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 science’s 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 pure philosophical speculation into issues covered by basic physical 
theory. The aim of this book is to explain this new idea of the nature of human 
beings and their causal role 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 man’s 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 one’s 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 one’s relationship to the power that shapes the 
universe. Such beliefs form the foundation of a person’s 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 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 man’s connection to that 
creator. Science, by casting doubt upon that belief, emasculated 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 person’s 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. 
This notion of human beings 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 one’s 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 picture of man is the image created by the science that reigned 
early in the twentieth century. According to that view the physical universe is 
composed of tiny separate bits of reality, and the unfolding, or evolution in time, 
of nature is completely fixed by direct contact interaction between these 
localized microscopic parts. Human beings, insofar as they belong to this 
physical aspect of nature, are simply conglomerations of these elemental 
material bits.
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. 
In place of the old idea Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, and their companions erected a 
vastly different conceptual framework. They were forced to a radical alteration 
of the very subject matter of physical theory itself by the strange character of 
the new mathematical rules, which were invariably validated by reliable empirical 
data.
The new theory accounts in a uniform manner for all the successes of the 
earlier physical theories, plus the immense mass 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 bits 
of information. Straightforwardly interpreted, the quantum rules describe a 
universe composed of a new kind of stuff, whose properties combine features 
formerly conceived to be imbedded in the physical world with aspects that belong 
to our streams of conscious thoughts.
The laws that govern the evolution of the world over the course of time differ 
significantly from the pre-twentieth century idea of these rules. According to the 
new physics, this evolution is specified not by a single causal process but rather 
by an interplay between two very different ones. The first of these is analogous 
to the operation that fixes the development of the material world in classical 
physics, and it is “locally deterministic”: what occurs at any point is completely 
fixed by what has just happened at nearby points. But that local rule is not the 
whole story. At certain instants a second kind of process intervenes: a 
“quantum jump” occurs. This intervention is highly non-local: it involves, in a well 
specified way, coordinated changes in regions that can lie far apart. The 
structure of these abrupt changes are mathematically similar to sudden 
increases in knowledge or information. Indeed, the original, and still orthodox, 
“Copenhagen” interpretation of quantum theory associates each quantum jump 
with an actual increase in somebody’s knowledge. Thus our basic scientific 
theory of the physical world, in its orthodox formulation, has become intrinsically 
entwined with our streams of conscious knowings.
The existence of this “second process” provides a reprieve from the classical-
physics verdict that human thoughts and feelings can make no difference in the 
flow of physical events. The new theory involves choices that are not 
determined by any currently known law of nature, but can nevertheless strongly 
influence the course of physical events. This means that contemporary science 
accommodates causally efficacious free will. The new physics allows, and in 
fact demands, the occurrence of happenings that, on the one hand, are fixed by 
no known law, yet, on the other hand, can influence in mathematically 
determined ways, both the unfolding of our thoughts and the course of our 
actions. The details of how this influence works match beautifully with the 
empirical findings that have accumulated over the past few decades in the field 
of The Psychology of Attention.
The potency and novelty of the new dynamics both stem directly from the 
property of “quantum entanglement”, and the closely related feature called 
“quantum nonlocality”. Entanglement is the property of two (or more) systems 
that have strongly interacted with each other but then moved far apart, to 
become, according to the theory, a single unified entity until observations are 
made that re-establish independent properties for the spatially separated parts.
This entanglement feature leads to the remarkable property of non-locality: no 
theory of nature can both accommodate the predictions of quantum theory and 
confine all influences of free choices to regions that can be reached by traveling 
no faster than light.
The upshot of these radical changes is this: Taken at face value, the new 
mathematical description of the universe portrays a world in which your mind 
can by free-willed actions influence, although not completely control, what 
happens in your body/brain. This participatory view contrasts starkly with the 
earlier science-based image of the human person as a conglomeration of 
atoms being mindlessly buffeted about by the chance collisions of atoms.
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 one’s 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 one’s 
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 well-being of the group than to that of your bodily self. 
In the present context it is not relevant whether this human tendency to enlarge 
one’s 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 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 to survive. 
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 the 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 relation  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 early twentieth  
century, a person’s 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 being a strictly determined high-level consequence 
of the low-level mechanical process.
This materialist conception of reality began to crumble at the beginning of the 
twentieth century with Max Planck’s discovery of the quantum of action. Planck 
announced to his son that he had, on that day, made a discovery as important 
as Newton’s. 
That assessment was certainly correct: the ramifications of Planck’s discovery 
were eventually to cause Newton’s materialist conception of physical reality to 
come crashing down.  Planck’s 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 observer’s point of view.
Planck’s discovery led by the mid twenties to a complete break-down, 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 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 and independent 
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 one’s point of view, and were mere artifacts of some 
particular social group’s 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 Neumann’s 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 Neumann’s 
formulation of quantum theory is the starting point of all efforts by physicists to 
go beyond the pragmatically magnificent but ontologically incoherent 
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 into the structure of basic physical theory. 
How this is done, and what the consequences are, is the subject of this book. 
But before plunging directly into this topic I shall say a little more about knowings.

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 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. 

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: 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 the 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 
function…takes 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 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 may 
imagine, as some do, that a strange confusion has confounded 
our best minds for seven decades, and that the strange 
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). 

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 tiny bits of matter that 
Democritus and Newton imagined the universe to be made of. 
Hence it is hardly 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 in the universe 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 is now understood to be a 
central player in our best theory of all purely physical phenomena, 
the question naturally arises: why not try to understand the role of 
mind in the workings of the thinking brain?

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 of atomic processes. Can one then expect to 
ignore it in the description of the organ of experience itself?