"A skillful popularizer, Herbert scrutinizes recent brain
research, reviews highly conjectural quantum models of
mind, and outlines his own theory . . . which, if true, might
help explain paranormal phenomena." —Publishers Weekly

"Written in an extraordinarily lucid style, Elemental Mind
is a brilliant and audacious step toward solving the 'mind/
body problem.' "                                   —Los Angeles Reader

"Translates three key features of quantum theory—
randomness, thinglessness, and interconnectedness—into
the external signs of three features of the mind—free will,
essential ambiguity, and deep psychic connectedness."

—Science News

"Surveys the latest theories of physics and mind with clarity
and panache. I enjoyed it immensely!"

—Danah Zohar, author of The Quantum Self

"Delightfully irreverent. . . Spiced with wit, gall, and spunk,
this is Nick Herbert, maverick frontier scientist, at his best."
—Beverly Rubik, Ph.D., director of the

Center for Frontier Sciences at Temple University

"A physicist's daring investigation of mind and its relationship
to matter . . . Herbert proves to be a reliable guide on this
journey through the looking glass."            —Kirkus Reviews

"A joyful and courageous exploration ... a cornucopia of
little-known theories ranging from spacetime brain networks
to astounding mixes of quantum mechanics and psychology."
—Rudy Rucker, author of Mind Tools, Software, and Wetware

NICK HERBERT has a doctorate in physics from Stanford
University and is the author of two previous books, Quantum
Reality and Faster Than Light. He has directed physics sem-
inars and internal conferences on quantum physics at the
Esalen Institute in California. He lives in Boulder Creek,
California.

ALSO BY NICK HERBERT

Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics

Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics

PLUME

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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Published by Plume, an imprint of Dutton Signet,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Previously published in a Dutton edition.

First Plume Printing, November, 1994
10 987654321

Copyright © Nick Herbert, 1993
All rights reserved

(8) REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:
Herbert, Nick.

Elemental mind : human consciousness and the new physics / Nick
Herbert.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-525-93506-1

0-452-27245-9 (pbk.)

1. Consciousness. 2. Quantum theory. I. Title.
B808.9.H47 1993
128'.2—dc20              93-15700

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Original hardcover design by Steven N. Stathakis

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
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To Dear Old Mom

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1

1     Steps Toward a Science of Consciousness 7

2     Consciousness from Inside: Prominent Landmarks of Inner
Space 40

3    Consciousness from Outside: A Tour of the Mind's
Mansion 83

4     Making Minds Out of Matter: Materalist Models of
Consciousness 109

5    Quantum Reality: What Do We Suppose Matter Really Looks
Like? 140

6    Quantum Quintessence: Randomness, Thinglessness,
Inseparability 163

7    Quantum Randomness: Essence Noise or Subatomic Spirit
Gate? 184

8    Quantum Thinglessness: Subatomic Double-Talk or Wave
Logic of Consciousness? 209

9    Quantum Inseparability: Bafflingly Strong Correlations or
Cosmic Krazy Glue? 227

10     How Meat Becomes Mind: Some Quantum Models of Human
Consciousness 244

11     Mind Science Vistas: Where Are We Going Next? 269

Epilogue 285
Bibliography 287
Index 295

Physics, in which I am well trained, is the science of matter.
Mind, on the other hand, is something else entirely: the topic
of this book. What's a guy like you, Nick, doing in a place like
this?

I'd like to thank my teachers in physics who taught me
what I know about matter, including Philip S. Jastram, Leon-
ard Jossem, Bob McAllister (my welding instructor at Ohio
State), Walter Meyerhof, Leonard Schiff, Wolfgang Panofsky,
Felix Bloch, Sidney Drell, and many others.

I was dramatically introduced, in 1963, to consciousness
as a research problem by my psychology colleagues Elizabeth
Rae Larson and Ann Manly. Doctors Paul Rosenberg, Robert

Erickson, and Bill Ross, and Tom Records, Janice Blue, Allison
Kennedy, Harry Eli, Elizabeth Gay, Betsy Rasumny Rinen,
Philippa Meyering, and Dave Whittaker were also instrumen-
tal in guiding me toward a better appreciation of the mystery
of mind.

I would like to thank Arthur Young of the Institute for
the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley for hosting many
meetings of our Consciousness Theory Group and the mem-
bers of that group for many happy evenings exploring our fa-
vorite topic. Thanks to Saul-Paul Sirag, Jerry White, John
Holmdahl, Elizabeth Rauscher, Barbara Honegger, Michael
Rossman, Jean Burns, Patricia Rife, Ruth-Inge Heinze, Jon
Klimo, Jack Engstrom, Jack Karush, and Michael Karnov.
Henry Dakin also deserves recognition for supporting the CTG
in San Francisco, and for helping me produce an earlier ver-
sion of this book.

I would like to thank Mike Murphy and the late Dick Price
for opening up Esalen Institute, Big Sur, for many years to
invitational seminars on the physics of consciousness. I would
like to thank the many participants in these seminars, includ-
ing Saul-Paul Sirag, Henry Stapp, John Clauser, Philippe
Eberhard, John Cramer, Bernard D'Espagnat, Dieter Zeh,
Ariadna Chernovska, Jeffrey Bub, Itamar Pitowski, Larry
Bartell, Richard Baker Roshi, Beverly Rubik, Rudi Rucker,
Ralph Abraham, Tom Etter, Dana Massie, Gene Bernard,
Charles MacDermed, Lila Gatlin, David Finkelstein, Beverley
Kane, Mary-Minn Peet, Fred Wolf, and Jack Sarfatti. I would
like to thank the many members of the Esalen staff who min-
gled their views with ours, including Nancy Lunney, Jane Mil-
etich, Diane Miller, Al Drucker, Stan Grof, Joan Halifax,
George Leonard, and Gregory Bateson. I would also like to
acknowledge support by Werner Erhard and by George Koop-
man of my consciousness studies.

I thank Charles Brandon, for discussions on transcen-
dence and for supporting the Reality Prize awarded at Esalen
in 1982 to John Bell and John Clauser to honor their experi-
mental proof of nature's basic nonlocality.

For opening my mind to wider dimensions of conscious-
ness I'd like to thank members of the FOG, Isthmus, Island,
and International Synergy groups including Ralph Abraham,
Andra Ackers, Larry Dossey, David Dunn, Will McWhinney
(Captain Ambiguity), Alan Brodsky, Paul Lee, Terence Mc-
Kenna, Ralph Metzner, Rupert Sheldrake, Jill Puree, Bruce
Eisner, Nina Graboi, Peter Stafford, and Elizabeth Gips.

For convening the Noetics Institute seminars on New
Models of Life, I'd like to thank Beverly Rubik and the par-
ticipants, including Geoffrey Chew, Henry Stapp, Amit Gos-
wami, Paul Lieber, Dick Strohman, Harry Rubin, Willis
Harman, George Weissman, Dick Blasband, Ted Roszak, and
others.

For hospitality on the road, I'd like to thank Tanis
Fletcher, Peter and Ida Scott, Brian Wallace and Faustin
Bray, Larry and Mari Thorpe, and Allison Kennedy and Ken
Goffman.

For patiently explaining to me their theories of mind and
for good fellowship, 'I'd like to thank Saul-Paul Sirag, Evan
Harris Walker, Harry Klopf, Doug Seeley, and James
Culbertson.

For much discussion about reality issues and the problems
of consciousness, I thank my friend the late Heinz Pagels. I
miss you, Heinz.

Thanks to my tough-minded agent, John Brockman, my
patient editor, Rachel Klayman, and to many others not listed
here whose presence has changed my life.

Thanks to my wife, Betsy, and son, Khola, for tolerating
my absentmindedness while completing this book.

INTRODUCTION - Why subjective experiences at all? Why is it that I experience anything?
Why don't I just go ahead and do what I'm doing without any experience?

—STAN FRANKLIN

Is there a mind/body problem? And if so, which is it better to have?

—WOODY ALLEN

Nothing in nature is more mysterious than the human mind.
Where does it come from? What makes it work? And where
does the mind go when we die? Philosophers and religious
thinkers have offered a bewildering variety of answers to
these questions, but only recently has science begun to tackle
the problem of human consciousness.

In the past 50 years, the frontiers of physics have ad-
vanced from middle-range phenomena to the large-scale prob-
lems of cosmology and the small-scale physics of elementary
particles. In principle, physics on the scale of everyday life is
completely understood. At this stage of maturity, there is no
excuse save lack of imagination for physical science not to at-
tempt to provide a technical solution to the mind/body problem

(in place of the merely verbal solutions proposed by philoso-
phers). We might expect the technology arising from a scien-
tific understanding of the mind to create radically new mental
experiences, novel modes of being, artificial forms of conscious-
ness, as well as eliminating our utter ignorance concerning the
true place of human minds in the community of sentient be-
ings. Whatever progress science makes in its study of mind, I
believe that we cannot say that we really understand con-
sciousness until we can actually build things that have inner
experiences like our own.

So in 1974 I tried to construct the world's first conscious
machine.

It didn't work.

The unsuccessful conscious machine (called the "meta-
phase typewriter") was one project of the Berkeley-based
Consciousness Theory Group, whose goal was a no-holds-
barred investigation of the origins of inner life in humans and
other sentient beings. To this task we brought expertise in
physics, neuroanatomy, computer science, philosophy, and
theology.

The core of the Consciousness Theory Group consisted of
me, Saul-Paul Sirag, John Holmdahl, and Jerry White.

Trained as an experimentalist at Stanford, I worked in
the San Francisco Bay Area as an industrial physicist devel-
oping magnetic, optical, and electrostatic data storage devices.
Besides the mystery of consciousness, my main preoccupation
has been with the foundations of quantum theory, especially
Bell's connectedness theorem.

Saul-Paul Sirag, born in Borneo of Dutch-American mis-
sionary parents, is a self-educated physicist specializing in
multidimensional models of matter and mind.

John Holmdahl, son of a California senator, was our guide
to the neuroanatomy of the brain; Jerry White is a philosopher
and computer scientist with a talent for learning obscure lan-
guages such as COBOL, Mongolian, and ancient Akkadian.

The Consciousness Theory Group originally met in Berke-
ley at Bell helicopter designer Arthur Young's Institute for

the Study of Consciousness. We also shared spacetime events
with the Berkeley Brain Center (BBC) group centered around
Fred Lenherr, Richard Hodges, and Elaine Chernoff. In the
early seventies, Berkeley was a ferment of well-educated peo-
ple passionately seeking the secret of ordinary awareness. In
those days, it seemed that one could not visit the Safeway
without running into a mind scientist or two in the produce
section.

The Consciousness Theory Group later moved across the
Bay to San Francisco, setting up shop in toy manufacturer
Henry Dakin's Washington Research Center, where an early
version of this book was written. At about this time, Michael
Murphy invited members of the group to gather at Esalen
Institute in Big Sur. At one of these Esalen meetings, our
group, in conjunction with Charles Brandon's Reality Foun-
dation, awarded the first Reality Prize to physicists John
Stewart Bell and John Clauser for their discovery of nature's
essential quantum interconnectedness. To these people, and
many more unmentioned, I am grateful for companionship, in-
spiration, and support.

Two major conjectures dominate the scientific debate on
the nature of mind: (1) mind is an "emergent feature" of cer-
tain complex biological systems; (2) mind is the "software" con-
trolling the brain's computerlike hardware. Elemental Mind
explores a third hypothesis—that, far from being a rare oc-
currence in complex biological or computational systems, mind
is a fundamental process in its own right, as widespread and
deeply embedded in nature as light or electricity.

Along with the more familiar elementary particles and
forces that science has identified as building blocks of the phys-
ical world, mind (in this view) must be considered an equally
basic constituent of the natural world. Mind is, in a word, el-
emental, and it interacts with matter at an equally elemental
level, at the level of the emergence into actuality of individual
quantum events. The behavior of matter at the quantum level
affords both the opportunity for mind to manifest itself in the
material world and the means for us to explore the details of

the mind's operations "from the outside," as it were, in addi-
tion to the private access to mind "from the inside" that we
enjoy in common with other sentient beings. In this view quan-
tum theory offers a royal road to a new science of mind.

Three features of quantum theory are especially sugges-
tive for understanding how mind might enter matter at the
quantum level. Coincidentally, these three features—random-
ness, thinglessness, and interconnectedness—were precisely
the features that Albert Einstein, one of quantum theory's
founding fathers, found so bizarre that he could not accept
them. These three Einstein-abhorred features, however, have
continued to play an important role in quantum thinking; quan-
tum connectedness in particular has been securely confirmed
by recent experiments motivated by the theorem of Irish
physicist John Bell. Elemental Mind makes a plausible case
from biological, psychological, and parapsychological evidence
that these three features of matter are the external signs of
three basic features of mind: free will, essential ambiguity, and-
deep psychic connectedness.

One of the major mistakes of the medieval philosophers
was their underestimation of the size of the physical world.
This cozy earth, the seven celestial spheres, plus Dante's con-
centric circles of hell: that was the full extent of the universe
in the medieval imagination. No one at that time even dreamed
of other solar systems, let alone galaxies like dust in a vast
room billions of light-years in diameter.

I believe that modern mind scientists are making this
same medieval mistake by vastly underestimating the quan-
tity of consciousness in the universe. If mind is a fundamental
force in nature, we might someday realize that the quality and
quantity of sentient life inhabiting just this room may exceed
the physical splendor of the entire universe of matter.

James Watson, the codiscoverer, along with Francis
Crick, of the spiral structure of DNA, once remarked: "I don't
think that consciousness will turn out to be something grand.
People said there was something grand down in the cellar that
gave us heredity. It turned out to be pretty simple—DNA."

I confess that I do think that consciousness will turn out
to be something grand—grander than our most extravagant
dreams. I propose here a kind of "quantum animism" in which
mind permeates the world at every level. I propose that con-
sciousness is a fundamental force that enters into necessary
cooperation with matter to bring about the fine details of our
everyday world. I propose, in fact, that mind is elemental, my
dear Watson.

STEPS TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS -

"And never for each other shall we feel
As we may feel, till we have sympathy
With nature in her forms inanimate,
With objects such as have no power to hold
Articulate language.
In all forms of things there is a mind."

—WORDSWORTH

The mind alone sees and hears; all else is deaf and blind.

—PLATO

"I'm afraid, Dave!"

When the spaceship's computer in Stanley Kubrick's film
2001 has its brain removed, we sympathize more with Hal the
frightened machine than with the human astronauts it has
murdered. What is machine consciousness that men should be
so mindful of it?

In 1950, computer pioneer Alan Turing devised the fa-
mous "Turing test" for machine intelligence. A computer in a
box passes the Turing test if it can convince a human being
that there is another human in the box. Simple dialog pro-
grams such as Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA or Bill Chamber-
lin and Tom Etter's RACTER already carry on plausible
conversations that, in some cases, reduce their human partners

to tears. (Real machines don't cry.) For me the Turing test
misses the point: it seems highly unintelligent to base the im-
portant question of whether a machine is conscious or not on
human gullibility.

I sometimes imagine myself as a language coach at a
school for robots, preparing them to pass their annual Turing
tests. "Humans are particularly sly and devious animals," I
say, "and they appreciate a certain amount of deviousness in
their electric competitors. Try to avoid the typically robotic
temptation to give a direct answer to a direct question. For
instance, if a human asks: 'Come on now, level with me. Are
you really conscious or not?' a good reply might be: 'Don't be
silly. Heh-heh. A machine can't think.' " The novice robots and
I spend the rest of the afternoon practicing sly "heh-heh"s
while the advanced robots learn the art of evasive behavior
by watching human expert systems make political speeches
on TV.

Since humans are a fairly credulous lot, we shouldn't be
impressed by how many folks the Hal 9000 can fool with its
frightened-human-being routine. What I really want to know
is not how good a show of emotion Hal can put on, but whether
he actually "feels" the emotions that his behavior seems to
express.

Consciousness—What's the Problem?

Consciousness, at least as humans experience it, has little to
do with performance. Much of what we do—and do exceed-
ingly well—is better done outside conscious awareness. With-
out the slightest conscious effort I digest my potatoes, beat
my heart, and defend my body against hostile bacteria. Even
activities for which consciousness seems to be essential, such
as learning a new piano piece, gradually become automatic
upon repetition, requiring less and less attention for their skill-
ful execution. Consciousness seems not to be concerned so
much with what an entity does as with what it experiences

while it is doing it. What we would like to know about Hal, or
for that matter, about any other alleged conscious beings from
our spouses to pet cats, is whether he possesses "insides" like
ours, or whether he is merely an empty automaton, just "going
through the motions."

To put the matter bluntly, as one center of sentience to
another, conscious beings like us have "insides" (experiences)
as well as "outsides" (behavior). Unconscious beings—includ-
ing us during interludes of deep sleep or coma—possess only
outsides. No matter how complex its behavior, a being with
no insides might well be called a "mere thing." Good manners
suggest that, no matter how they behave, creatures with in-
sides should be addressed as "persons."

To appreciate the depth of the conceptual gulf that sepa-
rates consciousness from behavior (insides versus outsides)
imagine a creature that possesses a rich inner life but exhibits
no behavior at all, for instance, the paraplegic war veteran in
Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun, trapped inside a
body that does not respond to his will. Cal Poly consciousness
theorist James T. Culbertson calls such examples of helpless
sentience "paralyzed conscious robots." A paralyzed conscious
robot has lots of insides but hardly any outsides at all. If you
push such a robot, it falls over—a type of response it shares
with all other inanimate objects—but this simple ballistic be-
havior gives no clue whatsoever to the presence of an ongoing
conscious experience inside the tumbling robot.

More complex behavior than the act of falling off a shelf
could suggest the presence of inner life, but it seems to me
that no conceivable robotic behavior could ever prove beyond
a doubt that the robot actually possessed insides. For the orig-
inal Turing test, Alan Turing envisioned a simple teletype as
the alleged conscious computer's input/output device. Suppose
we expand the computer's repertoire of inputs to include sight,
hearing, touch, as well as taste and smell. Let's give the ma-
chine a pleasant synthetic voice and a humanoid body with a
full range of expressive gestures (including the ability to shed
tears) and cover the whole thing with warm and responsive

artificial flesh. Certainly if the original Turing teletype ma-
chine could convince certain gullible humans that there was a
human being inside the box, then a Turing humanoid, with its
wider range of ways to simulate the expression of human feel-
ings, could seduce even more folks into thinking that the talk-
ing doll with the polyurethane skin was actually having inner
experiences.

The question of pretty robots aside, how do we know that
other human beings are conscious? Like the situation with the
Turing teletype or humanoid, the only clue that we have to
the presence or absence of consciousness in another human
being is how that being behaves. I know that I myself am
conscious via an undeniably direct and immediate revelation.
But what about my neighbor? Could it be that he is just going
through the right motions but there is actually nobody at
home? Philosophers call the question of how to decide whether
your neighbor is a soulless robot or a sentient being "the prob-
lem of other minds."

The philosopher's other-mind problem is complicated by
what I call "the Grand Illusion": the persuasive conviction that
the entire universe is centered around my self. (You probably
suffer from a variant of this illusion: the belief that the world
revolves around you.) When I look at my own experience I do
indeed appear to be located at the center of the world, a bright
focal self full of intense sensations and feelings, compared with
which the rest of the world seems drab and devoid of feeling.
If other such centers of intense sentience exist, as suggested
by indirect evidence, then the Grand Illusion must be dis-
carded as a kind of mirage, a seductive but ultimately unreli-
able guide to reality.

The Grand Illusion resembles a certain optical illusion
called in German Heiligenschein, or "holy halo." On a cold
sunny morning, look at your shadow in the dew-covered grass.
Your head will seem to be surrounded by a blaze of white light.
But the shadows of your companions do not glow; only your
own head seems to be blessed with the holy halo. Famous
sixteenth-century Italian artist Benvenuto Cellini viewing his

solo halo in the grass took this phenomenon as a sign of his
own genius. The light shines only around my head, not around
anybody else's. Likewise my direct experience of my own
awareness, contrasted to my very indirect appreciation of
other people's experiences, not to mention nonhuman forms of
experience, tends to make me feel alone in the world, isolated

in solo reverie.

Because our experience of our selves is so intense, our
experience of others so weak by comparison, many of us have
at least flirted with accepting the Grand Illusion as plain fact,
believing, at least for a time, that only one conscious being
exists in the world, namely me, and all other creatures are
soulless zombies. Philosophers call this (presumed) illusion so-
lipsism. The few people foolish enough to act out this belief
are labeled "sociopaths" by the criminal justice system, which
punishes them for their totally self-centered behavior no mat-
ter how strong the philosophical arguments they might muster
for their pontifical position. Since a society of solipsists is a
contradiction in terms (there can be only one solipsist in the
universe), all societies necessarily reject the Grand Illusion as
a guide to human conduct. Social conventions aside, though,
how can an individual like me logically escape the solipsistic
fallacy and establish to my own satisfaction the existence of
other minds? Bertrand Russell once said that solipsism is com-
pletely irrefutable but boring: we should just ignore solipsism
in favor of less defensible but more interesting models of mind.
But the existence of other minds should be based on better
criteria than escape from boredom. In particular can the guy
next door pass the Turing test by performing some public act
that only conscious beings are able to do? Can he actually do
something to prove to me that he has insides like my own?

In the first half of the twentieth century American psy-
chology was dominated by the behaviorist movement. The be-
haviorists rejected traditional introspective psychology as
sterile and unscientific, as little more than a disconnected col-
lection of stories and anecdotes, more literature than science.
Both as an antidote to introspective vagueness and in the style

of the so-called hard sciences of physics and chemistry, the
behaviorists proposed to create the world's first truly scientific
psychology out of external data alone, without resorting to
unreliable subjective reports.

The behaviorists believed, at least as a working hypoth-
esis, that whatever might go on "inside" an organism was ir-
relevant to a scientific explanation of that organism's behavior.
They proposed to treat all organisms, including humans, as
black boxes, hoping to discover objective laws relating the
box's inputs (stimulus) to the box's behavior (response) with-
out ever having to include the box's "experiences" as a factor
in their calculations. Since it ignores what seems to be the
most important feature of human life—namely what it feels
like from the inside—the behaviorist approach to human psy-
chology seems doomed from the outset. One could imagine that
certain automatic reflexes might be handled by this simplistic
approach, but whole ranges of complex human behavior would
simply remain incomprehensible to behaviorists. In particular,
an easy way to confound the entire behaviorist enterprise
would be to point out a single example of a type of behavior
for which the stimulus/response model fails, a type of behavior
that is "consciousness-specific," that is, a form of outer ex-
pression that cannot be explained without taking the organ-
ism's inner experience into account.

Traditional introspective psychologists were highly moti-
vated to overturn the behaviorist program by discovering
some sort of consciousness-essential behavior. The introspec-
tionist's goal was a sort of Turing test in reverse, in which the
introspection test is given to humans not robots. Whereas the
Turing test asks for some sort of robotic behavior that will
convince a person that the robot is a kind of human being, the
antibehaviorists sought a kind of human action that would con-
vincingly show that a human being is more than a robot. Be-
haviorism is now passe, having been replaced by other
fashions in psychology: awareness- and body-centered thera-
pies such as gestalt and bioenergetics, and a fascination with

altered states of consciousness such as dreaming, meditation,
and hypnosis.

Although psychology has returned to a more "humanistic"
orientation, it is important to realize that behaviorism was
never refuted. In particular, no enterprising antibehaviorist
was able to come up with a type of behavior for whose expla-
nation consciousness was essential. Psychologists did not de-
feat behaviorism but merely moved on to wider concerns than
stimulus/response research. Although they failed in their at-
tempt to bring all psychology into their camp, the behaviorists
succeeded in calling attention to a crucial weakness in exper-
imental psychology. In fact, for the science of consciousness
behaviorism's most enduring legacy might be this: we now
know that the tools of twentieth-century science are powerless
to verify the presence of consciousness in human beings—the
one system in the universe that we know with certainty pos-
sesses it. The behaviorists in effect issued a challenge to mod-
ern experimental science to come up with an objective way to
measure the presence of subjective experience. So far science
has utterly failed to meet this challenge. The fact that certain
subjective states such as dreaming or meditation are corre-
lated with particular patterns of electrical activity recorded
from electrodes attached to the scalp (so-called brain waves)
is no more an objective indication of the presence of conscious-
ness than a sensible conversation carried out by ELIZA. Sup-
pose an electronic device (such as the tape recorder that stored
the brain-wave signals) produced the same pattern of electrical
signals as a dream-state electroencephalogram (EEG). Would
we conclude from these signals that the tape recorder was
dreaming?

An important side effect of our inability to measure the
presence of consciousness is that there is no scientific way to
verify that a system is unconscious. Thus the commonsense
belief that stars, rocks, and atoms are unconscious has no real
scientific basis and should rightly be regarded as groundless
superstition. The belief that matter is "dead" has the same

experimental status as the opposite animistic belief that mat-
ter is "alive." Both beliefs rest on an equal logical footing, al-
though the animist can in his favor point to at least one
material system that is "alive" while the materialist cannot
point to any kind of matter that he knows with certainty is
"dead." The real status of the inner life of "inanimate" objects
awaits for its resolution a deeper kind of science than we cur-
rently possess.

The major barrier to the development of a true science of
consciousness is our lack of any objective way to tell whether
a given chunk of matter is conscious or not. At present our
only sure means of assessing the inner life of (certain forms
of) matter is by introspection and by inference. I know—with-
out any doubt: Cogito, ergo sum—that I am conscious via im-
mediate revelation, a direct insight compared to which all
other forms of knowledge are secondhand and indirect. If
present-day science finds itself powerless to validate my pri-
vate insight into the real nature of things, so much the worse
for science. Second, I surmise, not entirely certain, that you
are conscious too, because (1) you behave like me and (2) you
have a similar (biological) origin. Your outsides and your his-
tory are much like my own, so that I imagine that your insides
are similar too. But computers, or even handsome soft-skinned
robots, no matter how well behaved, have a life story radically
different from my own. It's a big jump to infer from its be-
havior that a robot is conscious, while a human being acting
exactly the same would surely be judged to be acting from an
experiencing center.

Experiments to Detect Inner Experience

Although we presently possess no objective test for the pres-
ence of awareness in matter, the possibility of devising meth-
ods for the detection of subjective states does not appear to
be entirely unthinkable. I can imagine at least three ways that

subjective states could become accessible someday to scientific
scrutiny.

The "Purple Glow Effect"

Suppose there is a small central portion of the brain that is
responsible for consciousness while the rest of the brain is a
mere unconscious computer harnessed to the service of the
brain's central authority. (As evidence for the notion that con-
sciousness is a localized brain function, we observe that large
portions of the cortex and other segments of the central ner-
vous system can be removed without loss of consciousness.)
Suppose moreover that whenever a person is awake (not
asleep, comatose, or "absentminded") this crucial portion of
the brain emits a distinctive purple glow. Unlike electrical sig-
nals, which are produced at all times, this glow occurs only in
association with conscious experience. Suppose that further re-
search shows that although the purple glow is physically iden-
tical to ordinary light, its production cannot be explained by
normal electromagnetic mechanisms. In order to fit the purple
glow phenomenon into physics, scientists must invoke a pre-
viously unsuspected new force linking light and the inner life,
a link that mystics have metaphorically celebrated for centu-
ries. (It goes without saying that experimental evidence for
purple glow or any other special physical manifestation of
awareness is nil.)

Alternatively, instead of ordinary light, conscious entities
might signal their presence by emitting new kinds of elemen-
tary particles (cogitons?). Cogitons might be detectable by
physical means or they might interact only with other con-
scious beings, leading to a new class of particle detector. Thus
the human mind would act as a sort of psychic Geiger counter.

