Future Visions Conference Position Paper.
(Henry Stapp)


Societal ramifications of the new scientific conception of 
human beings.
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A revolution occurred during the twentieth century in our scientific 
understanding of the nature of the physical world. This change is 
enormously important to religion, for it eliminates a basic conflict 
between science and the core religious belief.

Prior to this change, our scientific beliefs were based on 
an approach that was initiated in the seventeeth century by 
Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, and was completed early in 
the twentieth century Einstein. The basic conclusion from
that 250 years of science was simple: we live in a mechanical 
universe, and we, ourselves, are just complex machines. 
Science proclaimed that every motion of every part of the 
physical world is completely fixed by mechanical contact 
between adjacent tiny parts, and that our human bodies and 
brains are included in this mechanical world order. 

This scientific notion that man is a purely mechanical 
system contradicts what is probably the core religious belief, 
namely the idea that mind-like or spirit-like factors can 
make a difference in human  behaviour: the religious outlook 
assumes, I believe, that a human being, acting on 
basis of conscious choices, is NOT causally equivalent to a 
mechanical automaton whose every action is completely 
determined by direct interaction between tiny 
neighboring bits of matter.

The question of whether man is, or or not, just a complex 
mechanical device is not just an idle academic issue.
Differences in beliefs about this matter lead directly to 
divergent rules of conduct. Are we just machines created by 
genes to promote their own survival? Or are we integral parts 
of a deeper world order. Accepting the first alternative leads 
rationally to the treatment of other human beings as Pavlovian 
dogs to be conditioned to serve one's own desires: accepting 
the second alternative can lead to a more caring behaviour.

The key point for religion is this: Twentieth century 
science has shown the earlier mechanical conception of 
physical reality to be incompatible with the empirical 
facts. 

To cope with this failure of the earlier ideas physicists 
made a truly revolutionary change. Physical theory was 
converted from a theory about the physical world itself 
into a theory of WHAT COULD BE KNOWN about the physical world: 
information was introduced into the theory, and was made
fundamental.

The initial formulation of this new approach was called the 
Copenhagen interpretation. It had a serious drawback: it 
brought human knowledge into physical theory, but at the very 
stiff price of renouncing the possibility of understanding the 
underlying physical reality. However, the eminent mathematician 
John von Neumann and nobel laureate Eugene Wigner were able to 
reincorporate  physical reality by casting the new physics 
into a theory of the interaction between our thoughts 
or feelings and our physical brains.

The von Neumann-Wigner theory of mental-physical reality
was formulated in the early thirties. It encompassed all 
of the valid results of the earlier physical theories, 
and it rationally incorporated also our conscious thoughts 
into the basic dynamics. However, this theory was far 
ahead of its time: physicists were not yet ready to think 
seriously about the problem of the interaction between our 
thoughts and our brains. Moreover, the available data was 
then insufficient to make pursuit of the theory 
scientifically feasible. Now, however, there is a huge 
and rapidly growing fund of experimental data on this 
question of the connection between minds and brains, and 
this data supports the von Neuman-Wigner theory in many 
significant ways. Consequently, the serious exploitation 
and development of the von Neuman-Wigner formulation of 
quantum theory has now begun in earnest. 

This shift in science is important to religion in at least
four ways.  First, it removes the basic contradiction
between the older scientific claim that human beings are
essentially mechanical robots and the religious idea that 
men are not ruled by matter alone. Second, quantum physics, 
both in its original and von Neumann-Wigner forms, 
dynamically entangles our conscious thoughts with the 
quantum physicist's mathematical representation of the 
physical world. Third, the von Neumann-Wigner formulation 
provides the basic logical principles that govern the 
interaction between thoughts (or, more generally, feelings) 
and brains. Fourth, the new physics presents prima facie 
evidence that thoughts and feelings are linked to nature 
by nonlocal connections: what a person chooses to do in one 
region seems immediately to effect what is true elsewhere 
in the universe. This nonlocal aspect can be understood by 
conceiving the universe to be not a collection of tiny bits 
of matter, but rather a growing compendium of 
"bits of information".

This profound shift in what science says about the nature of 
physical reality , and of human beings, has not yet sunk into 
our culture. Thus one important thing that could be done to 
reduce the perceived disparity between the scientific and 
religious outlooks would be to promote the infusion into 
public awareness of an understanding of the radical shift 
wrought by quantum theory in our understanding of both nature,
and the nature of man.

