Abstract Anyone who has studied modern physics cannot escape the impression, grandly reinforced by Bell’s theorem and the results of experiments testing that theorem, that the universe is a vast and seamless web of activity. For many physicists, however, the sense that the cosmos is fundamentally unified does not appear very comforting. “The more the universe seems comprehensible;’ wrote Steven Weinberg, “the more it seems pointless.” “Man,” said Jacques Monod, “lives on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to his music, just as indifferent to his sufferings or his crimes:’ And “life;’ lamented Gerald Feinberg, appears to be merely a “disease of matter.”
Abstract Anyone who has studied modern physics cannot escape the impression, grandly reinforced by Bell’s theorem and the results of experiments testing that theorem, that the universe is a vast and seamless web of activity. For many physicists, however, the sense that the cosmos is fundamentally unified does not appear very comforting. “The more the universe seems comprehensible;’ wrote Steven Weinberg, “the more it seems pointless.” “Man,” said Jacques Monod, “lives on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to his music, just as indifferent to his sufferings or his crimes:’ And “life;’ lamented Gerald Feinberg, appears to be merely a “disease of matter.”
Abstract The worldview of classical physics allowed the physicist to assume that communion with the essences of physical reality via mathematical laws and associated theories was possible, but it made no other provisions for the knowing mind. In our new situation, the status of the knowing mind seems quite different. All of modern physics contributes to a view of the universe as an unbroken, undissectible, and undivided dynamic whole. “There can hardly be a sharper contrast;’ said Melic Capek, “than that between the everlasting atoms of classical physics and the vanishing ‘particles’ of modern physics.”
Discos have always been rather an ordeal for me. I am musically dyslexic and, in the tribal society of adolescence, I should rightly have been considered disabled. Instead, at school I played rugby and read “nerdish” books. One was the incisive Chance and Necessity by Jacques Monod. Man is a machine, he asserted, and free will an illusion
Later, when I made the crossover from theoretical physics to medicine, I was surprised by the aggressive nihilism of the biologists' world view—for example, Richard Dawkins's pithy remark that “the world has precisely the properties one would expect if there is [at its root] nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
Consciousness, it seems, is a rather tragic Darwinian epiphenomenon. Free will is likewise illusory in a universe that is merely a game of Newtonian billiard balls—its outcome determined at that first, bleak, break of time. And its author is either long gone, or certainly currently uninvolved.
My surprise partly stemmed from the vehemence and certainty of those who propounded these views. Anyone who had the temerity to believe otherwise was “scientifically illiterate.”
Yet I had come from a discipline that had long since abandoned the model of the world as purely mechanistic. It was not possible to calculate the trajectory of even a simple electron without summing the wave function over the whole universe. Treat the problem as though all interactions must be local and you would simply get the answer wrong. The universe appeared interconnected in a way that left even my marijuana smoking, three lectures a month, arts student friends surprised. Biologists who knew anything about quantum mechanics maintained, not unreasonably, that quantum effects were averaged out long before reaching microscopic scales and therefore had no discernible consequences in biological systems. But this always seemed a little unlikely to me.
Maybe I am deluding myself that life has meaning and I have choice. But if so, I like the delusion, and have yet to come across a cogent argument that persuades me otherwise. I have, though, given up the belief that in a parallel universe I could dance like John Travolta. The universe is strange, but maybe not that strange.