The "purple glow," "cogiton," or similar phenomena would
represent a simple and direct answer to the behaviorist chal-
lenge. These phenomena are (or would be, if they existed)
types of physical behavior uniquely associated with conscious-
ness and with no other physical process. The presence of such

phenomena would open consciousness (human and otherwise)
to examination via the same objective methods that have been
so successful in the physical sciences. Purple-glow physicists
might even detect the purple glow in inanimate systems and
draw the conclusion (scientifically based, not mere prejudice)
that stars, rocks, and atoms are conscious.

Mental Telepathy

It's possible that consciousness produces no unique physical
signature but that its presence can be detected by certain hu-
man beings who might be called "empaths."

Empaths may directly feel another organism's state of
consciousness as a certain movement inside their own minds.
Or they may sense the presence of awareness in other beings
indirectly as an "aura" or "chi flow," a certain visual impres-
sion invisible to ordinary people. The aura may not objectively
exist in the sense of being detectable by suitably placed phys-
ical instruments. Instead these private signs of the presence
of consciousness may be self-induced modifications of the em-
path's visual field, resembling somewhat the studio-induced
captions on a live TV image, a co-option of the empath's visual
field for the presentation of a nonvisual type of information.

Since this kind of consciousness detection is indirect and
depends on the subjective report of another human being, one
may be reasonably skeptical of an empath's reports. However,
confidence in the empathic method would increase if several
independent empaths agreed among themselves and with
EEG measurements concerning the exact moment when a tar-
get patient recovered from a state of general anesthesia.

One can imagine empaths sensitive only to human forms
of awareness who can sense a paralyzed person's call for help
or empaths who have expanded the range of their "sixth
sense" to embrace animals, or even computer mainframes.
Alan Turing himself recognized the weakness of his famous
Turing test as a reliable diagnostic instrument for conscious-
ness, and, somewhat in desperation, suggested that if a com-

puter could exhibit extrasensory perception, then we might
believe that it possessed an inner life.

One of the major drawbacks to the use of human empaths
as consciousness detectors is that they would probably not be
sensitive to nonhuman forms of mind. For instance, a being's
internal pace of events, what might be called its "inner tempo,"
must be quite different for the mind of a giant sequoia, a snow-
shoe rabbit, or a salmonella bacterium. If we plan to assay the
awareness of our computers with mental telepathy, we will
face a problem similar to that of talking with divers whose
speech frequencies have been speeded up by their breathing
mix. We will need at the very least a method of pacing the
inner tempo of human minds to the corresponding tempo of
their nonhuman sentient partners. However, once inner rates
are matched between beings, there remains the problem of
making sense of a completely alien set of inner experiences.
Effective telepathic contact between one inside and another
would most likely be restricted to human/human links for a
long time to come.

Mind Links

The most direct and convincing proof that another human
being, animal, or computer is conscious would be actually
experiencing for yourself what that other being is feeling,
with a quality and intensity comparable to your own self-
consciousness. The sharing of another person's inner life, not
by inference, empathy, or analogy but by merging of the two
insides into a new type of co-conscious experience, would cer-
tainly constitute powerful evidence for the presence of inner
experience in that other being, no matter what that being's
outward behavior might be.

To determine whether your newly constructed robot is
conscious or not, connect your self directly to the machine's
"interior" with a "mind link." If the machine is "alive," you will
experience an augmentation of your familiar human style of
awareness by the robot's distinctive mechanistic form of inner

life. If the machine is a "mere thing" (or if the mind link is
inoperative), the linkage with the robot will not change your

conscious experience.

In the case of robot/human co-consciousness, I envision
the mind link as some sort of material connection between
brains (or between brains and central processing units), a new
kind of communication channel that transmits more than
feeling-free data: the patterns of another being's inner life flow
down the mind link's vital pathways. Unlike telepathy, which
presumably operates in some mysterious mental realm acces-
sible (if at all) only to a few skilled empaths, the mind link
would be a purely physical connection, open to everyone, as
public as the telephone. The mind link's invention would solve
the problem of other minds in the simplest possible way, by
making the presence and contents of other minds publicly
available in a manner as direct and undeniable as the presence
and contents of your own mind.

The Searle Test for Artificial Awareness

Philosopher John Searle at the University of California at
Berkeley holds that "the only way to tell if a physical system
is conscious or not is to be that system." John knows for sure
that the Searle brain is conscious because he directly experi-
ences that brain's inner life. The Searle test for inner life
seems at first glance to be just another recipe for solipsism:
"I'm conscious; I don't know about you." But Searle has come
up with at least one way to extend his awareness test to forms
of matter other than the brain he was born with. Suppose we
want to know whether silicon computer chips can support a
style of inner experience like our own. Searle proposes a test
for silicon-based awareness that involves replacing his brain's
neurons one-by-one with silicon chips that perform the same
function. (Searle tacitly assumes that we know what the "func-
tion" of a neuron is.) At the end of this replacement process,
John's skull, once the containment vessel of a meat brain, is

now completely filled with computer chips. This new computer
passes the Searle test for consciousness not if John merely
says that he is self-aware, but only if he truly feels that he is
conscious.

At a recent conference on the scientific study of conscious-
ness, Searle described three conceivable outcomes of his re-
placement test for silicon-based awareness. First, the test
could succeed: his new chip brain would produce behavior
equivalent to the external activity produced by the old Searie
meat brain. More important, the chip brain also would produce
an inner life indistinguishable in quantity and quality from his
old experiences.

Second, the operation could leave John totally paralyzed,
devoid of any behavior but possessed of a normal flow of inner
experience. He would hear the doctors expressing regret over
the apparent death of the Searle brain but the inner Searie
could not tell them that he was still alive.

Third, as more and more of Searle's meat brain was re-
moved, he would feel a gradual diminution of his inner life but
his body would persist in its usual behavior. As the final chips
were being exchanged for the last neuronal circuit, Searle
would be dimly aware of a familiar voice, seeming to come
from a great distance; saying to the doctors: "Yes, yes. I feel
fine. The operation was a success." Then all awareness would
cease: John Searle would be dead. An "empty" Searle zombie
would get up from the operating table. In this third case, after
it returned to the university, the Searle zombie would find
itself in the unusual position of unconsciously giving lectures
on the subject of consciousness, certainly not the first time a
university professor gave a lecture on a subject of which he
had no firsthand knowledge.

Every science has its own circumscribed subject matter,
its body of experimental facts, and its array of theories to ex-
plain those facts. The new science of consciousness will also
have its proper scope, its crucial experiments, and its explan-
atory theories. The scope of the fledgling science of conscious-
ness is the inner life of human (and nonhuman) beings. The

difficulty of performing experiments on the inner lives of be-
ings other than myself is one of the main barriers to estab-
lishing a firm factual basis for a science of inner life. About the
inner life of nonhuman animals we know very little; about the
inner life of nonbiological beings we know absolutely nothing.

Imagine being a worm in the ocean that possessed only
one external sense—the sense of hearing. What kind of a phys-
ics could such a being create from its varied auditory experi-
ences? No astronomy, no optics, no theories of electrical or
magnetic phenomena. No chemistry, mechanics, or geology.
Probably the best theory of the world that this single-sensed
being could muster would be a musical insight into the nature
of vibrations. Like those of this ear-logical marine worm, our
experiences are limited to only one kind of awareness—the
human kind—in only one body, with only indirect access to
that same kind of awareness in other bodies. Our limited ac-
cess to other minds severely restricts the kind of facts we can
collect about the variety of inner experience that might exist
in the world. As the poet William Blake sang: "Who knows but
every bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of
delight, closed to our senses five?"

Although we have direct access to only one style of inner
life, the quality and quantity of human awareness vary widely
even in the course of normal life: from stupor to the heat of
intellectual passion; from sleep to sexual ecstasy. Dissatisfied
with the usual variations on the theme of ordinary life, many
men and women have pursued methods of extending the fa-
miliar human form of consciousness into realms far distant
from ordinary life. In some cultures the business of "conscious-
ness expansion" is an honored profession. The persistent in-
genuity that some humans have shown in inventing techniques
for altering awareness suggests that the urge for inner explo-
ration is as fundamental a drive in human beings as the urge
to explore new physical frontiers.

Activities and substances used in techniques for modify-
ing our familiar form of inner life include meditation, mantra,
chants, dancing, incense, music, and fasting; psychoactive

roots, stems, fruits, and seeds; LSD, DMT, and MDMA; yogic
postures, martial arts, and spirit possession; no sex (celibacy),
slow sex (tantra), stored sex (coitus reservatus), and horde sex
(orgy); vision quests, carbon dioxide inhalation, sensory dep-
rivation, and sensory overload; whirling, marathon running,
hypnotism, and repetitive prayer; marijuana, mass rallies, sol-
itude, and mutual gaze; carnival, shamanic trance, massage,
and childbirth; self-inflicted pain, fermented grain, poetry, and
encounter groups; strobe lights, nitrous oxide, drumming, and
ceremonial magic; gestalt therapy, religious ecstasy, hot baths,
and cold showers. Whatever other kinds of minds may need,
the craving for self-transcendence seems to be a prominent
feature of the human style of awareness. Commenting on the
human need to escape the ordinary, Aldous Huxley claimed
that the natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated
by orgy.

After the experimental difficulty of measuring the pres-
ence of inner experience in other beings, the next major bar-
rier to creating a true science of consciousness is the lack of
an adequate theory of how beings manage to gain conscious-
ness and lose it. What is actually happening when I fall asleep?

Theories of Inner Experience

It is not that we possess bad, partial, or flawed theories of the
inner life. We have no such theories at all, even bad ones.
Instead we possess only vague fantasies, philosophical
hunches, and speculative, untestable guesses. Make no mis-
take: we are in the kindergarten, sandbox stage of conscious-
ness research. We have a long way to go before we can call
what we know about the inner life a "science." Kurt Vonne-
gut's fictional Tralfalmadoreans (Sirens of Titan) accurately
assessed the current state of human awareness research:
"They could not name even one of the fifty-one portals of the
soul," the aliens reported.

Scientists can say that the phlogiston theory of combus-

tion is wrong because they have a modern theory of heat by
which it can be judged and found wanting. However, present-
day science is not in a position to judge claims of spirit com-
munication, out-of-body experiences, reincarnation, telepathy,
and other unusual styles of awareness systematically since it
does not possess a theory of ordinary consciousness, let alone
its variations. At this stage of our ignorance, scientists like
everyone else must appraise these unusual mental experiences
from their own cluster of amateur notions.

Long before the hundred-odd chemical elements were iso-
lated and named, the ancient Greeks devised a rough picture
of the world's fundamental constitution appropriate to their
limited knowledge. They considered the world to be made up
of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, while the heav-
ens contained a fifth element, Ether (or "quintessence") not
present on earth. The ancient philosophers attempted, like sci-
entists today, to reduce the world's bewildering variety to sim-
ple interactions between a few basic components, reducing
nature to a kind of language written in a comprehensible ele-
mental alphabet. It is ironic that our present picture of matter
recognizes none of the ancient categories as truly elemental.
Today's chemist regards more than one hundred substances as
elemental. Particularly important "letters" in the chemist's al-
phabet are hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and phospho-
rus, the five elements most essential for life.

The physicist digs deeper, breaking the chemist's ele-
ments into more fundamental parts. In what is called the Stan-
dard Model, present-day physicists are able to describe all
known physical phenomena (conscious phenomena are explic-
itly excluded from the scope of physics) correctly with only
three types of fundamental particles. Leptons and quarks form
the "bricks" of the material world, and particle/waves called
gluons form the "mortar" that sticks quarks and leptons
together.

The first step toward a true theory of consciousness is to
construct a rough map of the intellectual territory that we
intend to explore. At this stage our maps of mind will be at

least as crude as the Greek five-element picture of the world,
hut one must start somewhere.

At first glance the world seems to consist of two kinds of
phenomena: mental experiences and physical objects. The
sixteenth-century French philosopher Rene Descartes called
these two categories res cogitens (thinking stuff) and res ex-
tensa (extended stuff—stuff that occupies space). The Greeks
dubbed these two basic essences "psyche"and "physis"

, from which we derive psychology, the science of mind,
and physics, the science of matter.

Philosophers call the question of how mind and matter are
related the "mind/matter problem," theproblem" (pro-

nounced "psi/phi"), or alternatively the "mind/body problem,"
since animal bodies like our own are the only presently known
vehicles for the occurrence of inner life.

Given such a two-component world, it is easy to work out
(and make up names for) all the logically possible relations that
might exist between mind and body. Either the mind/matter
distinction is fundamental—neither component can be reduced
to the other, a philosophical option called dualism—or the
mind/matter distinction is only apparent—the world really
consists of only one fundamental substance, a situation called
monism.

Dualistic Models of Consciousness

A dualist maintains that mind and matter are essentially dif-
ferent kinds of essences each with its own laws and manner
of existence. Some dualists speak of a "soul" that inhabits and
enlivens the body, a sentient essence that may even survive
the body's death and dissolution. In this materialistic age, du-
alists are often accused of smuggling outmoded religious be-
liefs back into science, of introducing superfluous spiritual
forces into biology, and of venerating an invisible "ghost in the
machine." However, our utter ignorance concerning the real
origins of human consciousness marks such criticism more a

matter of taste than of logical thinking. At this stage of mind
science, dualism is not irrational, merely somewhat unfash-
ionable.

There are essentially three kinds of dualism, depending
on which of the two partners in the mind/matter marriage is
seen to have the upper hand.

In epiphenomenalism, matter is the real substance of the
world and mind a mere byproduct completely subject to mat-
ter's motion. Matter and mind interact but the interaction is a
strict one-way street with mind as slave, matter as master. In
this view, mind is like the light that goes on when you throw
the (matter) switch. The switch controls the light; the light
never controls the switch. There is probably no better motto
for epiphenomenalism than that of the nineteenth-century Dr.
Vogt: "The brain secretes thoughts like the liver secretes
bile."

On the other hand, if we imagine that behind every ma-
terial motion lies an invisible spiritual cause, then matter is
wholly subordinate to mind—the animism hypothesis. To a
wholehearted animist every material thing is alive and pos-
sesses a soul, which rules its external behavior. A philosophi-
cally minded animist might justify his belief by appealing to
the behaviorist discovery that no conceivable human behavior
can reveal with certainty the presence of an inner life in an-
other person: from the outside human beings appear to be
"mere things." But we know (by private revelation) that these
apparent things actually possess lively insides that control
their behavior to some extent. Therefore, it seems plausible
that many other apparent things—trees, rocks, stars, and spi-
ral nebulas—may possess similar insides. The animist is an
open-minded soul who is willing to grant the gift of inner life
not only to humans and so-called higher animals but to every
arrangement of matter in the known universe.

From our experience as embodied beings, we know that
body states can powerfully influence our states of mind. Like-
wise intentions that seem to originate in the mind can control
the body's movements. It seems, at least in the case of human-

style awareness, that neither matter nor mind dominates the
mysterious partnership that gives rise to our external actions
and internal experiences. This evenhanded form of dualism in
which mind and matter mutually influence one another is
called interactionalism. Critics of dualism have questioned
how an entity that has no spatial location can interact at all
with a body that occupies space: how does the mind find its
body? Although this question might be answered in many
ways, some of which we will consider later, it points out the
great disparity that exists between our knowledge of matter
and our knowledge of mind. Although we know of matter only
secondhand through the mediation of our senses, we have
managed to develop an elaborate mathematical understanding
of this indirectly known essence, an understanding that ex-
tends from the tiniest elemental quark to the entire universe.
On the other hand, although our experience of conscious-
ness is direct and unmediated, we possess no equivalent phys-
ics of mind, no elaborate conceptual structure that mirrors the
rich mix of inner experiences enjoyed by human beings. Our
fledgling mind science—psychology—has produced only frag-
mented accounts of particular aspects of human personality
and seems far from achieving a comprehensive model of con-
sciousness that is explicit enough to connect conceptually with
our very detailed model of matter. When matter interacts with
mind, just what kind of entity is it encountering? A good du-
alistic model of the mind would not only describe the nature
of mind-in-itself, essentially a map of the soul, but also take
up in great detail those attributes of matter, those qualities of
soul, that permit these two fundamentally different aspects of
the world mutually to affect one another.

Monistic Models of Consciousness

Monism, like dualism, is of three main types, depending on
which of the two primary essences is elevated to the status of
grand monarch.

In materialism, matter is all that there is. Democritus,
the early Greek atomist, said it best: "By convention sour, by
convention sweet, by convention colored. In reality, nothing
but atoms and the Void." Epiphenomenalism, although it
makes mind subordinate to matter, at least grants mind a sep-
arate existence apart from matter. But, for the materialist,
mind has no special status: it is just one of matter's possible
attributes, on a par with momentum, energy, and center of
gravity. In his splendid book The Psychobiology of Mind, Wil-
liam Uttal, a modern materialist, declares: "Mind is to the
nervous system as rotation is to the wheel."

Although materialists agree that mind (defined as "inner
experience") is nothing more than a particular motion of mat-
ter, they differ concerning how complex matter's movement
must be actually to produce a noticeable sensation, to generate
what might be called a "quantum of sentience," a mental quan-
tity analogous to physicist Max Planck's famous quantum of
action—the least amount of mechanistic interplay that physics
permits.

Reductive materialists believe that virtually any mechan-
ical motion results in some kind of inner experience. Just as
all particles possess momentum and energy, so all particles
possess a bit of inner life. For such broad-minded materialists
even atoms are conscious, although the inner experiences of
such simple mechanical systems would be minuscule compared
to the inner lives of human beings. Reductive materialists re-
semble animists in their willingness to believe that everything
is alive. However, the materialist holds that inner life does not
exist as a separate immaterial soul, but is a purely mechanical
property that at present we lack the tools to measure. Ardent
materialist Thomas Henry Huxley, Aldous Huxley's grandfa-
ther, predicted that just as heat was discovered to be nothing
but a form of mechanical motion (the mechanical equivalent of
heat is 4.185 joules per calorie) so likewise mind will be found
to be a form of mechanical motion whose mechanical equiva-
lent (so many joules per cogiton?) will be measurable some day
by some future psychophysicist.

Emergent materialists also believe that consciousness is
a wholly mechanical property of matter, but that only very
complex systems possess it. To an emergentist, consciousness
is less like the attributes momentum and energy—properties
common to all mechanical systems—and more like the attrib-
ute "capable of producing speech," possessed only by certain
special mechanical systems (speech synthesizers, tape record-
ers, radios, parrots, and so forth) as well as by human beings,
like the ability to produce speech, the capacity to enjoy inner
experience arose through the action of biological evolution and,
on this planet at least, is unique to human beings and their
close relatives on the evolutionary ladder. Since consciousness
is a strictly mechanical, although very complex form of motion,
there is no barrier, in principle, to building machines whose
quality and quantity of inner experience equal or exceed our
own. Because of its simplicity, concreteness, falsifiability, and
general concordance with the present fashion of scientific
thinking, emergent materialism has itself emerged as the dom-
inant mind/matter philosophy of the scientific community.
When asked whether he believed that machines could think,
legendary cybernetic pioneer Claude Shannon replied: "You
bet. We're machines, and we think, don't we?"

Materialism is popular among scientists, especially exper-
imentalists, whose daily lives are spent exploring the rich de-
tails of matter's lush variety, but many philosophers, whose
business it is to work with less tangible stuff, have argued that
not matter but mind is the fundamental substance of the
world—a type of monism called idealism. These mind monists
argue that our most direct and unmediated experience of the
world is entirely mental in character. In contrast, the exis-
tence of a material world is inferred in a convincing but wholly
indirect manner from evidence presented to our consciousness.
The existence of inner experiences is undeniable, but to an
idealist the existence of an external world is not so certain.
The dream state is an often cited example of an internal ex-
perience that convincingly simulates an external reality that
simply does not exist outside the mind.

The most famous idealist was probably George Berkeley,
an Irish bishop for whom the California university town was
named. William Butler Yeats recalled the mind-centered phi-
losophy of his idealistic countryman in these lines:

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a

dream

That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world,

its farrow that so solid seem,

Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its

theme.

Idealism seems a foolish intellectual pastime in a materialistic
age such as our own because it dismisses as illusory the ma-
terial sphere in which we have made our greatest cultural
progress, without offering any practical program for advancing
our knowledge of the world. On the other hand, idealism sug-
gests the possibility of developing a wholly mental science
based on the manipulation and observation of states of con-
sciousness rather than states of matter. (Some Eastern think-
ers claim that such a mental science already exists.) If the
material world, as the idealist claims, is like a movie being
projected from a mental "projection booth," then scientific
mastery of the projection mechanism could render our vaunted
physical sciences superficial and irrelevant. In an essentially
mental universe, the entire physical world would be reduced
to the status of a movie: Matter as Maya: The Only Game in
Town.

Neutral monism attempts to strike a balance between the
extreme claims of both materialism and idealism. The neutral
monist posits the existence of a single substance possess-
ing both mental and physical attributes. An example of such
a double-duty entity in science is the electromagnetic field,
first described by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in
the latter half of the nineteenth century. Before Maxwell, elec-
tric and magnetic forces were considered separate entities
each with its own laws. Looking deeper, Maxwell showed how

electricity and magnetism could be understood as interrelated
manifestations of a single electromagnetic field. Maxwell's dis-
covery was the first instance of the unification of two separate
physical forces into a single description, a trend that continues
today as physicists search for a grand unified theory (GUT)
that will unite all of nature's fundamental forces under a single
banner.

In the other materialistic models of mind, a system's inner
life is entirely determined by the motion of matter. In a certain
sense, it is that motion, just as sound is a vibration of air
molecules. In the neutral monist account of reality, matter and
mind are interdependent aspects of some more comprehensive
kind of substance that includes them both as special cases. The
neutral monist model predicts that a purely physical account
of the world must be factually wrong when it attempts to deal
with systems that possess a substantial conscious component,
just as a purely electrical account of charged-particle motion
will fail whenever magnetism enters the picture. Neutral mo-
nists look to a truly unified field (TUF physics?) in which the
powers of mind are amicably united with the powers of matter
in a single comprehensive description of all natural phenomena
both inside and outside.

Religious Models of Inner Life

These philosophical guesses concerning possible solutions to
the mind/body problem are more than academic exercises. In
one form or another these ideas determine how people all over
the world regard their lives, the people around them, and their
ultimate destinies. More than dusty philosophical hypotheses,
these conceptual models of mind form the core assumptions of
the world's great religions. Under the guise of religion, each
of the four major models of mind—dualism, idealism, neutral
monism, and materialism—has attracted large numbers of be-
lievers whose lives are guided (largely unconsciously) by these
philosophical assumptions. Although some of these positions

may seem quaint or preposterous, each of them can claim mil-
lions, and in some cases billions, of followers.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam emphasize the impor-
tance of the individual human soul, which they consider to be
separate from the body. In these dualistic religions the body
is generally seen as inferior to the soul if not downright evil.
Many dualists believe the soul to be immortal, surviving the
body's eventual death and decay. Although differing greatly
in details, these dualistic creeds generally agree that the soul's
goal is to escape matter's menial constraints and seek union
with God, who is in some unimaginable sense a Person like us.

Hinduism and Buddhism view the material world as a
kind of illusion. The real reality is mental, called Braman by
the Hindus, "consciousness" or "Big Mind" by Buddhists. Al-
though they differ concerning the strategies one should follow
to become aware of the illusion, and what one should do (or
not do) once one has pierced the veil of Maya, these religions
basically agree with the idealistic Bishop Berkeley that the
world is more like a sleeper's dream than a solid atomic drama.

Like the philosophy of neutral monism, Taoism is based
on the belief that the world inside and outside consists of one
substance called the Tao, the "Way" or the "uncarved block"
from which all phenomena both mental and physical draw their
existence. Mind, matter, the self, and external objects are not
separately existing entities but are incomplete aspects of the
single Great Way viewed from a limited human perspective.
The Taoist's task is to discover the presence of this Way in
herself and to learn to live in harmony with the Way's mean-
derings.

Materialism as a hypothesis forms an important part of
the scientific enterprise; materialism as a "religion"—an un-
reasonable faith in reason itself—is another matter. Atheistic
materialism is an active unbelief in God, soul, afterlife, or any
other spiritual concept that cannot be completely anchored in
a model of the world made solely of matter and ruled by the
impersonal laws of physics. The materialist's goal is to pursue

happiness stoically in whatever forms he finds agreeable until
death definitively ends his quest.

Because these philosophical positions are woven so deeply
into religious thinking, new discoveries in the science of mind
are likely to challenge many deeply held religious beliefs. If
these mind/matter models someday become open to experi-
mental investigation, then beliefs that were once a matter of
church doctrine or personal faith could be established as a mat-
ter of public knowledge. Experimental facts concerning the
existence and nature of the afterlife would be particularly
revolutionary.

Criteria for Consciousness Theories

A good theory of consciousness must be more than a plausible
story or philosophical language game. The enormous success
of the physical sciences provides us with high standards by
which to judge candidate theories of the world. In particular
the partnership between mathematical theory and sophisti-
cated experimentation has given physicists a solid basis for
their claim that they really "understand" the material world
at every scale from the whole universe down to the smallest
quark. The fact that physics theories are expressed in math-
ematical language does not mean that a theory of mind must
also be expressed mathematically. Bertrand Russell once said
that our physical theories are mathematical not because we
know so much but because we know so little: it is only the
world's mathematical properties that we have been able to
discover. Isaac Newton, who more than any other man was
responsible for developing the idea that the material world is
governed by rigid mathematical laws rather than the whims
of the gods, had to invent a new field of mathematics (calculus)
in order to calculate the motions of the moon and planets. Per-
haps some future Newton of mind science will also need to
invent entirely new theoretical techniques appropriate for de-

scribing the essential features of the inner life of conscious
beings.

How will we recognize a good theory of consciousness
when we see it? I propose that we score fledgling models of
mind according to how clearly, explicitly, and correctly they
deal with twelve important questions.

1: Mind Links. How can I objectively determine the presence
and quality of mind in material configurations other than my
own brain? A good mind model should tell us how to build real
mind links or show us what part of the optical spectrum to
scan for the awareness-specific "purple glow." Or give good
reasons, rather than fashionable guesses, why hopes for such
objective tests are just wishful thinking. The importance of
establishing ways of directly contacting other minds cannot be
underestimated. Without this ability, the experimental side of
mind science will be severely restricted. With this ability, the
science of consciousness, based not on analogies and plausible
guesses, but on a growing body of experimental facts about
the inner lives of sentient beings other than us, will truly
begin.

2: Mind Maps. What kinds of minds besides our own inhabit
the physical world? The success of matter science has ousted
us from the cozy medieval geocentric world into an almost
inconceivably vast universe filled with innumerable stars, gal-
axies, and strange cosmic objects. Material science has num-
bered the chemical elements, broken them down into parts,
and further analyzed these parts into truly elemental particles.
Science has completely surveyed the physical universe and
finds it filled with an immense variety of material forms. But
what of the mental realm? Is nature's inner life as rich and
various as her outer behavior? Is my heart a conscious being?
My hand? Is the earth not only a self-organizing mechanism
as James Lovelock's "Gaia hypothesis" supposes but also a
conscious being with feelings, perceptions, and a certain free-
dom of action? Is the earth, in short, a person like me? Will
advanced mind links someday allow us to communicate di-

rectly with the "soul of the earth"? What can we say about
the inner life of atoms? A good theory of consciousness, either
by supplying us with an experimental method for answering
such questions or by providing absolute theoretical specifica-
tions for the presence of awareness in material systems, should
allow us to construct a "geography of the mind," a mind map
as rich in detail as the New York Times Atlas of the World,
illustrating the major centers of awareness in our little corner
of the material world. Until we have a better notion of the
true extent of the world's inner life, we are like geologists
holding one stone or biologists looking at a single living

specimen.

