# Untitled Document

Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist

Adrian Kent

Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics,

University of Cambridge,

Silver Street, Cambridge CB3 9EW, U.K.

Abstract

The most dramatic developments in theoretical physics in the next millennium are likely to come when we make progress on so far unresolved foundational questions. In this essay I consider two of the deepest problems confronting us, the measurement problem in quantum theory and the problem of relating consciousness to the rest of physics. I survey some recent promising ideas on possible solutions to the measurement problem and explain what a proper physical understanding of consciousness would involve and why it would need new physics.

1. Introduction

As the twentieth century draws to a close, theoretical physics is in a situation that, at least in recent history, is most unusual: there is no generally accepted authority. Each research program has very widely respected leaders, but every program is controversial. After a period of extraordinary successes, broadly stretching from the 1900’s through to the early 1980’s, there have been few dramatic new experimental results in the last fifteen years, with the important exception of cosmology. All the most interesting theoretical ideas have run into serious difficulties, and it is not completely obvious that any of them is heading in the right direction. So to speak, some impressively large and well organised expeditionary parties have been formed and are faithfully heading towards imagined destinations; other smaller and less cohesive bands of physicists are heading in quite different directions. But we really are all in the dark. Possibly none of us will get anywhere much until the next fortuitous break in the clouds.

I will try to sketch briefly how it is that we have reached this state, and then suggest some new directions in which progress may eventually be possible. But my first duty is to stress that what follow are simply my personal views. These lie somewhere between the heretical and the mainstream at the moment. Some of the best physicists of the twentieth century, would, I think, have been at least in partial sympathy.<sup>1</sup> In any case, I am greatly indebted to Schrödinger and Bell’s lucid scepticism and to Feynman’s compelling explanations of the scientific need to keep alternative ideas in mind if they are even partially successful, as expressed in, for example, Schrödinger 1954, Bell 1987, Feynman 1965. But most leading present day physicsts would emphasize different problems; some would query whether physicists can sensibly say anything at all on the topics I will discuss.

I think we can, of course. It seems to me the problems are as sharply defined as those we have overcome in the past: it just happens that we have not properly tackled them yet. They would be quite untouched — would remain deep unsolved problems — even if what is usually meant by a “theory of everything” were discovered. Solving them may need further radical changes in our world view, but I suspect that in the end we will find there is no way around them.

2. Physics in 1999

The great discoveries of twentieth century physics have sunk so deeply into the general consciousness that it now takes an effort of will to stand back and try to see them afresh. But we should try, just as we should try to look at the night sky and at life on earth with childlike eyes from time to time. In appreciating just how completely and how amazingly our understanding of the world has been transformed, we recapture a sense of awe and wonder in the universe and its beauty.<sup>2</sup> We owe this, of course, not to nature — which gives a very good impression of not caring either way — but to ourselves. Though we forget it too easily, that sense is precious to us.

So recall: in 1900, the existence of atoms was a controversial hypothesis. Matter and light were, as far as we knew, qualitatively different. The known laws of nature were deterministic and relied on absolute notions of space and time which seemed not only natural and common sense but also so firmly embedded in our understanding of nature as to be beyond serious question. The propagation of life, and the functioning of the mind, remained so mysterious that it was easy to imagine their understanding might require quite new physical principles. Nothing much resembling modern cosmology existed.

Einstein, of course, taught us to see space and time as different facets of a single geometry. And then, still more astonishingly and beautifully, that the geometry of spacetime is nonlinear, that matter is guided by the geometry and at the same time shapes it, so that gravity is understood as the mutual action of matter on matter through the curvature of spacetime.

The first experiments confirming an important prediction of general relativity — that light is indeed deflected by the solar gravitational field — took place in 1917: still within living memory. Subsequent experimental tests have confirmed general relativity with increasingly impressive accuracy. It is consistent with our understanding of cosmology, as far as it can be — that is, as far as quantum effects are negligible. At the moment it has no remotely serious competitor: we have no other picture of the macroscopic world that makes sense and fits the data.

Had theorists been more timid, particle physics experiments and astronomical observations would almost certainly eventually given us enough clues to make the development of special and general relativity inevitable. As it happens, though, Einstein was only partially guided by experiment. The development of the theories of relativity relied on his extraordinary genius for seeing through to new conceptual frameworks underlying known physics. To Einstein and many of his contemporaries, the gain in elegance and simplicity was so great that it seemed the new theories almost had to be correct.

