Quantum Reality and the Importance of Consciousness in the Universe
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82 universe is clockwork, closed, and entirely predictable on the basis of unchanging laws. That worldview gave rise to the naive realism of mechanist Quantum Reality and the importance materialism, and to claims that all aspects of human beings, our loves, hopes, our creativity and spirituality, are nothing but the result of the properties of consciousness in the universe and dynamics of matter. When Darwin combined that same materialism with the laws of chance and natural selection, claiming to have found a * Lothar Schäfer comprehensive mechanism for the evolution of life and our existence, it seemed to many that life had lost all meaning and human values were exposed as mere adaptations to a senseless, exclusively material reality. Resumo Now at the dawn of a new era, this older scientific doctrine is being challenged on the basis of discoveries made by quantum physicists during A referência frequente à mente no contexto da física é um fenómeno the past century. In its place, a new scientific understanding has arisen which fascinante. Em muitos fenómenos a mente e os “aspectos” mentais da points to transcendent aspects of physical reality, and thus of human nature realidade tornaram-se importantes. Neste texto, descrevem-se detalha- damente os argumentos que se referem à natureza mental do universo, itself, providing a basis for a life with values that is not in conflict with the sugerindo-se que os aspecto da realidade física oferecem uma oportu- science of the world. One of the great achievements of twentieth century nidade real para a fundação dos nossos valores e princípios metafisicos, physics is the discovery that physical reality is different than we always incluindo os nossos valores morais, na ordem do universo. Questiona-se thought. At the foundation of ordinary things we find entities—the atoms, se a estrutura do universo pode assumir uma ordem espiritual, tal como molecules, elementary particles—which exist in a kind of reality that is física pode deter uma outra de natureza mental. Em suma, a realidade quântica requer uma nova visão do processo da evolução da vida. different than the reality of the objects that they form. Specifically, elemen- As moléculas são a base da vida, e as mesmas são sistemas quânticos. tary particles can act like they are at many places at the same time, they O nosso conhecimento da estrutura quântica das moléculas deve ser are able to affect each other instantaneously over long distances, they can integrado na discussão biológica. be meaningfully said to have mind-like properties, and they can exist in superpositions of states which are not quite real but “in the middle between the idea of a thing and a real thing”, as Heisenberg wrote (1962). In short, 1. Scope physical reality is not what it looks like and the microscopic constituents of things are not just miniaturized editions of the ordinary objects of our Up until recently, it was difficult for many to accept science as a conscious experience, but they are different in essence. source of knowledge about the world, and to consider that anything non- Among the unexpected aspects of twentieth physics, frequent refer- tangible and non-observable could be real. Since the seventeenth century ences to mind are a particularly fascinating phenomenon. In many phenomena the ruling scientific outlook (one that is still taught in our schools today) the mind-like aspects of reality come to the fore. For example, like a mind, was that of Galileo, Descartes, Newton and the Age of the Enlightenment. quantum systems can react to mere changes in information. Similarly, like Newton’s physics, in particular, spawned the doctrine that everything in the a mind, they can act spontaneously. The non-material probability fields of universe can be explained in terms of moving material particles; that the quantum reality are closer to the nature of a thought than a thing, and yet they determine the visible order of the universe. The existence of the periodic table of the elements is not due to any mechanical principle that * Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, we know, but it is the result just of the symmetry of the quantum wave Arkansas, 72701 USA. Email: [email protected] functions, a mental property. 83 84 In view of such phenomena, many pioneers of twentieth century physics The universe, once closed by Newtonian materialism, has opened again. have suggested the presence of mind in the universe, and it has become The world of mass-energy is not completely sealed anymore, and cracks plausible to assume that the background of the universe is mind-like and have opened in its mechanistic cortex to a type of reality that is different consciousness underlies matter, rather than being an epiphenomenon of than the reality of ordinary things. A person entering a room with several matter. It is the purpose of this paper to explore, what such a configuration, entrances always will come through just one of them, never through all of if true, might mean for our understanding of the nature of human beings and them simultaneously. But electrons seem to do just that. No ordinary thing our position in the universe. can behave like the elementary particles it is made off. 2. Quantum reality 2.2. Elementary particles can act instantaneously over long-distances In the common sense reality of our consciousness no signal, no influence 2.1. The constituents of real things are not as real as the things that is able to move at a speed faster than the speed of light. It means that, if one they make—the basis of the world is non-material intends to start some action somewhere else and far away, one has to wait for an effect at least as long as it takes for a signal to get there. For the same Electrons are ubiquitous elementary particles with a definite mass and reason there is always an unavoidable delay between question and answer electric charge. They are tiny objects, with a diameter less than a billion when one talks to an astronaut far out in space. billionth of a meter, and whenever we see one, it appears as a localized tiny In contrast, in the quantum world influences can act instantaneously thing, such as a flash on a TV screen, or as a small dot on a photographic over arbitrarily long distances. Experiments involving Bell’s theorem have film. We know the properties of electrons quite well and make use of them shown that, under certain conditions, decisions made by an experimenter in in electronic devices. In particular we are quite sure that they are indivisible; one laboratory can have an instantaneous effect on the results of an experi- they cannot be broken up into even smaller pieces of matter. ment in another laboratory a long distance away. In experiments of this In contrast to their compact nature, when electrons are projected kind, two particles which at one time interact and then move away from through a barrier with several holes in it, they act as though they were passing one another are found to stay connected, as though they were one thing, no through all the holes at the same time. This is electron diffraction. Electron matter how far apart in space they are. diffraction is a sign of the fact that, when we leave them alone, quantum This is the non-locality of the quantum world. If the universe is non-local, particles evolve in wave-like forms or fields, often called psi-fields, that are something that is proceeding in its depth may have an instantaneous effect on spread out over large areas in space. As it turns out, the nature of the psi- us right now and right here. -fields is that of probability fields. Probabilities are dimensionless numbers. Thus, the psi-fields do not carry any mass or energy, just information on 2.3. Elementary particles have mind-like properties numerical relations. Nevertheless, their power in the material world is almighty—their interactions determine the visible order of the universe. Whenever we want to physically affect a thing, we have to spend some In this way, at the foundation of reality we find numerical relations— energy to do so. For example, to move an object from one place to another non-material principles—on which the order of the world is based. Reality is we have to push it; that is, impart some energy to it. Just thinking about based on phenomena that transcend the monist material views of classical such an action will not get it done. physics, and St. Augustine’s thoughts, as expressed in his Confessions (book Elementary particles are different. Experiments show that these things 7), have obtained a new meaning: “The older I got, the more despicable change their behavior when what we know about them changes. Thus, in an became the emptiness of my thought, because I could think of no entity in observable way, quantum systems may react to the flow of information, as any other way than as bodily visible.” though what someone might think about them could affect them. “It is not 85 86 unreasonable to imagine,” Wheeler wrote (1999), “that information sits at the process, descendence with variation is the result of strictly local agents and core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer. Information may not (Darwin, 1872) ‘nature does not make any jumps.’ be just be what we learn about the world. It may be what makes the world”. In reality, nature makes nothing but jumps and the universe is not an The only other thing that we know that can react to the flow of infor- aggregate of disconnected fragments, but a network with possible non-local mation is the human mind.