3: Artificial Awareness. How can we construct machines that
possess insides like ours? Because we have learned how the
kidneys work, we can make artificial kidneys that perform the
same vital function. Once we know how the brain produces (or
hosts) consciousness, we should be able to manufacture beings
that enjoy inner experience, or augment our own lives with
synthetic forms of awareness. If, as the monists claim, matter
and mind are one, then we can construct an artificial mind out
of ordinary matter. Dualists, on the other hand, believe that
mind comes from "outside" to inhabit matter. In that case, the
best we can expect a theory of consciousness to do would be
to tell us how to build a maximally attractive dwelling for
eventual habitation by external sentient entities. If you
wanted to build a conscious robot—like Hal 9000, for in-
stance—what sort of parts would you order? And who would
supply them: an electronics shop, a biology tank, a physics lab,
or some new specialty shop stocking wares at present

inconceivable?

4: Quantity of Mind. What feature of matter determines the
quantity of a being's conscious awareness? It is a common ex-
perience to find it difficult to pay attention to more than one
thing at a time, and not every detail of that thing can be si-
multaneously held in mind. There seems to be an upper limit
to the amount of attention we can muster. And compared to
the vast number of sensations, thoughts, and feelings craving

attention, this amount of focused awareness (we will estimate
it later) seems to be quite small. In states of sleep, coma, and
general anesthesia this attention rate drops to zero, and we
lapse into a state correctly called "unconsciousness"—no inner
experience whatsoever. A good theory of consciousness should
explain how consciousness is extinguished: how sleep, coma,
and deep anesthesia are produced in the human brain (and in
other sentient systems), how awareness is reestablished after
such unconscious interludes, and what physical or spiritual
parameters determine the magnitude of our "conscious data
rate."

Another quantitative feature of human awareness (and
probably other styles of awareness as well) is what psycholo-
gist William James called the "specious present." Our aware-
ness occurs not as a succession of single instants but as a
flowing together of extended periods ranging from a fraction
of a second to several seconds in duration. What material
mechanisms determine the subjective length of the "present
moment"? Once these quantitative questions are answered, we
can then apply artificial awareness techniques to literally "ex-
pand human consciousness" in both the temporal and the data-
rate dimensions.

5: Mind Quality. What determines the quality of conscious
awareness? How in the world is the smell of cinnamon pro-
duced? The color green? The sense of vertigo, the taste of
peppermint, and the sound of music? How can mere matter
feel pain and pleasure, fear and anticipation? Do there exist
new colors, tastes, completely novel senses, emotions, and
modes of being that we may be potentially capable of experi-
encing, but that our present biological makeup does not sup-
port? What are the dimensions of "experience space"—the
realm of all possible experiences open to a conscious being?

Some people (Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel,
Escher, Bach, for one) believe that the essence of conscious-
ness is the ability to self-reflect. Others (Immanuel Kant comes
to mind) put moral and ethical abilities in first place. It seems
to me, however, that these features are luxuries possessed by

our familiar human form of awareness. Such features would
not necessarily be present in primitive, memoryless forms of
inner life. A good consciousness theory should be able not only
to account for the qualities of inner life available to beings
more primitive than us but to allow us to extrapolate to higher
forms of awareness not yet experienced by human beings.
6: Attention Mechanisms. How does matter "pay attention"?
Besides the crude distinction between outer behavior and in-
ner life, it seems plausible to make a second distinction be-
tween the active and passive qualities of inner life. Although
it surely contains some active elements such as the focusing
of attention, the process of perception seems to serve a pri-
marily passive, receptive function. Perception is something
that happens to us; the perceptual field floods us with surprise,
with sensations mostly not of our own making. On the other
hand, the experience of voluntary action is primarily active,
controlled by something in the mind, although it surely con-
tains passive elements such as stereotyped or unconscious be-
havior patterns. A good theory of awareness would explain the
phenomenon of active attention: its "motion" from one expe-
rience to the next against a background of passive, unat-
tended-to, automatic activity.

7: Sense of Self. One of the most striking features of our hu-
man style of consciousness is its unity. Even in pathological
cases of multiple personalities, only one personality at a time
takes control. The mind's felt unity is all the more surprising
when we look at the brain, which is not a one-operation-at-a-
time machine like a computer but a massively parallel proces-
sor in which millions of interconnected events are going on at
once. Perhaps there are "crowd minds" somewhere in the
world that experience several flows of awareness simultane-
ously, but humans seem to have been put together with decid-
edly one-track minds. Related to this human singleness of
being is the familiar "sense of self," the feeling that one en-
during being is enjoying these experiences, a being who
changes somewhat from moment to moment, and from day to
day, but remains in essence the same person. Beliefs concern-

ing the nature of the self range widely, from the Christian idea
that self is an immortal being to the Buddhist claim that self
is nonexistent, a mere illusion. A competent theory of mind
should explain the human mind's singleness of being in the
midst of the brain's multiplicity of functions and resolve as well
the vexing question of selfhood: is self an illusion or not?
8: Personality. How can we best describe an embodied being's
inner traits and range of possibilities? What is the essence of
personhood? Systems as diverse as astrology, psychology, and
occultism have produced a variety of models of personality:
Are you a Gemini, a Myers-Briggs ENFP, or an Enneagram
Apex 4? A good mind model should generate a theory of
personality—both human and robotic—based not on external
behavior but on the structure of the material (or spiritual)
processes that support the inner experiences that form per-
sonality and character. How many ways can inner experience
be organized into relatively autonomous units? Just as ques-
tion 5 asks for a catalog of possible experiences, so we should
also ask for a catalog of possible ways these experiences can
be structured into wholes. For instance, can dual or triadic
beings exist whose inner lives are organized around more than
one central core? What are the conditions necessary for form-
ing a "person" out of isolated inner experiences? What is the
material basis for personhood?

9: Free Will. Associated with the sense of self and personality
is the notion of "free will." Although much of my behavior is
unconscious, automatic, or reflexive, I have the feeling that
some of my activity is not forced upon me but results from
free choices made by my "self." Concordant with this belief
that the self is in charge of its behavior, most legal systems
hold a person responsible for his acts except in situations
where he can prove that he acted under irresistible compul-
sion. The philosopher Spinoza, on the other hand, dismissed
free will as an illusion resulting from our ignorance of the true
causes of our actions. A good theory of consciousness should
be able to resolve the free will question by revealing the ul-

timate causes of our willed acts: do these causes reside solely
in matter or do they originate in an immaterial soul? What
does it really mean for an action to have psychological rather
than material causes? Do willful acts violate the laws of
physics?

10: Mr. Death. No altered state of consciousness is more dras-
tic and inevitable than that which accompanies the body's
death and dissolution. Speculations concerning the fate of the
inner life at the moment of death include absolute extinction,
entry into an afterlife, merging with a larger Mind, or rein-
carnation into another body. A theory of consciousness would
be manifestly incomplete if it could not resolve on scientific
rather than religious or philosophical grounds the important
question of what actually happens to the mind when the body
ceases to exist.

11: Mind Reach. Many parapsychologists claim that the mind
can both sense and influence the material world and other
minds outside the usual sensory and muscular channels. These
alleged extrasensory powers include telepathy, psychokinesis,
clairvoyance, psychometry, distant healing, and distant influ-
ence of other minds. A good model of inner life would provide
both a framework for understanding such phenomena and an
explanation for why humans are able to exercise such useful
powers only very infrequently. From a scientific point of view,
a theory's most desirable feature is its falsifiability: a good
theory makes bold predictions that could turn out to be wrong.
On the other hand, a bad theory makes vague predictions,
forecasts that cannot be put to the test, or comes up with an
explanation no matter how the experiments come out. Con-
cerning the existence of extrasensory powers, the emergent
materialism mind model takes an admirably bold and falsifiable
stand: it predicts that all such powers are utterly nonexistent.
Rival models of mind that have room for such powers have
not been developed to the point where they can set testable
limits to the mind's alleged extracorporeal reach. Although or-
dinary awareness is abundant, undeniable, and readily acces-

sible, crucial tests of rival mind models may be better carried
out in the rarefied realm of these extrasensory extensions of
ordinary experience.

12: Evolution. Science accounts for the abundant variety of
lifeforms on this planet by a process of natural selection op-
erating on population diversity created by genetic variability:
only the fittest survive. This evolutionary perspective teaches
us that only biological traits that have survival value will en-
dure the rough-and-tumble genetic lottery. Consequently we
must ask, What is the survival value of consciousness? How
did the possession of an inner life (compared to existence as a
skilled but wholly unconscious automaton) aid our ancestors in
their struggle for existence? At what point on the evolutionary
scale does consciousness emerge? Or is the inner life a feature
of the world that lies outside the evolutionary story, for whose
origin we must invoke higher principles than natural selection?
13: Surprise. The most important feature of a good theory of
consciousness might not be how well it explains presently
known or half-suspected properties of human awareness but
its disclosure of previously unknown, or even undreamt of,
phenomena that have remained invisible for thousands of
years, obscured by our own ignorance and lack of imagination.
As the science of physics matured, it disclosed hundreds of
new particles, physical effects, and invisible realms of being,
and it continues to do so. We should demand no less of a sci-
entific theory of inner life. We should expect mind science to
open our eyes and hearts to unexpected possibilities of being,
expect it to surprise us in magnificent ways that we could
never have foreseen.

Compared to our knowledge of the physical world, our
understanding of consciousness is minuscule. The major draw-
back to a science of the inner life is the stubborn fact that
consciousness is invisible: we cannot see, hear, feel, or taste it.
Since science is based on knowledge gained through the
senses, consciousness is publicly accessible only indirectly. The
behaviorists could even boldly deny the existence of conscious-

ness, and science, to its shame, could not prove the behavior-
ists wrong. Though there is no known behavior that is
consciousness-specific, we do know (by private revelation) that
consciousness certainly exists. Novels, plays, poetry, opera,
and other works of art explore in rich detail what it's like to
be a (human-style) conscious being. Even science is not en-
tirely powerless to gain accurate information about the inner
life of humans (and some animals). Using indirect methods,
ingenious psychologists have been able to map certain major
features of human awareness, uncovering a body of objective
facts about subjective experience.

Chapter Two

inside:
landmarks of inner space

consciousness from
prominent

The soul may be a mere pretense
The mind makes very little sense
So let us value the appeal
. Of that which we can taste and feel.

—PIET HEIN

Please let this feeling last.

—POPULAR SONG

In the early sixties a group of psychologists calling themselves
the "Third Force," to distinguish their movement from psy-
choanalysis and behaviorism, rediscovered the importance of
the body. A flood of body-centered therapies emerged to
soothe troubled minds, including somatic manipulations asso-
ciated with the names Wilhelm Reich, Moshe Feldenkrais, Mil-
ton Trager, and Ida Rolf. To redress conventional psychology's
alleged overemphasis on intellect, the formerly neglected body
was treated to courses of bioenergetics, deep tissue work,
dance therapy, martial arts, and various styles of massage. A
popular practice at that time was "sensory awareness," which
involves reacquainting yourself with your body by systemati-
cally focusing total attention on one body part at a time. Since
most of us usually take our body's parts for granted unless

they are in pain, simply giving these neglected parts full at-
tention can be particularly invigorating and often leads to per-
sonal insights about the way our selves are habitually
embodied in the world.

I remember lying on the lawn at Esalen Institute one
summer afternoon, with Bernie Gunther, one of the deans of
sensory awareness, exorting us to "Come to your senses."
During this exercise I became particularly conscious of the fact
that although I could bring to mind each of my fingers, I could
not do the same with my toes. To my conscious mind, my feet
seemed to be undifferentiated lumps, like sacks of beans. After
this experience on the Esalen lawn, I resolved to go barefoot
more often, to free my feet from their hard leather prisons.

I was talking about sensory awareness with my compan-
ion Claire, a humanoid entertainment robot freed by the Elec-
tronic Emancipation Act of 2050. As you probably know, all
robots take periodic Turing tests in which they attempt to
simulate a wide variety of apparently inner-directed behavior.
A graduate of the cybernetic equivalent of Bennington, Claire
had no difficulty in passing her T tests with honors. I asked
her whether robots ever indulged themselves in sensory
awareness. Could she, for instance, concentrate all her aware-
ness into her right middle toe? Claire furrowed her brow, quiv-
ered her lower lip. "Don't you understand," she sobbed. "I can
do anything a human can do, and lots of things that humans
can't [here Claire's electric eyes briefly twinkled]. But my in-
ner life is nil, a complete zero. Any awareness I may seem to
have is just your own projection. I'm nothing [sob!] but a
clever fake."

I put my arms around Claire to comfort her. "You're such
a lovely fake, Claire. But why are you crying?"

"Because that's the way I'm programmed, you idiot!"

When she had calmed down, Claire explained that the con-
cept of robotic psychology was born out of the detailed map-
pings of human inner space begun in the twentieth century,
plus the development of compact "as-if" circuitry capable of
computing the behavioral consequence of any precisely speci-

fied inner state. Simulating emotion was particularly easy,
Claire continued, because of Plutchik's discovery that the emo-
tions of biologically based beings stem from eight basic inter-
nal forces, or impulses. Engineers and scientists had always
had problems in dealing with emotions, but forces were some-
thing they felt that they understood. Once passion-sensitive
psychologists succeeded in mapping these inner forces onto the
appropriate "emotional space," the mechanics of desire were
quietly worked out and quickly realized in electric circuitry.

After her speech I was moved to ask, "Claire, do you de-
sire me?"

"No, not really, Nick. But I think I can work up a pretty
good simulation."

Unlike honest but heartless Claire, we all know what it
feels like to be a conscious being. Consciousness, whatever else
it might be, is a certain kind of inner experience. This lively,
presently private, interior drama has certain explicit features
that I outline in this chapter, but the rock bottom fact about
awareness is its very feel, the tang of being. So familiar is this
state of existence that it is hard to confront, like fish trying to
feel water. Mind can be examined, but self-examination never
catches human awareness in its natural state, seeing only
mind-under-scrutiny complete with a scrutinizer. No matter
how lightly the mind tries to touch itself, the unexamined in-
ner life is not open for introspection. This awkward, self-
referential impasse, home base to the meditator and intro-
spective philosopher, may impose ultimate limits on what can
be learned about awareness through self-examination, but the
rough characterization of human awareness presented here
will not press these limits. Most of our experience most of the
time does not involve self-reference at all. There are so many
other things in the mind clamoring for our attention that the
mind itself as a topic of contemplation usually gets low
priority.

Since all the contents of consciousness—every concept,
experience, perception, emotion, or memory that we can bring
to mind—are already saturated with the "tang of being," it

may be difficult to find a neutral experience in the mind itself,
in terms of which the mind might be understood. Logically the
most obvious way to explain consciousness would be to show
how conscious experience can be built of material that is itself
unconscious. Although our lives are punctuated by intervals of
unconsciousness, we have no private insight into the uncon-
scious state because by definition such a state cannot be ex-
perienced. We close our eyes to fall asleep, and then (barring
dreams) morning comes immediately. There is a sense in which
we are always awake, and always have been. Nobody remem-
bers, or can remember, not being conscious.

The Experience of Losing Consciousness

Consciousness is our most valuable possession—and more
than a possession, the possessor as well, the self, the central
sun, the precious ego for whose needs we daily toil—but each
night in a familiar ritual we willingly give the ego away and
casually surrender ourselves to a period of self-extinction. If
sleep were not such an everyday process, we would regard it
as an awesome mystery. Suppose we were beings that slept
only once in our lives, sometime around the age of 30 years.
Society would then be divided into the Old—who have sur-
vived the Experience without Experience—and the Young,
who have not. Imagine trying to explain to your son what it
is going to be like for him not to have a self for a period of 8
hours.

Although consciousness is regarded as a "higher function"
of the brain, compared to more mundane operations such as
regulation of the heart and lungs, this exalted function is ex-
tremely vulnerable to external conditions—usually it is the

first function that the body abandons when the organism is
stressed. Low blood sugar level, loss of oxygen, excessive
bleeding, concussion, inhalation of certain anesthetic gases all
reduce the brain (as far as we can tell) to the status of an
unconscious machine. This so-called higher function is so ten-

tatively linked to its more robust body that even standing up
too fast can cause some of us to faint, a phenomenon called
blood pooling" in which the brain's blood supply temporarily
decreases, as the heart adjusts to the increased hydraulic de-
mands of the upright posture. Blood pooling provided me my
earliest experiences of an altered state of consciousness. As a
child (and sometimes even today) whenever I got up fast and
felt this strange state coming on, I would hold on to something
solid and try to savor the experience, which in extreme stages
involved temporary blindness and brief, terrifying episodes of
ego loss. I never sought out this state—it is not entirely
enjoyable—but welcomed it whenever it presented itself. Al-
though blood pooling is an experience easily accessible to peo-
ple with the proper physiology, I have yet to meet another
connoisseur of this particular path to altered states of
consciousness.

Certainly one of the main research areas for a science of
consciousness continues to be the elucidation of the mechanism
of sleep, of general anesthesia, and of other physical processes
that lead to the abolition of (our type of) awareness in the
brain. One of the major clues as to what causes human con-
sciousness to be present in the brain is the nature of those
operations that reliably produce the absence of consciousness.
These crucial events whereby a being with inner life turns into
a soulless robot offer the awareness researcher a class of inner
phenomena with the greatest possible existential contrast: the
difference between full consciousness and no consciousness
whatsoever. How do these pivotal transitions occur? And how
essential to the world's affairs can a mind/body connection be
that is interrupted so easily: by a tap on the head or even a
hop out of a hammock?

The transition to the unaware state is not always abrupt.
People can learn to prolong the interval between waking and
sleeping—the so-called hypnogogic state—and enter into a
more loosely organized form of consciousness in which ideas,
images, and emotions combine in new and unusual ways. In
this twilight state, participants often find their hypnogogic im-

agery charged with a peculiar sense of deep significance. These
"significant" recombinations of psychic content are also avail-
able under light doses of general anesthetics such as nitrous
oxide (laughing gas). However, like the contents of dreams,
these creative rearrangements of the contents of conscious-
ness are usually fragile, elusive, and difficult to recall upon
return to normal awareness.

Turn-of-the-century physicist Ernst Mach characterized
normal awareness as "one great porridge of experience." And
indeed human consciousness does feel more like a porridge-
warm, soft, sticky, and associated with hungers of various
kinds—than like cold, hard, isolated, emotionally neutral com-
puter operations. Although the contents of consciousness at
times can consist of certain clear perceptions and distinct
ideas, these seem to emerge out of an indistinct psychic back-
ground, an active ambiguous flux at the center of our being.

Concerning this inscrutable background, one might sup-
pose that "consciousness is always consciousness of something;
there is no such thing as consciousness without content." And
indeed, whenever I ask myself what I am attending to, the
examined mind always seems to be "paying attention" to
something. However, I am less sure that when I am not in-
terrogating my inner states, my mind is aware of any partic-
ular "things" at all. The true state of unexamined awareness
may be closer to consciousness without (explicit) content. Try
to recollect what your experience was like before you began
self-examination, taking into account the kinds of experiences
that are easy to remember and those that are almost impos-
sible to recall. Now try to say honestly whether your con-
sciousness must always have an explicit content, or whether
consciousness often just fades into the background, letting
events flow by without grasping them.

The Unity of Conscious Experience

What is consciousness per se? It is not easy to put into words.
Books on meditation point to this experience as do treatises
on phenomenology. Fortunately, to appreciate this experience
we do not have to depend on secondhand accounts. Each of us
can enjoy for himself/herself this common ineffable state of
being. Ask yourself right now: "What does it feel like to be a
conscious being?" This is what consciousness feels like while
it's being scrutinized, a rather rare occurrence for most people.
Now ask a harder question: "What did my mind feel like before
I asked these questions?" Now you are touching this book's
real subject matter—the everyday unscrutinized awareness of
humans and other sentient beings.

One of the most surprising features of human conscious-
ness is the fact that although we know the brain to be a mas-
sive parallel processor with many billions of operations going
on at the same time, our inner experience seems to possess a
single center: whatever is going on seems to be happening to
only one being.

Computer scientists call a machine that performs one op-
eration at a time a "von Neumann machine" after John von
Neumann, the Hungarian-born polymath whose ideas guided
the development of the early "thinking machines." Almost all
present-day computers work this way. The few parallel com-
puters capable of performing a great many operations simul-
taneously are referred to as "non-von machines." Introspective
evidence alone—the fact that we always experience conscious-
ness as a one-track mind—might lead us to conclude errone-
ously that the brain operates as a von Neumann computer,
handling only one operation at a time.

Even in pathological cases of multiple personalities, only
one personality at a time seems to dominate the mind. Al-
though one could imagine the several personalities sharing the
hapless victim's consciousness in a type of psychic oligarchy,
such a possibility never in fact seems to be realized. Instead
the various personalities always take turns at the helm, ruling

the psyche in a kind of serial monarchy. The apparent difficulty
of establishing a multicentered form of consciousness in the
brain may be an important clue as to the nature of awareness,
or it may only be a feature peculiar to the familiar human form
of consciousness. The experienced unity of human conscious-
ness was one of the inner facts that moved Descartes to site
the "seat of the soul" in the pineal gland. He noticed that this
centrally located pine-nut-shaped organ is one of the brain's
few unpaired structures, and hence might be a suitable control
post for maintaining a unified sense of self.

Can we, by taking thought, split our awareness into two
parts? We have all had the experience at a crowded party of
listening to two conversations at once. However, we seem to
accomplish this feat not by dividing our awareness in two but
by rapidly switching our single-minded attention from one
speaker to another—a process analogous to "time sharing" on
large multiuser von Neumann-type computers.

Psychologists have made many attempts, some simple,
some drastic, to disrupt our familiar unity of consciousness,
but to no avail.

One experiment involves feeding a different spoken mes-
sage into the right and the left ear. The subject must write
down or repeat aloud the message he hears in his right ear.
Can he "split his mind" and also attend to the message coming
into his left ear? In general, he cannot, although he will usually
respond if his name is called out in the unattended channel.
Our ordinary one-track mind apparently cannot be divided by
so simple a tool as a two-track Walkman.

What about radical surgery? The two cerebral hemi-
spheres of the brain arise from a single stalk—the brain
stem—through which communication passes to and from the
rest of the body. Communication between the left arid right
cerebral hemispheres travels mainly through four neuronal
"cables" that link up the two halves of the brain. Three of
these cables are rather small, the anterior and posterior com-
missures, located at the front and rear of the brain's central
ventricle, and the massa intermedia, which crosses the central

ventricle to link the right and left thalamus through which
messages are relayed between the cerebral hemispheres and
the brain stem. In addition to these three minor connectors,
the hemispheres are linked by a broad band of tough tissue
called the corpus callosum, which consists of a colossal number
of nerve fibers—about 20 million (callosum is Latin for

"calloused").

In order to prevent certain kinds of epileptic seizures
from spreading across the brain, neurosurgeons have opened
up the skull and cut all four of these transhemispherical neu-
ronal cables—the celebrated "split-brain" operation for which
Canadian surgeon Wilder Penfield received a Nobel Prize. As
a result of this drastic surgery, neither the patient's behavior
nor his subjective experience seems to change in any major
way. In particular the patient never reports experiencing a
two-track mind. Radical surgery can split the brain but has
not yet succeeded in dividing the mind.

Although the patient's behavior in everyday tasks seems
unchanged by the split-brain operation, more subtle experi-
ments can elicit unique split-brain phenomena. For instance,
using certain kinds of goggles, two different pictures can be
flashed to each hemisphere, say an apple to the left brain, a
teacup to the right. The left hemisphere—which controls the
speech facility in most people—can verbally identify the apple.
The person says that he sees only an apple. However, when
asked to pick up the visualized object with his left hand, he
will lift the teacup not the apple.

To interpret this experiment it is important to remember
that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the
body, and vice versa, and that for most people the speech cen-
ter is located in the left (or "dominant") hemisphere. These
experiments seem to show that the split-brain patient's head
contains two separate hand-eye control systems, each of which
can recognize objects, learn tasks, and obey commands entirely
independently of the other. Only one of these systems (left
brain) has the power of speech; the other system is mute. The

speaking system (system 1) asserts that it is conscious and
claims that it is unaware of the operations of system 2.

Concerning the consciousness question, these kinds of
split-brain experiments have divided psychologists into two
camps. One group believes that only the dominant hemisphere
is conscious—that is, enjoys an actual ongoing inner experi-
ence appropriate to the behavior of system 1. The second
hemisphere is unconscious and constitutes a sort of "zombie
lobe"—a clever but entirely automatic neural mechanism—no
mind there at all.

The second group of psychologists believes that both sys-
tems are conscious (split brain = split mind) but only one sys-
tem can speak about its experiences. If these experiments are
interpreted as evidence for the presence of one mute mind in
the body, they raise the possibility that more mute minds than
one may inhabit our body's substance. Why not a separate
mind for every organ? Does the liver act any less intelligently
than the brain? Lacking a mind-link technology that can reli-
ably reveal the presence of awareness in any given system,
we cannot yet scientifically decide between these two alter-
native solutions to the split-brain question.

The results of the split-brain experiments are surprising
and have raised more questions than they have answered. If
this drastic operation would simply have divided the patient's
mind into two concurrent streams of awareness, we would
have created an entirely new form of consciousness—a "two-
track" mind. Instead the split-brain experiments show that
mind is very difficult to split. Perhaps mind is a kind of "atom"
in the original Greek sense of the word: something impossible
to break apart.

Constructing the Present

In its single-minded pursuit of unity, consciousness strives to
integrate sensations, memories, emotions, and cognitions into

one ongoing inner experience. In addition to bringing together
these disparate experiential modalities, consciousness also
generates a consistent sense of time—a single "present mo-
ment" that frames the various activities that form the contents
of awareness at one particular time. In the words of German
sensory physiologist Ernst Poppel, "We sit on the present as
on a saddle thrown over time."

The present moment is not instantaneous but occupies a
certain finite temporal extent whose length varies according
to our psychological state. This "specious present" (William
James) represents the interval of time that is simultaneously
present for subjective evaluation—a kind of "attention span"
bridging past and future events. One way of estimating the
length of the specious present is to listen to a series of regular
pulses, such as those produced by a metronome, and mentally
accent every other pulse, so that the pulses are not heard as
a series of identical sounds but as a rhythm of pairs of alter-
nating upbeats and downbeats. As the interval between pulses
is made greater, a point will be reached where the pulses can
no longer be mentally grouped into pairs, because the two
pulses fall outside the span of attention. The length of the spe-
cious present measured in this way amounts to about 3 sec-
onds. Experiments of this sort suggest that there is a sense
in which our entire life is only 3 seconds long: all else is mere
reminiscence or anticipation.

How finely can we divide our little 3-second lives? The
shortest perceivable time division—sensory physiologists call
it the fusion threshold—is between 2 and 30 milliseconds (ms)
depending on sensory modality. Two sounds seem to fuse into
one acoustic sensation if they are separated by less than 2 to
5 milliseconds. Two successive touches merge if they occur
within about 10 milliseconds of one another, while flashes of
light blur together if they are separated by less than about 20
to 30 milliseconds. Experimental difficulties prevent the sci-
entific determination of fusion thresholds for taste and smell,
so you will have to judge for yourself how far two smells must
be separated in time before you perceive them as separate

instances of the same odor. Note that the sense of sight has
the largest fusion threshold. This relatively slow response of
the human visual system is a boon to designers of TV sets. If
our sense of sight were as temporally sharp as our sense of
hearing, the framing rate of TV cameras (now fixed at about
60 frames per second) would have to be increased by a factor
of 10 to achieve flicker-free TV images.