While the development of quantum theory too relied on brilliant intuitions and syntheses, it was much more driven by experiment. Data — the black-body radiation spectrum, the photo-electric effect, crystalline diffraction, atomic spectra — more or less forced the new theory on us, first in ad hoc forms, and then, by 1926, synthesised. It seems unlikely that anyone would ever have found their way through to quantum theory unaided by the data. Certainly, no one has ever found a convincing conceptual framework which explains to us why something like quantum theory should be true. It just is. Nor has anyone, even after the event, come up with a truly satisfactory explanation of what precisely quantum theory tells us about nature. We know that all our pre-1900 intuitions, based as they are on the physics of the world we see around us every day, are quite inadequate. We know that microscopic systems behave in a qualitatively different way, that there is apparently an intrinsic randomness in the way they interact with the devices we use to probe them. Much more impressively, for any given experiment we carry out on microscopic systems, we know how to list the possible outcomes and calculate the probabilities of each, at least to a very good approximation. What we do not fully understand is why those calculations work: we have, for example, no firmly established picture of what (if anything) is going on when we are not looking.

Quantum theory as originally formulated was inconsistent with special relativity. Partly for this reason, it did not properly describe the interactions between light and matter either. Solving these problems took several further steps, and in time led to a relatively systematic — though still today incomplete — understanding of how to build relativistic quantum theories of fields, and eventually to the conclusion that the electromagnetic force and the two nuclear forces could be combined into a single field theory. As yet, though, we do not know how to do that very elegantly, and almost everyone suspects that a grander and more elegant unified theory of those three forces awaits us. Nor can we truly say that we fully understand quantum field theory, or even that the theories we use are entirely internally consistent. They resemble recipes for calculation, together with only partial, though tantalisingly suggestive, explanations as to why they work. Most theorists believe a deeper explanation requires a better theory, perhaps yet to be discovered.

Superstring theory, which many physicists hope might provide a complete theory of gravity as well as the other forces— a “theory of everything” — is currently the most popular candidate. Though no one doubts its mathematical beauty, it is generally agreed that so far superstring theory has two rather serious problems. Conceptually, we do not know how to properly make sense of superstrings as a theory of matter plus spacetime. Nor can we extract any very interesting correct predictions from the theory — for example, the properties of the known forces, the masses of the known particles, or the apparent four-dimensionality of space-time — in any convincing way.

Opinions differ sharply on whether those problems are likely to be resolved, and so whether superstring theory is likelier to be a theory of everything or of nothing: time will tell. Almost everyone agrees, though, that reconciling gravity and quantum theory is one of the deepest problems facing modern physics. Quantum theory and general relativity, each brilliantly successful in its own domain, rest on very different principles and give highly divergent pictures of nature. According to general relativity, the world is deterministic, the fundamental equations of nature are non-linear, and the correct picture of nature is, at bottom, geometric. According to quantum theory, there is an intrinsic randomness in nature, its fundamental equations are linear, and the correct language in which to describe nature seems to be closer to abstract algebra than geometry. Something has to give somewhere, but at the moment we do not know for sure where to begin in trying to combine these pictures: we do not know how to alter either in the direction of the other without breaking it totally.

However, I would like here to try to look a bit beyond the current conventional wisdom. There is always a danger that attention clusters around some admittedly deep problems while neglecting others, simply through convention, or habit or sheer comfort in numbers. Like any other subject, theoretical physics is quite capable of forming intellectual taboos: topics that almost all sensible people avoid. They often have good reason, of course, but I suspect that the most strongly held taboos sometimes resemble a sort of unconscious tribute. Mental blocks can form because a question carries the potential for revolution, and addressing it thoughtfully would raise the possibility that our present understanding may, in important ways, be quite inadequate: in other words, they can be unconscious defences against too great a sense of insecurity. Just possibly, our best hope of saying something about future revolutions in physics may lie in looking into interesting questions which current theory evades. I will look at two here: the measurement problem in quantum theory and the mind-body problem.

