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 
sciences 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 mans 
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 ones 
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 ones relationship 
to the power that shapes the universe. Such beliefs form the 
foundation of a persons 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 mans 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 persons 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 ones 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 mans 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 Neumanns 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 Neumanns 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 whats 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 Neumanns 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 Neumanns 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 ones 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 ones 
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 ones 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 persons 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 Plancks discovery 
of the quantum of action. Planck announced to his son that he 
had, on that day, made a discovery as important as Newtons. 
That assessment was certainly correct: the ramifications of 
Plancks discovery were eventually to cause Newtons 
materialist conception of physical reality to come crashing 
down.  Plancks 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 observers point 
of view.
Plancks 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 ones point of view, and were mere 
artifacts of some particular social groups 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 Neumanns 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 Neumanns 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 functiontakes 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 observers 
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 sciences conception of 
the human person?