philosophers
who sought rationality in the conduct of human affairs, but accepted the
findings of science, were led to the irrationality of allowing us act
*as if* our human choices could make a difference in the world, in the
face of the claim of science that that idea was an illusion. Rationality
could not be consistently maintained, within that scientific framework.

Early in the twentieth century it was found that this mechanical
conception of nature could not be reconciled with a flood of new
empirical data. A new theory was created. It dealt consistently and
successfully with both the new data and the old. Its most radical
innovation was to convert human beings from mechanistically controlled
spectators to "participants" whose actions could influence the physical
universe, yet be, themselves, uncontrolled by the known laws. In the
absence of such causal closure, our causally effective human choices
*were* *treated in actual practice* as determined in part directly by
our subjective thoughts, in close accord with normal intuition and the
great moral traditions of East and West. Thus the underlying technical
source of the schism between science and culture was dissolved by the
twentieth-century shift in science.

In addition to this re-assertion, within basic physical theory, of the
effective causal power of our thoughts, there was another basic change.
It is exemplified by a famous theorem proved by John Bell. It had been
thought that the effects of a human choice made in one region could not
appear in another region sooner than this effect could be carried there
by something traveling at the speed of light. But quantum theory allows,
and indeed seems to demand, that certain (not directly measureable)
effects appear essentially instantaneously in faraway places: Mental
actions *seem to have* instantaneous global effects. Quantum theory, and
all the known data, is certainly compatible with this possibility. Thus
contemporary physical theory provides a scientific foundation for a
conception of nature in which a global "mind", containing the
information/knowledge represented by the quantum state of the universe,
provides the framework within which our human minds and bodies operate.
This conception of nature is in general concordance with the great
traditions of East and West, but is much more definite and specific
because it incorporates, and conforms to, all the laws of contemporary
physics.

The image of ourselves as integral components of this global process,
with each of us contributing in his or her own way, via the laws of
physics, to the unfolding of this global mental-physical reality
provides a world view that is rationally compatible with both
contemporary science and the cultures of East and West, and also with
the notion of each of us as a responsible citizen in a global network of
causally effective agents that are both actors and spectators in the
great drama of existence.

This communication is an elaboration of the UNESCO-sponsored "Message
from Tokyo" of September 14, 1995.