3. Quantum Theory and the Measurement Problem

As we have already seen, quantum theory was not originally inspired by some parsimonious set of principles applied to sparse data. Physicists were led to it, often without seeing a clear way ahead, in stages and by a variety of accumulating data. The founders of quantum theory were thus immediately faced with the problem of explaining precisely what the theory actually tells us about nature. On this they were never able to agree. However, an effective enough consensus, led by Bohr, was forged. Precisely what Bohr actually believed, and why, remain obscure to many commentators, but for most practical purposes it has hardly mattered. Physicists found that they could condense Bohr’s “Copenhagen interpretation” into a few working rules which explain what can usefully be calculated. Alongside these, a sort of working metaphysical picture — if that is not a contradiction in terms — also emerged. C.P. Snow captures this conventional wisdom well in his semi-autobiographical novel, “The Search” (Snow 1934):

Suddenly, I heard one of the greatest mathematical physicists say, with complete simplicity: “Of course, the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry are laid down for ever. The details have got to be filled up: we don’t know anything of the nucleus; but the fundamental laws are there. In a sense, physics and chemistry are finished sciences.”

The nucleus and life: those were the harder problems: in everything else, in the whole of chemistry and physics, we were in sight of the end. The framework was laid down; they had put the boundaries round the pebbles which we could pick up.

It struck me how impossible it would have been to say this a few years before. Before 1926 no one could have said it, unless he were a megalomaniac or knew no science. And now two years later the most detached scientific figure of our time announced it casually in the course of conversation.

It is rather difficult to put the importance of this revolution into words. \[$`\mathrm{}`$\] However, it is something like this. Science starts with facts chosen from the external world. The relation between the choice, the chooser, the external world and the fact produced is a complicated one \[$`\mathrm{}`$\] but one gets through in the end \[$`\mathrm{}`$\] to an agreement upon “scientific facts”. You can call them “pointer-readings” as Eddington does, if you like. They are lines on a photographic plate, marks on a screen, all the “pointer-readings” which are the end of the skill, precautions, inventions, of the laboratory. They are the end of the manual process, the beginning of the scientific. For from these “pointer-readings”, these scientific facts, the process of scientific reasoning begins: and it comes back to them to prove itself right or wrong. For the scientific process is nothing more nor less than a hiatus between “pointer-readings”: one takes some pointer readings, makes a mental construction from them in order to predict some more.

The pointer readings which have been predicted are then measured: and if the prediction turns out to be right, the mental construction is, for the moment, a good one. If it is wrong, another mental construction has to be tried. That is all. And you take your choice where you put the word “reality”: you can find your total reality either in the pointer readings or in the mental construction or, if you have a taste for compromise, in a mixture of both.

In other words, on this conventional view, quantum theory teaches us something deep and revolutionary about the nature of reality. It teaches us that it is a mistake to try to build a picture of the world which includes every aspect of an experiment — the preparation of the apparatus and the system being experimented on, their behaviour during the experiment, and the observation of the results — in one smooth and coherent description. All we need to do science, and all we can apparently manage, is to find a way of extrapolating predictions — which as it happens turn out generally to be probabilistic rather than deterministic — about the final results from a description of the initial preparation. To ask what went on in between is, by definition, to ask about something we did not observe: it is to ask in the abstract a question which we have not asked nature in the concrete. On the Copenhagen view, it is a profound feature of our situation to the world that we cannot separate the abstract and the concrete in this way. If we did not actually carry out the relevant observation, we did not ask the question in the only way that causes nature to supply an answer, and there need not be any meaningful answer at all.

We are in sight of the end. Quantum theory teaches us the necessary limits of science. But are we? Does it? Need quantum theory be understood only as a mere device for extrapolating pointer-readings from pointer-readings? Can quantum theory be satisfactorily understood this way? After all, as we understand it, a pointer is no more than a collection of atoms following quantum laws. If the atoms and the quantum laws are ultimately just mental constructions, is not the pointer too? Is not everything?

Landau and Lifshitz, giving a precise and apparently not intentionally critical description of the orthodox view in their classic textbook (Landau & Lifshitz, 1974) on quantum theory, still seem to hint at some disquiet here:

Quantum mechanics occupies a very unusual place among physical theories: it contains classical mechanics as a limiting case, yet at the same time requires this limiting case for its own formulation.