This initiative would involve, for example, encouraging the
introduction into curricula, at all levels, of an emphasis, 
not on creationist ideas that run counter to scientific 
belief, but rather on the twentieth-century conception 
of nature in terms of information. False mechanistic ideas 
inculcated into tender minds at an early age are hard to 
dislodge later. If our children are taught the false doctrine 
that the actions of human beings are necessarily completely 
controlled by contact interactions between tiny mechanical 
parts then both science and religion are damaged. The 
progress of science is inhibited by imbuing young minds with 
a false idea of the nature of nature, and religious views 
are falsely maligned by teaching as scientific fact something 
that science has in fact proved false.
 
One might think that the ideas of quantum physics
are too counterintuitive for young minds to grasp.
Yet students have no trouble comprehending the even more 
counterintuitive classical idea that the solid chairs upon 
which they sit are mostly empty space. Children and 
students who, through their computers, deal all the time 
with the physical world conceived of as a repository and 
transmitter of information should grasp more easily the 
the quantum concept of the physical world as a store 
of information than the classical concept of the physical 
world as a horde of unseen particles that can somehow be, 
or control, human experience. A thoroughly rational concept 
into which one's own experiences fit neatly should be easier 
to comprehend than a mechanical scheme that has no 
natural place for one's efficacious thoughts, and which 
has confounded philosophers from the day it was 
invented, and which has now pushed some philosophers to the 
point of trying to convince us that consciousness, as we 
intuitively understand it, does not exist, or is an illusion, 
and other philosophers to the point of making truth a social 
construct. 

The fact that philosophers find themselves forced to such 
extremities suggests that they have been building on false
premises.  That suggestion is now validated by the
downfall, at the fundamental level, of the mechanistic
science from which they started. 

One problem stands in the way of pursuing this updating
of the curricula. Most quantum physicists are interested 
more in applications of quantum theory than in its
deep implications. Hence they normally endorse the 
`Copenhagen' philosophy of renouncing the quest to understand 
reality, and settling, instead, for practical rules that work. 
This desertion by physicist of their traditional goal of 
trying to understand the physical world means that there is 
now no official statement as to the nature of reality, or 
of the place of man within it. Still, I believe that there 
will be general agreement among quantum physicists that, to 
the extent that a rationally coherent conception of physical 
reality is possible, this reality will be informational in 
character, not material. For the whole language of the 
quantum physicist, when he is dealing with the meaning of 
his symbols, is in terms of information, which one may or 
may not choose to acquire, and in terms of Yes-or-No 
answers that constitute BITS OF INFORMATION. And I believe 
that most quantum physicist will also agree that our 
conscious thoughts ought eventually to be understood within 
science, and that when properly understood our thoughts 
will be seen to DO something: they will be efficacious.

Having been burned once---by the downfall of the seemingly
secure classical conception of the physical world---
physicists are understandably reluctant to be drawn into 
speculation about  the nature of reality. The vacuum thus 
created has undoubtedly been a major obstacle to the 
introduction of the new ideas into our curricula. However, 
silence is not a satisfactory alternative, for this leaves 
the field in the possession of those who promulgate the 
certainly false mechanistic conceptions, and those who, 
noting the desertion of the scientist from the search for 
the truth about nature, reject to whole concept that there 
is any real truth about anything, except the truth that 
there is no other truth. This opens the way to a descent 
into moral relativism. 

Given the importance of bringing ideas from contemporary 
science into play I think certain ontological claims are 
warranted, and are generally in line with what quantum 
physicists believe;

1. The ``physical world'', as understood in quantum theory, 
is a store of information, and this information is NOT 
imbedded in hordes of tiny particles, as they were conceived 
of in classical physical theory. The information is stored 
in a mathematically described structure that specifies also
propensities for certain events to occur. These events 
include, paradigmatically, the acquisition of information 
by human agents.

2. Conscious events should eventually be understood in 
science, and these events should be efficacious: they should 
have real effects on our actions.

Not many scientists yet realize  how beautifully and 
naturally the von Neumann-Wigner formulation of quantum theory
achieves these ends. But this is just a matter of dissemination
of information about a topic that has never been seriously 
broached in science, not because it was considered 
unimportant, but because it was deemed too difficult, 
and because the pertinent data seemed insufficiently 
restrictive. But these problems have now been overcome by 
fifty years of diligent experimentation by psychologists, 
and by a great deal of development on the theoretical side. 
[Refs. 1, 2, 3]


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1. http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/stappfiles.html
   "From quantum nonlocality to mind-brain interaction"

2. http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/stappfiles.html
   "Importance of decoherence in brain process""

3. Numerous published papers, references to, and copies of 
   which, can be found at the website cited above