Paris Talk: Newsome Version. (May 21, 2001, Paris) _________________________________________________________ [At the workshop I had a long talk with Bill Newsome, Stanford Neuroscientist. He identified passages of my paper that made no sense to him, and that he thought would not be understood by other neuroscientists. This version of my paper is directed at readers more like Bill than the targets of the original version.] ___________________________________________________________ Science has improved our lives in 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. However, it has led also 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 human beings fit into the scheme of things, and how we should conduct our lives. This problem stems fundamentally from the fact that the physical sciences have, until recently, focused primarily on describing the behavior of matter. But the important and exciting news is that the intensive study of the properties of matter has revealed fundamental flaws in our earlier understanding of the basic nature of the physical universe, and the new understanding impacts strongly on human issues. My intention here is to introduce you to the vistas opened up by our new deeper understanding of the nature of the physical universe. These advances lead me to believe that, in the end, the greatest gift of science to humanity will be not its material benefits, but rather the shift in values generated by what it reveals about human beings and our connection to the rest of nature. It is often claimed that science has no connection to values. To counter that idea I shall begin by sketching 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. "Traditions" were 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 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". 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 state of the universe at early times. 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 ramifications 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 critical development soon followed: In 1905 Einstein announced his special theory of relativity. It denied the validity 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 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. In order to cope with some strange features of the data, physical theory was construed to be not an attempt to describe nature as she existed apart from human agents, but rather a human endevour to create mathematical rules that would allow human scientists to make reliable predictions about correlations between their experiences under certain specified kinds of conditions. This new approach 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 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 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 started this mischief were generally too interested in the 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. 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 by the work of Tomonaga and Schwinger, during the forties, to a form compatible with the physical requirements of the Theory of Relativity. Von Neumann's theory, unlike the transitional ones, dynamically integrated the empirical data of our subjective experience with the mathematical structures of theoretical physics, and was compatible with the existence of a psycho-physical reality embodying observer-independent objective truths. Let me explain how von Neumann accomplished these things. 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 procedure of treating different parts of the physical world in logically incompatible ways worked beautifully at the practical level, but introduced severe logical difficulties. These logical difficulties were evaded in Copenhagen quantum theory by renouncing the search for objective reality: "if it works, that's good enough." But von Neumann demanded logical coherence, and this meant treating the entire physical universe, including our bodies and 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 new integral conception of the human person departs radically from the earlier scientific picture of man in three important ways: 1. It is based on A NEW CONCEPTION OF MATTER that differs profoundly from the old one, which is provably false. 2. It automatically produces a bona fide, rather than illusory, FREE WILL. 3. It allows for THE CO-EVOLUTION OF OUR MIND AND BRAIN from a primitive beginning to its present complex form. These three changes add up to a rationally coherent conception of the human person that differs greatly from the caricature that arose from materialism. To appreciate these changes one needs, first of all, to understand the new idea of matter, where by "matter" I mean the "stuff" out of which the physical universe is made. The quantum conception of this stuff is radically different from the idea of matter postulated by Isaac Newton and his successors. The properties of "quantum matter" lie "mid-way" between those of classical matter and mind: the "stuff" of the physical universe has acquired certain mind-like characteristics. But how can anything lie "midway" between mind and classically conceived matter? The two ideas are so totally different and incommensurable that it seems that nothing could share properties of both. Indeed, many earlier thinkers had surmised that nature ought to be built out of some intermediate kind of stuff, but the way to achieve this was finally grasped by quantum physicists