This is the difficulty. The classical world — the world of the laboratory — must be external to the theory for us to make sense of it; yet it is also supposed to be contained within the theory. And, since the same objects play this dual role, we have no clear division between the microscopic quantum and the macroscopic classical. It follows that we cannot legitimately derive from quantum theory the predictions we believe the theory actually makes. If a pointer is only a mental construction, we cannot meaningfully ask what state is in or where it points, and so we cannot make meaningful predictions about its behaviour at the end of an experiment. If it is a real object independent of the quantum realm, then we cannot explain it — or, presumably, the rest of the macroscopic world around us — in terms of quantum theory. Either way, if the Copenhagen interpretation is right, a crucial component in our understanding of the world cannot be theoretically justified.

However, we now know that Bohr, the Copenhagen school, and most of the pioneers of quantum theory were unnecessarily dogmatic. We are not forced to adopt the Copenhagen interpretation either by the mathematics of quantum theory or by empirical evidence. Nor is it the only serious possibility available. As we now understand, it is just one of several possible views of quantum theory, each of which has advantages and difficulties. It has not yet been superseded: there is no clear consensus now as to which view is correct. But it seems unlikely it will ever again be generally accepted as the one true orthodoxy.

What are the alternatives? The most interesting, I think, is a simple yet potentially revolutionary idea originally set out by Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber (Ghirardi et al. 1986), and later developed further by GRW, Pearle, Gisin and several others. According to their model, quantum mechanics has a piece missing. We can fix all its problems by adding rules to say exactly how and when the quantum dice are rolled. This is done by taking wave function collapse to be an objective, observer-independent phenomenon, with small localisations or “mini-collapses” constantly taking place. This entails altering the dynamics by adding a correction to the Schrödinger equation. If this is done in the way GRW propose, the predictions for experiments carried out on microscopic systems are almost precisely the same, so that none of the successes of quantum theory in this realm are lost. However, large systems deviate more significantly from the predictions of quantum theory. Those deviations are still quite subtle, and very hard to detect or exclude experimentally at present, but they are unambiguously there in the equations. Experimentalists will one day be able to tell us for sure whether or not they are there in nature.

By making this modification, we turn quantum theory into a theory which describes objective events continually taking place in a real external world, whether or not any experiment is taking place, whether or not anyone is watching. If this picture is right, it solves the measurement problem: we have a single set of equations which give a unified description of microscopic and macroscopic physics, and we can sensibly talk about the behaviour of unobserved systems, whether they are microscopic electrons or macroscopic pointers. The pointer of an apparatus probing a quantum system takes up a definite position, and does so very quickly, not through any ad hoc postulate, but in a way that follows directly from the fundamental equations of the theory.

The GRW theory is probably completely wrong in detail. There are certainly serious difficulties in making it compatible with relativity — though there also some grounds for optimism that this can be done (Pearle 1998, Kent 1999). But GRW’s essential idea has, I think, a fair chance of being right. Before 1986, few people believed that any tinkering with quantum theory was possible: it seemed that any change must so completely alter the structure of the theory as to violate some already tested prediction. But we now know that it is possible to make relatively tiny changes which cause no conflict with experiment, and that by doing so we can solve the deep conceptual and interpretational problems of quantum theory. We know too that the modified theory makes new experimental predictions in an entirely unexpected physical regime. The crucial tests, if and when we can carry them out, will be made not by probing deeper into the nucleus or by building higher energy accelerators, but by keeping relatively large systems under careful enough control for quantum effects to be observable. New physics could come directly from the large scale and the complex: frontiers we thought long ago closed.

4. Physics and Consciousness

Kieslowski’s remarkable film series, Dekalog, begins with the story of a computer scientist and his son who share a joy in calculating and predicting, in using the computer to give some small measure of additional control over their lives. Before going skating, the son obtains weather reports for the last three days from the meteorological bureau, and together they run a program to infer the thickness of the ice and deduce that it can easily bear his weight. But, tragically, they neglect the fire a homeless man keeps burning at the lakeside. Literally, of course, they make a simple mistake: the right calculation would have taken account of the fire, corrected the local temperature, and shown the actual thickness of the ice. Metaphorically, the story seems to say that the error is neglecting the spiritual, not only in life, but perhaps even in physical predictions.

