\newpage 
{\bf Appendix B. Knowings, Knowledge, and Causality.}

I shall flesh out here the idea that Nature is built out 
of knowings, not matter.

A typical knowing of the kind that quantum theory is built upon
is a knowing that the pointer on the measuring device appears to lie
between the numbers 6 and 7 on the dial. This is the sort of fact
that all (or at least most) of science is built upon. It is quite
complex. The idea that the appearance pertains to a dial on something
that acts as a measuring device has a tremendous amount of education
and training built into it. Yet somehow this  knowing has this background
idea built into it: that idea is a part of the experience.

William James says about perceptions:

``Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops 
of perception.  Intellectually and upon reflection you can divide 
these into components, but as immediately given they come totally 
or not at all.''

This fits perfectly with Copenhagen quantum theory, which takes these
gestalts as the basic elements of the theory. In the von Neumann/
Wigner type ontology adopted here there is, in association
with this knowing, a collapse of the state vector of the universe.
It is specified by acting on this state with a projection operator
that acts on the degrees of freedom associated with the brain of the
perceiver, and that reduces the state of the body/brain of the observer,
and consequently also the state of the whole universe, to the part of 
that state that is compatible with this knowing. 

So a knowing is a complex experiential type of event that, however, 
according to the theory, occurs in conjunction with a correspondingly 
complex ``physical'' event that reduces the state of the the brain/body 
of the person to whom the experience belongs to the part of that state 
that is compatible with the knowing. [I shall use the word ``physical''
to denote the aspect of nature that is represented in the Hilbert-space 
description used in quantum theory: this aspect is the quantum analog 
of the physical description of classical physics.]

That ``person'' is a system consisting of a sequence of 
knowings bound together by a set of tendencies that are specified by
the state of the universe. This state is essentially a compendium of 
prior knowings. However, these knowings are not merely human knowings, 
but more general events of which human knowings are a special case.

In strict Copenhagen interpretation quantum theory is regarded as merely a 
set of rules for making predictions about human knowledge on the basis of 
human knowledge: horses and pigs do not make theoretical calculations using
these ideas about operators in Hilbert space, and their ``knowings''
are not included in ``our knowldge. 

But in a science-based {\it ontology} it would be unreasonable to posit 
that human knowledge plays a singular role: human knowings must be 
assumed to be particular examples of a general kind of ``knowings'' that 
would include ``horse knowings'' and ``pig knowings''. These could be 
degraded in many ways compared to human knowings, and perhaps richer 
in some other dimensions, but they should still be of the same general 
ontological type. And there should have been some sort of things of this 
general ontological kind even before the emergence of life.
[In the section, ``What is Consciousness'', I have tried to provide an 
intuition about what a knowing associated with a nonbiological system
might be like.]

Science is an ongoing endeavor that is expected to develop ever more  
adequate (for human needs) ideas about the nature of ourselves and of 
the world in which we find ourselves. Newton himself seemed to 
understand this, although some of his successors did not. But the 
present stage of theoretical physics makes it clear that we certainly 
do not now know all the answers to even the most basic questions: physics 
is still very much in a groping stage when it comes to the details of 
the basic underlying structure. So it would be folly, from a scientific 
perspective, to say that we must give specific answers now to all
questions, in the way that classical physics once presumed to do. 

This lack of certainty is highlighted by the fact that the 
Copenhagen school could claim to give practical rules that worked in the
realm of human knowledge without paying any attention to the question
of how nonhuman knowings entered into nature. And no evidence contrary to
Copenhagen quantum theory has been established. This lack of data about
nonhuman knowledge would make it presumptuous, in a science-based approach,
to try to spell out at this time details of the nature of nonhuman knowings,
beyond the reasonable presumption that animals with bodies structurally 
similar to the bodies of human beings ought, to the extent they also
behave like human beings, to have similar experiences. But knowings cannot 
be assumed to be always exactly the kinds of experiences that we human beings 
have, and they could be quite different.

The knowings that I mentioned at the outset were percepts: knowings 
that appear to be knowings about things lying outside the person's body. 
But, according to the von Neummann/ Wigner interpretation, each such knowing 
is actually connected directly to the state of the person's 
body/brain, after that event has occurred. This state of the body/brain
will, in the case of percepts of the external world, normally be correlated 
to aspects of the state of the universe that are not part of the
body/brain. But experienced feelings, such as the feelings of warmth, joy,
depression, devotion, patriotism, mathematical understandings, etc. are not 
essentially different from percepts: all are experiences that are
associated with collapse events that reduce the state of the 
body/brain to the part of it that is compatible with the experience.. 