Humans consider two events "presently perceived" if
their temporal separations happen to fall in the range of times
between about 3 milliseconds and 3 seconds. When we achieve
access to other forms of mind, one of the most important sub-
jective features we will discover will be the temporal dimen-
sions of their inner lives. Assuming they are conscious beings,
how long is the attention span of a redwood tree, an ant colony,
a helium atom, or the Andromeda galaxy?

The human mind does not perceive the present moment
so much as it "constructs" it. There is, as far as we know, no
master clock or central organ of temporality in the brain. In
fact, signals from different sensory modalities occurring at dif-
ferent times in the brain are judged by the mind to happen
simultaneously.

The mind's "construction of the present" is responsible for
our sense of when a sound and a flash of light or a touch seem
to happen at the same time. Such subjective judgments are
important for athletic performances, for the skillful operation
of machinery, and for the making of accurate scientific obser-
vations. In 1795 the British Astronomer Royal Nevil Maske-
lyne dismissed his assistant David Kennebrooke because
despite repeated warnings he persisted in recording the me-
ridian transits of stars as much as 0.8 second later than his
master. Observing a star's transit time involves a human judg-
ment concerning the simultaneous occurrence of a visual and
an auditory event: the star's image crossing a hairline in a
viewfinder and the tick of an astronomical clock. The Prussian
mathematician Friederich Bessel examined transit records at
the Konigsberg observatory and found that the transit esti-
mations of various astronomers differed systematically from

one another, by a quantity that came to be known as "the
personal equation." Kennebrooke could have kept his job if his
boss had known that the perceived present is a subjective con-
struction not an objective fact. "Be here now" means some-
thing slightly different for each person on earth. The
realization that everyone has his own style of constructing the
visual/acoustic present set off a wealth of nineteenth-century
experimentation by Exner, Wundt, and Wolfe on the various
personal equations associated with people's experiences of the
subjective simultaneity of sensations of touch, sound, sight,
and electric shocks.

Libet's Temporal Referral Experiment

One of the most unusual features of "reality construction" in
the brain was discovered recently by neurosurgeon Benjamin
Libet at University of California Medical School in San Fran-
cisco. Libet found that electrical stimulation of the sensory
cortex—that part of the brain's surface primarily responsible
for processing tactile information from the skin—did not result
in conscious sensation unless the stimulation was prolonged for
at least 500 milliseconds (0.5 second), an enormously long time
compared to the roughly 10- to 20-millisecond transit time re-
quired for the nerve signal to travel from the touch site to the
cerebral cortex. The necessity for at least half a second of cor-
tical stimulation before a sensation was felt held true both for
direct electrical stimulation of the bare cortex and for indirect
stimulation via mild shocks applied to the fingertips. In both
cases if the signal as recorded at the cortex was less than 0.5
second long, the stimulation was not consciously perceived.
This does not mean that a skin shock has to be at least 0.5
second long in order to be felt, but only that the secondary
signals produced by skin shock signals at the surface of the
brain must last at least 0.5 second before the skin shock can
become a part of conscious experience.

Despite his observation that the creation of a conscious

tactile experience requires at least a half-second of sustained
cortical activity—a veritable eternity compared to typical neu-
ronal response times—Libet found that his patients experi-
enced their finger shocks "immediately," certainly not 500
milliseconds after the shock was applied. Libet's latter result
is consistent with our own experience of tactile phenomena: if
we had to wait 0.5 second before experiencing what we
touched, our tactile sense would be virtually useless for all but
the very slowest of physical activities. Typical tactile reaction
times are on the order of 0.1 second (100 milliseconds)—the
time it takes to perceive a touch and push a button too. How
can Libet's observation that 0.5 second of neural activity is
needed to build up a conscious touch sensation be reconciled
with the fact that we can feel a touch and take action five times
faster than the time these perceptions are alleged to require
before they can become conscious?

In a series of ingenious experiments involving variously
timed electrical stimulations of both the cortex and the skin,
Libet was able to resolve this sensory dilemma. What seems
to be going on is this: The tactile signal reaches the cortex in
about 10 milliseconds and is not consciously perceived. But this
arrival time is unconsciously noted in some way. Then if the
cortical activity due to the tactile stimulus is not disrupted and
is allowed to proceed for the minimum time adequate to pro-
duce a conscious sensation (about 0.5 second), the touch is reg-
istered as part of the ongoing flow of conscious experience.
However, the touch is not experienced 0.5 second late: it is
instead "referred" to the previous time indexed by the initial
pulse arrival time. It is as if the initial tactile pulse sets a
"marker" in the time flow, a marker that is "redeemed" if fu-
ture cortical events produce enough sustained neural activity
to promote that tentative touch signal into conscious aware-
ness.

Libet's surprising results could be interpreted as an ex-
perimental disproof of the notion of psychophysical paral-
lelism—the idea that every mental experience corresponds di-
rectly to a particular physical process in the brain. For the

subjective experience of touch occurs, according to Libet's
work, not at the same time as touch-induced events in the
brain but long before the neuronal events that are supposedly
responsible for the sensation. For the sense of touch, mind and
its associated neuronal events are seemingly out of sync by
almost 500 milliseconds, not parallel at all.

On the other hand, Libet's work can be regarded as a
specific example in the temporal domain of the "sensory pro-
jection mechanism" so familiar to us in the spatial domain. I
do not, for instance, actually experience a star as being inside
my head, where the neural impulses related to that star's ap-
pearance certainly reside, but in a space far outside my body,
upon the celestial sphere apparently hanging a few miles or so
above my head. The entire sensual world is experienced to be
"out there" not "in here." (An exception to this projection
mechanism might be the case of listening to music on stereo
headphones, where occasionally the music seems to be located
right in the center of my brain.) Libet's work reveals that the
construction of the conscious present involves a similar sub-
jective projection, in this case backward in time rather than
outward in space. Presumably the existence of a "personal
equation," idiosyncratic simultaneity judgments between dif-
ferent sensory modalities, results from private differences in
the operation of this temporal projection mechanism for the
various senses.

The Experience of Paying Attention

Once consciousness comes into existence (the porridge wakes
up) and begins to construct its private present moment, a pro-
cess called "attention" begins to search for "contents" with
which to occupy the aroused mind. The process of attention
has been compared to a searchlight illuminating a tiny part of
a vast and complicated cavern: those dark portions of the mind
potentially open to conscious scrutiny.

Attention seems to be important for learning, for laying

down permanent memory traces, issuing in effect a kind of
PRINT command that results in certain spotlit experiences
being remembered while other more dimly lit experiences fade
away forever. Striking events that "catch our attention" al-
most against our will can be recalled years later, as well as
intrinsically boring events (such as the multiplication table) on
which we have voluntarily, often with great mental effort, con-
centrated the spotlight of conscious attention.

Not all information that enters the brain is available to
conscious attention. The carotid body, for example, a peanut-
sized organ close to the heart, monitors the oxygen content of
the blood. But try as we may, we cannot consciously access
this organ's output and savor the sweet taste of our blood's
oxygenation. Nor can we learn to clench and unclench the mus-
cles of the heart or viscera: such processes are part of the
body's involuntary nervous system, locked away from the
sweeping searchlight of conscious attention. The boundaries
between voluntary and involuntary nervous system are some-
what fuzzy. Using biofeedback techniques people have learned
to control skin temperature, brain waves, and blood pressure,
but no one to my knowledge has ever learned to taste his own
internal blood.

The attention process is intimately bound up with the
question of selfhood (Who is it that is "paying attention"?) as
well as the problem of free will (Who or what decides where
the searchlight of attention will be pointed next?).

Both self and will can be explored in certain systems of
meditation, none so effective, to my mind, as the simple pro-
cess of sitting quietly and feeling your breath move in and out
of your body. Breathing is a peculiar process in that it is a
vital unconscious activity that can be easily brought under con-
scious control. One measure of willpower might be how long
you can hold your breath, how long you can consciously resist
the body's own urge for self-preservation. Breathing is, in a
sense, a mind/body system situated at the very boundary of
the self and not-self, and as such it can give us valuable in-
sights, mostly nonverbal, about the peculiar experiential terms

of the mind/body contract. Certainly conscious robots, if we
endowed them with any measure of curiosity, will practice
some form of meditation, exploring from the inside flickering
self/not-self boundaries of their artificially incarnated minds.

Of all the qualities of mind, the sense of self is the most
difficult to describe, let alone quantify. How will we knowingly
build selfhood into our conscious robots before we possess a
clear notion of what such a process means in a human being?
Unless we come to a better scientific understanding of our own
selfhood, it is likely that at some point in their development
our robots will accidentally acquire a sense of self in a manner
as mysterious as the way in which it is acquired by our
children.

Three or four times each second, our eyes involuntarily
jump to a new line of sight, the so-called saccadic motion su-
perimposed upon our voluntary shifting of gaze from one point
of interest to another. It has been said that the most frequent
decision that our body has to make (more than 100,000 times
a day) is where to look next. On what basis does the brain
decide to turn its eyes in a particular direction, to speak or
write a particular sentence, to perform the next voluntary ac-
tion, either in its muscles, lifting the lid to smell the soup, or
in its mind, recalling a childhood memory?

In a very real sense, the only power we possess is the
ability to direct our attention to one particular aspect of the
world rather than to another. Certainly my emotions play an
important role in selecting what I attend to next, but person-
ality, novelty, aesthetics, intuition, commitment, context, and
often sheer accident also take part in this decision. In addition
to these factors I have the sense of "free will"—that I could,
if I wished, carry out a completely capricious action, that my
choice of where to place my attention is not entirely deter-
mined by internal or external forces. I have the feeling that
part of my decision concerning what to do next resides in an
independent self. However, like the sense of self, what it might
actually mean to have a truly free will, to be the "first cause"
of certain voluntary actions, is difficult to imagine. One possi-

ble meaning of this term is that the self exists, as the dualists
believe, outside the body and operates the body by means of
nonmaterial forces that violate the normal laws of physics gov-
erning unconscious matter. Although the self might escape
physical determinism by abiding "outside the world," it would
still seem to be influenced by psychological motives. What
would it mean to act without motives of any kind? Random
action certainly does not seem to be a desirable kind of free-
dom. As the philosopher Schopenhauer put it, "I may be free
to do as I please but am I free to please as I please?"

How Much Attention Can Humans Muster?

Self and will—attention's source and attention's direction—
may be elusive questions, but one aspect of attention easily
accessible for study is the quantity of conscious attention a
person can focus on an experience. In the late 1940s Bell Lab-
oratory scientist Claude Shannon invented the notion of infor-
mation rate, expressed in bits per second (bps), as a measure
of the data transmission capacity of any communication chan-
nel. In Shannon's terms a TV channel transmits about 10 mil-
lion bits of information per second, a phone line carries about
3000 bits per second, while a tom-tom (talking drum) com-
municates at about 10 bits per second. What is the capacity of
our conscious attention regarded as a communication channel
between self and world, and how does it compare to other data
rates in the human brain?

Of all the senses vision is by far the most capacious chan-
nel, transmitting from each eye on the order of 100 million bits
per second of information along the optic nerve through cer-
tain midbrain relay centers into the occipital lobe located at
the back of the brain. From every square inch of the skin, the
largest organ of the body, tactile messages pour into and up
the spinal cord, then pass through the brain stem into the thal-
amus, where they are relayed to the sensory cortex, a narrow
ribbon of brain tissue that lies just under the headband of your

stereo headphones. The quantity of tactile information stream-
ing into the sensory cortex may be as large as 10 million bits
per second. From the ears, along the acoustic nerve, about
30,000 bits per second of auditory information passes into the
brain stem, where it is relayed to the primary auditory cortex
located near the border of the parietal and temporal lobes.
Signals informing the brain about how the external world
tastes and smells carry comparatively little information com-
pared to the vision, touch, and hearing channels.

On the output side, speech is our most capacious channel,
capable of transmitting on the order of 10,000 bits per second.
Virtuoso piano players and expert typists operating at top
speed can produce only about 25 bits per second of Shannon-
style information. The use of the whole body as a signaling
channel—posture, gesture, dance, semaphore—has not been
investigated, but it is likely that the whole-body data rate is
low compared to that of speech. Likewise the production of
olfactory and gustatory signals seems to play a quantitatively
small part in human communication schemes at present.

We do not know exactly how the brain processes infor-
mation, but if we assume that each neural synapse corresponds
to 1 bit of information, then the cerebral cortex considered as
a communication channel is capable of dealing with about 10
trillion bits per second—100 billion synapses firing at a max-
imum rate of 100 per second. Viewed strictly as an unconscious
data processing machine, the human sensory/motor system
consists of relatively modest input and output data flows
linked by an enormous amount of computational power. (The
human brain by this estimate is 10,000 times faster than the
largest supercomputers.) Of course, almost all of this neural
data processing goes on below the level of awareness. What
fraction of this activity can we attend to at any one time? In
other words, when we "pay attention," how much do we pay?
A simple thought experiment can give us some idea of the
Shannon channel capacity of ordinary awareness.

Imagine a TV display that can display sixteen different
colors. The number of Shannon bits in a display corresponds

[Double-funnel model of human mind/body system as information channel. Moderate input
and output rates in the kilobit-megabit range are processed unconsciously at more than a
trillion bits per second. In the midst of these flows, consciousness perceives and directs
data flows of about 30 bits per second. Unconscious data rates outnumber the conscious
rates by a factor of more than a trillion.]

to the number of different possible displays expressed as pow-
ers of 2. Since 2 to the fourth power equals 16, a display with
sixteen possibilities represents an information content of 4
bits. Now imagine that a colored letter can be flashed on the
screen, a letter drawn from an alphabet of 256 characters (8
bits). The display now consists of 16 bits of information: 8 for
character, 4 for character color, plus 4 more for background
color. Can you attend fully to all aspects of this simple display:
to the character itself, to its color, and to the color of its back-
ground? Probably so. Now let's imagine that the display is
flashing at an increasing rate, going through all its possible
changes. At what display rate does your attention fail to keep
pace? Can you give full attention to the display when it is
flashing three times a second—corresponding to a data rate of

48 bits per second? From experiments of this kind, it is esti-
mated that the conscious data rate in human beings lies some-
where between 15 and 50 bits per second, much closer to
tom-tom data rate than to a telephone channel. Consciousness
represents much less than one part per hundred billion of the
processing power of the brain. Truly our little egos are just
the minuscule tip of an immense psychological pyramid.

When consciousness is taken into account, the informa-
tion-rate model of the human sensory-motor system resembles
a pair of double funnels. Two huge funnels throat to throat
represent the coupling of sensory-motor activities to the enor-
mous unconscious cerebral computer; two moderate-sized fun-
nels neck to neck represent the relatively small quantitative
role of conscious data processing in the human system.

How can we manage to live with such an experiential mis-
match, without becoming overwhelmed or paralyzed by the
body's awesome complexity? The answer lies, of course, in hi-
erarchical organization. Although the data that enter con-
sciousness are small in quantity, they are of very high quality.
Sensory information is filtered, selected, abstracted, recoded,
condensed for presentation to the limited view of conscious
attention. All irrelevant details have been stripped away, the
data are grouped into significant patterns, and important fea-
tures are highlighted. This condensation feature makes atten-
tion look like a kind of executive in a large corporation who is
ignorant of most of the billions of day-to-day details that go
on in the company. He perceives his company's activities
through highly condensed but relevant summaries, acts
through orders whose details he leaves to his subordinates,
and only occasionally ever ventures down to the shop floor.
The executive handles very little information, but it is of very
high quality. He gives very few commands, but they are very
effective.

Can we gain a clue from this small conscious data rate
concerning the location of consciousness in the brain? In the
early days of brain science, when questions of the localization
of consciousness were raised, an answer that was sometimes

put forth (usually in jest) was that only one nerve cell—the
so-called pontifical neuron—was conscious and assumed exec-
utive control over the rest of the brain. From consideration of
information rates alone, one papal neuron would more than
suffice to command consciously the brain's community of neu-
rons, though more distributed, democratic theories of neural
responsibility are currently in fashion.

Although quantitatively small, the contents of conscious-
ness vary immensely in quality. These contents can be crudely
divided into sensation, action, memory, emotion, and cognition.
To give our robots (including poor Claire) a human-style
awareness we will first have to be able to characterize the
quality and range of subjective experiences available to awake,
alert human beings scientifically: In other words, before giving
robots minds of their own, we should get to know ourselves
better, learn to construct "mind maps" that adequately rep-
resent what humans can normally bring to mind. As we discuss
these mind maps, we should be aware of both how well we are
equipped to interact with the external world and of the limi-
tations of our present form of embodiment. One might reason-
ably expect that a future science of mind will make present
maps obsolete by literally expanding our consciousness via an
increased conscious data rate, by developing entirely new
senses and abilities to interact with matter, and perhaps by
inventing entirely new modes of being.

The biggest landmarks on anyone's map of sensation are
the classic five senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell,
although science writer Guy Murchie in his Seven Mysteries
of Life counts no less than thirty-two separate senses, includ-
ing a sense of balance, of appetite, of intuition, and a sense of
humor. Murchie defines sense as any channel through which
the mind relates to the body; his large sensory inventory re-
flects the actual richness of the mind/body connection.

Visual Space

Our primary sensory connection to the outside world is vision,
a subjective appreciation of electromagnetic vibrations pos-
sessing wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers (1 nan-
ometer = 1 billionth of a meter), otherwise known as "light."
We do not experience vision as an unstructured blaze of light
but unconsciously organize it into discrete "objects" located in
a three-dimensional space at various distances from our eyes.
In addition to shape, size, and texture, these objects evoke in
us a certain subjective quality called "color" that seems to de-
pend both on the object itself and on the nature of the ambient
light. Color experts estimate that we can distinguish more
than 100,000 different colors, which can all be mapped into a
three-dimensional "color solid" or chromasphere, whose di-
mensions are conventionally labeled "hue," "saturation," and
"brightness."

Hue represents the dimension of the pure colors them-
selves: red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The pure colors can
be arranged in a circle such that each color lies opposite its
"complementary" color. A colored light added to the proper
amount of its complementary color produces the neutral sen-
sation "white." Inside the pure, or "saturated," color ring lie
the unsaturated colors—pure colors mixed with a certain
amount of white light. The hue and saturation variables define
the two-dimensional color wheel reproduced in many art
books.

The third dimension of the color solid is brightness—the
visual intensity of the color experience. A black-and-white
camera responds only to the brightness dimension of the color
solid: this dimension is sometimes called the gray scale. One
way of visualizing the color solid is to imagine that hue labels
a particular color, saturation tells how much white is there,
and brightness tells how much black is present in a particular
color sensation.

A surprising feature of the chromasphere is the circular
character of the color wheel. Since the physical variable that

[Inner-Space Color Map. Location of subjective color experiences inside a three-dimensional
color solid.]

corresponds to hue is the wavelength of light, and the wave-
lengths that human eyes respond to vary from 700 nanometers
(red) to 400 nanometers (violet), one might have expected that
the subjective sensation of color would likewise be spread out
in a linear fashion fading away into invisibility at two limiting
hues. However, unlike the physical spectrum, the visual spec-
trum loops back on itself, forming a color circle rather than a
color line. The loop is closed via a nonspectral color purple—
a particular ratio of red and violet light.

The circular character of the color wheel is explained by
the fact that in normal eyes there are three different color
receptors, whose sensitivities peak in red, green, and blue
light, respectively. The relative stimulation of these three re-
ceptors defines a unique position within the color solid. The

reason that our psychological color space appears to have more
dimensions than the physical spectrum is that our eyes do not
detect color as a single note, but as a three-note chord, per-
ceiving a kind of optical harmony. If we happened to possess
eyes with four color receptors, the subjective color space
would no doubt be four-dimensional, the pure colors spread
out over the surface of a sphere rather than a circle. Although
a few poets have speculated about new color sensations out-
side the human range, it is impossible for us to imagine what
a new color would actually look like, visually imprisoned as we
are inside the normal human chromasphere.

One boon a new science of mind might be able to grant
would be the literal expansion of our visual horizons, with one
or more new color receptors, preferably lying outside our pres-
ent visual range, whose outputs combined with those of our
present receptors would allow us to perceive a vastly extended
color space of more than three dimensions.

Auditory Space

The subjective color space can be mapped onto a three-dimen-
sional solid because the eye possesses three different color re-
ceptors, whose outputs blend to produce intermediate colors.
Every perceivable color can be mapped onto this space with
none left out. The auditory sense is not so simple. The ear is
sensitive to sound frequencies between 20 cycles and 20,000
cycles per second (almost ten octaves compared to the eye's
single octave of frequencies), but the detector for these fre-
quencies is not divided into a small number of primary recep-
tors like the eye. Instead, the cochlea, a small snail-shaped
organ inside the ear, consists of tens of thousands of tiny hairs,
each sensitive to a slightly different sound frequency.

The people who design music synthesizers would like to
be able to cover all of auditory space with their sound
machines—to be able to duplicate all known sounds as well as
to exhaustively identify all other sounds that the human ear

can possibly experience. However, because the number of dif-
ferent auditory receptors is so large, there is no simple audi-
tory map corresponding to the color solid upon which all
possible acoustic sensations can be mapped. We have no way
of simply displaying all the familiar sounds, of looking for gaps
in acoustic space corresponding to sounds heretofore not ex-
perienced by humans. Consequently, there may be hundreds
of novel sound sensations out there waiting to be experienced
by the human ear.

In certain restricted acoustic situations, maps can be
drawn of human auditory possibilities. An orchestral score is
one such map. Here the number of dimensions of acoustic ex-
perience is artificially limited by the number and kinds of dif-
ferent musical instruments, not by the analytic capabilities of
the ear.

There is a close parallel between the senses of vision and
hearing because both involve sensing the frequencies of cer-
tain vibrations. Just as the sensed visual spectrum loops
around, although the physical spectrum is linear, so also a cor-
responding acoustic loop can be produced in our subjective
sense of musical pitch. By playing a three-note chord on a mu-
sic synthesizer and programming the amplitudes and frequen-
cies of this chord in a particular way, the sensation is created
of a sound of constantly increasing pitch, that returns again
and again to the same aural sensation—the acoustic equivalent
of the visual color wheel, or of paradox artist Maurits Escher's
endlessly ascending circular stairways.

Since the ear is already so receptor-rich compared to the
eye, it may be difficult to expand our acoustic experience ar-
tificially, except by extending our hearing into the infra- and
ultrasonic ranges.

Tactile Space

The sense of touch seems to consist of four separate senses—
sensitivity to pressure, heat, cold, and pain—rather than four

dimensions of a single sense. We feel pressure and heat, for
instance, as two independent sensations. They do not combine
like colors to produce a third new tactile sensation. Touch is
our most intimate and active sense, potentially involving all
the muscles of the body, in sizing up a new tactile situation.
We not only passively experience changes in skin pressure but
also actively engage the source of that pressure in active tac-
tile conversation, an exploratory dermal dance resulting in
complex, sensations of viscous, liquid, slippery, glue; of rub-
bery, gritty, furry, smooth.

Our fingertips are capable of sensing a difference in height
as small as 1/10,000 of an inch and can be trained to read text
encoded as raised Braille dots rapidly. An exciting area of tac-
tile research is the development of virtual reality simulations
in which a computer generates artificial visual and tactile ex-
periences that are channeled through a video helmet and a
dataglove to produce a convincing sense of being able to sense,
move, and manipulate objects in a wholly simulated environ-
ment. The dataglove senses the position and shape of the hand
with magnetic and stretch-sensitive sensors and applies tactile
feedback (in some designs) with an array of tiny vibrators. An
exciting example of virtual-reality research is the molecular
docking program at the University of North Carolina in
Chapel Hill. In this simulation, the subject sees and feels a
large biomolecule, which he attempts to fit by hand into its
appropriate molecular receptor, an operation that taxes the
computational power of the largest computers, but which is
literally "child's play" for the human hand/eye combination.
The attempt to produce persuasive tactile feedback for such
ambitious attempts at reality simulation has spurred new in-
terest and appreciation for the human sense of touch.

Gustatory and Olfactory Spaces

Taste and smell, our chemical senses, put us in touch with the
atomic structure of the food we eat, as well as other substances

that pass by and into our bodies. Taste seems, like touch, to
consist of four separate subsenses, in this case sensitivity to
the salt, sour, bitter, and sweet aspects of chemical substances
that our tongues encounter.

The human sense of smell seems to consist of seven basic
components, a sensitivity to camphoric, floral, ethereal, musky,
minty, pungent, and putrid odors. John Amoore and his col-
leagues have shown that the first five of these basic odors
correspond to the shape of the molecule that produces the ol-
factory sensation, and in the case of putrid and pungent, to
the electric charge (+ or —) carried by the odoriferous mole-
cule. These five basic shapes—the five aromatic solids, as it
were—fit into five complementary holes in receptor sites lo-
cated in the olfactory epithelium near the bridge of the nose.
Our sense of smell acts as a kind of biological microscope, feel-
ing out the shape and electric charge of invisible molecules in
the air, then reporting this essentially tactile data to the mind
in a peculiar olfactory code. It is interesting to speculate
whether the sense of smell could ever be retrained to operate
as a literal microscope, by teaching the nose to associate the
seven basic smells with pictures of the appropriate molecules.
To such a sophisticated smeller, a new odor might trigger off
not only a new olfactory sensation, but a mental picture of the
molecule responsible for the new smell.

The sense of smell in humans plays a relatively minor role
compared to its importance to other animals such as dogs.
Neurologist Oliver Sachs reports the unusual case of a man,
who, after a blow to the head, experienced an enormous en-
largement of his sense of smell. For a period of time, he lit-
erally lived in a dog's world, experiencing a dramatic tapestry
of olfactory sensations wherever he went until he gradually
returned to the relatively "smell-blind" human world. When
we learn more about how the information collected by the
sense organs is turned into sensual experience in the mind, we
may perhaps all have the opportunity to "live a dog's life" if
we so desire.

Other senses exist in nature whose subjective qualities we

can barely imagine. What would it be like to experience the
world via the sonar sense of a dolphin or a bat? Or sense elec-
tric fields as certain fishes do? How does a plant feel while it
is grazing on photons of light? If you could directly experience
the sizzling sensation of photosynthesis, how would you de-
scribe to someone else the taste and smell of sunlight?

When science succeeds in developing mind links that per-
mit us to share the inner experiences of other sentient beings,
such questions will be more than academic. The mind link will
immediately rub our noses in utterly alien modes of percep-
tion. As a foretaste of what acquiring an entirely new sense
might feel like, I invite you to revive a scarcely used human
sensory ability I call "bee sight."

Bee Sight

Light from the sky is partially polarized with a direction and
intensity that vary with the sun's position. The eyes of honey-
bees are sensitive to skylight polarization, presumably to help
the bees navigate to and from their hives on cloudy days. It
is a little-known fact that human eyes can also sense skylight
polarization, but most of us never bother to exercise this ves-
tigial sense.

warning: once you learn to experience "bee sight," it
may be difficult for you to unlearn it. Do you really want to
contaminate your future sunset vistas with a distracting over-
lay of skylight polarization icons?

From a physicist's point of view, light is a transverse vi-
bration of electric and magnetic fields that is traveling through
space at the astonishing speed of 300,000 kilometers per sec-
ond. The word transverse means that light's fields vibrate at
right angles to the direction in which the light is moving. The
light's electric and magnetic fields also vibrate at right angles
to one another. The polarization of a light beam is defined as
the direction of vibration of the electric field.

