CONSCIOUSNESS AND QUANTUM REALITY
with NICK HERBERT, Ph.D.
[Abridged]
THINKING ALLOWED Conversations On The Leading Edge Of
Knowledge and Discovery
With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Good evening and welcome. Our
topic tonight is consciousness and reality, and my
guest, Dr. Nick Herbert, is the author of a book
called Quantum Reality. Dr. Herbert is a physicist.
Nick, welcome to the program.
MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know,
as a parapsychologist I find it fascinating that of
the various academic disciplines that are interested
in psychic phenomena, there seems to be the most
interest from quantum physicists such as yourself.I
wonder if we can begin the program tonight by having
you explain to our viewers just what is quantum
physics, and why would you find the phenomenon of
consciousness to be so interesting?
HERBERT: Well, quantum physics started out in the
twenties to explain the interaction of light with
atoms. It focused on that, but now it's extended to
explain the interaction of anything with anything.
It's basically the physicists' theory of the world
these days, and it's been very successful. So there
are two reasons, I think,why quantum physics and
consciousness have some connection. One is that
quantum theory, as most people know by now, is very
strange. It has very weird properties.

MISHLOVE: You're dealing with the very smallest
particles of matter that exist.
HERBERT: Yes, that's true.

MISHLOVE: Subatomic particles. Typically we hear that
this sort of stuff [knocking on furniture] is no
longer solid; it's mostly a vacuum in quantum physics.
HERBERT: Not only is it not solid, is it mostly empty
space, but it's also probabilities -- just fuzzy, not
even totally real.

MISHLOVE: In other words, particles aren't even
particles anymore.
HERBERT: Particles aren't even particles anymore.
That's one of the connections with consciousness --
that the solidity of matter is dissolving away in
light of these theories, and becoming more and more
like the fuzziness that's inside our heads.

MISHLOVE: And that's the basic, most fundamental
theory in all of physics.
HERBERT: Yes, that's the basis of everything that we
do in physics anyway, in quantum physics.

MISHLOVE: And physics is in fact the basic science of
all the sciences. So the most fundamental theory of
all of science is that the basis of reality is fuzzy.
HERBERT: Is fuzzy, is crumbling, and it is ambiguous
-- that's a word I like to use. Somehow there's a
basic ambiguity at the center of the world -- the
center of the inanimate world, the unconscious world.
So that's the first reason -- that there are some
formal resemblances between quantum theory and what
the mind looks like from the inside. And the second
reason is that physicists are running out of problems.
In some senses we're too successful. All the problems
that are within our grasp we've not solved entirely,
but solved in principle. So we're reaching for more
and more things to capture within this net. People are
now trying to explain the very creation event itself
by using quantum physics, and we've just about run the
particle trip down to the limit. Now it's only a
matter of money -- bigger and bigger accelerators,
that's the way to go. But that can only go on so long,
so many physicists are looking for new questions to
ask.

MISHLOVE: A term that I keep hearing is quantum
interconnectedness, and the notion that separability
doesn't exist -- that somehow all is one, the way the
mystics used to say it.
HERBERT: Yes. There is a peculiar feature in quantum
theory called quantum interconnectedness, and it was
discovered right when quantum theory was discovered.
It was found that in the quantum description of two
objects, when two objects briefly interact and then
you pull them apart, in the description at least they
never come apart; there's a kind of stickiness that
connects them together, so they're bound together
forever in the theory. They never separate, even
though they're not interacting anymore. It was thought
that this was just a theoretical artifact; it was
nothing that existed in the real world. Physicists
noted it, said this is very strange, and then they
promptly forgot about it for about fifty years. But
recently, due to something called Bell's theorem, new
interest has been rekindled in this
interconnectedness. Bell's theorem proves that this
connection is not a theoretical artifact, but actually
exists in the real world.

MISHLOVE: I should mention for the benefit of our
viewers, Nick, that you are probably one of the
world's foremost authorities on Bell's theorem; that's
what you specialized in. Bell's theorem seems like the
crack in the cosmic egg, in a way; it's the one part
of quantum physics that's almost turned everything
upside down.
HERBERT: One of my claims to fame is that I have
produced the shortest proof of Bell's theorem in
existence. It's about three lines.