only as a consequence of their intense and unrelenting efforts to comprehend the baffling character of the empirical data. This melding of mind and matter arises as follows: the quantum state of a system is essentially a cloud of classical possibilities. Each droplet in the cloud is a possible classical system. Thus the individual droplets bring certain classical-physics properties into the quantum system. However, the cloud acts as a unit, and the overall shape of the cloud constitutes an informational structure. To get the main idea, consider a system consisting of a single particle confined to a box, and suppose the question is posed "Is the particle in the left-hand half of the box?" and that Nature then delivers an answer, Yes or No. That answer constitutes one bit of information, and this information is incorporated into the state of the system by resetting the shape of the cloud. Thus if Nature's answer is No, then the part of the cloud that occupies the left-hand half of the box is set to zero. This resetting incorporates into the quantum state of the system the new bit of information. This simple example captures the essence of quantum dynamics: a sequence of Yes-No questions is posed, and nature delivers an answer, Yes or No, to each such question. Each answer constitutes one bit of information, which is incorporated into the quantum state of the system by resetting the shape of the cloud. This description of quantum dynamics focuses attention on a peculiar but essential aspect of quantum dynamics: the necessity of a sequence of Yes-No questions. Without these questions nothing actually happens: the universe, and every subsystem of the universe, just keeps evolving into an ever-expanding clouds of possibilities. But where do these "questions" come from? Copenhagen quantum theory was formulated like a game of twenty question in which human participant/observers, who stand outside the system described by the quantum mathematics, put questions to nature. They do this by setting up experiments that will PROBE the system in specific ways. Nature returns an answer, Yes or No, to each inquiry by resetting the cloud to a new form that incorporates the information specified by the answer. von Neumann placed the entire physical universe, including the bodies and brains of these human observers, in the system described by the quantum mathematics. This resolved the questions arising from the ad hoc separation of the physical universe into differently described parts, but it did not alter the essential feature that the known laws of physics did not fix the "questions posed by the participant/observers". Yet these questions remained essential components of the dynamics. Thus von Neumann's quantum dynamics, like its Copenhagen forebearer, still involves "freely choosen questions" that are not specified by any KNOWN laws of physics. What is a typical question? In the context of a quantum treatment of a human person's mind-brain the question is always of the form: Will the experience E associated with the neural correlate of consciousness N(E) appear now in that human person's stream of consciousness. Here von Neumann, like contemporary neuroscience, and psycho-physics, ackowledges the fact that our scientific description of the mind-brain has two kinds of data that are described in different languages. One of these languages is the language of physics, which pertains to locations, shapes, and motions in space of entities regarded as built in some sense out of atomic particles and molecules, and the other is the language of psychology, which is used to describe the feelings and ideas of the participant/observer. The aspects described in these two different ways are related by what called "the neural correlate N(E) of an experience E". This neural correlate is the set of activities in the physically described brain of a participant/observer that is assumed to be occurring in conjunction with his occurring experience E: N(E) is the brain counterpart of the experience E. Two kinds of experiencs are particularly important. One is the experience of `coming to know' something, such as the color, red or not red, of yonder traffic light, and the other is the `feeling of effort" to attend to, and hold in place, some idea that would, without that effort, flit away. In the first example the question would be "Is the next experience in my stream of consciousness going to be seeing the red light, and experiencing it in the particular way W?" In the second example the question will be "Shall I continue to attend to action A?", where A might be thinking about some particular idea, or pursuing some particular course of physical activity. Each particular possible way of apprehending W, or course of action A, is presumably generated by brain activity. But, according to quantum theory, that does not make it determinate. In general, the cloud of possible classical brain states will be some amorphous cloud of possibilities that is diffusing, or spreading out, due to the indefiniteness engendered by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Once some particular possible experience E is selected, THEN this cloud of possibilities can be separated into two well defined parts, the part that is compatible with experience E and the part that is not. The next step in the dynamical process is Nature's choice of the answer, Yes or No. There is a statistical constraint on that answer. But the KNOWN laws of physics do not specify which possible experience E will be picked out by the question put to Nature. If Nature's answer to the actually posed question is Yes, then the cloud of possibiliies will reset in a way that eliminates all classically described components that are incompatible with experience E. If the answer is No, then the resetting will eliminate all classically describable components that do not contain a possible neural correlate of E. This resetting of the quantum state to a form that is compatible with the new human experience is the key feature of Copenhagen quantum theory, and it is retained in von Neumann quantum theory. The mathematics of quantum theory is perfectly suited to this question and answer scenario, and seems to require it. In the Copenhagen formulation this resetting is a resetting of the quantum state of some system that is external to the bodies of all observers. But in von Neumann's formulation what is reset, directly, is the state of the brain of the observer/participant who has the experience: those patterns of his brain activity that are compatible with the experience E are preserved, whereas those patterns that are not compatible with the experience are eliminated. A second key feature of both Copenhagen and von Neumann quantum theory is that the basic dynamical rules automatically entail that this resetting of the brain state of the experiencing participant/observer will reset also the state of the entire quantum system so that all subsequent experiences of all observer/participants will be compatible with this experience of the experiencing participant/observer. This global resetting of the quantum state is the mysterious "action at a distance" that Einstein found so objectionable. However, it cannot be evaded if one demands a rationally coherent idea of the reality that lies behind our experiences. This necessary action-at-a-distance is called "quantum nonlocality." Copenhagen quantum theory deals with this embarrassing fact by renouncing the quest for an understanding of the reality behind our experiences, and by excluding our bodies and brains from the system described in terms of the quantum mathematics. von Neumann's approach is to treat our bodies and brains as parts of the physical universe described by the quantum mathematics. and let the chips then fall where the mathematics dictates. In a classical treatment there would be no "free choice" associated with the "questions": for every possible experience E the question of whether or not it occurs can be asked, and answer would be predetermined already at the big bang. In the classical case, asking this question, and receiving the predetermined answer, has no effect on the predetermined evolution of the universe. Quantum theory, on the other hand, permits only one such question to be asked at a time, and the CHOICES OF THESE QUESTIONS (quite apart from the answers returned) can strongly affect the course of physical events: CHOICES that that are NOT specified or determined by any KNOWN law of physics can control the likely flow of physical events. This efficacious free choice can be called "Free Will". Quantum theory thus introduces an essential and efficacious element of freedom into mind-brain dynamics: one can no longer validly assert that matter is governed by matter alone, acting in accordance with impersonal, local, mechanical laws, or that a person's every action was predetermined already at the big bang by known local, mechanical laws. There may indeed be absolute predetermination, but it certainly is not via the currently known physical laws, which do however account for all the valid predictions of both classical and quantum physics. The reason that the known laws can be both complete in this sense, and yet essentially incomplete, is that the connection of the theory to verifiable predictions is done via the Copenhagen formulation, which does not try to specify what the participant/observers will choose to do: the mind-brain dynamics is left out. So far I have focused on the quantum dynamics of the human mind-brain. One reason for doing this is that quantum theory was originally formulated in terms of the experiences of human beings: "pigs don't do science." Von Neumann's immediate objective was to reproduce in principle the predictions of the earlier Copenhagen quantum theory, and he thererfore needed to include in his dynamics the human experiences that were the basis of the earlier formulation. Another reason for starting with human beings that it is only through our human experiences that we even know that streams of consciousness exist. Data pertaining to human streams of conscious events are directly accessible to human beings, and are, in the end, the sole data of all science, including the science of the mind-brain connection. In spite of this special role of human beings in Copenhagen and von Neumann quantum theory, I regard it as axiomatic that our human mind and brains co-evolved from simpler structures. Continuity then demands that each of these simpler "mind-brain" structures must also have the capacity to reset the evolving cloud of possibilities that constitutes its quantum state. This capability gives to the evolving mind-brain the efficacy it needs in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology: a non-efficacious mind has no physical consequences, hence no survival value, and hence no capacity to evolve by natural selection. This issue of the