I do not myself share Kieslowski’s religious worldview, and I certainly do not mean to start a religious discussion here. But there is an underlying scientific question, which can be motivated without referring to pre-scientific systems of belief and is crucial to our understanding of the world and our place in it, and which I think is still surprisingly neglected. So, to use more scientifically respectable language, I would like to take a fresh look at the problem of consciousness in physics, where by “consciousness” I mean the perceptions, sensations, thoughts and emotions that constitute our experience.

There has been a significant revival of interest in consciousness lately, but it still receives relatively little attention from physicists. Most physicists believe that, if consciousness poses any problems at all, they are problems outside their province.<sup>3</sup> Penrose is the best-known exception: space does not permit discussion of his rather different arguments here, but see Penrose 1989, 1994. After all, the argument runs, biology is pretty much reducible to chemistry, which is reducible to known physical laws. Nothing in our current understanding suggests that there is anything physically distinctive about living beings, or brains. On the contrary, neurophysiology, experimental psychology, evolutionary and molecular biology have all advanced with great success, based firmly on the hypothesis that there is not. Of course, no one can exclude the possibility that our current understanding could turn out to be wrong — but in the absence of any reason to think so, there seems nothing useful for physicists to say.

I largely agree with this view. It is very hard to see how any novel physics associated with consciousness could fit with what we already know. Speculating about such ideas does seem fruitless in the absence of data. But I think we can say something. There is a basic point about the connection between consciousness and physics which ought to be made, yet seems never to have been clearly stated, and which suggests our present understanding almost cannot be complete.

The argument for this goes in three steps. First, let us assume, as physicists quite commonly do, that any natural phenomenon can be described mathematically. Consciousness is a natural phenomenon, and at least some aspects of consciousness — for example, the number of symbols we can simultaneously keep in mind — are quantifiable. On the other hand we have no mathematical theory even of these aspects of consciousness. This would not matter if we could at least sketch a path by which statements about consciousness could be reduced to well understood phenomena. After all, no one worries that we have no mathematical theory of digestion, because we believe that we understand in principle how to rewrite any physical statement concerning the digestive process as a statement about the local densities of various chemicals in the digestive tract, and how to derive these statements from the known laws of physics. But we cannot sketch a similar path for consciousness: no one knows how to transcribe a statement of the form “I see a red giraffe” into a statement about the physical state of the speaker. To make such a transcription, we would need to attach a theory of consciousness to the laws of physics we know: it clearly cannot be derived from those laws alone.

Second, we note that, despite the lack of a theory of consciousness, we cannot completely keep consciousness out of physics. All the data on which our theories are based ultimately derive from conscious impressions or conscious memories of impressions. If our ideas about physics included no hypothesis about consciousness, we would have no way of deriving any conclusion about the data, and so no logical reason for preferring any theory over any other. This difficulty has long been recognised. It is dealt with, as best we can, by invoking what is usually called the principle of psycho-physical parallelism. We demand that we should at least be able to give a plausible sketch of how an accurate representation of the contents of our conscious minds could be included in the description of the material world provided by our physical theories, assuming a detailed understanding of how consciousness is represented.

Since we do not actually know how to represent consciousness, that may seem an empty requirement, but it is not. Psycho-physical parallelism requires, for example, that a theory explain how anything that we may observe can come to be correlated with something happening in our brains, and that enough is happening in our brains at any given moment to represent the full richness of our conscious experience. These are hard criteria to make precise, but asking whether they could plausibly be satisfied within a given theory is still a useful constraint.

Now the principle of psycho-physical parallelism, as currently applied, commits us to seeing consciousness as an epiphenomenon supervening on the material world. As William James magnificently put it (James 1879):

Feeling is a mere collateral product of our nervous processes, unable to react upon them any more than a shadow reacts on the steps of the traveller whom it accompanies. Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the voyage of life, it is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch the helm or handle the rigging.