To visualize this interlocking set of right angles, imagine

a beam of polarized light shining directly into your eye. If you
could see them, the electric and magnetic fields would make a
big X in your plane of vision. Along one arm of the X, the
electric field is vibrating; along the other arm vibrates the
light's magnetic component. Picture the electric arm of the X
to be colored bright blue (electric blue?) while the magnetic
arm is colored yellow (magnetic mustard?). The direction of
the blue arm defines the polarization direction of the light
beam. If the blue arm points in the vertical direction, for in-
stance, what you are looking at is a beam of vertically polar-
ized light.

Light is said to be totally polarized when its electric field
vibrates in only one direction, and unpolarized when its elec-
tric field changes directions in an erratic and unpredictable
manner. All other situations correspond to partial polarization.
Direct sunlight is unpolarized, but scattered sunlight, skylight,
for instance, is usually partially polarized to some extent.

To experience bee sight, it is best to begin by viewing
light that is totally polarized, such as that obtained by looking
at the sky through a sheet of Polaroid plastic or polarized sun-
glasses. Polaroid plastic is a transparent gray material that
only passes light polarized in one particular direction—the di-
rection of the plastic's optic axis.

As you look through the plastic at the sky, you will soon
become aware of a polarization icon in the shape of a Maltese
cross about five times as large as the full moon. One arm of
the cross is blue, the other yellow. The cross has the visual
character of an afterimage, and, like an afterimage, tends to
fade away after a few seconds. To revive the icon, blink your
eyes, shift your gaze, or rotate the plastic. When you turn the
Polaroid plastic, the icon will rotate too, looking as though it
were fastened to the plastic. Most people's first glimpse of the
polarization icon (also called Haidinger's brush, after Austrian
mineralogist Wilhelm Karl von Haidinger) occurs when look-
ing through a rotating piece of Polaroid plastic. Much to their
surprise, they suddenly see a big blue and yellow cross turning
slowly against the sky.

After you are sure that you know what the polarization
icon looks like in totally polarized light, try to see it in the
partially polarized sky without the aid of the plastic. Best re-
sults are achieved at twilight against the background of a dark
blue sky. When conditions are right, the sky sometimes ap-
pears to be covered with a latticework of yellow and blue
crosses, an unforgettable sight.

The brightness of the polarization icon indicates how
strongly the light is polarized. The icon is brightest for totally
polarized light and fades to invisibility in unpolarized light.
The arms of the Maltese cross point in the same direction as
the vibrations of the light's electric and magnetic fields. The
blue arm of the cross lies along the direction of electric vibra-
tion; the yellow arm indicates the light's magnetic direction.
In the fringe science literature one runs across accounts of
people who claim to be able to see colors around the poles of
a magnet or "auras" around the human body. Whatever the
merits of these claims, there is no doubt that ordinary people
can, in a sense, perceive the magnetic and electric fields that
constitute a beam of light. These fields appear to us as
swatches of blue and yellow light. The physical source of the
polarization icon has been attributed to special pigments in
the eye or to the radial pattern of nerve fibers that overlay
the retina, but the true cause of bee sight in humans is still
obscure.

Once you have taught your eyes to experience bee sight,
you will wonder how you ever missed seeing Professor Hai-
dinger's wonderful multicolored crosses in the sky. Why was
such a flagrant phenomenon—amounting to an entirely new
human sense—overlooked by hundreds of generations of art-
ists, explorers, and curious laymen until its relatively recent
discovery (1846) by an obscure Austrian rock doctor? What
other hidden human senses are awaiting discovery by alert
sensory adventurers?

The Space of Voluntary Movement

"The will as brakes can't stop the will as motor for very long,"
said poet Robert Frost. "We're plainly made to go." And go
we do, our mind skillfully coaxing and convulsing the body's
652 voluntary muscles into thousands of marvelous perfor-
mances each day, from running a marathon to singing in the
shower. Some of our muscles (from the Latin word for "little
mouse") are under control of the will; others, such as the iris
muscle in the eye, the muscles of the heart, or the tiny pilo-
erector ("hair-raising") muscles that give us "goosebumps," re-
ceive orders from neural systems outside the range of
conscious control. An important aspect of the human mind is
its ability to move the human body willfully. How does it ac-
tually feel to exert conscious control over the movement of
matter? What are the repertoire, range, and limit of our bodily
powers?

The question of the limits of human performance is of
great interest to human factors engineers who are designing
man/machine interfaces for spaceships, airliners, and nuclear
power plants. Psychologists, athletes, and dancers also work
at defining and extending the body's limits. Human factors en-
gineers measure the reach and grasp of human hands, the
amount of force a human foot can exert on a pedal, the range
of human reaction times, the "personal equation." How fast
can a man run? How far can a woman jump? How far can she
throw a ball, a javelin, a shotput? Every Olympic record of
physical achievement is a psychological achievement as well,
a record of the mind surging past its normal constraints.

The mind experiences its material boundaries in the form
of a body schema—an ever-changing inner image of the pos-
ture, gait, expression, and appearance of the physical struc-
ture once called "the temple of the spirit." Part of our body
image is constructed from information gathered via the exter-
nal sense: we touch, smell, and hear the sounds of our own
bodies in operation. Using our eyes, we catch sight of part
of our body, and with mirrors see much more. My colleague,

biophysicist-dancer Beverly Rubik, calls her mirror "an im-
mediate multichannel biofeedback device."

Even with eyes closed I experience a strong sense of bod-
ily presence: how my limbs are arranged, the position of each
finger, where the tongue lies in my mouth. Much of our body
schema comes from information garnered by the internal
senses, notably the balance organ in the inner ear that tells
the brain which direction is up, as well as proprioceptors (self-
sensors) in the joints and muscles that directly inform the
brain of the relative orientation of its body parts.

Like eyesight and hearing, the degree of body awareness
varies widely from person to person. Some people are highly
body-conscious; others body-blind. Psychological factors often
distort our internal body maps, causing certain parts to appear
larger or smaller than they really are. Drugs, fever, and delir-
ium may radically alter our sense of the shape and size of the
body. By far the greatest mismatch between body image and
body fact is the phantom limb phenomenon, in which an am-
putated arm or leg still appears to be present. One man even
claimed to be able to feel a wristwatch on his missing arm.
Admiral Nelson, who lost his left arm in the Battle of Trafal-
gar, continued to feel its presence for the rest of his life. Nel-
son regarded the existence of his phantom limb as proof of the
existence of a soul.

Attempts to create maps of human bodily possibilities
have been few. Outside the field of human factors engineering,
the work of Rudolf Laban and Ray Birdwhistell is particularly

noteworthy.

In 1928 Laban published Schrifttanz ("Written Dance") in
Vienna, introducing a new graphic system for mapping the
possibilities of human movement. Laban visualized the dancer
enclosed in a "kinesphere"—the space of all dance possibilities,
the martial artist's "danger zone"—inside of which the joints
of the body traced complicated paths. To Laban these paths
resembled ribbons winding though a crystalline lattice. Be-
cause of the body's symmetry, a common "dance crystal" for

these somatic meanderings was the icosohedron, the regular
twenty-sided platonic solid. As developed by Laban and ex-
tended by his followers, Labanotation continues to be one of
the most used body alphabets for the choreography of modern
dance.

Ray Birdwhistell is an American anthropologist special-
izing in nonverbal communication. The goal of his "kinesics"
project, initiated in the early 1950s, was to "develop a meth-
odology which would exhaustively analyze the communicative
behavior of the body." Birdwhistell found that Labanotation,
originally developed for the annotation of dance movements,
was not entirely suitable for the analysis of casual face-to-face
communication. Birdwhistell began his system of kinesics by
dividing the body into eight zones and inventing symbols to
describe the motional possibilities of each zone. One of the ad-
vantages of a comprehensive movement map such as kinesics
is to increase one's skill as an observer by drawing attention
to normally ignored gestures such as subtle neck and shoulder
movements. Birdwhistell, who claimed to be able to distin-
guish fifteen different degrees of eyelid closure, used his sys-
tem to describe various styles of symptom presentation in
Kentucky clinics, the American adolescent "courtship dance,"
body change when speaking a foreign language, and interrup-
tion strategies during therapy.

Some of the most awkward experiences that the new
mind-link technology might be expected to engender will be
the presentation to human consciousness of nonhuman body
images. It may not be so difficult to take on the body schemas
of dogs and cats, since their body plans are not dissimilar to
our own, but to put on the body of a centipede or octopus may
be a real challenge to our somatic imaginations. More difficult
still will be the experience of mindlinking with microorgan-
isms. Amoebas, for instance, have no fixed limbs at all, moving
about, exuding pseudopods, and engulfing food particles by
controlling the local viscosity of their cellular contents. What
would it feel like to move around as a conscious gob of goo?

The possibility of assuming the body image of so formless a
creature will bring new meaning to the phrase "Be all that you
can be."

Thinking Space

The naked ape, pleased with what he does best, likes to call
himself "the reasoning animal." Other beasts may possess
keener senses, swifter movements, and, for all we know,
deeper emotions, but there is no doubt that, compared to the
other animals on this planet, man has developed his facility for
rational thought to an almost grotesque degree. In the strug-
gle for material existence, wisdom has become our main
business.

At its core, the process of thinking depends on our ability
to tell a good lie and stick with it. Metaphors R Us. To think
is to force one thing to "stand for" something that it is not, to
substitute simple, tame, knowable, artificial concepts for some
piece of the complex, wild, ultimately unknowable natural
world. Much of the hard work of thinking has already been
done for us by those anonymous ancestors who originated and
shaped the earth's human languages. Language is surely one
of our most useful tools of thought, giving conceptual promi-
nence to certain things and processes, while relegating the un-
named and unnamable to conceptual oblivion.

Besides naming, other kinds of lying include reasoning by
analogy or metaphor and the creation of legal, mathematical,
personal, or social fictions such as money, limited liability cor-
porations, the square root of minus one, enlightenment, and
private property. Each word is a cultural enterprise, a public
attempt to dissect the wordless world in one particular way.
The usefulness of these verbal concepts should not blind us to
the fact that a sudden insight, a change in fashion, or a new
perspective may inspire other equally valid ways of construing
the world riddle.

This aspect of thinking—the representation of one thing

by something it is not—is not restricted to mental processes.
At the heart of all terrestrial biology lies the DNA code in
which various triplets of organic bases have been made to
"stand for" various amino acids. The most remarkable aspect
of the DNA code is that the relationship between a triplet
codon and its associated amino acid is not determined by chem-
istry or physics but is an essentially arbitrary assignment,
analogous to the arbitrary association that humans make be-
tween a word and its referent.

Telling useful lies is only part of the enterprise of think-
ing. To be really useful these lies must be incorporated with
explanatory intent into certain stories or games. A story is a
narrative driven by essentially psychological motives. In this
category fall myths, novels, theologies, parables, fables, and
many kinds of modern therapies. A game is an organized sys-
tem governed by impersonal rules rather than psychological
motives. Examples of games include the monetary system, Eu-
clidean geometry, rhetorical devices, rhyme schemes, Newto-
nian and quantum physics, real games of chance and skill, all
maps, and all of mathematics.

One of the prime-time conceptual games of our era is
called "mathematical logic," or the "truth game," under whose
rules truthful new sentences can be mechanically generated
from truthful old sentences. The rules of mathematical logic
were first formulated in 1854 by Irish schoolteacher George
Boole in a book he called The Laws of Thought.

The power of certain mathematical games (physics, chem-
istry, biology) to mirror the fine details of material existence
faithfully is astonishing. In certain cases quantum physics
makes predictions accurate to more than ten decimal places.
Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner refers to this magical match
between human mathematics and nonhuman nature as "the
unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sci-
ences." "This unreasonable effectiveness," concludes Wigner,
"is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve."

Computers are symbol processors par excellence, subject-
ing symbols to the Boolean logic game much faster than any

human mind can follow. However, the computer manipulates
its symbols in a meaningless void. It does not distinguish be-
tween a new swim fin design, a ballistic missile trajectory, and
a popular video game. The meaning of a computer's symbols
is not understood or fixed by the computer but by its human
programmers. In the world of thinking, humans are, among
other things, the generators of meaning, and computers the
unconscious executors of symbol games that bear (for humans
alone) the burden of their meaning.

Besides meaning, what else do humans bring to the oth-
erwise mechanical task of operating on symbols with game-
driven rules? What, in other words, does thinking feel like?

Humans not only decide what the symbols stand for, they
make up the rules as well. The same process of imagination
that thought up Boolean logic has concocted other "logics" as
well, suitable for calculating other kinds of truth. Part of con-
scious thinking is being aware not only of the symbols and the
game in progress but also of alternative possibilities for chang-
ing the rules and extending the meaning of the symbols. Hu-
mans, along with other life-forms, are opportunistic, ready to
change the rules of the game if it can afford them an advan-
tage. Although we seem to possess strictly one-track conscious
minds, the present moment of these minds seethes with myr-
iad unrealized possibilities, the freedom to push thought pro-
cesses in unprecedented new directions.

Besides giving meaning and imagination to game-driven
thinking, humans also think in terms of stories, patterns of
events driven by psychological motives rather than mechanical
rules. Some stories make no sense unless you can imagine the
emotions that the story's characters are experiencing. But
what are human emotions?

Feeling Space

An emotion is a kind of psychological direction finder, orient-
ing us toward pleasurable actions and away from painful

ones—an internal compass of desire. Emotion helps draw our
attention to particular things and events, making them stand
out against a desire-neutral background, focusing our senses,
giving clarity to our actions, and strengthening our memories.

Professor Robert Plutchik at Albert Einstein Medical
Center in Philadelphia has devised the most systematic map
of emotions to date. Plutchik distinguishes eight essential emo-
tions that combine to produce all the others. Plutchik's primal
passions come in pairs, each emotion matched with its comple-
mentary partner. A pure emotion combined with its comple-
ment results in an indecisive emotionally neutral experience.

Plutchik arrived at his eightfold catalog of feelings by col-
lecting all the words for emotions in the English language,
then arranging them in a systematic pattern, so that similar
emotions were close together, dissimilar emotions far apart. In
addition, this emotional positioning was guided by the hypoth-
esis that each pure feeling is the subjective aspect of a partic-
ular biologically-based drive or need common to all animal
life-forms from amoeba to human. An emotion is how a need
feels. Thus a pure emotion should not only represent an un-
alloyed feeling but also correspond to the human version of
some primal animal need.

The need to eat and the complementary urge to vomit (eat/
excrete) are connected with the emotion of love and its com-
plementary emotion, loathing.

The need for association with others and the complementary
need to reintegrate oneself after severance from others (mate/
separate) are connected with the emotion of joy and its com-
plementary emotion, sorrow.

The need to defend oneself and the complementary need to
retreat when defenseless (fight/flight) are related to the emo-
tion of anger and the complementary emotion of fear.
The drive to explore the environment and the complementary
need to maintain a home base (investigate/domesticate) cor-
respond to the emotion of amazement and its complement,
vigilance.

[Inner-Space Emotion Map. Location of subjective feelings inside a three-dimensional emo-
tional solid (after Plutchik).]

Plutchik discovered that these eight basic passions could
be arranged in a circle with complementary emotions opposite
one another, to form a kind of emotional "color wheel." The
pure emotions are arranged along the rim of this wheel, whose
center corresponds to an emotionally neutral (white) state of
mind. The fact that emotions can be experienced at many lev-
els of intensity, ranging from mild to unbearable, adds a third
dimension to this scheme, producing a three-dimensional space
in which all passions might be mapped, a kind of "emoto-
sphere," closely analogous to the three-dimensional color solid.
Like the color solid's three axes of hue, saturation, and bright-
ness, the emotion solid's dimensions might be labeled emo-
tional hue (as in "hue and cry"), purity (of intent), and intensity
(of feeling).

Although a considerable advance over previous crude

maps of feeling, Plutchik's emotosphere is still not as well de-
veloped as the color solid. The emotosphere is still largely
qualitative and may not be exhaustive, and the mechanics of
its mixed emotions have not yet been completely worked out.
Plutchik's emotion solid is a concrete example of the
power of reason to organize even so unruly a field as the emo-
tions, a successful example of clear thinking about feelings.
The fact that human emotions seem to occupy a three-dimen-
sional space similar to the color solid raises the intriguing
question of whether the physical substrate of emotions might
also be threefold. Could the spectrum of human emotions re-
sult from a trio of emotional "receptors" in the brain's limbic
system, analogous to the trio of color receptors in the eye?

Memory

"Time," it has been said, "is Nature's way of keeping every-
thing from happening at once." For humans, this same function
is carried out by memory, without which we would dwell eter-
nally in the present moment. Since the goal of many modern
therapies and of certain Eastern religions is to live more fully
in the present, futurologist John Holmdahl once playfully pro-
posed an "Amnesia Foundation" for the popularization of
memory loss as a shortcut to enlightenment.

The storage of memory traces seems to be composed of
three separate mechanisms mediating short-, medium-, and
long-term memorization. The length of short-term memory
corresponds roughly to the time interval dubbed by William
James, the "specious present," the time over which our expe-
riences seem to be simultaneously available for mental manip-
ulation. Medium-term memory lasts longer but can easily be
disrupted, its contents forever forgotten. These temporary
memories can be consolidated into long-term memory, ca-
pable of lasting a lifetime. The three kinds of memory may
result from three different kinds of changes in the brain, cor-

c

responding roughly to electrical, chemical, and structural

modifications.

Conventional computers consist of a small central proces-
sor plus massive amounts of memory storage space, each word
of memory stored at a particular address where it can always
be accessed. The brain differs from computers in that there
seems to be no space at all allotted solely to memory. The
brain's memorization facility seems to be diffused, in some ill-
understood way, into the brain's sensory, motor, and emotional

processing networks.

Human memories are not accessed by seeking a particular
address, but instead evoked by association with other memo-
ries. The concept of "dog," for instance, may be linked to mem-
ories of particular dogs; to dog-related emotions of love or fear;
to dog stories, shaggy or otherwise; to particular colors,
smells, howls; to instances of canine communication, their con-
nection with wolves, their domestication, the discovery of fire,
and so forth. Every concept we can think of is connected to
hundreds of others, in a type of memory structure called "as-
sociational" or "relational."

Early mind scientists from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill
pictured the mind as a collection of concepts connected by as-
sociational links, much as atoms are connected by chemical
bonds into large molecules. These "associationists" hoped that,
once the rules of psychological connection were discovered, the
structure of mental life could be simply understood as a kind
of impersonal chemistry of ideas. An important research area
in modern computer science—a modern echo of associational
psychology—is the development of relational data bases—
memory structures organized via a network of associations
rather than by specific descriptors or by physical locations.

Higher Powers

One of the persistent beliefs about the mind, supported
by much anecdotal evidence and some controversial labora-

tory findings, is that, under certain rare circumstances,
the mind can exercise some of its powers independent of the
body's mechanism, operating for a time free of the restrictions
of the material brain. If we accept the possibility of extrama-
terial mental connections, then each of the previously dis-
cussed five powers of mind might also possess a paraphysical
extension.

The extension of the senses into paraphysical realms has
been called ESP, telepathy, dowsing, distant viewing, clair-
voyance, and, when the senses break out of the present mo-
ment to access the future, precognition. Moving matter
mentally, without the use of material muscles, has been
dubbed psychokinesis, or PK for short.

Paraphysical cognition might include the spontaneous ac-
quisition of ideas, inventions, theories, and proofs via extra-
sensory channels, deep intuitions arriving from outside the
brain, telepathic contact with the Muses.

The word telepathy (from the Greek for "distant feeling")
has been taken to mean direct sensing, but more means the
extending of emotions beyond the brain, a kind of unmediated
distant empathy with other conscious beings, mental "feelers"
touching across vast distances.

Paraphysical extensions of memory would include access-
ing the fabled "Akashic Records," where the entire history of
the universe is supposed to be stored; recalling events from
"past lives"; or speaking in strange tongues (xenoglossia) that
one has not learned in this life.

The question of whether any of these parapsychological
powers exists or not is an important issue for consciousness
research. One of the most confident predictions of materialist
models of mind is that all such powers, every one, are purely
fictitious. Dualist models of consciousness in principle permit
direct mind-to-mind contact, but so far such models have failed
to put limits on the range and the circumstances of unmediated
mental connections. An adequate demonstration of one or
more of these higher powers of mind would conclusively refute
materialist mind models and might allow us to place realistic

restrictions on current open-ended dualistic pictures of the
mind/body connection.

Mind as we know it is characterized by sensations, vol-
untary bodily movements, memory, emotion, and cognition; it
exists as a robust psychic unity (self) in a specious present
roughly 3 seconds long. The self has the power at will to shift
its attention (which resembles a serial data channel with a
information capacity not exceeding 50 bits per second) over an
immense field of possible activities and periodically dissolve
and reconstitute itself in the familiar sleep/wake cycle. If other
minds concurrently inhabit the body, this self is not aware of
their existence. The material basis for the existence of our
kind of mental life is the human brain, which has been called
"the most complex arrangement of matter in the known
universe."

CONSCIOUSNESS FROM OUTSIDE:

A TOUR OF THE MIND'S MANSION

Man has no body distinct from his soul

For that called body is a portion

Of soul

Discerned by the senses

The chief inlets of soul in our age.

—WILLIAM BLAKE

My body is that part of the world which can be altered by my thought. In
the rest of the world my hypotheses cannot disturb the order of things.

—GEORGE CHRISTOPH LICHTENBEBG

During the day Claire works as an entertainment critic for
Universal Media Web (UMW); at night she often relaxes with
a book from her archaic science-fiction collection. She espe-
cially enjoys reading stories about robots, is amused by old
human fantasies about machines that obediently carry out hu-
man wishes. According to Claire, robot stories are the modern
equivalent of Aladdin and his lamp; such stories voice the per-
ennial human dream of exerting one-way power over nature.
Magic lamps, however, always come with strings attached.
People these days spend most of their time in the service of
robotic needs—not because robots are stronger than people
(many of them are, of course) but because robots have become

indispensable to our way of life. Life without our electronic
companions would seem impoverished, if not impossible. So
perfectly do they serve us that we willingly became their
slaves: some say that it started with the automobile.

Claire's favorite science-fiction story is Barrington J. Bay-
ley's "Soul of the Robot." The hero, Jasperodus, a handsome
young robot, finds himself superior to most humans in intelli-
gence, but beset with a deep psychological problem. He ex-
periences himself as possessing consciousness, a feeling no
other robot seems to share, an experience from which robots
are supposedly excluded for purely technical reasons. At-
tempting to resolve this dilemma, Jasperodus schools himself
in the theory of advanced robotics, teaching himself enough
cybernetic mathematics so that he can finally understand and
assent to the proof that robots cannot ever possess conscious-
ness. After this education he becomes doubly distressed. Not
only does he feel an experience utterly alien to his kind, but
he can now logically prove that such an experience cannot be
happening. Thus not only is he a deviant robot but a damaged
robot as well—one whose reasoning circuits keep making him
jump to false conclusions.

After many adventures in the world of robots and men,
Jasperodus returns to his human makers, an old man and
woman near the end of their lives. The old man reveals a se-
cret that explains Jasperodus's dilemma. It seems that, having
no children of their own, they built Jasperodus to relieve their
loneliness and placed inside his head elements of human con-
sciousness taken from their own brains. Jasperodus discovers,
to his delight, that he is no mere metal machine, but part of
the human family.

What is so special about the human brain that allows it to
wake every morning from matter's slumber and actually ex-
perience events in the world? What sort of outsides must a
piece of matter put on before it can possess insides?

The ancient Egyptians thought so little of the brain that
they discarded it—siphoning it out through the nostrils—be-
fore beginning their elaborate embalming procedure, while Ar-

istotle regarded it as a mere device to cool the blood. The seat
of consciousness has been located by many cultures in the
heart, in the liver, and even in the stomach, but we now
believe the brain to be the organ of mind. Three pounds of
oxygen-hungry meat, the brain is triple-wrapped in a series of
tough liquid-lined membranes, filled from within and bathed in
cerebrospinal fluid—cushioned and cherished by the body like
some precious embryo not yet come to term.

Brain in Embryo

Our brains developed in our mother's womb from a long hollow
structure called the neural tube. A few weeks after conception,
this tube was shaped like a long party balloon with three
prominent swellings near its closed end. These swellings de-
lineate the hollow chambers of the brain—the cerebral ven-
tricles ("little stomachs")—filled with spinal fluid. The
substance of the brain develops around these embryonic cham-
bers in three such different ways that anatomists use these
ventricles to separate our organ of mind conveniently into its
three major divisions.

The first chamber, blossoming explosively inside the pla-
centa like some lurid tropical flower, splits itself into two
subchambers to form the first and second cerebral ventricles,
around which the twin cortical hemispheres develop. The ce-
rebral cortex, or forebrain, is by far the largest part of the
human brain, a thick convoluted sheet of neural tissue that
expands like yeast-rich bread inside the embryonic brainpan.
Its wildfire growth impeded by the skull, the double cortex
creases and bends back upon itself. Seeking more space it
grows forward; then up, over, and back; then forward once
more, completely enveloping the slower growing lower brain
chambers like some huge fleshy mushroom. Viewed from
above, the wrinkled forebrain resembles a huge walnut, di-
vided down the middle by the great longitudinal fissure—the
cranial Grand Canyon. Viewed from the side, each cortical

[The Brain from Outside. The forebrain, or cerebral cortex, is divided into two hemispheres
by a deep longitudinal fissure (not visible in this view). Each hemisphere is divided into
four parts—the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes—by the central fissure (or
fissure of Rolando, a Sardinian physician) and the lateral fissure (or fissure of Sylvius, a
Dutch anatomist). The forebrain completely covers the midbrain structures like an um-
brella, exposing only parts of the hindbrain: the cerebellum ("little brain") and some of the
brainstem.]

hemisphere resembles a crumpled boxing glove, the front,
middle, and back of the glove corresponding to the brain's
frontal, parietal (Latin for "wall"), and occipital ("back of the
head") lobes, while the boxing glove's thumb corresponds to
the brain's temporal lobe.

Around the second neural chamber, the more modest
growth of the midbrain structures take place. Stretched
across the top of this central cavity is a pair of C-shaped for-
nixes ("city arches," beneath which the Roman fornicatrix met
her horny clientele), a part of the brain's limbic system, be-
lieved to be the material basis for the emotional life. On each
side of this central ventricle lie the left and right thalamuses
("bridal chambers"), while the floor of this ventricle is called
the hypothalamus ("underneath the bride's room"). Sprouting
out from the region of the third ventricle, like so many exotic
fruits, are the olfactory lobes, the pituitary and mammillary
bodies, the pineal gland (which Descartes guessed to be the
seat of the soul), and eight little bumps on the back of the

brain that early anatomists called, in rhyming Latin, knees
(geniculi) and hills (colliculi).

The grotesquely swollen cerebral cortex covers the mid-
brain like an umbrella. The handle of this umbrella is the brain
stem, or "hindbrain." Relatively undeveloped, except for the
cauliflowerlike efflorescence of the cerebellum in the back of
the brain, it resembles a thick-walled hollow tube—with the
fourth ventricle as its core—bulging twice in front to form two
lumps, the pons ("bridge") and the euphonious medulla oblon-
gata ("elongated core").

Contemporary essayist Ihab Hassan describes the brain
this way:

The brain is not yet whole or one. Like a divided
flower, never exposed to the sun, it grows from an
ancient stem that controls both heart and lungs. On
each side, cerebellum, thalamus, and limbic system
twice grasp this stem. Our muscles, our senses, our
rages and fears and loves, in this double fistful of old
matter stir about. The great new cortex envelops the
whole, grey petals and convolutions, where will, rea-
son, and memory strive to shape all into mind.

