1.	SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES.

This book is about what you are, and how you are connected to what 
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 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 converted connections that formerly had been matters of 
pure philosophical speculation into causal properties dealt with by 
basic physical theory.
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 man. 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 man’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 his 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 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 over 
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, 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 amount of newer 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 information. 
Straightforwardly interpreted, the quantum rules describe a universe 
built out 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 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 that 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, statistical or otherwise, yet, on the other hand, 
can influence in mathematically determined ways, the flow of our 
experiences about the physical world. 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: although the theory gives you the capacity to make free 
choices that can influence your future experiences, some of those 
those possible futures must in some cases be influenced before any 
influence traveling at the speed of light could arrive by similar free 
choices made faraway 

But 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, but 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.
But what impact, if any, does 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 humans beings do in fact have the capacity to 
expand our image of "self", and an 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, and applicable to, all men, 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 Man 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 reality 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. 
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 of 
describing reality completely in terms of tiny bits of matter was 
abandoned, and science was construed to be a human endeavor to 
understand the structure of human experience, rather than a quest to 
discover the form of nature herself. 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 of doing it are, is the subject of this book. I begin by 
sketching out a little more of the historical background.