Third, the problem with all of this is, that as James went on to point out, if our consciousness is the result of Darwinian evolution, as it surely must be, it is difficult to understand how it can be an epiphenomenon. To sharpen James’ point: if there is a simple mathematical theory of consciousness, or of any quantifiable aspect of consciousness, describing a precise version of the principle of psycho-physical parallelism and so characterising how it is epiphenomenally attached to the material world, then its apparent evolutionary value is fictitious. For all the difference it would make to our actions, we might as well be conscious only of the number of neutrons in our kneecaps or the charm count of our cerebella; we might as well find pleasures painful and vice versa. In fact, of course, our consciousness tends to supply us with a sort of executive summary of information with a direct bearing on our own chances of survival and those of our genes; we tend to find actions pleasurable or painful depending whether they are beneficial or harmful to those chances. Though we are not always aware of vital information, and are always aware of much else, and though our preferences certainly don’t perfectly correlate with our genetic prospects, the general predisposition of consciousness towards survival is far too strong to be simply a matter of chance.

Now, of course, almost no one seriously suggests that the main features of consciousness can be the way they are purely by chance. The natural hypothesis is that, since they seem to be evolutionarily advantageous, they should, like our other evolutionarily advantageous traits, have arisen through a process of natural selection. But if consciousness really is an epiphenomenon, this explanation cannot work. An executive summary of information which is presented to us, but has no subsequent influence on our behaviour, carries no evolutionary advantage. It may well be advantageous for us that our brains run some sort of higher-level processes which use the sort of data that consciousness presents to us and which are used to make high-level decisions about behaviour. But, on the epiphenomenal hypothesis, we gain nothing by being conscious of these particular processes: if they are going to run, they could equally well be run unconsciously, leaving our attention focussed on quite different brain activities or on none at all.

Something, then, is wrong with our current understanding, There are really only two serious possibilities. One is that psycho-physical parallelism cannot be made precise and that consciousness is simply scientifically inexplicable. The other is that consciousness is something which interacts, if perhaps very subtly, with the rest of the material world rather than simply passively co-existing alongside that world. If that were the case, then we can think of our consciousnesses and our brains — more precisely, the components of our brains described by presently understood physics — as two coupled systems, each of which influences the other. That is a radically different picture from the one we presently have, of course. But it does have explanatory power. If it were true, it would be easy to understand why it might be evolutionarily advantageous for our consciousness to take a particular form. If say, being conscious of a particular feature of the environment helps to speed up the brain’s analysis of that feature, or to focus more of the brain’s processing power on it, or to execute relevant decisions more quickly, or to cause a more sophisticated and detailed description to enter into memory, then evolution would certainly cause consciousness to pay attention to the relevant and neglect the irrelevant.

We have to be clear about this, though: to propose this explanation is to propose that the actions of conscious beings are not properly described by the present laws of physics. This does not imply that conscious actions cannot be described by any laws. Far from it: if that were the case, we would still have an insoluble mystery, and once we are committed to accepting an insoluble mystery associated with consciousness then we have no good reason to prefer a mystery which requires amending the laws of physics over one which leaves the existing laws unchallenged. The scientifically interesting possibility — the possibility with maximal explanatory power — is that our actions and those of other conscious beings are not perfectly described by the laws we presently know, but could be by future laws which include a proper theory of consciousness.

This need not be true, of course. Perhaps consciousness will forever be a mystery. But it seems hard to confidently justify any a priori division of the unsolved problems in physics into the soluble and the forever insoluble. We ought at least to consider the implications of maximal ambition. We generally assume that everything in nature except consciousness has a complete mathematical description: that is why, for example, we carry on looking for a way of unifying quantum theory and gravity, despite the apparent difficulty of the problem. We should accept that, if this assumption is right, it is at least plausible that consciousness also has such a description. And this forces us to accept the corollary — that there is a respectable case for believing that we will eventually find we need new dynamical laws — even though nothing else we know supports it.

One final comment: nothing in this argument relies on the peculiar properties of quantum theory, or the problems it poses. The argument runs through equally well in Newtonian physics. Maybe the deep problems of quantum theory and consciousness are linked, but it seems to me we have no reason to think so. It follows that anyone committed to the view I have just outlined must argue that a deep problem in physics has generally been neglected for the last century and a half. So let me try to make that case.

There is no stronger or more venerable scientific taboo than that against enquiry, however tentative, into consciousness. James, in 1879, quoted “a most intelligent biologist” as saying:

It is high time for scientific men to protest against the recognition of any such thing as consciousness in scientific investigation.

