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 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 seen to described not a self-sufficient physical 
reality that can exist independently of all minds, but rather our human 
knowledge of a reality of which we are integral components. 

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 
experimenters 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 
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 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 can now be understood to be an 
integral part of the causal process of nature, the question naturally 
arises: why not try to understand the role of mind in nature within the 
framework of the laws that cover the chemical and physical process 
that control brain activity?

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?