MISHLOVE: Now, Bell's theorem, as I understand it,
goes back even prior to Bell -- to Einstein, and
Einstein's disagreement with quantum physics, back in
the early days. He made his classic statement, "God
doesn't play dice with the universe," at a time when
Einstein himself felt he disagreed with quantum
physics, as I understand it. He felt that if quantum
physics were true, it would have these horrendous
implications which it now turns out are true.
HERBERT: Yes, Einstein was never comfortable with
quantum theory, and he basically had three gripes with
it. The one gripe was that quantum theory is a
probabilistic theory. It just describes things like
the world is essentially random and governed only by
general laws that give the odds for things to happen,
but within these odds anything can happen -- that God
plays dice. Einstein didn't like that, but he could
have lived with that. The second aspect that Einstein
didn't like was the thinglessness, this fuzzy
ambiguity -- that the world isn't made of things, it's
not made of objects. It was put by Paul Davies -- the
notion that somehow big things are made of little
things. Quantum theory doesn't describe the world that
way. Big things aren't made of little things; they're
made of entities whose attributes aren't there when
you don't look, but become there when you do look.
Now, that sounds very, very strange.

MISHLOVE: Like an illusion.
HERBERT: Like an illusion, yes.

MISHLOVE: Or the Hindu concept of Maya, something like
that.
HERBERT: That's right. The world exists when we don't
look at it in some strange state that is
indescribable. Then when we look at it, it becomes
absolutely ordinary, as though someone were trying to
pull something over our eyes -- the world is an
illusion. Einstein didn't like that. He felt that the
big things were made of little things, as the
classical physicists thought.

MISHLOVE: The Newtonian view of billiard-ball-like
particles -- that if you could only understand the
momentum and position of each one, you could predict
everything in the universe.
HERBERT: Everything in the universe, yes, a
comfortable sort of view.

MISHLOVE: You mentioned three things that Einstein
objected to; then there must be one more.
HERBERT: Well, the third thing is this
interconnectedness. Einstein said the world cannot be
like this, because this interconnectedness goes faster
than light. With this quantum interconnectedness, two
objects could come together, meet, and then each go
into the universe, and they would still be connected.
Instantaneously one would know what the fate of the
other one was. Einstein said, now that can never be;
that's like voodoo -- in fact, he used the word --
it's like telepathy, he said; he said it's spooky,
it's ghostlike. Almost his last words in his biography
were, "On this I absolutely stand firm. The world is
not like this." He died in '55, and ten years later
Bell showed that the world must be like this. It's
kind of ironic. Bell himself said, "My theorem answers
some of Einstein's questions in a way that Einstein
would have liked the least."

MISHLOVE: And Einstein created a very strange picture
of the universe as it is, almost time travel, in his
theory of relativity.
HERBERT: Yes, but even Einstein's mind wouldn't go
this far, to accept these instant connections, which
now we believe really must exist in the universe.

MISHLOVE: The notion of instant connections almost
implies that space itself is an illusion.
HERBERT: Yes, that distance is an illusion.

MISHLOVE: That distance is an illusion -- that you and
I and our viewers and the chair are all somehow
intimately connected with the most distant part of the
galaxy.
HERBERT: Yes, that we're all in one place, that there
aren't any places.

MISHLOVE: And the notion the mystics sometimes say,
that you and I, we're not really separate individuals,
but at a deeper level we're like fingers; we're all
connected. Or we're like islands connected. There's
that sense of connectedness as well.
HERBERT: Yes. This now has a certain kind of
verification in Bell's theorem. But like most of these
things in physics, there's a good side and a bad side.
Bell's theorem shows this connection must exist, but
it also says that in some senses it's an invisible
connection, it's an inner connection. There are two
aspects to quantum physics; in a sense it's a little
bit like dice. There are two aspects to dice. There
are the individual dice events that occur, and then
there are the statistical patterns -- like a lot of
sevens will occur and not many twelves. So there's the
overall pattern, and the individual events. Now, what
quantum theory talks about are the patterns; quantum
theory predicts patterns. And what Bell's theorem
shows is that none of these patterns are ever
connected faster than light; you will never see a
faster-than-light pattern. But the individual events,
the dice falls themselves, must be tied together
faster than light. One could say, "Well, everything is
connected faster than light, instantaneously," but
that's not so, because the patterns don't connect, but
the individual dots do. So that's the constraint on
this connectedness. If all the patterns were
instantaneously connected, it would really be a
strange world, because our ordinary experience is made
of patterns of dots, of these little quantum events,
and so there wouldn't be any space for us.

MISHLOVE: Now we're dealing with a paradox, it would
seem. It reminds me in your book you conclude with a
little blues song. As I recall, it goes something
like, "If we're all so connected, why do I feel so all
alone?"
HERBERT: Oh yes, "Bell's Theorem Blues." Yes, we're
all connected in a sense, but in another sense we're
not connected. There's a certain balance in nature. In
fact, that's one of the things that drew me to
physics. We're learning that the world is put together
in such a strange way that it's almost like reading
science fiction. You don't know what's going to happen
next. And this is certainly a strange way to make a
universe. All the patterns are perfectly ordinary;
they preserve space and time, and they're separated at
light speed. Yet the bricks that make up these
patterns are not that way at all. They don't know
anything about space and time, and they're connected
instantaneously. Now, why make a universe that way? I
would never make a universe that way. To make a local
universe, I would use local parts. But whoever made
this universe, or if it made itself, s/he did it with
parts that were better than the whole, in some sense.

MISHLOVE: We'd better define what local means in this
context.
HERBERT: Well, local is a technical term used by
people involved with Bell's theorem. A local
connection is an ordinary connection that obeys the
speed of light, and a non-local connection is like
voodoo -- that when you do something here, instantly
it affects someone over here. What Bell proved was
that no model of the world that used only local
connections would work.

MISHLOVE: So there have to be occasional non-local
connections.
HERBERT: Not occasional -- everything is non-local.

MISHLOVE: Everything is non-local, but as you say, it
doesn't normally show up in the patterns of events.
Well, let me ask you this. Let's talk for a moment, to
shift gears, about psychic phenomena -- telepathy,
voodoo, or psychokinesis. Quantum physicists are very
interested in this. How do the predictions of quantum
physics relate to this aspect of mental functioning --
information transfer at a distance?
HERBERT: Well, since information is a pattern, Bell's
theorem would say, well, no patterns are transferred
faster than light, so you won't see any telepathy on
that level. So at a first cut, Bell's theorem would
say no telepathy. But then there are these individual
events that are churning along. Now, one of my
speculations is that there are two kinds of knowledge
that people have about themselves. One is the kind of
computer-like knowledge where you have facts, and the
other is this very experience ourselves, that we have
right now. It isn't computer-like, it isn't facts.

MISHLOVE: Direct, raw experience.
HERBERT: Raw awareness, whatever that is. My feeling
is that these correspond to the two types of
observation, two types of phenomena, going on in
quantum theory -- that there are these patterns, these
are like computer data; and then there are the events
themselves, the irreducible events, and that's like
awareness. So my feeling is that people might be able
to share awarenesses, whatever that is, but not data.
So there might be mood links.

MISHLOVE: Empathy.
HERBERT: Empathy -- soft connections, but no hard
connections. So if I were to do experiments of this
sort, I would work on that level -- try and find a way
of making clearer these non-data type of experiences
that people have, and see if they're connected with
one another. I'm afraid Bell's theorem doesn't offer
much hope for mind reading and things of that sort. At
least it doesn't to me; I can't see how to use it.

MISHLOVE: Interesting. That answer surprised me a
little bit, but I know you yourself have conducted
some ESP research. You designed a very unique
instrument called the metaphase typewriter to test
psychokinesis. Perhaps we could talk about that a
little bit, and what you did find.
HERBERT: OK, well, since physicists don't know much
about consciousness, we start with very crude models.
So one model was that things have insides and
outsides. Your outside is the physicalness of you, and
the inside is your consciousness. So we assume
everything has an inside and an outside, all the way
from atoms to people.

MISHLOVE: You mean atoms might be conscious?
HERBERT: Oh yes. We'd never know it, because I can't
find out your insides either.

MISHLOVE: There are some psychologists who think that
human beings aren't conscious either.
HERBERT: That's true. What they show is that
psychological methods can't show a psychologist
someone else's insides. That's what they've proved.

MISHLOVE: You can only know your own.
HERBERT: Yes. So if we can't do it with people, we
certainly can't do it with atoms. Atoms, for all we
know, could be conscious; there's no way to show one
way or another. My notion had to do with the idea of
discarnate entities coming through channels, through
spirit mediums. I felt there might be something
unethical about that -- of a spirit's inhabiting a
body already inhabited by a spirit. So the idea came
to me, why not build a little machine that an entity,
a discarnate, could inhabit?

MISHLOVE: A computer, in effect.
HERBERT: A computer, or some receptacle similar enough
to human minds, that a discarnate could inhabit. And
since I believe that quantum mechanics is at the basis
of our consciousness, that somehow the reason we are
conscious is not because we are really good computers
-- because actually we're not very good computers at
all; our consciousness pretty much impedes in some
senses our computational facilities. Consciousness is
really a luxury, so for whatever reason, I believe
that somehow quantum theory has to do with
consciousness. So any quantum system would do, but
then it needs to be coupled to a level we can
understand. So the metaphase typewriter used a quantum
system coupled through a computer to a
language-generating device, and it typed out English,
and the English came from nowhere. It came from
absolute quantum randomness, generated by a
radioactive source. We put the metaphase typewriter in
very high-energy psychic realms and tried to invoke
spirits to come into it and take over its keyboard.