Scientific men and women certainly have protested this, loudly and often, over the last hundred and twenty years. But have those protests ever carried much intellectual force?

The folk wisdom, such as it is, against the possibility of a scientific investigation of consciousness seems now to rest on a confusion hanging over from the largely deleterious effect of logical positivism on scientists earlier this century. Hypotheses about consciousness are widely taken to be ipso facto unscientific because consciousness is presently unmeasurable and its influences, if any, are presently undetectable. Delete the word “presently”, and the case could be properly made: as it is, it falls flat. If logical positivism is to blame, is only the most recent recruit to the cause. The problem seems to run much deeper in scientific culture. Schrödinger described (Schrödinger 1954) the phenomenon of:

\[$`\mathrm{}`$\] the wall, separating the ‘two paths’, that of the heart and that of pure reason. We look back along the wall: could we not pull it down, has it always been there? As we scan its windings over hills and vales back in history we behold a land far, far, away at a space of over two thousand years back, where the wall flattens and disappears and the path was not yet split, but was only one. Some of us deem it worth while to walk back and see what can be learnt from the alluring primeval unity.

Dropping the metaphor, it is my opinion that the philosophy of the ancient Greeks attracts us at this moment, because never before or since, anywhere in the world, has anything like their highly advanced and articulated system of knowledge and speculation been established without the fateful division which has hampered us for centuries and has become unendurable in our days.

Clearly, the revival of interest in Greek philosophy that Schrödinger saw did not immediately produce the revolution he hoped for. But our continued fascination with consciousness is evident on the popular science and philosophy bookshelves. It looks as though breaking down the wall and building a complete worldview are going to be left as tasks for the third millennium. There could hardly be greater or more fascinating challenges.

Nor can there be many more necessary for our long term well being. Science has done us far more good than harm, psychologically and materially. But the great advances we have made in understanding nature have also been used to support a worldview in which only what we can now measure matters, in which the material and the external dominate, in which we objectify and reduce ourselves and each other, in which we are in danger of coming to see our psyches and our cultures, in all their richness, as no more than the evolutionarily honed expression of an agglomeration of crude competitive urges.

To put it more succinctly, there is a danger, as Vaclav Havel put it in a recent essay (Havel 1996), of man as an observer becoming completely alienated from himself as a being. Havel goes on to suggest that hopeful signs of a more humane and less schizophrenic worldview can be found in what he suggests might be called postmodern science, in the form of the Gaia hypothesis and the anthropic principle.

I disagree: it is hard to pin down precise scientific content in these ideas, and insofar as we can it seems to me they are no help. But I think we have the answer already. The alienation is an artefact, created by the erroneous belief that all that physics currently describes is all there is. But, on everything we value in our humanity, physics is silent. As far as our understanding of human consciousness is concerned, though we have learned far more about ourselves, we have learned nothing for sure that negates or delegitimizes a humane perspective. In that sense, nothing of crucial importance has changed.

5. Postscript

All this said, of course, predicting the future of science is a mug’s game. If, as I have argued, physics is very far from over, the one thing we should be surest of is that greater surprises than anything we can imagine are in store. One prediction that seems likelier than most, though, is that the Editor will not be restricted to considering human contributors for the corresponding volume in 2999. Perhaps our future extraterrestrial or mechanical colleagues will find some amusement in our attempts. I do hope so.

References

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Feynman, R. 1965 The Character of Physical Law. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. Reading: Addison Wesley.

Snow, C.P. 1934 The Search. London: Victor Gollancz.

Ghirardi, G. et al. 1986 Unified Dynamics for Microscopic and Macroscopic Systems. Physical Review D 34 470-491.

Landau, L. and Lifshitz, E. 1974 Quantum Mechanics. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Pearle, P. 1999 Relativistic Collapse Model with Tachyonic Features. Physical Review A 59 80-101.

Kent, A. 1998 Quantum Histories. Physica Scripta T76 78-84.

Penrose, R. 1989 The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Penrose, R. 1994 Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

James, W. 1879 Are We Automata? Mind 13 1-22.

Havel,V. 1996. In The Fontana Postmodernism Reader, (ed. W. Truett Anderson). London: Fontana.