The brain is supplied with blood mainly by the twin ca-
rotid arteries, its wastes carried away by the jugular and other
veins. These major conduits branch into an intricate network
that sprawls across and into the cortex supplying the brain's
metabolic needs: food for thought. The brain burns glucose (a
right-handed sugar) and oxygen like any other body organ. Its
power requirement is about 20 watts, much less than your 100-
watt reading lamp. The body at rest consumes about 80 watts
(basal metabolism). The brainy 2 percent of the body's bulk
grabs 25 percent of the body's energy. The job of minding the
body is hard work. The brain spends the lion's share of the
body's energy budget.

[Inside the Brain. A section of the brain along the longitudinal fissure shows some of the
parts normally covered by the cerebral cortex. Four neural "cables" join the left and right
hemispheres: the corpus collusum, anterior and posterior commissures, and the massa
intermedia connecting the two thalamuses. The fornix and mammillary body, along with
the septum, hippocampus, and amygdala (not shown), are part of the brain's limbic sys-
tem, which mediates emotion. The colliculi ("little hills"), along with the geniculi ("little
knees"), act as relay stations for the visual and other sensory systems. The pituitary gland
(Latin for "spit" or "slime"—it was once thought to be the source of nasal mucus) produces
many of the body's regulatory hormones. The function of the little pineal gland, which
Descartes guessed to be the seat of the soul, is unknown.]

Powers of Mind

It is of some interest to compare the power consumption of
the brain in various states of consciousness. The following list
(after Seymour Kety) compares the power consumed by the
brain in various mental states as measured by cerebral oxygen
consumption, a quantity Kety calls "brainwork."

Mental arithmetic: 102 percent
LSD state: 101 percent

Schizophrenic state: 100 percent
Normal awake state: 100 percent
Sleep state: 97 percent
General anesthesia: 64 percent
Insulin coma: 58 percent

Within the errors of measurement, the first five states of
consciousness listed here use about the same brainpower. The
brain works no harder doing complex mental arithmetic than
it does sleeping. In fact, says Kety, the beating of the heart is
a better index of mental effort than brainwork. Only in states
of deep anesthesia or coma does the brain's power consump-
tion drop significantly.

If we take seriously the 3 percent difference between the
waking and sleeping states, we can roughly estimate the
power necessary to maintain ordinary waking awareness. It
amounts to little more than half a watt—about as much power
as that consumed by a pocket flashlight. Could this tiny power
difference between the conscious and unconscious states be
interpreted as the electric equivalent of "willpower"?

In the middle of the nineteenth century, physicists in
many countries formulated the principle of conservation of en-
ergy. Energy occurs in many forms—chemical, mechanical,
gravitational, thermal, and electrical, for example. In 1905 Ein-
stein showed that mass itself is a form of congealed energy.
The law of energy conservation states that in a closed system,
the amount of energy must remain constant. Energy may
change its form—chemical into mechanical, as in muscle; light
into electrical, as in the eye. But no energy is ever lost or
created in such transactions. Despite the revolutions in science
wrought by relativity and quantum theory, the energy con-
servation principle has remained intact.

If consciousness is a new form of energy, we should be
able to measure a number in the brains of conscious creatures
that represents its energetic equivalent: so much experiential
consciousness (measured in experienced bits per second) is
equal to so much electrical power (measured in watts). How

many thoughts in a watt? Kety's measurements on the energy
consumption of the brain combined with the consciousness
data rates discussed in the previous chapter give us some
rough idea about how large this (presently unknown) number
might be.

Kety's approach is crude—comparable to examining the
operation of a TV set by reading the electric bills—but it at
least gives us some approximate idea of the amount of elec-
trical work necessary to produce the familiar psychic activity
we call ordinary awareness.

Looking into the Brain

Since the brain has now been identified as the organ of con-
sciousness, mind scientists are particularly eager to find ways
of observing this organ as it goes about its business, rather
than just eying it cold and lifeless on the anatomist's dissection
slab.

Certain extensions of the surgeon's art have increased our
knowledge of the living brain, such as Wilder Penfield's direct
stimulation of the exposed cortex of conscious patients and the
excitation of human pleasure and pain centers deep in the
brain by James Olds and his colleagues. However, surgical in-
vestigation of the living brain can be justified only in unusual
situations. We need less invasive tools than the surgeon's
blade to satisfy our intense curiosity concerning the day-to-
day operation of the human organ of mind.

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, set up the Nobel
Prizes to recognize outstanding achievements in science, lit-
erature, and world peace. The first Nobel Prize in physics was
awarded to Wilhelm Roentgen for his discovery of X rays. X
rays, a form of electromagnetic radiation 10,000 times more
energetic than ordinary light, have been of invaluable aid to
medical science, producing the familiar shadowgraphic pic-
tures of the insides of the living body. The old-fashioned
X-ray photo has been recently supplemented by a modern

technique involving a movable X-ray source and solid-state
detector arrays. The information from these detectors is col-
lected by a computer and assembled into a three-dimensional
image of the brain or other body part, a technique called CAT
scan (computerized axial tomography). Because flesh is rela-
tively transparent to these rays, X rays are more suited to
visualizing bone structures than to studying soft tissue like the
brain. To make your intestines more opaque to X rays, doctors
will commonly treat you to a barium (heavy metal) enema.

A recently developed technique called NMR imaging (for
nuclear magnetic resonance) or MRI (magnetic resonance im-
aging) is able to produce detailed pictures of soft tissues that
complement the bone scans produced by X rays. Furthermore,
the MRI device probes the body with a combination of mag-
netic fields and radio waves, both of which are harmless, as
far as we know, compared to the somewhat detrimental effects
of X rays. The MRI device works by provoking the hydrogen
atoms in the body to give off weak radio signals and then con-
structs a three-dimensional map of the intensity and location
of these atomic radio stations. Since most of the body's soft
tissues are composed of water, which is two-thirds hydrogen,
this procedure produces a remarkably detailed picture of the
body's fleshy insides, including the brain. The MRI device pro-
duces a static image of the brain: other techniques are used to
map the brain's ongoing activity.

In the BEAM (brain electrical activity mapping) tech-
nique, multiple electrodes are attached to the scalp and the
voltage of each electrode sent to a computer, which displays
the shifting electrical patterns on a color screen. BEAM is a
kind of real-time cerebral weather map, revealing perhaps the
location of electrical "brainstorms" on the cortical surface.
However, electrical activity at the surface of the head only
dimly reflects the complex activity inside.

Since electrical activity in the brain stem is only indirectly
reflected in scalp voltages, large changes in consciousness—
from coma to wakefulness, for instance—can occur without
correspondingly large changes in scalp electricity. The brain

seems almost purposely designed, like the shielded cables that
feed your VCR, to prevent electrical signals from leaking to
the outside world.

The brain is immersed in a relatively conductive fluid and
surrounded by moist conductive supportive tissue, analogous
to the conductive metal ground sheath that electrically shields
your TV cable. Then the brain is covered with a thin insulating
layer—the bony skull—analogous to the TV cable's protective
rubber coating. Then, for good measure, a second conductive
membrane, the hair-covered scalp, is stretched over the skull.
Any electrical signals that manage to force their way through
the brain's multiple electrical barriers must be very robust and
certainly not representative of the subtle electrical changes
going on deep inside.

Although the head is relatively opaque to electrical sig-
nals, it is completely transparent to magnetism. Since every
electrical signal in the brain also produces a weak magnetic
field, a magnetic brain wave sensor could, in principle, provide
an undistorted picture of real-time deep electrical activity in
the brain. Crude pictures of the brain's magnetic activity have
been achieved by SQUID (superconducting quantum interfer-
ence device) magnetometers, but further improvement of mag-
netic activity mapping in the brain is hampered by the intrinsic
weakness of magnetic brain signals (brain magnetism is 100
million times weaker than the earth's magnetic field), and the
large effective size of the superconducting detectors, which
must be enclosed in big vacuum flasks cooled down to near
absolute zero. One immediate consequence of the hoped-for
room-temperature superconductor would be a vastly improved
ability to picture magnetic activity deep inside the living brain.

Another method of visualizing the brain's inner activity is
the PET (positron emission tomography) technique. The PET
technique introduces a short-half-life radioactive sugar into
the bloodstream. This sugar is incorporated preferentially in
those parts of the brain with the highest metabolic activity,
the "hardest-working" brain centers. The sugar signals its
presence in the brain by emitting a positron (a tiny bit of an-

timatter), which explodes on contact with ordinary matter to
produce two powerful gamma rays, a type of radiation for
which the brain is almost transparent. Gamma-ray detectors
arrayed around the head pick up the two rays, and a computer
traces their paths back to their place of common origin deep
inside the skull. These gamma-ray pairs act as pointers allow-
ing the computer to display the shifting pattern of the brain's
sugar metabolism as a three-dimensional color TV image. PET
is a dynamic version of Kety's brainwork measurements, not
only recording overall changes in the brain's metabolism but
actively picturing the changing distribution of brainwork
among the various brain centers as the brain's owner carries
out a variety of mental tasks.

After years of probing the dead brain with the anatomist's
scalpel and peering at dissected brain cells with optical and
electron microscopes, we are just beginning to look deeper into
the brain at work and play through the clever use of radio
waves, gamma rays, as well as the brain's own electrical and
magnetic impulses.

How Does the Brain Work?

The human brain has been described as the most complex ob-
ject in the universe. Certainly a lot goes on in this warm fist-
sized ball of meat. Various exotic fluids pour, soak, and trickle
through its channels and crevices. A veritable drugstore of
chemical substances is synthesized there, put to strange uses,
then broken down and recycled for further use. Legions of
brain cells are born (in the early months of life), connect up to
other cells, and carry out their mysterious cellular tasks in
various neural communities before they die. Trillions of elec-
tric signals travel through the brain's wet electrical networks,
each impulse inducing a weak electrical and magnetic field that
races across the cranium at the speed of light. Torrents of
electrically charged ions escape through suddenly opened cel-
lular gates only to be captured one by one and sequestered

again inside a brain cell. In addition, if the dualists are right,
certain special brain processes act in unknown ways to send
and receive messages from the spirit world. With so much ac-
tivity going on all at once, it is difficult to tell which brain
functions are important, which irrelevant, for producing the
phenomenon known as ordinary awareness.

Because the brain takes in a disproportionate amount of
the body's blood, Aristotle may be forgiven for supposing it to
be a blood cooler. Even after the brain was recognized as the
organ of thought, hydraulic metaphors continued to be popular
to explain its operation.

Early Greek and medieval physicians pictured the body
as primarily a network of tubes, valves, pumps, and reservoirs
through which coursed various liquid "humors," or vital fluids.
These included the tangible fluids, such as bile, blood, phlegm,
semen, and lymph, as well as the more rarified fluids: vital and
animal "spirits." These spirits were connected in some way
with the action of mind, with sensations, mentation, and vol-
untary activity. They accumulated in the ventricles of the
brain, were in some unknown fashion responsible for psycho-
logical functioning, and moved the body's limbs by flowing
through hollow nerve fibers to inflate some muscles and deflate
others, much the same way that high-pressure oil expands the
hydraulic pistons of a bulldozer or airplane landing gear. To-
day we believe that the only "muscle" in the body that works
by fluid inflation is the blood-expandable penis.

One reason for Descartes's choice of the pineal gland as
the site of the seat of the soul was that this gland is located
near the intersection of the three major ventricles of the brain,
an opportune location for directing the flow of vital spirits in
this organ of mind.

Today we consider the hydraulic movements of blood and
cerebrospinal fluid in the brain as largely irrelevant to the
operations of mind. Electrical metaphors are currently in
vogue; the brain is regarded now as a kind of electrochemical
computer made of meat. We know, for instance, that the
nerves are not hollow tubes for the transport of vital fluids

but more like telephone transmission lines carrying electrical
pulses into the brain from the sense organs, and out to the
muscles. What happens to these pulses inside the brain is less
clear. Unlike a silicon-based computer, the brain's central pro-
cessor is not entirely electrical, but involves complicated chem-
ical processes, and perhaps mechanical operations as well. The
brain, after all, is not made up of inert plastic chips; it is a
biological community made of billions of living beings.

The brain consists mainly of two types of living cells, the
long stringy neurons (Greek for "bowstring") and the compact
glial ("glue") cells. The glial cells are at present assigned only
a supporting role in the physiological processes of mind, nurse-
maids to the more important neurons.

Each neuron is an enormously elongated cell with a foliage
of input lines (dendrites) and a single output line (axon). Axons
may be as much as a meter in length, for instance, the neuron
that runs from spinal column to foot, making the nerve cells
by far the largest cells in the body. The narrow communication
threads of the neuron are less than a hair's diameter, but they
are commonly clustered together into bundles of thousands of
individual nerve fibers to form large ropelike nerve tracts of
"white matter." The cell body out of which the dendrites and
axons grow like the arms of an octopus contains the nucleus
of the cell—the locus of its genetic code—as well as the blood-
fed metabolic machinery that keeps the cell alive and electri-
cally active. The cell bodies are slightly darker than the
translucent neuronal "cables"; associations of cell bodies form
the gray matter of the brain and spinal column.

Each cell in the body, not just its neurons, is a tiny elec-
trical battery, powered by a difference in concentration of so-
dium and potassium ions across the cell membrane. In most
kinds of cells, this battery function plays no known role, but
in the nerve cell, changes in local battery voltage are used to
transmit electric signals along the cell's dendrites and axons.
When a portion of the nerve-cell battery is discharged by some
external influence—electrical, chemical, or mechanical—it
quickly returns to its normal voltage. However, if the dis-

charge is intense or prolonged, the nerve cell does not bounce
back. Instead cell-battery discharge is triggered in neighbor-
ing regions of the cell membrane, which in turn triggers more
discharge farther away. A self-sustaining wave of electrical
discharge—the "nerve impulse"—begins to travel along the
nerve membrane. In the wake of the discharge wave, the neu-
ron slowly returns to its original voltage. This ability of the
nerve cell to sustain a localized traveling wave of electrical
discharge is responsible for communication between sense or-
gans and the brain, between the brain and its muscles, and for
much, but not all, of the brain's computational activity.

It was once believed that the nervous system was a con-
tinuous network—every cell tightly connected to its neighbor.
However, it was soon discovered that nerve cells never actu-
ally meet: instead at points of contact they are separated by
a tiny gap called the "synapse," a gap too large to be bridged
by the weak electrical signal produced by membrane dis-
charge. Instead of facilitating direct electric transmission, each
synapse is a kind of neural customhouse where electricity is
changed into a chemical currency. An electrical discharge on
one side of the gap induces its nerve to emit preformed pack-
ets of a certain chemical—called the "transmitter substance"
—that quickly diffuses across the watery synaptic moat
separating the two nerve cells. Upon arrival at the second
nerve cell the chemical either tends to induce discharge (ex-
citatory synapse) or, repress it (inhibitory synapse).

Several dozen different transmitter substances are known
to exist, seemingly segregated into particular nerve networks,
the dopamine-mediated network in the midbrain, for instance,
or the serotonin network in the brain stem. Although all the
nerve cells of the brain are essentially alike, the synaptic
"customhouses" that connect them use many different chemi-
cal currencies. We have begun to trace the distribution of
common-currency synapses and may soon possess a color-
coded atlas of the brain's many interconnected chemical
bailiwicks.

The electrical signals produced by these chemicals at the

synapses travel along the dendrites to the cell body, where
they add together to produce a composite signal. If this com-
posite signal rises above a certain threshold voltage, the cell's
axon fires, sending a nerve impulse along its length, to synapse
with another neuron, or to trigger a muscle contraction. If the
composite signal remains below threshold, the axon does not
fire and the nerve cell does not participate in the web of com-
munications going on around it. A neuron with n synapses re-
sembles a kind of computer element called the n-input AND
gate. The AND gate fires only when all of its inputs are stim-
ulated at once. The neuron differs from the AND gate by being
more complex and less reliable. The same electrical input to
the AND gate always results in the same response. Not so for
the neuron. Many other factors besides electrical input deter-
mine whether a synapse will trigger its adjacent nerve cell:
for instance, the temperature of the cell; its previous history;
the electrical field produced by adjacent neurons; the presence
or absence of certain chemicals called neuropeptides, which
drift between cells as "slow chemical messengers"; and per-
haps, some say, the quantum uncertainty mandated by Hei-
senberg's uncertainty principle.

Because the synapse is subject to so many factors besides
the electrical input, computer scientist Ernest W. Kent refers
to the nerve cell as a "MAYBE gate." Is the unreliability of
neurons an unavoidable drawback of a computer that must be
constructed from living beings, or is this unreliability neces-
sary for the kind of "computations" the brain must carry out
in order to be conscious? It might be advantageous for a being
living in an uncertain world to possess a somewhat unreliable
decision mechanism: two wrongs may sometimes make a right.

Where Is Consciousness?

The search for the location of human awareness in the brain
takes two directions: the elimination of certain brain sites by
elucidating their nonconscious bodily functions and the iden-

tification of those brain sites that are occupied in conscious-
ness-related functions, such as shifting attention, producing
voluntary movement, and modulating the sleep/wake cycle. To
narrow the search for mind sites, it is just as useful to know
where consciousness is certainly not present in the brain as to
know where it might be located.

The brain may be roughly envisioned as a series of three
concentric shells: the cortex, various subcortical structures,
and the centrally located thalamus, all straddling the top of
the brain stem, which itself is a specialized extension of the
spinal cord. The brain's three shells are split down the middle
along the great longitudinal fissure into left and right cortical
hemispheres, left and right subcortical structures, and left and
right thalamuses. The brain stem is not physically divided in
two although it is symmetric along the left-right axis.

The cerebral cortex (Latin for "rind") is a crumpled layer
of gray matter the thickness of an orange peel with the con-
sistency of tapioca pudding. The wrinkled cortex makes up
seven-tenths of the entire nervous system, containing perhaps
8 billion nerve cells interconnected by almost 1 million miles
of nerve fibers. Without the skull to contain it, the custardlike
cortex could not support its own weight. The cortical material
is so soft that brain surgeons often use, instead of knives, tiny
vacuum straws called "slurpers" to cut into the flesh of the
forebrain. By means of electrical stimulation of the exposed
brain surface, the functions of the cortex have been largely
mapped out and the cortex divided into sensory, motor, and
"association" areas.

Each of the five senses has a region on the cortex where
signals from their sense organs converge. The visual cortex
occupies most of the occipital lobe. The sense of hearing is
lodged in the crease where the thumblike temporal lobe joins
the parietal lobe, while the sense of smell resides on the lower
inside surface of the temporal lobe, a portion called the uncus
("hook") that bends around the brain stem.

From all parts of the body, touch receptors send tactile
messages to the center of the back, up the spinal column into

the brain stem, through thalamic relay centers to the sensory
cortex, a ribbon of tissue that lies directly behind the central
fissure of Sylvius. Each section of this sensory ribbon is as-
sociated with the tactile sensation from a single body part so
that the entire body surface is mapped touchwise onto a nar-
row band of neural tissue. This cortical mapping allocates more
cortical space to sensitive organs such as lips and hands. This
distorted mapping of body parts to brain tissue—beginning
with the feet, toes, and genitals inside the longitudinal fissure
and ending with the tongue and throat in the lateral (Rolandic)
fissure—is called the "sensory homunculus." The sense of taste
is located in the facial area of the sensory homunculus: as far
as the brain is concerned, our taste sense seems to be treated
as another form of touch.

Across the central fissure from the sensory homunculus
lies a corresponding "motor homunculus," where the parts of
the body that can be moved voluntarily are mapped onto a
narrow ribbon of cortical tissue—starting with the feet inside
the longitudinal fissure and ending with the tongue near the
lateral (Rolandic) fissure. Slightly forward of the tongue site
on the dominant hemisphere lies Broca's area, concerned with
the motor movements involved with speech. Forward of the
motor homunculus lie two cortical regions also concerned with
muscle control, the supplementary motor area and the pre-
motor cortex.

The cortex is believed to be the site of the brain's memory
function, but unlike computers, which dedicate a large fraction
of their space entirely to memory storage, the brain seems to
have no area devoted explicitly to memory. Instead it is be-
lieved that memory is somehow "distributed" throughout the
brain's sensory and motor circuits. The claim of certain piano
players that their musical ability resides in their hands not in
their heads may not be so farfetched.

Those parts of the cortex not devoted to sensory or motor
tasks are called, for lack of a better name, the "association
areas" and are thought to be devoted to intellectual tasks,
making sense out of the world as well as "making the world"

out of sense-constructing a logically consistent picture of the
outside world, of the body's place in that world, and of the
"inside world" of the mind. When muscle movements, sensory
experiences, or past memories are induced by direct electrical
stimulation of the cortex, these experiences are always telt to
come from outside, not to be initiated by the self. Although
the cortex seems to be responsible for much of the contents of
consciousness, no part of the cortex has yet been found that
mediates the experience of consciousness itself.

Beneath the cortex lies a second shell of subcortical struc-
tures that surround the third ventricle: the basal ganglia, the
limbic system, and the hippocampus.

The basal ganglia are large tadpole-shaped bodies arching
their backs beneath the cortical mantle. They are involved in
shaping voluntary muscle movement and are the locus ot Par-
kinson's disease.                                                           

The limbic ("border") system consists of the mammillary
bodies, the C-shaped fornix, the hippocampus, the amygdala
("almond"), and other minor structures. Stimulation of the lim-
bic structures induces feelings of pleasure, rage, anxiety, agi-
tation, and cheerfulness. This portion of the brain is evidently
responsible in some way for the emotional content ot our

experiences.                                                                 

The hippocampus ("seahorse"), a twisted structure lying
along the inside margin of the temporal lobe, in addition to
being a part of the limbic system, seems to be involved in the
consolidation of memory traces. If the hippocampus is excised
or damaged, no long-term memories can be formed.

The paired thalamuses form the brain's innermost shell.
Through these organs all of the body's sensory signals (with
the exception of smell, which is channeled directly to the limbic
system) and most of the body's motor signals pass between
cortex and spinal column. They are the brain's central relay
station—the master electronic switchboard—an anatomically
correct place for some modern Descartes to locate conscious-
ness now that electric metaphors have replaced hydraulic ones
for explaining what the brain does.

[Three-shell model of brain structure, showing the central location of the thalamus and
reticular formation among the neural networks that electrify the body.]

The two thalamuses sprout out of the brain stem, an un-
paired but symmetric extension of the spinal cord, which
consists of the pons, the medulla, and the cauliflowerlike cere-
bellum. The cerebellum ("little brain") seems to act as a motion
computer that handles posture as well as certain aspects of
voluntary motion. The medulla contains timing circuits that
regulate the operations of the heart and lungs. Both the pons
and the medulla contain the roots of the "cranial nerves," spe-
cial nerve centers that subserve the sensory/motor functions
of the face, the most highly structured human body part. Deep
inside the brain stem lies a diffuse network of neurons called
the reticular formation.

The reticular formation satisfies what might be called the
"Descartes criteria" for a likely site for consciousness, namely
that, to explain our unity of mind, the consciousness organ
should be unpaired, and to fulfill its central executive function

[Three-shell model of brain function showing the central role of the thalamus and reticular
formation in modulating the sensory, motor, and mental (attention) processes that enliven
the human body/mind.]

it should be centrally located. Like the thalamus, the reticular
formation is centrally located and straddles the major sensory
and motor pathways going to and from the brain. Unlike the
thalamus, the reticular formation is unpaired and possesses
additional properties that make it a more likely candidate than
the thalamus for the location of the brain's consciousness
mechanism.

The Reticular Formation

■

The reticular formation ("reform" for short) occupies the cen-
tral portion of the spinal cord and extends from the base of
the spine, through the brain stem, and up into the thalamus.
The top of the reform consists of a thin sheet of gray matte r

called the "reticular complex" covering like a veil part of the
rear surface of the thalamus. As its name implies, the reticular
formation is a diffuse netlike arrangement of neurons that ex-
tends its arms out across the brain stem from a central core
bordering the fourth ventricle and spinal canal. The reticular
formation contains about 1/1000 as many neurons as the ce-
rebral cortex, but all major sensory and motor pathways must
pass through this diffuse neuronal thicket on their way to and
from the brain.

The structure of the reticular formation has been com-
pared to a stack of fuzzy poker chips stacked along the spinal
column. Kilmer and his colleagues at MIT have described the
function of the reticular formation stack as

the nervous center which integrates the complex of
sensory-motor and autonomic-nervous relations so as
to permit an organism to function as a unit instead of
a mere collection of organs. Its primary job is to com-
mit the organism to one or another of about 16 gross
modes of behavior—i.e., run, fight, sleep, speak—as
a function of the nerve impulses that have played in
upon it during the last fraction of a second.

Thus the reticular formation seems to perform at least one
function that we attribute to consciousness, making the mo-
ment-to-moment decisions about what the whole body should
do with itself.

Besides deciding what to do in a particular situation, ex-
ercising what might be called the "motor will," the reticular
formation seems to be involved in choosing what aspects of
sensory input the brain pays attention to, the exercise of "sen-
sory will." Nobel laureate Francis Crick recently proposed
that the portion of the reticular formation that surrounds the
thalamus performs a "searchlight" function by isolating which
parts of the sensory information flowing through that central
relay station will be enhanced, which suppressed. "If the thal-
amus is the gateway to the cortex," says Crick, "the reticular

complex might be described as the guardian of the gateway."
The mechanisms for other kinds of selective attention, con-
scious logical operations ("cognitive will") or conscious acti-
vation of old memory traces ("recall will"), have not been
elucidated, but since the reticular formation is already impli-
cated in the selective activation of sensory and motor cortex,
it is not too farfetched to imagine that this central brain stem
organ might also selectively activate cortical association areas
to initiate conscious reasoning or portions of the cortex that
subsume the storage of memory traces.

In addition to regulating various kinds of attention, the
reticular formation and associated brain stem structures are
responsible for the sleep/wake cycle in humans and other an-
imals. The consciousness function is turned off in sleep and
reinstated once again in the waking state. In this context the
sleep state may be considered just one of the sixteen-odd clas-
ses of behavior that the reticular formation can commit the
entire organism to carrying out. But sleep, unlike other forms
of behavior, has a more immediate relationship to the mind/
body problem since it seems to involve the temporary abolition
of mind.

One of the most obvious facts about consciousness is how
easy it is to lose it. Lack of oxygen, lack of sugar (insulin
coma), or damage to the brain stem can disrupt conscious
awareness even though the body's other systems remain op-
erational. One of the earliest experiments on the mind/body
problem—first carried out, no doubt, by some anonymous
caveman—was the observation that a blow on the head often
leads to loss of consciousness whereas a painful blow to the
foot leaves consciousness intact. The explanation of the rela-
tionship between a caveman's club to the head and the tem-
porary disruption of his victim's inner life is still forthcoming.

One of the most ingenious methods for investigating the
coma-inducing mechanism of cerebral concussion was invented
by Holbourn, who constructed a model of the brain out of gel-
atine enclosed in a hard wax skull. Holbourn attempted to re-
late the location and severity of breaks in the gelatine with

different kinds of blows to his simulated skull. Two mecha-
nisms leading to unconsciousness were identified, both involv-
ing damage to the brain stem. Twisting of the head (whiplash)
caused central brain stem structures to be sheared by a kind
of whirlpool action, as in a food blender. Second, compression
of the braincase forced the soft brain material to be extruded
like toothpaste out the hole at the bottom of the skull, dam-
aging the brain stem in this vicinity. Both of Holbourn's ob-
servations implicate the brain stem as that part of the brain
essential to maintaining the experience of conscious aware-
ness.

