SCIENCE, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND SPIRITUALITY.
(Addendum to my Freiburg Talk, July 3, 2008)


1. Science.

I characterize "Science" as the ongoing effort
to understand scientific data, where "scientific data"
are phenomena that are "effectively repeatable" and 
"robust". 

Heraclitus emphasized that:
 "We never step into the same river twice."
The world never returns to a former state.

So by "effectively repeatable" is meant only
that we are able to repeatedly re-create
conditions of observation in which the seemingly
pertinent controllable conditions are nearly identical. 

"Robust" means that under these conditions the 
observational feedbacks conform to statistical 
regularities when extended over sufficiently long 
experimental runs. The robustness condition  rules 
out phenomena that exhibit the so-called 
"decline effect", which seems to afflict all of the 
so-called "psi" phenomena that are "effectively 
repeatable".

Science has two separable aspects: 1) the empirical/
phenomenal/experiential aspect, and 2) the theoretical
aspect.


2. Theory

In the 'classical physics framework" that stemmed from 
the work of Isaac Newton, and that was regarded as 
the basic physics from the time of Newton until the 
rise of quantum mechanics in the early twontieth century,
the basic theoretical framework rested exclusively  on 
"physical" properties, which can be characterized as 
properties that are specified by attaching mathematical 
properties to spacetime points, and which are supposed 
to conform to physical laws that fix exactly the 
physically described future in terms of the physically 
described past. 

The experiential or phenomenal aspects of reality, 
which are the only aspects that we actually "know", are, 
within the classical framework, regarded as merely some 
causally superfluous add-on: e.g., as the psychologically 
described streams of consciousness of "observers" who 
passively witness the physically described aspects without 
affecting them; or perhaps as some psychologically 
described epiphenomemenal (without-causal-physical-effect) 
by-product of the physically described processes 
occurring in our brains/bodies.

A main point is that Heisenberg's creation
of quantum mechanics arose from his move to step back
from this marginalization of observations. 
Following the lead of Einstein's creation of the 
(special) theory of relativity, Heisenberg focussed on 
observable properties, and eventually arrived at the 
conclusion that the ordering of the acts of observation 
was important, and hence that the acts of observation 
were not purely passive.

The acts of measurement/observation thus became a central
feature of the theory. The mathematical and conceptual
structure of the (quantum) theory is somewhat similar 
to that of classical STATISTICAL mechanics, which is 
explicitly about "our knowledge" of the world, and in 
which there are, correspondingly, abrupt "reductions" of the
probability function when new knowledge is received (see 
TUTORIAL for specifics), rather than being explicitly about some 
physically describable world imagined to be causally closed 
without any consideration of the process by means of which
what is described in physical terms becomes known.
  

3. The World As Interaction of 
Collective/Objective  Knowledge with Subjective Knowledge.

The world, as it reveals itself to us via the laws
of quantum mechanics, is most easily understood, not in terms
of a mechanical universe causally divorced from our knowledge
of it, but instead as an interplay between two kinds of 
knowledge: 1), Our individual subjective streams of conscious
knowledge; and 2), An absolute, objective, collective body of
knowledge faithfully represented by the evolving quantum 
state of the universe. 

In QM, an individual subjective stream of consciousness influences
nature's dynamical process by means of a "local choosing" of 
a question (von Neumann's process 1). Nature's response to the 
collection of local probing questions is a GLOBAL response, in 
the specific sense that it specifies local answers to all of 
the locally posed questions, and these local responses take 
into account which questions were locally posed globally, in
in far-apart regions. The responding process seems to "know"
what questions have been asked over an entire collection of
spacelike separated regions of the universe, and to respond, 
accordingly, in these spacelike separated regions.

4. Spiritually

I have always refrained from talking about "spirituality",
prefering to stick closely to science. I shall here
continue to stick to science, but will, nevertheless. say some 
things relevant to the concept of spirituality. 


The response process described by QM appears to be able to 
"act" coherently over large spacelike distances, on the basis 
of a "knowing" that accesses the inputs subjectively  created 
at spacelike separated sites. This essential "non-locality" property 
suggests that nature is, or has, an agency that can be conceived 
to operate in a way that is somewhat similar our conception of 
how we ourselves operate, but possessing, or manifesting, a 
far more global reach. Each subjective stream of consciousness 
appears, from this perspective, to an aspect of a global whole, 
in the specific sense that the individual subjective components 
contribute inputs into the global aspect, and then receive from 
it responses that reveal the global character of the responding 
agency.

This knowledge-based conception of nature seems better able 
to provide an understanding of the scientifically revealed  
properties of nature than what the mechanistic 
world view of classical physics can provide.

The claim here is not that anything has been PROVED, but
merely that, from an unbiased standpoint, a global knowledge-
based ontology appears to provide a more natural foundation 
for understanding the scientific data than a mechanism-based
ontology. The latter is more difficult to reconcile with 
both the nonlocal (holistic) aspect of quantum phenomena 
and the "collapse" or "reduction" feature. The reduction
feature is, of course, completely natural for a faithful 
representation of knowledge, but is not natural for a 
faithful representation of a machine.