9. VALUES.

This book began with the observation that the claims of science about 
what you are and how you are connected to ‘the other’ can affect 
your values. Our focus so far has been upon the advances in 
science. They are important. But we can return now to the question of 
the impact of those advances upon values.

I have already mentioned the matter of personal responsibility for 
one’s acts. This concept has been greatly corroded by the notion that 
we are simply the product of our genes and our environment, and 
hence are not responsible for anything we do: that our actions are 
just automatic consequences of blind mechanical processes of one 
kind or another. The notion of conscious control is being increasingly 
dismissed as some weird illusion, disproved by “modern science,” 
which supposedly reveals us to be mechanical robots deluded by the 
absurd belief that such insubstantial and immaterial phantasms as 
our thoughts could affect the implacable march of the atoms.

There can be no doubt that this notion of the ineffectualness of our 
minds to control our actions has gained great standing and credibility 
in our legal, social, intellectual, institutional, and philosophical 
systems, and that this idea has drawn immense support from the 
authority of science. But the picture of the human agent that flows 
most naturally from quantum theory, in its most rational form that tries 
to go beyond mere pragmatic rules, namely the formulation by von 
Neumann, is very different, and in good agreement with both intuition 
and the empirical facts. The corrected physics provides an actual 
mechanism whereby mental effort can control physical actions, while 
leaving open, so far, exactly what the origin of this feeling of effort is. 
This mental effort controls an effect that is capable in principle of 
overriding the strongest forces arising from the mechanical side of 
nature. This development in physics undercuts the verdict of 
nineteenth century science, and rescues intuition and moral values 
based on that intuition.

A second effect pertains to non-locality. I mentioned in connection 
with Process I the possibility of including within physics the further 
process, Process III. In order to focus on Process I, I left open the 
issue of whether the “collapse” Process III, really occurs as an 
objective physical process, or is merely some sort of subjective 
illusion. Having deflated the claim that the causal efficacy of our 
thoughts is an illusion, we are led naturally to question also the claim 
that Process III is a mere subjective illusion. But if Process III is 
accepted as an objectively real physical process then one is led 
inexorably to the conclusion that real Process-I events are related by 
causal connections that are instantaneous in some frame of 
reference. These causal connections relate the Process-I events that 
create you as a thinking entity to ontologically similar events all over 
the universe. This gives you an image of yourself that is far different 
from the conception of yourself as a pile of dirt, or a vehicle 
constructed by mindless genes for a purpose they do not know. That 
latter picture generates low self esteem, compared to the idea of 
yourself as a creative mental force enacting high-level judgments, 
and charged with giving form to the universe, in coordination with a 
vast array of similar creative centers with which you are 
instantaneously but non-physically connected. 

Level of self-esteem is a primary determinant of quality of endeavor, 
and the replacement of the classical image of yourself by its quantum 
update cannot have no effect on the value you place on yourself and 
your efforts on behalf of the reality of which you are such an integrally 
connected and significant part.