Science, Values, and the Nature of the Human Person. (May 21, 2001, Paris) Science has improved our lives on many ways. It has lightened the load of tedious tasks and multiplied our physical powers, and thus contributed to a greater flowering of our creative capacities. But it has also contributed to a sense of malaise among those who sometimes stand back from the pursuit of material ends and seek to satisfy their yearning for a better understanding of how we fit into the scheme of things, and how we should conduct our lives. This problem stems from the fact that physical science has, until now, focussed on describing the behavior of matter. But the important and exciting news is that this study has revealed fundamental flaws in our earlier understanding of the nature of matter, and our new understanding impacts strongly on these human issues. My intention is to introduce you to the vistas opened up by this deeper understanding of the nature of matter, I believe that, in the end, the greatest gift of science to humanity will be not its material benefits, but rather a shift in values generated by what it reveals about ourselves, and our connection to the rest of nature. To acquaint you with the impact of science on human values I shall first sketch out a bit of human intellectual history. I divide this history 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. "Tradition" was the chief source of wisdom about our connection to nature. The "modern" era began in the seventeeth century with the rise of what is called "modern science". That science was based on the ideas of Bacon, Descartes, Galileo and Newton, and it provided a new source of knowledge, which came to be regarded by many thinkers as more reliable than tradition. The basic idea of the modern era was "materialism". This is the idea that the physical world is composed basically of tiny particles of matter interacting with each other according to "laws of nature", and that these laws completely determined the course of physical events for all time from the initial conditions. These laws did not acknowledge the existence of our conscious thoughts, ideas, feelings, and efforts, and even excluded the possibility that supernatural agencies, such as gods or spirits, could influence the course of physical events. Matter was asserted to be governed by matter alone, acting in accordance with impersonal, local, mechanical laws. 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 ramification's of Planck's discovery were soon 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 devastating soon followed: In 1905 Einstein announced his special theory of relativity, which denied the validity our intuitive idea of the instant of time "now", and promulgated the thesis that even the most basic quantities of physics had no objective "true values", but were definite only"relative" to the 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, The new basic physical theory was developed principally by Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Wax Born, and it had a strong "idealist" flavor: physics was viewed as a HUMAN ENDEAVOUR designed to make predictions about how the results of human observations were correlated with each other. It involved a renunciation of all efforts to describe or understand the physical reality that is the cause of these correlations between our observations. This approach is called "Copenhagen quantum theory". This overturning by science itself of 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 artefacts 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 the Theory of Relativity had retreated from the idea of objective observer-independent truth. This apparent inability of the new sciences that had overthown the earlier materialism to provide an rationally coherent replacement meant that the whole idea of an objective scientific truth lying behind the vagaries of human experience was cast into doubt. This placed every competing idea of truth on a par with every other one: insofar as an idea worked for a group it was true for the group. The physicists were generally too interested in the practical developments in their own field to get involved in these complex human issues. Thus they failed to broadcast the fact that, 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. That development was the creation by John von Neumann, during the early thirties, of a rationally coherent objective Quantum Theory of Reality. This theory was elevated by the work of Tomonaga and Schwinger, during the late forties, to a form compatible with the physical requirements of the Theory of Relativity. Let me give you a quick idea of what von Neumann did. The earlier Copenhagen approach applied the principles of quantum theory only to relatively small systems, and used classical concepts to describe the rest of nature. This tearing apart of nature worked beautifully at the practical level, but it introduced severe logical difficulties. These logical difficulties were basically ignored in the Copenhagen approach. However, von Neumann demanded logical coherence, and this meant treating our brains quantum mechanically, and connecting a person's conscious thoughts to activities in his brain in accordance with laws provided by the theory itself. This quantum idea of the human person is superior to the materialist conception on at least three counts. First, it is based on a contemporary scientific conception of matter, rather than one that is demonstrably false. Second, it automatically produces a bona fide, rather than illusory, free will that can exert a causal influence on the body/brain. Third, it provides for a step-by-step co-evolution of mind and brain from primitive beginnings to their present complex human forms. These three virtues provide the basis for a rationally coherent conception of the human person that contrasts sharply to the caricature that arose from materialism. To explain how these three features arise I must do three things; 1) Explain the quantum conception of matter. 2) Show how efficacious free will arises and functions. 3) Describe how mind and brain co-evolved My first task is to explain the quantum idea of "matter". The relativistic quantum theory of von Neumann, Tomonaga, and Schwinger gives a conception of the physical, or "material", aspect of nature that is radically different from the idea of matter postulated by the physics of Newton and his successors. The properties of this quantum matter are a mixture of those of classical matter and classical mind: quantum matter lies "mid-way" between classical matter and classical mind. But how can that can possibly be? It seems at first inconceivable that anything could lie between between classically conceived mind and classically conceived matter: the two seem too utterly different to be combined. Indeed, it was only with great difficulty that this new idea of matter was hammered into the minds of physicists by the incessant beating of the empirical data. The answer is this. The classical-matter aspect arises from the fact that the quantum universe can be described as a cloud of "virtual" classical universes that evolves "almost always" in accordance with the Schroedinger equation. This equation is the quantum analog of the classical equations of motion. Thus many features of the classical universe are transferred to the quantum universe by the fact the latter is a cloud of "virtual" copies of the former. The mind-like features enter through the cracks opened up by the words "virtual" and "almost always". The word "virtual" signifies that the copies are not fully real: they are real only as "potentialities". Potentialities for what? Potentialities for an "Event" to occur! What kind of