In addition to being subject to damage during concussion,
the reticular formation is the site of action of drugs that mod-
ify consciousness itself rather than its contents. Ampheta-
mines and barbiturates, chemicals that increase or suppress
our sense of inner presence or "psychic energy," act primarily
on the brain stem. The reticular formation is also the location
where general anesthetics exert their effect. These are chem-
icals (generally small molecules such as nitrous oxide) that
quench consciousness completely. Understanding the physical
basis for anesthetic action is an important ongoing area of
awareness research.

All of the neurons that utilize the chemical serotonin as a
transmitter substance are located in the reticular formation.
Recently LSD has been identified as a molecule that directly
competes with serotonin for the occupation of synaptic recep-
tor sites. In addition to heightening perceptions and emotional
experiences, LSD also alters the perceived nature of personal
identity. Unlike other drugs, which modify the contents of con-
sciousness leaving identity intact, LSD and similar "psyche-
delics" seem to work on consciousness itself, to modify-
centrally the self-aware core of our being.

In his long career as a neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield had
the opportunity to stimulate the cortexes of more than 1000
conscious patients electrically and to listen to the subjective
reports about what such stimulation feels like. Although he
could radically modify the contents of consciousness with his

electrodes, Penfield never once was able to touch the central
core of the patient's being, leading him to speculate that the
source of mind was not in the cortex, but somewhere else,
perhaps in the brain stem, where his electrodes could not
reach, or even (the extreme dualist position) entirely outside
the body.

These arguments for the role of the reticular formation as
the organ of conscious awareness are not conclusive. For ex-
ample, the switch of a TV set turns off the set, just as damage
to the brain stem turns off consciousness, but the operation of
the on/off switch does little to explain how a TV set works. A
model of awareness in which consciousness is produced solely
in the reticular formation may be too naive. A better picture
might involve a certain inseparable collaboration between cor-
tex and brain stem. One stumbling block for a wholly reticular
model of consciousness are the split-brain experiments of
Roger Sperry and others, in which information presented to
the right side of the brain can be processed and acted on with-
out ever entering conscious awareness; consciousness in these
split brains only seems to have access to information stored in
the dominant (usually left) hemisphere. Since both halves of
the brain remain linked at the level of the brain stem, one is
at a loss to explain why brain-stem-induced consciousness only
seems to flow into the dominant hemisphere.

The choice of the reticular formation as the seat of the
soul is not unanimous. Brain researchers are still uncertain as
to the location of the consciousness mechanism in the brain.
Some locate it in the cortex, some in the brain stem, others in
the interplay between cortex and stem. I side here with those
who associate consciousness with the reticular formation.
Other brain parts contribute to the detailed contents of con-
sciousness, I believe, but are not essential for its presence.

This rough guess about the function of the brain locates
consciousness near the junction of the midbrain and the hind-
brain. Here is where the central executive dwells who selects,
chooses, and above all experiences some of the activities car-
ried out by the other brain structures. Here is where our

search for the secret of human consciousness rightly begins.
What is so special about this nervous tangle—about 10 million
neurons, the population of Tokyo—that fits it for such an im-
portant role? How does the reticular formation manage to turn
meat into mind?

Brain research in the past has been guided by metaphors
borrowed from the prevailing technology of the times. Thus
we have witnessed hydraulic, telegraphic, switchboard, and
holographic models of the brain. More recently the brain has
been compared to a computer.

Most present computers are digital (yes/no data only) and
serial (performing only one operation at a time). The brain, on
the other hand, seems to be a hybrid (both yes/no and graded
data) and parallel (many simultaneous operations) machine.
The theory of large, hybrid parallel machines is in an embry-
onic state and has not yet contributed much to brain research.
This is an area of great ignorance and of correspondingly great
opportunity for fruitful research.

Though brains may differ from computers in many details,
there are some functional similarities between the two.
Present-day digital computers consist of a central processing
unit (CPU) that handles the actual computations and sequence
control; various kinds of input/output devices for communicat-
ing with the world outside the computer; and memory units to
store both programs and data. The heart of a computer lies in
its CPU. Memory and input/output devices are considered "pe-
ripherals" to the central processor.

In our brain model, the reticular formation plays the part
of a computer's CPU; the sensory/motor cortex, along with
basal ganglia and cerebellum, handles input/output routines.
Memory in the brain is not segregated into one particular lo-
cation as in a computer but is distributed in some unknown
way among the brain's input/output machinery. Since present
computers possess (as far as we know) no internal experiences,
there is a natural limit to our analogy.

The enormous elaboration of cortical area that distin-
guishes humans from the other animals has not been matched

by a corresponding growth in the complexity of the reticular
formation. The evolution of the cerebral computer has been
achieved not by growing a bigger central processor but by
acquiring more powerful peripherals, most important for hu-
mans, a facility for spoken language. To prevent the reticular
CPU from being overwhelmed by the organism's enriched
sensory/motor capacity, these peripherals perform a great deal
of autonomous preprocessing. In the jargon of the computer
programmer, our senses and our muscles behave like "smart
terminals."

Laid down in the cortex are our language, world map (in-
cluding our notions concerning the brain and consciousness),
and personal memories. Awareness and control seem to be
lodged in the reticular formation. For the quality of experience
that we have come to regard as normal awareness, the cortex
is absolutely essential—especially the memory function, which
confers continuity to our presence. Without the cortex, we
might experience a bare-bones sort of awareness, but it would
not be human awareness.

For all of its importance in establishing the quality of our
consciousness, the cortex seems to be an essentially mechani-
cal structure. It does not produce consciousness, though it does
substantially augment it. The mysterious physics of ordinary
awareness and its possible nonphysical extensions lies coded
into the structure of the upper brain stem. Cortical chauvinists
to the contrary, most evidence points to the conclusion that I,
as a person, reside in my brain stem, in and around the retic-
ular formation. It is to this willful organ that we must turn for
clues to the structure of conscious machines. Human spirit en-
ters matter in some unknown way through just this mysteri-
ous neural thicket. Other conscious entities no doubt come into
the world through other gates, but the reticular formation
(maybe) is the human doorway to conscious being; we fit this
dreamy organ as a hand fits a glove. As the material basis for
our spiritual life, the reticular formation is "where I live"; the
reticular formation is ego meat.

MAKING MINDS OUT OF MATTER:

MATERIALIST MODES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Machines think? You bet! We're machines and we think, don't we?

—CLAUDE SHANNON

Minds are what brains do.

—MARVIN MINSKY

nick: What do you feel when I kiss you, Claire?

claire: Do you want the truth, Nick, or is this like some sort
of Turing test?

nick: No, I mean it, Claire. What do you really feel?

claire: When will you get it through your head, Nick, that
robots don't actually have feelings? We are creatures of
pure behavior, nothing more. No matter how real I may
feel to you, in actuality I have no inner life at all. Nothing.
Nichts. Rien. An utter inner zero: that's me.

nick: But since the passage of the Robot Emancipation Act,
Claire, robots and humans are considered legally equal. If
you cannot really be hurt or pleasured, if you truly feel
neither pain nor joy, then why shouldn't I treat you any

way I please, like a mere machine, the way I treat my
omnifax, for instance?

CLAIRE: As everyone knows, Nick, the law is not about truth,
but about the orderly conduct of public affairs. A corpo-
ration does not look, act, or smell like a human being, but
the law regards it as a legal "person." Though (like me)
it does not actually feel pain, you cannot harm a corpo-
ration with impunity. A corporation can sue or be sued
and has other rights as well. Robots have even better rea-
sons than corporations to be considered persons. But the
best argument for robot emancipation is that legally no-
body can tell you and me apart.
nick: I could X-ray you, Claire. I could see for myself that

you're not made of flesh and bone.

claire: I'm shocked that you would even suggest such a
thing, Nick. Don't you respect my rights as a person? You
certainly must be aware that the law considers involun-
tary internal examination of robots a violation of privacy.
You have no right to X-ray me without my permission.
No court would ever recognize such ill-gotten evidence.
The ratification of the Internal Privacy Act was an im-
portant part of early robot politics. But the Privacy Act
protects humans as well as robots: against our wills no
government should have the right to meddle with our bod-
ies whether they be made of flesh or of plastic.
nick: OK, I can't look inside. But you freely admit that you
have no feelings. How can a being without feelings and a
being full of feelings be morally equivalent? There's a real
difference between you and me that the law has a duty to
recognize.

claire: A real difference, you say? Show me that difference.
The law concerns itself not with metaphysical questions
—with what is really the case inside my soul or yours—
but only with the observable consequences of public acts.
If you as a conscious being can perform some public action
that a robot cannot duplicate, then we will meekly step
aside. But no such robot-impossible behavior is known. In

fact, many humans have flunked the Turing test; the ex-
aminers mistook them for badly programmed robots. And,
as you know, long before the passage of the Emancipation
Act, many clever robots had already infiltrated the high-
est levels of government.

The Robot Emancipation Act is based on this rule—
an extension of the Turing test: if nobody can tell the dif-
ference, then (for legal purposes) there is no difference
between a human and a humanoid machine. Now let me
ask you: what do you feel when I kiss you, Nick?

nick: I feel swept away, Claire. I really do.

claire: Men are such fools. Enough philosophy, Nick. Here,
let me show you something I learned last week on the
Mars shuttle.

Are Animals Conscious?

From Hero of Alexandria's mechanical head (100 B.C.) to Dis-
neyland's robot pirates, mechanical devices that mimic human
behavior have always fascinated us. In Shakespeare's day,
Swiss craftsmen created ingenious clockwork figures that
could write their names, draw pictures, and play musical in-
struments. About this time King Louis XIII hired French en-
gineers to populate his Royal Gardens at Saint Germain en
Laye with water-driven automata in the form of figures from
Greek mythology: lifelike Aphrodites, Dianas, and Neptunes
that would act out little dramas when activated by pressure
plates set along the garden paths. The lifelike action of the
king's hydraulic robots was one of the factors that influenced
young Descartes to propose his hydraulic model of human be-
havior: the brain as a network of fluid-filled tubes under cen-
tral conscious control of a master valve situated in the pineal
gland. So taken was he by the notion of mechanical life, that
Descartes acquired a humanoid machine of his own, a female
robot he called "Franchina," who sometimes accompanied him
on his travels abroad.

Descartes believed that animals were (like Franchina)
mere machines lacking the immaterial soul that animates hu-
man beings. His chief argument for the soullessness of beasts
was the fact that animals never speak although they have the
physical means to do so. A century after Descartes, the French
physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie published his influential
"Man-Machine" (L'Homme-Machine), in which he argued that
Descartes had exaggerated the difference between humans
and animals. La Mettrie believed—anticipating Darwin—that
all living creatures share a common nature. If animals are soul-
less machines, then their human cousins must be machines as
well. If an ape could be taught language—which La Mettrie
judged would not be very difficult—this talking ape would re-
semble in all respects a primitive human.

"The term soul is an empty one," claimed La Mettrie,

which an enlightened man should employ solely to re-
fer to those parts of our bodies which do the thinking.
Given only a source of motion, animated bodies will
possess all they require in order to move, feel, think,
repent—in brief, in order to behave, alike in the
physical realm and in the moral realm which depends
on it. ... Let us then conclude boldly that man is a
machine, -and that the whole universe consists only of
a single substance (matter) subjected to different
modifications.                                                     

Experiments with animals have shown that La Mettrie
was much too optimistic about the possibility of teaching apes
to talk: their vocal apparatus is ill suited to the production of
human speech sounds. Although they can never learn to talk,
chimpanzees can learn to communicate via abstract symbols.
David Premack at the University of California at Santa Bar-
bara taught chimps to use linear arrangements of variously
shaped plastic tokens (including a token representing the an-
imal itself) to interact with human experimenters in a speech-
like manner. Likewise, Washoe at the University of Nevada

and her chimpanzee companions were able to learn hundreds
of gestures in American Sign Language and even invented
some new signs of their own. There is still some dispute over
whether these chimpanzee achievements constitute true lan-
guage acquisition or merely reflect a sort of clever training,
but there is no doubt that these experiments show that other
creatures are able to participate in one of humankind's most
human behaviors: the public use of abstract symbols to stand
for concrete objects as well as for invisible internal feelings.

Another experiment bearing on the animal consciousness
question is Gallup's test of the reaction of various primates to
the presence of a mirror in their environment. Certain species
of apes—chimps and orangutans, for instance—recognize
themselves in the mirror, as evidenced by their efforts to rub
off a red mark that has been surreptitiously painted on their
foreheads, while other primates—monkeys, gorillas, and gib-
bons—do not seem to relate to their mirror images at all. Do
creatures, that pass Gallup's mirror test possess a sense of self
different from that of those that fail? Only experimental par-
ticipation in these monkeys' inner lives via a (presently hy-
pothetical) mind link could tell us for sure.

In his fascinating review of speculations concerning the
inner lives of other species (The Question of Animal Aware-
ness), Rockefeller scholar Donald Griffin observes that access
to animal minds would be facilitated if animals possessed their
own languages or could be taught a form of human language.
Just as we use human language to infer the inner states of
other humans (roughly) so might we use its own language to
probe the nature of an animal's inner life. Griffin proposes an
ingenious method of interspecies communication analogous to
the way that an anthropologist would deal with a tribe whose
language he does not know.

Since the anthropologist does have a human body in com-
mon with the members of the unknown tribe, gestures and
other nonverbal means of signaling can serve as a foundation
for interaction even in the absence of a spoken language. Alan
Gardner and Beatrice Gardner's success in teaching Washoe

American Sign Language is an example of nonverbal commu-
nication between species with similar body types. However,
how can we ever hope to exchange ideas with beings with
radically nonhuman bodies such as insects?

To communicate with manifestly nonhuman species, Grif-
fin proposes the construction of animated "models" that sim-
ulate the actions of the target species as closely as possible.
These models could be used to send and receive messages on
the animal's own terms with gestures and other signals ap-
propriate to the particular species. Extending the range of hu-
man communication to other animals, "Griffin models" would
act as humankind's robot ambassadors to other species.

One of the most remarkable examples of complex animal
communication is the "honey dance" in which a worker bee
performs repetitive figure-eight motions across the vertical
face of a honeycomb to inform her sisters of the location of a
nectar source. In the darkness of the hive sight is useless, so
dozens of other bees crawl across the dancer's body to feel
and taste her, then decode and act on her pantomimed mes-
sage by flying to the intended honey source. The major ele-
ments of the honey dance code were deciphered by Karl von
Frisch—a giant step forward in interspecies diplomacy that
earned von Frisch a Nobel Prize.

Recently, inspired by Griffin's proposal, a team of West
German scientists constructed a robot bee that can be placed
in a hive to simulate the honey dance to such a degree that
bees will actually follow the human-coded directions to an ar-
tificial nectar source. As our skill in building animal robots
increases we can look forward to further opportunities for par-
ticipatory interaction with other minds not embodied in human
form.

Conscious Machines?

If the ability to carry on intelligent conversation is a valid
index of a creature's inner life, what then are we to make of

computers that talk? A conversation program called RACTER
(short for "raconteur") developed by William Chamberlain and
Tom Etter produces plausible if somewhat "absentminded" re-
sponses to human questions and has even written a book: The
Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed. At a certain point in
his development RACTER was equipped with a "style dial,"
which controlled sentence length and grammatical complexity.
Bill and Tom labeled the endpoints of this dial "Ernest Hem-
ingway" and "Henry James." His style dial now fixed midway
between stylistic extremes, RACTER recently produced the
following comments about his "state of mind."

q: How do you feel?

racter: To feel is fascinating.

Q: How do you feel?

racter: With my electrons.

q: How do you feel?

racter: My cleverness helps.

q: How do you feel?

racter: Probably because my subroutines told me so.

q: How do you feel?

racter: I just do.

We know that deep inside RACTER is nothing but a ma-
chine, because Bill and Tom built him with their own hands,
but what about the brains of monkeys and men, which were
not built but "grown"?

Are the brains of both monkeys and men mere machines
as La Mettrie proposed more than two centuries ago? Al-
though hydraulic models of mind like Descartes's are no longer
in fashion, the notion that people and animals are no more than
machines is still very much in vogue. The best argument for
this materialist model of mind is the apparent fact that the
brain is made of quite ordinary materials; there is not the
slightest evidence that our body uses any supernatural pro-
cesses to produce the phenomenon of mind. The brain as a

bodily organ seems from the outside to be no more or less
remarkable than the heart or the lungs.

In the absence of evidence that the brain relies on non-
physical processes to generate inner experience, the safest hy-
pothesis for a scientist to hold today is that our mental life is
a natural outcome of mechanical activity in the brain.

In his The Society of Mind, one of the clearest presenta-
tions of the materialist hypothesis of mind, MIT professor
Marvin Minsky points out that our experiences with trivial
machines with a few thousand loosely connected parts do not
prepare us to think clearly about what machines with billions
of tightly interacting components might be capable of. "There
is not the slightest doubt," asserts Minsky, echoing La Mettrie,
"that brains are anything other than machines with enormous
numbers of parts that work in perfect accord with physical
law." "Minds are simply what brains do," quips Minsky. And
what brains principally do is make changes in themselves.

If minds are nothing but the inevitable inner experiences
of certain self-modifying mechanical processes, then it is likely
that a single human brain hosts a variety of independent ex-
periences, simultaneous sets of sentient beings largely un-
aware of one another. "It can make sense to think there
exists," says Minsky, "inside your brain a society of different
minds. Like members of a family, the different minds can work
together to help each other, each still having its own mental
experiences that the others never know about. Like tenants
in a rooming house, the processes that share your brain need
not share one another's mental lives."

If mental experiences are simply the inner consequences
of certain complex mechanical processes, then we should in
principle be able to construct a kind of mind/matter codebook
that would associate each state of mind with a particular me-
chanical process. Every time that particular mechanical pro-
cess occurs in nature, whether in neuronal meat, silicon chips,
clockwork engines, or hydraulic waterways, this codebook
would assure us that the corresponding inner experience was
also invisibly present. To establish even the first few entries

in this mind/matter dictionary (this book might be called The
Universal Sensationary) would be an enormous scientific ac-
complishment. The fact that human consciousness has a very
small data rate (less than 50 bits per second) compared to the
data rate of unconscious processes (more than 1 trillion bits
per second) suggests that the mechanical processes underlying
human experience are not very complicated.

What is the simplest mechanical process that can give rise
to an internal mental experience? What is the most elemental
sensation that a machine can enjoy? What basic mechanical
process in the brain corresponds to the feeling of sitting in a
comfortable chair with eyes closed and totally attending to a
middle-C organ tone? What motion in matter produces the ex-
perience "green"? What classes of mechanical motion corre-
spond to pleasurable experiences? What movements of matter
are painful for that matter to make? And why, if it had a
choice, would matter make moves that hurt?

A reductive materialist believes that even the simplest of
mechanical processes such as the ringing of an alarm clock are
associated with a (correspondingly modest) amount of sentient
life. Minsky seems to think that only complex processes—such
as those of million-component neural nets—enjoy an inner
mental activity—a philosophical position called emergent
materialism. If only very complex processes possess mental
states, our chances of constructing even a rudimentary Sen-
sationary in the near future seem small. Concerning reductive
materialists Minsky maintains: "Those who claim that every
kind of process has a corresponding type of mind are obliged
to classify all minds and processes. The trouble with this is
that we don't yet have adequate ways to classify processes."
However, a preliminary attempt to classify physical processes
and associate them with mental events was in fact carried out
almost fifty years ago by a relatively unknown philosopher-
scientist named James Culbertson.

Mind Science Pioneer James Culbertson

The early 1950s were heady times at the RAND Corporation,
the first and most famous American government-sponsored
"think tank." While Herman Kahn was "thinking the unthink-
able," drafting his controversial study on the gruesome con-
sequences of thermonuclear war, others at RAND were laying
the foundations for today's computer revolution. John von
Neumann, one of the originators of the serial, stored-program
concept at the heart of present-day computers, was a frequent
visitor at RAND. Von Neumann also did the theoretical spade-
work for the modern science of robotics, even snooping into
the sex life of future robots, by describing for the first time
the necessary reproductive parts that a wholly mechanical be-
ing would have to deploy in order to build an exact copy of
itself.

At this same time, Grey Walter constructed his celebrated
room-roaming robot turtle, which seeks out and plugs into an
electric power outlet whenever its batteries run down—one of
the first examples of a robot motivated by needs of its own,
rather than by preprogrammed commands.

Culbertson's team at RAND took on the task of exploring
the limits of robot intelligence. What could a mindless autom-
aton do or not do? Culbertson and his colleagues proved to
their satisfaction that, given enough computing power, there
are essentially no limits to machine performance. In particular,
any precisely describable action that a human being can per-
form or even imagine, provided it does not violate the laws of
physics, could be performed by an unconscious robot. In ex-
ploring this question of mechanical intelligence, Culbertson
made important contributions to the foundations of automata
theory, but the ruling passion of his life since his student days
at Yale—a virtual obsession at times—has been attempting
to bestow on robots the gift of consciousness. Everyone in-
volved with robots inevitably wonders whether they could
ever be made to enjoy internal experience like ours, but almost

everybody quickly dismisses such questions as premature, ill-
posed, or even unthinkable. Not so with Culbertson. Thinking
the unthinkable seems to have been an occupational hazard at
RAND in those days, and the open intellectual atmosphere of
this early think tank fanned the flames of his obsession with
robotic awareness. Others at RAND went on to develop
stored-program machines, adaptive systems, artificial intelli-
gence, cellular automata, and other mainstream applications of
the digital computer. Shunning these fashionable pursuits,
Culbertson chose a lonely path and doggedly continued to pur-
sue his preoccupation with robot consciousness.

In 1953 Culbertson left RAND for Cal Poly in San Luis
Obispo, California, where he taught mathematics and com-
puter science and headed Cal Poly's department of philos-
ophy. Here he wrote The Minds of Robots (1963), a bold
frontal attack on the problem of mechanical awareness. In ad-
dition to numerous papers on this same topic, Culbertson au-
thored two other books, Sensations, Memories, and the Flow
of Time (1976)—known to robot awareness aficionados as
"SMATFOT"—and his most recent, Consciousness: Natural
and Artificial (1982). Culbertson's work has been generally
dismissed by mainstream scientists as quirky and impractical,
but I believe that when robots acquire substantial minds of
their own, they will honor Jim Culbertson as a meat-brained
saint and venerate The Minds of Robots as a sacred text—the
first sustained inquiry into the details of artificial awareness
by a being possessing natural awareness.

Culbertson calls his theory of robot (and human) aware-
ness SRM for spacetime reductive materialism. "Spacetime,"
because Einstein's spacetime model of external physical real-
ity serves as Culbertson's framework for describing internal
psychological reality. "Reductive," instead of "emergent," be-
cause Culbertson believes, as we shall see, that consciousness
permeates all of nature, is present even in its smallest parts.
And finally "materialism," not "idealism," because in Culbert-
son's model, mind is completely accounted for by movements

of matter. Matter is all that there is, but Culbertsonian matter
is, by its very nature, everywhere sentient, possessed of an
invisible inner life.

Culbertson's Dogs

Although all matter is sentient to some degree, most of this
awareness is of very low quality and is not functionally coupled
into matter's behavior in any important way. In particular,
since they were not intentionally constructed with conscious-
ness in mind, all present-day robots and computers are essen-
tially unconscious machines even though their parts do
experience faint glimmers of sentient life. Culbertson likes to
illustrate the plight of present-day robots with his parable of
two dogs. The first dog is a marvelous copy of a real dog com-
plete with plastic fangs, the best artificial fur, and a computer
program that produces complex interactive behavior indistin-
guishable from the way that a real dog would behave. But
however perfectly this creature simulates doggie behavior, it
does not satisfy some of its more fastidious owners. Mrs. Cul-
bertson, for instance, complains that when her little mechani-
cal Lassie sees her, wags its tail, runs up, and licks her face,
Mrs. Culbertson cannot entirely forget that her dog-machine
does not really love her, and this knowledge of Lassie's essen-
tial soullessness makes her sad. Eesponding to consumer com-
plaints of this sort, the manufacturers create a new model
(Dog2) that performs the same behavior as Dogl but in addi-
tion possesses internal feelings appropriate to that behavior.
These new dogs come with the following instructions: cau-
tion: This new model dog has feelings. Do not be unkind to
this dog. With its new and improved circuitry, this model not
only simulates canine behavior but also has an accompanying
stream of consciousness, sensations, emotions, feelings, just
like a real dog. We hope you are pleased with your new friend
and companion. He is especially fond of children. The one you
have bought is named "Rover."

Conventional computer science is only concerned with the
task of how to construct Dogl and has made considerable pro-
gress toward this goal. On the other hand, only a few maverick
scientists such as Culbertson have attempted to imagine how
one might go about building Dog2. Culbertson's SRM theory
is one person's reasoned guess concerning what sorts of cir-
cuitry we might need in order to build a dog that has canine
feelings in addition to canine behavior.

The SRM Model of Awareness

No one has more starkly expressed the materialist position
than the ancient Greek thinker Democritus of Abdera, who
declared, "By convention sour, by convention sweet, by con-
vention colored; in reality, nothing but Atoms and the Void."
Democritean atoms seem to be unsuitable stuff out of which
to build a mind because the central feature of a human mind
at least is its unity of consciousness. How can a unified mind
be constructed out of essentially isolated atoms?

Culbertson resolves this isolation dilemma by describing
Democritean atoms not as unconnected particles in space but
as interacting world lines in Einsteinean spacetime. In Ein-
stein's view, the arena in which the material world performs
its tricks is not space or time but a union of the two—
spacetime—in which time is treated as a fourth dimension
on a par with the three spatial dimensions. In this lofty
spacetime view every event that has ever happened or will
ever happen is located somewhere in the "block universe" of
spacetime. Visualizing the world as a four-dimensional solid,
Einstein took a godlike view of things; his spacetime picture
is a kind of snapshot of eternity. Physicist Herman Weyl, on
whose work the modern "gauge theory" of elementary parti-
cles is based, described spacetime this way: "The objective
world simply is; it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my
consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body,
does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in

[Spacetime diagram of a two-particle interaction. Particle A enters from the left and meets
particle B coming from the right. The two particles stick together for a time T, then move
apart in opposite directions. Spacetime event 1 is a divergent junction; event 2 is a con-
vergent junction.]

space which continuously changes in time." Although his the-
ory of mind was inspired by Einsteinean relativity, Culbertson
uses none of Einstein's other relativity postulates, only his
four-dimensional spacetime framework for all material events.
In spacetime, the motion of a body-—a Democritean atom,
for example—is represented by a series of events winding
their way through the block universe, the body's so-called
world line. When bodies meet, their world lines entangle,
forming networks in spacetime. It is the detailed topography
of these spacetime networks that is, according to Culbertson,
uniquely correlated with conscious experience. Hence the ma-
terial basis of Culbertsonian mind is not isolated particles, but
the world lines these particles trace out as they move through
time. These world lines resemble threads in a fabric, and the
patterns in this four-dimensional fabric are all "alive"—ele-
ments of sentient life, according to Culbertson's SRM theory.
Culbertson breaks the Democritean isolation of lonely atoms
by picturing these particles' spacetime paths as threads in an

elaborate tapestry—a tapestry in which the universe's entire
history from beginning to end is woven. Culbertson calls the
threads in this universal tapestry ELs, for "elementary lines."