I have spoken here of a body/brain, and its connection to an experience. 
But what is this body/brain? It seems to be something different
from the knowing that it is connected to. And what is the nature of this
connection?

The body/brain is an aspect of the quantum mechanically described state 
of the universe. This Hilbert-space state (sometimes called density
matrix) is expressed as a complex-valued function of two vectors, each of 
which is defined over a product of spaces, each of which corresponds to 
a degree of freedom of the universe. Any system is characterized by a 
certain set of degrees of freedom, and the state of that system is 
defined by taking the trace of the state of the universe over all 
other degrees of freedom, thereby eliminating from this state any 
explicit reference to those other degrees of freedom. 

In this way the state of each system is separately definable, 
and dependent only on its own degrees of freedom, even though the system 
itself is basically only an aspect of the whole universe. Each part 
(i.e., system) is separately definable, yet basically ontologically 
inseparable from the whole: that is the inescapable basic message of 
quantum theory. Each system has a state that depends only on its own 
degrees of freedom, and this system, as specified by its state, is 
causally pertinent, because each knowing is associated with some system, 
and the probabilities for its alternative possible knowings are specified 
by its own state, in spite of the fact that the system itself is 
fundamentally an inseparable part of the entire universe. It is the
properties of the trace operation that reconciles these disparate 
requirements
 
The state of the universe specifies only the probabilities
for knowings to occur, and it generally undergoes an instantaneous
global instantaneous jump when a new knowing occurs. But this
probability, by virtue of the way it jumps when a new knowing occurs,
and suddenly changes in regions far away from the system associated 
with the new knowing, and that it is formulated in terms of infinite
sets of pssibilities that may never occur, is more like an idea or a 
thought than a material reality. Indeed, these properties of the state 
are exactly why the founders of quantum theory were led to the conclusion 
that the mathematical formalism that they created was about knowledge.

The state of the universe is the preserved compendium of all knowings.
More precisely, it is an aspect of that compendium that expresses certain
statistical properties pertaining to the next knowing. There is
presumeably some deeper structure, not captured by the properties
expressed in the Hilbert-space mathematical structure, that fixes what
actually happens. 

The knowings that constitute our experiences are the comings into being 
of  bits of knowledge, which join to form the knowledge that is 
represented by the state of the universe. This gives an ontology
based on knowings, with nothing resembling matter present. But the 
statistical causal structure of the sequence knowings is expressed in 
terms of equations that are analogs of the mathematical laws that 
governed the matter postulated to exist by the principles of classical 
mechanics. This connection to classical mechanics is enough to ensure a 
close similarity between the predictions of classical mechanics and those 
of quantum mechanics in many cases of interest, even though the two 
theories are based on very different mathematical structures.   

If one starts from the ontological framework suggested by classical
mechanics the questions naturally arise: Why should experiences exist
at all? And given that they do exist, Why should they be composed of
such qualities as sensations of (experiential) colors and (experiential)
sounds, and feelings of warmth and coldness, and perceptions of
simple geometric forms that correspond more directly to the shapes of
structures outside the body/brain than to  structures (such as patterns
of neural excitations that are presumably representing these various 
features) inside the body/brain. How do these experiential types of 
qualities arise in a world that is composed exclusively of tiny
material particle and waves? The experiential qualities are not 
constructible from their physical underpinnings in the way that  
all the physical properties of a tornado are, according to classical
mechanics, constructible from its physical constituents.  

Quantum theory allows one to get around these questions by eliminating
that entire classical ontology that did not seem to mesh naturally with
experiential realities, and replacing that classical ontology with one
built around experiential realities. These latter realities are embedded in 
a specified way, which is fixed by the pragmatic rules, into a mathematical 
structure that allows the theory to account for all the successes of 
classical mechanics without being burdened with its awkward ontological 
baggage.

A discussion of this appendix with cognitive scientist Pat Hayes can
be found on my website:// 
[http://www-physics.lbl.gov/`tilde'stapp/stappfiles.html]
where `tilde' stands for the tilde symbol.