Event? A Psycho-Physical Event! What is that? It is the occurrence of a "Mental Event" that grasps a whole unit of structural information, and injects it into the quantum state of the universe. This injection is called "the reduction of the wave-packet," or "the collapse of the wave function." It reduces the prior physical world of potentialities to a new form that incorporates the newly grasped structural information. This thumb-nail description is enough to reveal the radical difference between the quantum and classical descriptions of the universe: the classical description was in terms of LOCALIZED BITS OF SUBSTANCE, whereas the quantum description is in terms of NONLOCALIZED BITS OF INFORMATION that are mentally grasped, and physically represented in an evolving cloud of virtual classical universes. Von Neumann's work associates each Psycho-Physical event with the mind/brain of an observer/participant, and it effectively demonstrates that this objective form of quantum theory can account for all the known empirical data, including everything that is adequately described by classical physics: quantum physics encompasses the valid predictions of classical physics. To tie this deeper understanding of the human person to moral issues I turn now the second question listed above: the existence and causal efficacy of "free will". It is sometimes suggested that the statistical aspect of quantum theory could justify the idea of "free will". However, the injection of a statistical or random element into the dynamics makes the situation worse: it makes it even more difficult for our mental resolves to control our physical actions. The intrusion of true randomness, which is what quantum theory demands, tends to decreases the effectiveness of mind, rather that increasing it. Causally efficacious free will arises in a very different way. Orthodox quantum theory is similar to the parlor game "twenty questions". In the quantum case the game is played between an observer/participant and Nature. The observer/participant first devises, and then "puts to nature", a specific question that can be answered "Yes" or "No", where the "Yes" must correspond to a Psycho-Physical event of the kind mentioned before, and "No" is its complement. Nature then returns an answer. The rules of quantum theory specify the relative probabilities of the two possible answers, "Yes" and "No". Orthodox quantum theory gives each observer/participant the freedom to choose which question he will put to nature: which experimental apparatus he will set in place. However, the mind of the observer/participant who makes this choice lies outside the physical system described by the known quantum rules: this choice is thus a "free" variable, insofar as the known laws of quantum theory are concerned. This element of freedom allows "the questions", which are necessary parts of the game, to "bootstrap" themselves into being: whatever laws control the selection of the questions can be completely compatible with all the known laws of quantum theory, both statistical and otherwise, yet not be entailed by these laws. The quantum theory provide in this way a dynamical element of "free will". The next question is whether exercising this free will can affect the behavior of the observed system, which in this case is the body/brain of the observer/participant. This is a technical question, and the answer is YES: By exercising his "free will" an observer/participant CAN influence the behavior of his body/brain. To summarize: in von Neumann-Tomonaga-Schwinger objective quantum theory certain choices made by the observer/participant are: 1) DEMANDED BY THE THEORY ITSELF, 2) Not determined by the known laws of quantum physics, and 3) Able to influence that person's behaviour. I shall not attempt to give a detailed account of the co-evolution of mind and brain, but will merely emphasize that causal actions of the mind back on the brain are a necessary prerequisite for such an evolutionary co-development. Once the possibility for a two-way causal connection is in place the stage is set for an evolutionary co-development of the two causally connected parts. I have given the bare-bones of a rationally coherent quantum mechanical description of the human person. The key step in fleshing it out is to identify the quantum process of "picking a question" with the psychological process of "paying attention". I haven't the time to pursue that technical development here. I return instead to the moral issues raised earlier. The first main point is that "Materialism" of "modern physics" is strictly incompatible with the empirical evidence. The second main point is that contemporary quantum physics naturally produces a causally efficacious free-will whose properties cannot be explained in terms of the concepts of pre-quantum physics. The third main point is that any support that post-modern thought might try to draw from the breakdown of the idea of objective truth within science can be countered by noting that the difficulties that that arose during the transitionary period are overcome by the von Neumann-Tomonaga-Schwinger objective formulation of relativistic quantum field theory. Of course, all scientific theories are, by nature, provisional, and unprovable: all that science can offer is the description of a neat, parsimonious, rationally coherent, and pragmatically useful theory that fits all the data. We now possess such a theory. It 1) reinstates the concept of objective truth, 2) yields causally efficacious free will, and 3) entwines the human person in a complex way with the rest of nature. These resurrected ideas are the foundations of traditional moral philosophies. Point 3 concerns nonlocality, and it needs elaboration. The thing that drove the final nail into the coffin of materialism was the debate between Einstein and Bohr, and the subsequent contribution of John Bell. Einstein, and two colleagues, Podolsky and Rosen, came up with a tight argument that proved, on the basis of an assumption that nature allowed no causal influence to travel faster-than-light, that quantum theory could not be complete. Bohr was hard pressed to rebut this argument. He was finally forced to assert that although "mechanical" influences could not propagate faster than light, certain other more subtle kinds of influences pertaining to information could. This way of evading Einstein's conclusion was taken by many critics to be tantamount to admission that Einstein was right! However, Bell proved conclusively that no theory that conforms to the local realism that Einstein espoused, could possibly fit certain predictions of quantum theory. The empirical validity of these predictions have by now been essentially confirmed by many experiments. Hence Einstein's position has been proved wrong. This buttresses Bohr's opposing position. The subtle faster-than-light influences whose existence Bohr acknowledged are explicitly present in von Neuman-Tomonaga-Schwinger objective quantum theory. These influences entail that our human experiences are entangled with faraway events in ways that are totally incompatible with the tenets of materialism. Thus according to this objective quantum theory, the human person is much more deeply entangled with nature than the local materialistic ideas of pre-quantum physics could ever allow. This quantum conception of the human person, with its causally efficacious free will, and its profound nonlocal intertwining of man and nature, can when infused into our culture, provide the foundation for a significant shift in values away from the shallow ones generated by the materialist conception of the human person as a local mechanical automaton whose every act was pre-ordained before he was born.