Human Potential And The Knowing World

When we consider human potential we must look at quantum theory.

In his book “The creation of quantum mechanics and the Bohr- Pauli dialogue” the historian John Hendry (1984) gives a detailed account of the fierce struggles, during the first quarter of this century, by such eminent thinkers as Hilbert, Jordan, Weyl, von Neumann, Born, Einstein, Sommerfeld, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Dirac, Bohr and others, to come up with a rational way of comprehending the data from atomic experiments.

Each man had his own bias and intuitions, but in spite of intense effort no rational comprehension was forthcoming. Finally, at the 1927 Solvay conference a group including Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, and Born come into concordance on a solution that came to be called “The Copenhagen Interpretation”.

Hendry says: “Dirac, in discussion, insisted on the restriction of the theory’s application to our knowledge of a system, and on its lack of ontological content.” Hendry summarized the concordance by saying: “On this interpretation it was agreed that, as Dirac explained, the wave function represented our knowledge of the system, and the reduced wave packets our more precise knowledge after measurement.”

Let there be no doubt about this key point, namely that the mathematical theory was asserted to be directly about our knowledge itself, not about some imagined-to-exist world of particles and fields.

Heisenberg (1958a): “The conception of objective reality of the elementary particles has thus evaporated not into the cloud of some obscure new reality concept but into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.”

Heisenberg (1958b): “…the act of registration of the result in the mind of the observer. The discontinuous change in the probability function…takes place with the act of registration, because it is the discontinuous change in our knowledge in the instant of registration that has its image in the discontinuous change of the probability function.”

Heisenberg (1958b:) “When the old adage ‘Natura non facit saltus’ is used as a basis of a criticism of quantum theory, we can reply that certainly our knowledge can change suddenly, and that this fact justifies the use of the term ‘quantum jump’. ”

Wigner (1961): “the laws of quantum mechanics cannot be formulated … without recourse to the concept of consciousness.”

Bohr (1934): “In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of phenomena but only to track down as far as possible relations between the multifold aspects of our experience.”

Certainly this profound shift in physicists’ conception of the basic nature of their endeavor, and the meanings of their formulas, was not a frivolous move: it was a last resort.

The very idea that in order to comprehend atomic phenomena one must abandon ontology, and construe the mathematical formulas to be directly about the knowledge of human observers, rather than about the external real events themselves, is so seemingly preposterous that no group of eminent and renowned scientists would ever embrace it except as an extreme last measure.

Consequently, it would be frivolous of us simply to ignore a conclusion so hard won and profound, and of such apparent direct bearing on our effort to understand the connection of our knowings to our physical actions.

This monumental shift in the thinking of scientists was an epic event in the history of human thought and human potential. Since the time of the ancient Greeks the central problem in understanding the nature of reality, and our role in it, has been the puzzling separation of nature into two seemingly very different parts, mind and matter.

This had led to the divergent approaches of Idealism and Materialism. According to the precepts of Idealism our ideas, thoughts, sensations, feelings, and other experiential realities, are the only realities whose existence is certain, and they should be taken as basic. But then the enduring external structure normally imagined to be carried by matter is difficult to fathom.

Materialism, on the other hand, claims that matter is basic. But if one starts with matter then it is difficult to understand how something like your experience of the redness of a red apple can be constructed out of it, or why the experiential aspect of reality should exist at all if, as classical mechanics avers, the material aspect is causally complete by itself.

There seems to be no rationally coherent way to comprehend the relationship between our thoughts and the thoughtless atoms that external reality was imagined to consist of.

Einstein never accepted the Copenhagen interpretation. He said: “What does not satisfy me, from the standpoint of principle, is its attitude toward what seems to me to be the programmatic aim of all physics: the complete description of any (individual) real situation (as it supposedly exists irrespective of any act of observation or substantiation).” (Einstein, 1951, p.667) and “What I dislike in this kind of argumentation is the basic positivistic attitude, which from my view is untenable, and which seems to me to come to the same thing as Berkeley’s principle, esse est percipi.” (Einstein, 1951, p. 669).[Translation: To be is to be perceived]

Einstein struggled until the end of his life to get the observer’s knowledge back out of physics.

But he did not succeed!

Rather he admitted that: “It is my opinion that the contemporary quantum theory…constitutes an optimum formulation of the [statistical] connections.” (ibid. p. 87).

He referred to: “the most successful physical theory of our period, viz., the statistical quantum theory which, about twenty-five years ago took on a logically consistent form. … This is the only theory at present which permits a unitary grasp of experiences concerning the quantum character of micro-mechanical events.” (ibid p. 81).

One can adopt the cavalier attitude that these profound difficulties with the classical conception of nature are just some temporary retrograde aberration in the forward march of science.

Or one can imagine that there is simply some strange confusion that has confounded our best minds for seven decades, and that their absurd findings should be ignored because they do not fit our intuitions.

Or one can try to say that these problems concern only atoms and molecules, and not things built out of them. In this connection

Einstein said: “But the ‘macroscopic’ and ‘microscopic’ are so inter-related that it appears impracticable to give up this program [of basing physics on the ‘real’] in the ‘microscopic’ alone.” (ibid, p.674).

Just some light stuff to consider over the weekend…enjoy!

Reference:

Attention, Intention, and Will in Quantum Physics – Henry P. Stapp, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory