The Mind and the Brain (36 page)

Impressed by what seemed a kindred mind, I therefore e-mailed Stapp on March 2, 1998, introducing myself as a friend of Chalmers (whom Stapp had met several times) and telling him that I “had started reading your book Mind Matter and QM—I’m still working on it and finding it of great importance.” Stapp responded on March 10, with requests for some of my reprints. In a phone call soon after, we discussed, among other things, how Newtonian approaches had evolved so as to stifle morality, and why science was therefore vastly overrated as a force for good. Stapp, a courtly man, seemed sympathetic (if not as passionate as I about all this), and we arranged to get together. On June 9, I drove my old used 1988 copper Mercedes up to Berkeley and met Henry for the first time and spent the afternoon in his office. At a long dinner that evening at a restaurant hard by the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Berkeley, the conversation ranged from quantum mechanics to phantom pain, from statistical tests of the paranormal to the attempts by some theologians to find spiritual messages in the discoveries of cosmologists. (That week, Berkeley was hosting a symposium, “Science and the Spiritual Quest.”)

Back home, I was juggling a couple of tasks. Although I had only a rudimentary understanding of quantum physics at the time I tackled Stapp’s 1993 book, its relevance to the mind-brain question, and to my interpretation of the OCD brain data, made it clear that I needed to learn a whole lot more. Quantum mechanics seems to contain a role for consciousness in the physical world. Fortunately, Stapp’s book, as well as papers for nonphysicists that he posted on his web site, addressed those questions in accessible, if not entirely elementary, ways. Even better, Stapp himself is the soul of patience, who proved to be extraordinarily open to question-and-answer sessions by phone and e-mail. And so, over the next two and a half years, I slowly got a handle on key physics concepts
supporting the causal efficacy of volition and attention. In a September 7, 1998, phone conversation, Stapp told me, “In quantum theory, experience is the essential reality, and matter is viewed as a representation of the primary reality, which is experience.” I wrote it down verbatim and tacked it on my office wall, where it still hangs today.

As I worked to deepen my understanding of quantum mechanics, I was also trying to apply the basic structure of Stapp’s physics reasoning to a philosophical paper I was writing about the OCD work. In April, I had presented a paper at a conference that Dave Chalmers had helped organize at the University of Arizona’s Tucson campus, “Toward a Science of Consciousness.” I had spoken about my OCD work, particularly the “mind can change brain” aspects. Now, in June, I was in the midst of turning the oral presentation into a paper for the conference proceedings. In addition, A
Return to Innocence
was in galleys at this point, on track for a September 1998 publication. The combination of the book, in which I used “mental force” as a literary device, plus my philosophically grounded reanalysis of the PET scans of my OCD patients for the Tucson paper, created a powerful alchemy. As I turned over in my mind yet again the four steps I taught my OCD patients to go through when in the throes of a compulsion—Relabel, Reattribute, Refocus, Revalue—it occurred to me that mental force might be more than just a way to help readers of
Return to Innocence
understand how mindfulness and directed effort can help reshape the way they think and behave. To the contrary: there was nothing about mental force as I conceived it that condemns it to be just a metaphor. Whether it had any genuine scientific import, I had no idea—not yet, anyway.

But Stapp might. My manuscript contained the first use of “mental force” in more than a metaphorical sense and marked the first time I had used it in a scientific paper. On June 21, I e-mailed Stapp that I was writing something he might consider beyond the pale: “I know I took some serious risks with my use of the concepts
of energy, power and force,…so I’ll definitely need your feedback on that—hopefully you’ll still be willing to talk to me after you see it.” Three days later, I prepared to e-mail the paper to Stapp to get his reaction. I stared at the computer screen for what seemed like ages before I could screw up my courage to hit “send.” I think this is pretty good, I thought, but considering what I know about physics and forces I might be about to embarrass myself royally.

Stapp replied by e-mail on June 25: “Your draft was masterful,” he wrote.

Henry Stapp had been interested, since his student days, in what has come to be called the interpretation of quantum theory. When Wolfgang Pauli visited UC Berkeley to deliver a series of lectures in 1958, the physics department, as was customary, assigned a postdoc to take lecture notes. Stapp got the nod. That put him in frequent and close contact with Pauli, who invited Stapp to go to Zurich to work with him. Stapp arrived in the fall of 1958, but Pauli died that December. Since Stapp’s fellowship was to last six months, he
found himself with unexpected time on his hands. He used it to delve into the work of the mathematician John von Neumann, in particular his book on the foundations of quantum theory. This work raised in Stapp’s mind questions about the role of mind in physics. In 1959, still in Zurich, he foreshadowed his later book by writing an essay, “Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics,” in which he discussed the notion that reality comes into being only when an observer observes it. But he also recognized serious problems with this idea. In 1965, when the United States sent the unmanned
Mariner 4
probe to pass by Mars, Stapp asked, Are we to believe that a mountain on Mars springs into existence only when some guy at mission control calls up
Mariner’s
imaging data on the console screen? Like most others, Stapp resisted von Neumann’s suggestion that mind had anything to do with creating reality. But he continued to ponder the mystery of what turned all of the potentials embodied in the Schrödinger wave function into a single observed reality.

Back in Berkeley, this was the challenge Stapp took up. “I worked long and hard trying to figure out what led to the collapse of the wave function. In the end, I became more convinced that conscious experiences needed to be taken seriously,” he recalls. In 1968, Stapp went to Munich, where he became engrossed in discussions with Heisenberg about his and Bohr’s more philosophical papers. “Then as now, physicists pay lip service to these writings, but quantum physics is taught as engineering,” says Stapp. “This is how you apply it and these are the mathematical rules. The philosophy is brushed under the rug; you don’t try to think what’s really happening.” Or as physicists sometimes put it: “Don’t think. Calculate.”