efficacy of mind is central. Most philosophers of mind, and of psychology, can see the absurdity of minds that diligently attend to the very features of the world that are most germane to the decisions that must be made by the participant/observers, but can do nothing but passively observe the occurrence of what was already pre-ordained at the time of the big bang by the micro-local laws of classical physics. The favored way of evading this absurdity of epiphenomenal consciousness is via an "emergent identity" approach that emphasizes that as physical systems become more complex they can acquire new modes of behaviour that can conform to complex conceptual structures not previously manifested in physical behaviours. These complex conceptual structures can involve both structural and functional conditions. Some examples are the wheelness of a wheel, the automobileness of an automobile, the mitosis of a cell, the digestive property of a stomach, the liquidity of water, and the solidity of an ice cube. These are all real efficacious structural/functional properties of physical systems; properties that were not manifested in nature during the first three minutes after the big bang, even though the basic laws of physics are presumed to hold then. To confirm that some such conceptual structure is being "implemented" by an occurring activity in a physical system one matches features of that physical system with features of the conceptual structure, and verifies that the physical activity conforms to the conceptual structure. It is easy to believe that our brains exhibit complex modes of behaviour that "implement" complex conceptual structures that were not manifested in the early universe. But these are properties of BRAINS: to confirm that some such conceptual structure is being "implemented" by an occurring brain activity one relates certain physical features of the occurring BRAIN activity to counterparts in the conceptual structure, and verifies that the behaviour of the brain does conform to the constraints imposed by the conceptual structure. This conceptual structure could be a psychological theory formulated in psychological language. One can thus imagine that scientists will some day be able to confirm that a certain brain activity, described in the classical approximation, implements, perhaps approximately, a process describable in psychological language. But what would that imply about consciousness? It is clear that something essential is missing. One might be able to devise a similar psychological theory that matches up with the activity of some mechanical computer. The matching in this case obviously does not entail that the computer is actually feeling anything at all. By the same token the demonstration of a match between an activity in a human brain and some psychological theory would not entail the existence of actual feelings. It would demonstrate only the existence of a physical brain activity that is constrained in a way that permits it to be mapped into a certain conceptual structure. This proves nothing about the existence of the consciously experienced feelings. The essentual point here is that consciousness is different in principle from mitosis and the other high-level concepts mentioned above. To confirm that a cell is undergoing mitosis one need only show that the atomic and molecular constituents, or physical structures imagined to be built out of them, are moving about in a way that conforms to the concept. The same goes for the other examples. (If the concept involves functional aspects then one must consider also how the system `would' behave under certain conditions.) If the psychological description were in terms of behaviour then the same method of confirmation would be available for it. However, the psychological description is supposed to be in terms of FELT or EXPERIENCED qualities. Specifying how the physical components are shaped, or are moving about, does not, entail, within the framework provided by classical physical theory, the existence of feelings. In order to deduce the existence of a felt reality from the fact that the physical behaviour of a system conforms to some high-level concept one needs some POSTULATE or ASSUMPTION connecting physical activities to felt realities. But there is nothing within the laws or principles of classical physics that allows the existence of patterns of physical brain activity that conform to some high-level conceptual structure to ensure the co-existence of FEELINGS of any kind. Some added ontological principle would be needed in order for the existence of a physical system behaving, or constrained to behave, in some special way to entail the existence of a felt experiential quality, such as a pain. Orthodox (Copenhagen or von Neumann) quantum theory, on the other hand, takes felt realities experienced by the participant/observers to be basic aspects of nature. And von Neumann quantum theory causally connects these felt realities to physical activities in the brain of the participant/observer. Copenhagen quantum theory and von Neumann quantum theory both enlarge the basic ontology, by bringing in the conscious experiences of the participant/observer as irreducible realities. A pain is a pain is a pain: a pain is not "really" something else. Classical physical theory also can accomodate experiences as irreducible realities, but if they are not reducible in some sense to the physical realities then they are