Sent Oct9 to Psyche-d.

Lamont Granquist quotes Pat Hayes:

> theories are somehow inadequate. In particular, the idea that QM can
> account for consciousness because it (QM) is somehow already imbued with
> the subjective/objective distinction is based on Bohr's mysticism rather
> than QM itself. (Anyone been reading the recent debates in NYRB about the
> (ir)relevance of deconstructionism to science?).

and then he (LG) continues:
"I'd agree completely with this.  The subjective/objective feature of quantum
mechanics occurs only in the Bohr/Wigner/Von Neumann approach to QM.  And the
BWVNI seems to me to be taking something that we don't understand and trying
to solve it by invoking consciousness.  It seems to me that this should be a
last resort.  I would like to see a better description of what kind of
reasoning this is other than "mysticism", however."

The approach is not "mysticism" at all, but rather a shedding of mysticism
in favor of a thorough-going rationalism. Einstein said of Bohr that his
(Bohr's) approach did more justice to the complexities of the situation than
anyone else's. Physicists are a pretty hard-headed lot, and are not going to 
buy into a bunch of mystical mush.

Einstein started the rational approach going, in his analysis leading to
the special theory of relativity. He noted that physics was a quantitative
discipline based on numbers and that the basic contact between theory
and experience was in the readings of measuring devices, which in his case
were clocks and rulers. Physical theory is, in the end,  a theory of 
relationships between readings of measuring devices because it is these
relationships between numbers that can be checked and used to confirm
or invalidate the theory. The background theory is less secure that the
relationships between meter readings that it produces, for it is only the 
later that are quantitatively checked: different theories leading to the same
connections between all actual observations would be equivalent, even though
they might have a very different intuitive feel.

Faced with the extremely puzzling features of the results of measurements
on atomic systems Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli (whose god father was E.Mach)
thought it wise to retreat to this position already prepared by Einstein,
which took the readings of devices to be the secure anchor posts of
quantitative physical theory. They allowed the back-ground theory to mold
itself as dictated by experiment around these anchor posts, which were
essentially experienced directly, rather than forcing the theoretical structure
to follow the form dictated by the classical concepts of Newton and Maxwell.
This breaking away from the forms dictated by the earlier classical concepts 
was the key to the development of a kind of physical theory, in which
the "values" of the unobserved background quantities were replaced by 
"noncommuting operators". The readings of measuring devices were described 
as before, and all of the results in terms of these reading were recovered
from the new theory in a certain idealized limit in which Planck's constant
was decreased to zero (contrary to fact). The effects obtained from the
new theory were certainly very real, and generalizations of Bell's theorem
have now shown that the classical ideas were incapable of ever producing
the results predicted by the new theory.

This development is the very antithesis of mysticism: it is a paradigm
of rational thinking. Isaac Newton was the first to insist that theoretical
ideas should evolve to fit the emerging empirical facts: to insist that his 
theoretical ideas were not written in stone, binding all future generations
of scientists. Old ideas must not be discarded lightly, but in the case of 
this replacement of the classical ideas of Newton and Maxwell 
by the closely related but fundamentally different ideas of quantum theory  
this change is overwhelmingly mandated by the empirical evidence.

I have said much more about these matters in my 1972 Amer.J.Physics article
[AJP 40,1098-1116], which is reprinted in my book [Mind, Matter, and QM,
Springer, 1 (800) springer] and in my recent papers
[http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/stappfiles.html]

Henry P. Stapp