MISHLOVE: Now, let me step back for a moment, because
I think we made a logical leap. The typewriter was in
effect being controlled by the output of subatomic
particles from a radioactive source.
HERBERT: Yes.

MISHLOVE: And you referred to that as nowhere because,
as I understand it, the output of subatomic particles
is considered in quantum physics to be a purely
random, unpredictable phenomenon.
HERBERT: Totally uncontrollable. As far as physicists,
that's where physics stops. Physicists can't explain
when the next subatomic particle will come out. Even
if they have complete control over the experiment,
they can't make the next one come out. It comes out of
its own accord. And all of quantum physics is like
this. When the next light photon comes out of a laser
can't be controlled, or any other quantum phenomenon.

MISHLOVE: I should mention, for the benefit of our
viewers, that this is the basis of a great deal of
computerized research today in parapsychology -- using
a quantum mechanical radioactive source, and having
people -- some with psychic experience or psychic
claims, and other people -- try to predict or attempt
to control that radioactive output.
HERBERT: It's certainly more random than the wheels at
Reno. It would be very impressive if someone could
change a radioactive source's output at will.

MISHLOVE: You connected this output to a language
generator, so that if any patterns were to form in the
output, it might be intelligible as language. So if
some kind of discarnate entity could control the
radioactive output, it would be like a computerized
Ouija board; it might be able to create sentences,
words, and so on.
HERBERT: Yes, but it would be better than a Ouija
board, because no human would be operating it. It
would be a direct proof of the existence of
discarnates, in addition to being your channel to
discarnates. So we did the metaphase typewriter, and
also an advanced version that involved a voice
generator, called the quantum metaphone, where this
voice came out -- out of nowhere again, out of the
quantum void. And we invited Matthew Manning one
afternoon, at Xerox, actually, to come in.

MISHLOVE: The famous psychic from Britain.
HERBERT: He didn't like the sound of the voice, so we
turned that off, and we just sat him in front of the
typewriter, which came out on a typewriter as well as
a TV screen. He liked to watch the TV screen as this
gibberish scrolled across the screen.

MISHLOVE: Normally, this is what it would be, is
gibberish -- random phonetic sounds.
HERBERT: Yes. And he just watched that, and tried to
will something to come across. That one was
unsuccessful. In fact, most of the events were
unsuccessful as far as getting a clear channel, a
clear psychic channel. We had a lot of strange events
happen, whether by random or by some spirit hitting it
for an instant.

MISHLOVE: What would be an example of such a strange
event?
HERBERT: Well, the best one was we had an all-day
Houdini fest, on the hundredth anniversary of Harry
Houdini's birth. We set up challenge posters to
Houdini, who claimed that if he could make it back
from the dead, he would try to make it back. And here
was an anniversary of Houdini's death. We held it in
San Francisco, a place Houdini liked. We held seances
while the metaphase typewriter was going on. We turned
out the lights and held hands and tried to contact the
spirit of Houdini. We tried everything we could think
of to bring Houdini's spirit into this typewriter. But
what happened, the very first line of data was what
was most interesting, because the typewriter wouldn't
work. The feed malfunctioned.

MISHLOVE: Jammed or something.
HERBERT: And the print went all over the page, making
a little frame. In that frame there was a single word,
and that word was "inininfinitime."

MISHLOVE: That's quite a word.
HERBERT: That's a nice word.

MISHLOVE: "In an infinite time."
HERBERT: It wasn't spelled quite right; it was
"inininfinitime."

MISHLOVE: Phonetically. In other words, In an infinite
time, if I had a million zillion monkeys all typing,
eventually I could type out Macbeth.
HERBERT: Or I could type out a message from Houdini.
So it was a very ironic message. We burst out
laughing, of course, at this message, and that seemed
to be the only conscious thing to come across on the
metaphase typewriter that day. By the way, the
metaphase typewriter generates literature not in lines
or pages, but in pounds, if you can imagine. As fast
as the typewriter can print, we can generate that.

MISHLOVE: With the high-speed printers these days. So
that was one of the rare occasions when something
interesting did come across.
HERBERT: Yes.