epiphenomenal, which is a `solution' that most thinkers find unacceptable. One final important question is whether our minds stand inside the physical universe, or outside it. Von Neumann's argument involved shifting the boundary between `the physical system described by the quantum mathematics' and `the observing system described in terms of possible experiences'. At the final stage of the analysis all parts of nature that are classically conceived to be built out of atomic particles (and the EM and Gravitational fields) are included in the quantum physical universe. But the psychologically described observer/participant was not included: this psychological residue was called by von Neumann the "abstract ego". This suggests that the psychologically described aspect of nature must stand outside the physical universe described by the quantum mathematics. That may indeed be the case. But all that is really shown is that the psychologically described aspect is not fully determined by the KNOWN laws of physics: those laws do not determine everything. Indeed, we already know this to be true in regard to Nature's choices, which are determined by the known laws only statistically. On the other hand, it is certainly possible that some yet-to-be-discovered law could fix the 'free' choice of the question posed by the participant-observer, including the choice of when it is posed, in terms of the evolving physical state of the brain of that person. Then the actually occurring experience could be postulated to be (a manifestation of) the resetting of the state of the brain of the participant/observer. This would effectively put the entire dynamics into the physical universe, insofar as one was willing to forego any explanation of the statistically determined choice on the part of Nature. I have adhered, so far, to the restricted program of just following through on von Neumann's approach without adding any speculative ideas. The question of what determines which questions are posed by the participant/observers is not answered within that program, which does, however, provide a rationally coherent conception of the evolving universe that accounts for all the validated predictions of classical and quantum physics, as well as the effects upon brain activities of effortfully focused attention [1]. The fact that all this can be achieved without specifying whether our minds lie inside or outside the physical universe it means that science, rationally pursued, is still mute on some very basic questions about the nature of man. Humility, not arrogance, on the part of scientists is therefore certainly called for. SUMMARY A malaise has been created by the seeming pointlessness of life as seen through the eyes of science. For centuries science has been proclaiming that each human person is naught but a mechanical automaton whose every act was pre-ordained before he was born. But in the early twentieth century basic science, in an about face, renounced the search for objective truth and settled for practical success. Thus the attempt to base our lives on science and reason led, seemingly, into the abyss of moral relativism. However, that transitional science systematically avoided, as too difficult, or beyond its scope, the basic question at issue, which is the nature of the human person and his connection to the rest creation. Contemporary science reveals a far richer conception of what we are than earlier science and philosophy had imagined. We can now understand how man is endowed with efficacious free will, and is, far from being an isolated glob of proto-plasm, is nonlocally entangled with the rest of nature in a way that completely transcends the materialistic concepts of Newtonian physics. Although the full implications of this deeper understanding of the human person has yet to be made fully clear, we have at least been rescued from the demoralizing notion that science shows us to be, basically, nothing but tiny particles careening mindlessly through space. ---------------------------------------------------- Paris Talk May 21 (Short Presentation) Part I: The Physics of Consciousness (ala Bohr/von Neumann). MIND Mind plays a basic role in orthodox (Bohr/vonNeumann) QT! The theory is about the mathematical structure of connections between human actions and experiences. MATTER The stuff of the physical universe is partly mind like: the physical universe is a CLOUD of possible classical universes, and the shape of this cloud represents information. FREEDOM There are TWO KINDS of "free" choices: NATURE'S "free" choices are subject to statistical laws. HUMAN "free" choices are subject to no KNOWN laws. WILL Human "free" choices are EFFICACIOUS: they can strongly influence brain activity. NONLOCALITY Human "free" choices have "instantaneous" effects far away: we are "nonlocally entangled" with rest of nature. Part II: Moral Impact. Science has shown the materialist conception of nature to be false. By validating free will it has rescued "Personal responsibility". It has also resuscitated "Objective truth". And it has made our minds into efficacious aspects of the highly nonlocal process that creates the growing informational structure that is the physical universe. ------------------------------------------------------------ [1] Quantum theory and the role of mind in nature. http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/stappfiles.html -----------------------------------------------------------