But Stapp was deeply curious about the philosophy implied by quantum physics, and whether in fact the act of observation has a hand in bringing about one possible reality rather than another. “When I came to Munich I was filled with lots of questions,” he recalls.

Heisenberg believed that the infamous cat was indeed either alive or dead, even before an observer looked and collapsed the wave function; it is nature herself who collapses the wave function. “It was very useful for me to hear right from him that there was not total agreement” on the role of the observer, Stapp says. “I came to realize that the interpretation of quantum physics, particularly the underlying ontology, was not totally worked out.”

Shortly after his discussions with Heisenberg, Stapp was returning from Europe and had to overnight in London. He walked to a park and settled in on a bench with William James’s
The Meaning of Truth
. What he read produced an epiphany. “That was when it all came together,” says Stapp. “James argues that we’ll never know for sure the absolute truth, and that science is therefore provisional. In the end all you can do is say how well your theories are working. Once I read James’s idea, it allowed me to understand what Bohr was saying,” with his conclusion that we cannot know what really happens, but only what we observe to happen. Was the Danish physicist (who died in 1962) familiar with the work of the American psychologist? The science historian Thomas Kuhn once asked Bohr whether there was any connection between his ideas and James’s. Bohr responded, “Yes, it’s all coming back; we’ll talk about that
tomorrow.” He died that very night, November 18, taking the answer with him.

As Stapp interpreted quantum mechanics, the observer plays two roles. He experiences the output of the measuring devices, of course—the clicks of the Geiger counter in our radioactive atom experiment, for instance. What he records depends on which choice nature has made: the atom decays or it doesn’t. This is known as the Dirac choice after P. A. M. Dirac, the English physicist who, at the fifth Solvay Congress of physics in Brussels in 1927, conceptualized this random event as a choice by nature (but is better known for predicting the existence of antimatter). It is, as far as physicists know, a truly random choice. But the observer plays another role: he chooses which questions to pose to nature. Stapp named this the Heisenberg choice, because Heisenberg stressed it at the 1927 congress. “In quantum theory,” Stapp says, “the observer must decide which question to put to nature, which aspect of nature his inquiry will probe. A person’s conscious thoughts can and…must…play a role that is not reducible to the combination of the Schrödinger and Dirac processes.” Until a question is posed, nothing happens. Without some way of specifying what the question is, the quantum process seizes up like a stuck gear and grinds to a halt. There is, then, a three-part process: the evolution of the wave equation as described by the Schrödinger equation, the choice of which question to pose (the Heisenberg choice), and nature’s statistical choice of which answer to give (the Dirac choice).

This three-part description of quantum mechanics had never been presented publicly in any detail when, in July 1999, Stapp and I, along with Dave Chalmers and a host of renowned physicists, neuroscientists, and philosophers, ascended into the cool clear mountain air of Flagstaff, Arizona, for a conference, “Quantum Approaches to Consciousness.” I eagerly looked forward to this meeting, both because of its lovely Grand Canyonesque location and because I knew that here, before a solemn (well, at least during the daytime sessions) gathering, Stapp would tackle the thorny
question of how the probabilities described by the Schrödinger equation collapse into the actualities we observe and measure. Eugene Wigner, as I hinted earlier, followed the new realizations to their inevitable conclusion. “The laws of quantum mechanics cannot be formulated…without recourse to the concept of consciousness,” he wrote in 1961. Matter has become intrinsically connected to subjective experiences. And that leads to a profound implication. It makes little sense, Wigner argued, to describe the mind and consciousness in terms of the positions of atoms, for one simple reason: the latter are derived from the former and have no fixed and non-probabilistic existence outside the former. “It seems inconsistent,” Wigner said in 1969, “to explain the state of mind of [an] observer…in terms of concepts, such as positions of atoms, which have to be explained, then, in terms of the content of consciousness.” If the positions of atoms (and thus, for our purposes, the state and arrangement of neurons, since neurons are only collections of zillions of atoms) have no unambiguous existence independent of the consciousness of an observer, Wigner asked, then how can that very consciousness depend on those same atoms? “The extreme materialistic point of view…is clearly absurd and…is also in conflict with the tenets of quantum mechanics,” he concluded.

Classical physics had no way to account for consciousness; Copenhagen brought in consciousness, all right, but at the ghastly price of substituting it for objective reality. The von Neumann/ Wigner theory that Stapp referred to in his first e-mail to me, in 1998, seemed to offer a way out. Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann had joined the wave of refugees fleeing Hitler and had wound up at Princeton University. In 1932, von Neumann formulated a new version of quantum mechanics. Its main point of departure from the Copenhagen Interpretation is this: Copenhagen describes measuring devices (things like Geiger counters and scintillation counters as well as the human brain that registers the results of those measurements) in Newtonian rather than quantum terms. This makes the theory inherently inconsistent, since one part
of the physical world (subatomic particles) gets the quantum treatment but the rest of the physical world (lab equipment and brains) stays Newtonian. And yet the stuff in the second group is made of the same atoms and subatomic particles as the stuff in the first. Von Neumann realized that this made no sense: a measuring device is not intrinsically different from the atoms that make it up. So he fixed the problem. In the mathematical rules of quantum theory he worked out, he first incorporated measuring devices, so that when physicists did a calculation they would have to apply quantum rules to these devices. And then he incorporated everything made of atoms and their constituents—in particular, the human brain. In von Neumann’s formulation, every experiential event, such as reading a measuring device or otherwise making an observation, has a corresponding brain event. No surprise there. But von Neumann went further: the brain, he argued, operates according to the rules of quantum mechanics.