The capacity to acquire and use fully complex language systems made the members of our species fully conscious and self-aware beings in the vast cosmos. But this enormous privilege came with a price. After our ancestors began to live storied lives in a linguistically based symbolic universe, the world that previous generations experienced as an integrated and undivided whole split into two worlds—an inner world where the self that is aware of its own awareness exists and an outer world in which this self seeks to gratify its needs and establish a meaningful sense of connection with other selves. And this explains why the most fundamental impulse in the storied lives of fully modern humans has always been to close the gap between these inner and outer worlds by integrating all seemingly discordant parts of a symbolic universe into a meaningful and coherent whole. The narrative that has consistently served this function is religion. But during the first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, another narrative emerged called Newtonian or classical physics that also promised to bridge the gap between self and world by integrating all of the seemingly discordant parts of the physical universe into a coherent and meaningful whole. In this physics, one universal force, gravity, governs the motion, interaction, and blending of indestructible atoms or mass points. And since the laws of gravity were completely deterministic, it was assumed that all events in the cosmos are predetermined by the forces associated with these laws and that the future of any physical system could be predicted with absolute certainty if initial conditions are known. In the worldview of classical physics, human beings were cogs in a giant machine and linked to other parts of this machine in only the most mundane material terms. The knowing self was separate, discrete, and isolated from the physical world, and all the creativity of the cosmos was exhausted in the first instant of creation. As physicist Henry Stapp points out, “Classical physics not only fails to demand the mental, it fails to even provide a rational place for the mental.
“I refute it thus!” Samuel Johnson famously dismissed Bishop George Berkeley's argument for the unreality of matter by kicking a large stone (Boswell, 1823). In the light of modern physics, however, Johnson's simple reasoning evaporates. Apparently solid matter is revealed, on closer inspection, to be almost all empty space, and the particles of which matter is composed are themselves ghostly patterns of quantum energy, mere excitations of invisible quantum fields, or possibly vibrating loops of string living in a ten-dimensional space–time (Greene, 1999). The history of physics is one of successive abstractions from daily experience and common sense, into a counterintuitive realm of mathematical forms and relationships, with a link to the stark sense data of human observation that is long and often tortuous. Yet at the end of the day, science is empirical, and our finest theories must be grounded, somehow, “in reality.” But where is reality? Is it in acts of observation of the world made by human and possibly non-human observers? In records stored in computer or laboratory notebooks? In some objective world “out there”? Or in a more abstract location? THE GROUND OF REALITY When a physicist performs an experiment, he or she interrogates nature and receives a response that, ultimately, is in the form of discrete bits of information (think of “yes” or “no” binary answers to specific questions), the discreteness implied by the underlying quantum nature of the universe (Zeilinger, 2004).
Current physics has progressed beyond the idea that there is an outside world lying somewhere entirely separate from ourselves. It has shown very clearly instead that there are real and functional connections between our minds and the world around us and that our human senses do not and cannot appreciate this more variable world of space-time, interaction and exchange as an objective and real place. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen were worrying about a part of physics called quantum theory which others like Bohr and Heisenberg were regarding as a complete theory. One new part of physics is suggesting that matter and the universe itself may have connections and correlations in an enfolded universe where there seem to be no clear causes and effects, but only connections.
Introduction We saw in Part I that in addition to explaining consciousness there is another hard problem for the modern scientific worldview – understanding what quantum physics is telling us about reality. And if anything this one is harder. In philosophy of mind there is at least consensus enough for an orthodox position to exist (materialism), and a widespread expectation that it will be vindicated by future neuroscience. By contrast, in philosophy of physics all sides understand that quantum theory is compatible with a variety of metaphysical interpretations, and have little hope that new empirical discoveries will settle the matter. But both problems are “hard” in the sense that, despite tremendous intellectual effort over many decades, no clear progress has been made toward solving them. The basic idea of quantum consciousness theory is that bringing the two problems into contact may be the key to solving both (though I will be addressing only the mind–body problem in what follows). That this could be a novel idea attests to the fact that their philosophical discussions have evolved quite separately. While philosophers of physics have long been interested in the role of consciousness in the measurement process, they have engaged little with the mind–body problem per se; and philosophers of mind have been almost unanimous in dismissing the suggestion that consciousness has anything interesting to do with quantum physics. Social scientists might echo such skepticism, wondering how adding the problem of interpreting quantum theory to the problem of consciousness will help them . Besides piling up jargon and arcane debates, in moving to the sub-atomic level we are now even farther removed from the human world, and seemingly poised to engage in the most vulgar reductionism. Yet, naïvely one might expect the two problems to be related, for two reasons. The first is the intriguing analogies mentioned in Chapter 1 between the mental and quantum domains.