MISHLOVE: Well, you mentioned earlier that you believe
quantum physics is at the basis of consciousness. I
wonder if you would come back to that point and
elaborate on it.
HERBERT: Yes. Right now there are two main approaches
to consciousness, I believe. They are studying the
brain, looking at how the brain does it -- the one
machine in the world that we know is conscious for
sure -- and then trying to simulate cognitive things
on computers. I think this is where the smart money is
placed these days. I think these are a good place to
do research.

MISHLOVE: Trying to simulate brain functioning on the
computer.
HERBERT: On computers, and looking at brains. And I
think we learn a lot about brains and computers there,
but not very much about consciousness.

MISHLOVE: The field of bionics.
HERBERT: Bionics, robotics, something of that sort. It
seems to me that consciousness is wholly other than a
computer program or electric impulses. The brain is an
exotic electric medium. It doesn't have wires.

MISHLOVE: It's been defined as a kind of computer with
electrical impulses and chemical impulses, so it might
be both an analog and a digital computer. But you're
saying if there's a quantum mechanical basis it goes
down to a subatomic level, then, not just neurons.
HERBERT: Not just neurons. And I believe that any
entity that's conscious must tap into this quantum
level somewhere -- that somewhere in the brain there
is a system that is sensitive to quantum fluctuations,
and that that system is where we are conscious. If you
look at consciousness from an information theoretical
point of view, there are certain data rates associated
with things. The data rate associated with television,
for instance, is six million bits a second. That's how
much it takes to take these images and send them.

MISHLOVE: That's a lot.
HERBERT: It's a lot. The telephone takes about three
thousand bits a second -- three thousand bits to send
a voice along a line. To send Morse code it takes
about ten bits a second. Now, I've looked at the data
rate of human consciousness. It's maybe two or three
bits a second.

MISHLOVE: Two or three bits a second?
HERBERT: Two or three bits a second.

MISHLOVE: Slower than Morse code?
HERBERT: Slower than Morse code.

MISHLOVE: And what do you base that on?
HERBERT: How many things we can pay attention to at
any one time. I mean, sure, there's a lot going on in
the brain, and sure, there's a lot going on in your
visual field. But how much of that do you see, right
this instant? We're very distractible, very
small-data-rate entities.

MISHLOVE: OK, but what you're saying, if I understand
you right, then, is that the brain is receiving a lot
of information, but consciousness is filtering it out
somehow.
HERBERT: The brain is about 1012 bits per second. It's
immensely more powerful than TV.

MISHLOVE: And than consciousness itself.
HERBERT: Well, consciousness itself is a minuscule
flea on the back of this enormous machine.

MISHLOVE: And yet it's responsible for all of our
culture.
HERBERT: Yes. So consciousness as a data rate would be
obviously almost undetectable in the masses of
everything else that's going on there, unless it were
located in some central point, which may be so. We had
a little group in San Francisco called the
Consciousness Theory Group. We were going to solve the
problems of consciousness. There were people from
physics and from psychology and computer sciences, and
one of our hobbies was looking at slides of the brain
and trying to locate where the consciousness would be.
One popular place is the reticular activating system.

MISHLOVE: Oh yes, in the brain stem.
HERBERT: In the brain stem, a very primitive part of
the brain.

MISHLOVE: It has to do with awareness, alerting you to
pay attention to things, waking and sleeping.
HERBERT: Yes, to various sorts of things. But it's not
a very complicated system.

MISHLOVE: But what you're saying, then, is
consciousness is very, very small. And yet my sense is
-- you surprised me -- I would think consciousness
would be potentially very large.
HERBERT: No, not as far as data rate goes. Basically,
it's like the President and the three hundred million
people, or however many there are, and one man in some
sense controls the actions of the whole thing -- not
the detailed actions, but the collective actions.

MISHLOVE: I see. In other words, the control system is
a very small part of the whole system. I've got it.
HERBERT: Exactly. If you think the purpose of
consciousness is to control this.

MISHLOVE: Well, Nick, you've certainly raised many
more questions than we've had time to answer this
evening, but it's been a real pleasure having you with
us exploring the mysteries of consciousness and
quantum reality.

END
 
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"Jivanmukti is knowing, while still incarnated on this planet, that you are the eternal, non-dual Self (Brahman), and knowing also that the Self is never embodied since the body is not at last real (and neither are worldly appearances). So like a reflection in a lake the world  appears to exist, but it is not ultimately real. This understanding is 
foundational to attaining Jivanmukti. It is NOT an intellectual understanding however.
It is a way of experiencing the world, of being in it...but not of it."