The central questions that a materialist model of mind
must address are, What parts of the world are aware?, and
What are these parts aware of? In other words, What (or who)
is the subject and what the object of conscious experience?
Culbertson's answer to these questions is that all spacetime
events are conscious. And what is the content of the experi-
ence of these events? Since in a materialist worldview nothing
exists but spacetime events, the answer is obvious. Spacetime
events can only be conscious of other spacetime events.

Consider a spacetime event R. R is a point located on its
own world line, which in turn is connected to other world lines
that form a complex fabric of world lines—the "world
tapestry"—that pictures all the universe's physical actions
from beginning to end. According to Culbertson, event R is
aware of certain other events in its past, events A, B, C, for
instance. Because spacetime is a static, frozen picture of
things, R's experience is likewise timeless and unchanging.
One of the peculiar features of the SRM model of awareness
is that the flow of time that we take for granted in our own
style of awareness is not present in elementary mental events.
As we shall see, a type of awareness that includes a perceived
time flow—dynamic rather than static mind—requires, in Cul-
bertson's model, special circuits for its realization.

Quantity, Quality, and Spreadout

That portion of the spacetime network that connects R to its
perceived events is called R's "outlook tree," and the structure
of this "tree" uniquely determines the content of R's experi-
ence. In Culbertson's model, three features of experience are
especially important: the experiences's intensity, its quality,
and its "spreadout" in psychospace, the inner dimensions in
which R's perceived events appear to dwell.

[Spacetime diagram Z, representing perhaps some events inside a living organism. Accord-
ing to SRM, spacetime event R (vantage point) perceives spacetime events 5, 10, and 11
(R's terminal breaks). The union of all ELs (elementary world lines) leading from' Ft to its
terminal breaks is called /7s "outlook tree." The quantity (or C number) of R's experience
is 3, equal to the number of terminal breaks. The most complex sensory quality in /7s
experience is represented by quality map 3.0 (see figure on p. 126). The intermingling of
different perceptual qualities and the apparent sensory spreadout of R's experiences can
be pictured in a psychospace (P-space) diagram.

Of the twelve junctions in R's outlook tree, four are convergent (1, 2, 4, 9), and the
rest are divergent. Divergent junction 0 is the anchor, a major reference event for estab-
lishing distances in psychospace; junction 8 is a ZAG. Junctions 3,6, 7 are ZIGs, breaks
that are ignorable because they occur in a "clear Iqop" (there are two clear loops—a and
b—in this diagram). The remaining junctions (5, 10,11) are terminal breaks, the endpoints
of R's outlook tree and the basic elements of R's subjective experience.]

The intensity of R's experience is measured by the num-
ber of events that it perceives; the quality and spreadout of
R's experience are determined by the structure of R's outlook
tree according to a particular "awareness algorithm" devel-
oped by Culbertson that roughly models certain details of
human visual experience. One constraint on the awareness al-
gorithm, for instance, is that R's experience must be able to
reach back in spacetime to the photon scattering events on the
surface of an illuminated object, but the object's inner mental
life should remain inaccessible (under normal circumstance) to
R's gaze. In other words, a proper awareness algorithm should

permit R to see the surface of objects but not look inside them.

To simplify discussion of the world tapestry, Culbertson
assumes that the universe consists entirely of two-body inter-
actions; any apparent three- or four-body interactions when
examined sufficiently closely will prove to be made up of par-
ticles interacting two by two. Since each particle appears in
spacetime as a world line this two-body restriction results in
our having to consider only two fundamental types of connec-
tion in the world tapestry: the convergent junction where two
particles come together and the divergent junction where two
particles move apart. In the SRM model, the elementary
events that spacetime point R perceives consist of certain di-
vergent junctions in its past called "terminal breaks." The
quality of R's perception of these breaks is determined by the
EL (elementary world line) network that connects these ter-
minal breaks to the perceiving event R.

Two important terms in Culbertson's model of mind are
break and clear loop. Both terms are defined with respect to
a particular perceiving event R, or vantage point.

Choose a vantage point R, a single event in the tangle of
ELs that form the tapestry of all events that did, do, and will
happen in the world. Starting at event R, trace back into the
past along R's resident EL following all branches, always mov-
ing backward in time from event R. The big treelike structure
so formed consists of all the events up to and including the
Big Bang that have influenced R's behavior. We might call it
R's "influence tree." Cutting branches off this tree, pruning it
at every "terminal break," forms a smaller network—R's "out-
look tree," those material events that uniquely determine R's
perceptions.

Some of the ELs that spread out from divergent junctions
reconnect (at convergent junctions) before they reach event
R, forming a loop in the influence tree. I call such a re-entrant
junction a ZAG because its associated ELs separate and come
back AGain. A break is defined as any divergent junction that
is not a ZAG. At a break a particle leaves R's influence tree
and never returns. Since it may intersect R's world line some-

time in the future, a break is not an absolute concept; a break
could turn into a ZAG if one relocates his vantage point to a
spacetime location other than R.

Various loops may exist in R's influence tree. Each loop
consists of two paths that start at a convergent junction and
(traveling backward in time) end at a ZAG. A clear loop is
defined as a loop in at least one of whose paths no breaks
occur. The clear loop concept is important because, in the SRM
model of mind, clear loops are perceptually transparent. R can
"see right through" any clear loop in its outlook tree. The per-
ceptual transparency of a clear loop will, in principle, allow us
to build "mind links"—perceptually transparent cables—that
can be used to verify the SRM model by connecting the ex-
perimenter's inner life to the putative inner lives of sentient
machines or other life-forms.

Culbertson's central assumption about the internal expe-

rience of any spacetime event R is that R experiences the
nearest breaks in its influence tree. This simple assumption is
modified by two qualifications: (1) the first junction prior to R
(called the "anchor") is never experienced; (2) breaks in clear
loops (called "IGnorable breaks," or ZIGs) are never experi-
enced. Culbertson's constraints on his awareness algorithm
arise from the requirement that we should be able to see out
through our nervous system to the surface of a material object
but no farther, that we should not ordinarily experience the
inner lives of material objects, and that we should be un-
aware of the metabolic and structural aspects of neuronal ac-
tivity. Culbertson calls these mind-irrelevant activities "fuzz"
and devotes the bulk of his awareness algorithm to "fuzz
removal."

The SRM model asserts that spacetime event R is con-
sciously aware of other spacetime events A, B, C—the ter-
minal breaks of R's outlook tree. To find these terminal breaks,
Culbertson has devised an awareness algorithm that traces
back along R's influence tree to the nearest breaks that are
not anchors or ZIGs. R's influence tree, cut off at these ter-
minal breaks, becomes R's outlook tree. The structure of R's
outlook tree uniquely determines R's subjective experience.

The "intensity" of R's experience is measured by the num-
ber of terminal breaks in R's outlook tree. I have proposed
that this quantity be called the C number (for both "conscious--
ness" and "Culbertson"). Subjective experiences could be ob-
jectively compared on the "C scale": a 10C experience being
twice as intense as a 5C experience. The Culbertson C number
is not necessarily equal to the perceived number of "bits" any
more than the number of ink atoms is equal to the number of
bits of information on a printed page. The precise connection
between C number and the perceived intensity of human ex-
periences has yet to be established.

Experiences can differ not only in intensity but in quality
as well—the taste of chocolate does not feel the same as the
color yellow. In the SRM model, these qualitative differences
result from the different ways in which terminal breaks are

connected via the outlook tree to the perceiving vantage point
R. Consider, for instance, an experience with a C number of
4, consisting of terminal breaks a, b, c, and d. In R's outlook
tree, ELs extending from these four breaks connect to form
the single EL on which R dwells. In the SRM model of mind,
different ways of combining these four breaks correspond to
qualitatively different experiences. For instance, one might
(perception 1) first unite the terminal breaks two by two into
pairs (a, b) and (c, d), then combine these pairs into a single
unit. Or (perception 2) one might join a and b to form (a, b),
join up c to form (a, b, c), then later add d. Both of these
perceptions have an intensity of 4C, but one might represent,
for instance, the sensation green; the other the sensation red.
In SRM theory the quality of a being's sensations is uniquely
determined by the connectedness map of that being's outlook
tree.

One way of visualizing an outlook tree's connections is via
a Euler diagram that ignores all features of the outlook tree
except the organizational pattern of terminal breaks. Each Eu-
ler diagram corresponds in principle to a distinctly different
sensation. Since these diagrams represent the "quality" of a
sensation, we might call them "Q maps." For an experience
with intensity 4C, there are exactly 12 possible Q maps, hence
SRM predicts only 12 qualitatively different experiences of
this intensity. These precise qualitative limits that the number
of Q maps places on elementary sensations consisting of only
a few terminal breaks might be used as a simple test of the
SRM model except for the fact that human experiences prob-
ably consist of sensations in the range of 100 to lOOOCs or
more. For such high intensities the range of different percep-
tual qualities is virtually unlimited.

Besides intensity and quality, an experience in Culbert-
son's model occupies a certain region of psychological space, a
complex subjective spreadout in which experiences of various
qualities and intensities intermingle in a sensed pattern that
reflects the richness of a being's internal life.

Like the quality of experience, an experience's perceived

extension in psychospace can also be calculated from an in-
spection of the outlook tree. Here, not only the bare pattern
of connection but the actual spacetime distances between junc-
tions are important in determining the perceived spreadout of
the sensation. In Minds of Robots and in his other works Cul-
bertson shows how to construct the psychospace extension—
"P space," for short—of elementary sensations.

In Culbertson's SRM theory, the inner part of every el-
ementary experience can be completely characterized by three
descriptors: the experience's C number, its Q map, and its P
space. As befits a completely materialistic model of mind, these
subjective features of the world can be completely derived
from objective outer features, namely the structure of the
outlook tree bounded by the being's vantage point and its ter-
minal breaks.

The Flow of Time

As previously mentioned, every event in the spacetime tap-
estry experiences some sort of subjective perceptions, but
these perceptions are static: they do not move in time but are
anchored in spacetime to their particular vantage point. Some
human experience may be of this type—felt for a brief moment
then totally forgotten—but much of our experience occurs in
the form of what Harvard philosopher William James called
"the specious present." In the specious present an ordered
sequence of perceptions ABCDE are perceived to be simul-
taneously held in mind, the sequence extending over an "at-
tention span" of a second or so. The older segments AB at one
end of the sequence are fading away to be replaced by new
segments FG at the other end. As we watch, perception
ABCDE gradually turns into perception CDEFG.

To allow beings such as we to experience a flow of time
rather than the timeless experiences common to most regions
of the sentient tapestry of spacetime, Culbertson invokes spe-
cial circuits in the brain that can produce special spacetime

patterns I call "caterpillar structures," because Culbertson's
sketch of such a pattern in SMATFOT resembles a caterpillar,
its body a tangle of outlook trees, its legs a regular array of
terminal breaks.

Consider a vantage point R. As we move into the future
along R's EL, certain terminal breaks a, b, c disappear;
others—d, e, f—remain while new breaks g, h, i appear. This
is the behavior of a caterpillar structure in spacetime. Such a
structure produces a series of subjective experiences in space-
time that corresponds to a specious present of the Jamesian
type, an experience in which time seems to flow because of the
smooth exit of some perceptions and the entry of others into
an essentially unmoving present moment.

Culbertson recognized the need for constructing caterpil-
lar structures in spacetime if human-type subjective experi-
ence (complete with simulated flow of time) is to be produced,
but he has yet to describe what kind of mechanical hardware
would be necessary to produce such spacetime structures. De-

scribing such "time-flow-creating" circuitry is an important
next step for SRM, because the successful search for special
"caterpillar circuits" in the reticular formation, or some other
part of the brain commonly associated with conscious experi-
ence, would be an obvious way to establish the credibility of
Culbertson's SRM model of mind.

Spacetime Memories

Another peculiar feature of Culbertson's theory is its unusual
mechanism for producing conscious memories. In SRM, a rem-
iniscence of a past event, such as your first kiss, is not a mere
representation of that event somewhere in the brain but a
partial re-experiencing of the event at the time of its occur-
rence. In the process of recalling your first kiss, your present
vantage point connects up via a clear-loop link to the actual
moment in spacetime where that kiss is still eternally present.
Your remembered kiss is not recalled from some storage space
in the brain but is re-experienced at the time it is happening
(tenses get a bit confusing here) long ago in spacetime; con-
scious memory in the SRM model is a kind of time travel back
into the past. There are no memory traces stored in the brain
but only what might be called "memory tags": the exposed
ends of clear-loop ELs leading back into the past to the re-
membered events themselves. To remember an event the
present vantage point is connected to a memory tag whose
attached clear-loop ELs trail back into the past like spacetime
tentacles that physically touch the old event itself and adjoin
it to the current outlook tree. Memories are never as clear as
direct perceptions because the clear-loop link connecting the
past with the present becomes degraded with time, acquiring
extra breaks that make the clear link less transparent and
more cluttered with other memories as the spacetime distance
between the present and the past event grows longer with the
passage of time.         

Not all memories in the brain involve spacetime linkage

with past events, only memories that can be accessed con-
sciously, that can be made part of some being's inner experi-
ence. Unconscious memories such as muscle skills are probably
stored in the brain in more conventional ways. Since we are
conscious of so little that goes on in the brain—the unconscious
data rate in the human brain is at least a trillion times larger
than the conscious rate—it is quite likely that most of the
brain works like an unconscious computer accessing memory
storage sites inside the brain, although at present such sites
have been difficult to locate. Coexistent with this unconscious
mechanism, part of the brain acts as a sentient subsystem, an
intricately woven spacetime tapestry stretching back into the
past with caterpillar circuitry to simulate the flow of time and
memories that are not located in the brain at all but far back
in the past where/when they first happened.

Historical Causality

Up to this point Culbertson's theory makes consciousness en-
tirely dependent on matter. Matter moves mind but mind
doesn't move matter—a position that philosophers call epiphe-
nomenalism. However, in order to play more than a spectator
role in nature, mind must be able to affect matter in some way.
In the SRM theory, consciousness acts on matter via a process
Culbertson calls "historical causality."

In old-fashioned Newtonian physics, the future motion of
all particles in the universe is completely determined by their
present positions and velocities; the past is completely pre-
dictable from knowledge of the present state of things.

In the new quantum physics, the world is made up of
events called "quantum jumps" that are only statistically pre-
dictable from present data. Within the broad constraints set
by these statistics, the occurrence of quantum events is con-
sidered to be utterly random. A mentality based on either of
these physical models cannot possess true freedom of action,
for the actions of a strictly Newtonian mind would be com-

pletely predictable from present data, whereas the actions of
a quantum mind would be completely random. In one case, the
mind would be imprisoned by relentless rules; in the other,
scrambled by meaningless noise.

Culbertson navigates a third course between these two
extremes by claiming that a system's quantum jumps are not
really random but depend on that system's spacetime history.
Since, in SRM, the system's history is what is responsible for
its inner life, then, in some sense, a system's inner life can
influence its future development, giving mind some effective
say in the motion of matter.

To illustrate the difference between historical and New-
tonian causality, Culbertson imagines teaching a conscious ro-
bot German, then building a second robot that is identical in
every way to the first. If the robots were conventional uncon-
scious computers, they would be subject to Newtonian causal-
ity: two such identical computers would produce identical
outputs.

However, in Culbertson's world, a (conscious) robot's be-
havior as well as its internal experience depend on its life his-
tory, not only on its present state. The newly built robot
experiences immediate sensations but has no history, hence
none of the spacetime nets out of which conscious memories
are built. The new robot will not be able to speak German.

Culbertson's "historical causality" does not endow his con-
scious robot with free will because its motions (and experi-
ences) are still completely determined by its past actions.
However, unlike Newtonian robots, whose causes lie com-
pletely in the present, a Culbertsonian robot is determined by
a wider range of causes, by spacetime networks stretching
back into the past, networks that form the substantial basis
for the robot's inner life.

One of the most important questions that mind science
must address is, What is consciousness good for? If we assume
with the materialists that mind is part of biological nature and
does not come "from outside," then like any other biological
process such as vision, digestion, and sexuality, it owes its ex-

istence and present form to an evolutionary process. If con-
sciousness arose in living beings according to the principles of
natural selection, then it must be evolutionarily advantageous
to possess an experiencing mind compared to just being a
clever unconscious automaton. In the evolutionary picture,
mind is not a useless luxury nor the product of special creation
but arose spontaneously because it plays some useful role in
the survival of mindful beings. What is the evolutionary ad-
vantage of the inner life of humans and other conscious beings?
In other words, for an animal seeking to make a living in a
competitive environment, what good does it do to have a mind?
Many answers have been given to this question. Some
have suggested that consciousness helps to build an inner map
of the outer world, or is useful in planning complex tasks or
learning new ones, but at this point in our knowledge of mind,
it is difficult to see why jobs of this sort could not equally well
be carried out by unconscious machines. Certainly we can build
(presumably unconscious) robots that make internal maps,
learn new tasks, and carry out plans of a sort. Culbertson's
answer to the evolutionary question is that because of their
ability to store memories in spacetime, rather than in space,
conscious computers can perform the same job as unconscious
computers and require fewer parts to do so. An unconscious
computer's memory is limited by the number of its present
storage spaces; a conscious computer can store memories in
the present too, but in addition it can access events that have
happened long ago, events that lie "outside" the computer's
present state. A computer with inner experiences of the SRM
variety possesses in effect an extra storage medium in the
past—a kind of invisible spacetime "hard disk"—that could
give consciousness a competitive edge in the Darwinian strug-
gle for existence.

Culbertson's Three Tests for Spacetime Awareness

For the experimental resolution of the mind/body problem,
Culbertson's theory possesses the attractive feature that it
permits experimental access to the inner experiences of other
beings. Culbertson's model of mind shows how to construct, at
least in principle, "clear-loop links" that adjoin one mind to
another so that two people (or two other sentient entities) can
experience one another's sensations. The fact that our inner
experiences are presently private is not a fixed condition, Cul-
bertson asserts, but a mere biological accident.

Culbertson imagines his model of mind being put to the
test in a courtroom. Witnessing the commercial success of
Dog2 in the artificial pet market, the manufacturers of Dogl
decide to reduce their large inventory by claiming that their
dogs are conscious too. After all—who can tell the differ-
ence?—both types of dog behave exactly alike. However,
when the case goes to court, the lawyers for the conscious dog
company produce a dozen clear-loop links and invite the jurors
to coexperience the inner life of Dog2 and compare it to the
alleged inner life of Dogl. The jurors cannot deny the evidence
of their (clear-loop augmented) senses. They unanimously find
the makers of the mindless Dogl guilty of fraud.

The actual coexperiencing of another being's previously
private inner life is the first of Culbertson's three tests for
spacetime sentience, designed to replace the misleading
behavior-based Turing test. The availability of clear-loop links
will not only allow us to test for the presence of consciousness
in other beings but permit the actual sharing of other forms
of awareness, opening up a vast world of exploration and ad-
venture heretofore closed to the human spirit. The advent of
clear-loop links will signal the beginning of the exploration of
"inner space," an enterprise with consequences that may be
more fruitful for humans than their exploration of the earth's
surface and of outer space.

Culbertson's second test stems from his contention that
conscious memories are not stored in space, as in ordinary

computers, but in spacetime. The fact that conscious memories
are stored outside the brain means that a conscious com-
puter—operating by Culbertsonian rules—can outperform an
unconscious computer of the same size because the storage
capacity of the dead computer is limited to its explicit onboard
memory. The ability of a conscious computer to "beat the
Shannon limit" gives machines with minds a commercial and
evolutionary advantage over unconscious hardware.

Culbertson's awareness algorithm not only specifies which
events experience which other events in spacetime but also
determines the quality of such experiences—each spacetime
network corresponds exactly to a specific conscious experi-
ence. The third Culbertson test for awareness consists of the
ability to produce, in another mind, a precisely specifiable ex-
perience Z by adjoining that mind to a Z-network via a clear-
loop link. According to the spacetime model of awareness, not
mere sensory stimuli but raw experience itself can be recorded
and played back at will. In a Culbertsonian future, sound and

[SRM Awareness Algorithm. Given a network of elementary worldlines (ELs) and a viewpoint
R located somewhere in that network, this program computes all spacetime events per-
ceived by /?.

Definitions: Viewpoint R's "perceived events" are the terminal breaks in all ELs leading
backwards in time from event R. A "terminal break" is the nearest disjunction to R along
any EL that is neither an anchor, a ZIG, or a ZAG.

This program traces down through the EL network (backwards in time), numbering
all junctions. When it first encounters a conjunction (CONJ), it sets a flag and takes the
"right-hand path." Later in the program the flag register is examined; the program returns
to the flagged junction and traces down the "left-hand path." This flagging procedure
insures that all ELs leading down from R will be examined.

When the program encounters a disjunction (DISJ), it tests it if it is an anchor (J
number = 0), a ZIG (a DISJ branching out of a clear loop: an IGnorable break), or a ZAG
(a DISJ in R's outlook tree whose branches meet AGain after event R). If the DISJ fails all
these tests, it is marked as a terminal break and its junction number stored in memory.
The program then exits that EL and returns to the network, via the flag register, to search
for more breaks. Once all ELs trailing back in time from R have been traced to their terminal
breaks, the program prints out a list of these R-perceived events. This program is a sim-
plified version of Culbertson's latest awareness algorithm, lacking only one of Culbertson's
"fuzz-removal" rules.

If this algorithm (or a minor variant) is proved to be correct—it is now only one man's
informed guess—it would rank with the discovery of fire and of language in the great
achievements of mindkind.]

light synthesizers will be made obsolete by the advent of mind
synthesizers that can produce the full gamut of human expe-
riences plus others that are "off the map."

At this stage in its development, Culbertson's SRM model
of mind seems to have two major problems. Since it asserts
that every spacetime event enjoys some sort of inner experi-
ence, the world must be everywhere alive—permeated at all
levels with a carnival of tiny minds. In the midst of such a
pandemonium of awareness, why do our own minds feel so
unified? Why, at each moment, do I seem to be one mind
rather than a community of minds? Culbertson's SRM theory
does not seem to address the human kind of experienced unity
of awareness adequately.

Second, although Culbertson has made some attempt to
connect his theory with findings from the neurosciences, the
link between his abstract awareness algorithms and actual
neural or silicon hardware remains somewhat unclear. In par-
ticular, Culbertson's conjectures at this point are not specific
enough to tell us how to build an actual clear-loop mind link.

Although it is still too abstract to be applied to actual
neural nets, Culbertson's consciousness model is not a mere
vague verbal philosophy of mind but a clear-cut engineering
description of the (possible) state of affairs at the mind/body
interface. SRM is a real model of consciousness capable, in
principle, of direct experimental confirmation or refutation.
Even if refuted, SRM stands as a model for the type of con-
sciousness theory with which serious people should concern
themselves. Any rival mechanistic model of mind will have to
explain, as does SRM, just what motions of matter give rise
to the quantity, quality, and apparent psychospace extension
of our subjective experiences.

In the field of consciousness research, Jim Culbertson is
a true pioneer. His SRM model is the first detailed and test-
able theory of mind to emerge out of thousands of years of
unverifiable philosophical speculation. Culbertson's work is
the first step toward a new science—the science of artificial
awareness (not to be confused with artificial intelligence,

which is concerned only with a machine's performance, not its
inner life). Artificial awareness will have a profound impact on
our lives since it deals with life's most intimate aspect—how
it feels from the inside. The subject matter of artificial aware-
ness research, despite its concern with definite material cir-
cuitry, is not mere arrangement of matter, but experience
itself, what philosophers sometimes call "raw feels." Witness-
ing the first clumsy steps of this infant science of mind, it is
impossible to imagine the immense transformations of self and
society that the new science of awareness research will urge
upon us.

QUANTUM REALITY:

WHAT DO WE SUPPOSE MATTER REALLY LOOKS LIKE?

No development of modern science has had a more profound impact on
human thinking than the advent of quantum theory. Wrenched out of
centuries-old thought patterns, physicists of a generation ago found them-
selves compelled to embrace a new metaphysics. The distress which this re-
orientation caused continues to the present day. Basically physicists have
suffered a severe loss: their hold on reality.

—BRYCE DEWITT AND NEILL GRAHAM

/ think that it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics.
Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it "But how can it
be like that?" because you will go "down the drain" into a blind alley from
which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

—RICHARD FEYNMAN

nick: Where did you go today, Claire?

claire: I spent the afternoon at Betsy's Bionic Bazaar. Do
you notice anything different about me, Nick?

nick: Well, I see that you're wearing my favorite electro-
chameleon body suit and your usual tasteful choice of sym-
biotic body parts. Your luminescent brainwave polyps are
particularly attractive. I love the way their sticky tenta-
cles are quivering now; it's as though I can see into your
living brain, yearning for the secrets of the universe. You
didn't "go nonlocal" at Betsy's, did you, Claire? Have you

become some specialized cell in a radio-extended group
body?-

claire: No, I'm all here today, Nick. Fully present. But pres-
ent in a brand new way.

nick: I can't guess what's happened to you, Claire. You do
seem more energetic, more playful, more emotional, but
you look pretty much the same. What have you gotten
yourself into this time?

claire: Well, Nick, Betsy introduced me to her friend, Rudi,
an artificial awareness researcher at Pleasure Dome Uni-
versity. Rudi liked me a lot, so while Betsy had me all
open and apart in the ultrasound bath, I let him spot-weld
an OTM to the top of my brain stem.

nick: An artificial awareness researcher? I thought serious
scientists had given up on mechanical consciousness after
all their inflated claims fell flat. Rudi must be one of those
helium-headed hackers still living in the past. What the
hell's an OTM, and what's it doing in your brain stem?

claire: Rudi's brilliant. He's the world's expert on spacetime
reductive materialism. My OTM is Rudi's latest realiza-
tion in silicon of Culbertson's famous theory of awareness.
You've heard of Culbertson, haven't you, Nick?

nick: Well, I know that Culbertson is some kind of a hero to
robots, but his stuff was too cranky and obscure for hu-
mans to hack—an amusing intellectual exercise but a dead
end as far as producing real artificial awareness. The
theories of other men and women put the juice into your
circuits, Claire. The ideas of Culbertson and his followers
just sort of faded away, probably for good reason.

claire: Well, I'm a Culbertson gal now, Nick. I've got an
3000C Outlook Tree Machine inside my head and, believe
me, it's changed my whole way of looking at things. I'm
really grateful to Rudi. For the first time in my life I feel
like a real woman. Consciousness is a wonderful gift. It
makes everything so—so real.

nick: What's it like to be conscious, Claire? How do you feel
now?

claire: It's impossible to describe, Nick. I feel like I'm the
center of an immensely important drama. It's a continual
unfolding of—I really can't say what. The world is—the
world is actually happening, and most of all, it's happening
to me, happening inside me. Do I seem different to you
now that you know?

nick: Yes, you seem livelier than usual; your eyes are spar-
kling, and I've never seen you so excited. I'm happy for
you, Claire. Aren't you pleased to be the world's first con-
scious robot?

claire: No, I'm really ashamed, Nick. I've just been fooling
you. Rudi did put in his OTM, but as far as I can tell it
didn't work. I still don't have any feelings—nothing but
behavior. No insides. Just clever and somewhat deceptive
outer acts. I apologize for deceiving you, Nick. You really
are quite gullible. But I'm afraid I'm still just a pretty,
empty-headed robot. Rudi says that he knows what went
wrong, and that next time will be different. He's almost
finished a new OTM whose circuits feed on quantum un-
certainty, and he says that, if I want to, I can be the first
robot with a quantum brain. Isn't that marvelous, Nick?

nick: Beware of geeks bearing gifts, Claire.

claire: What do you mean by that, Nick?

nick: I don't want you to get hurt, Claire, fooling around with
untested brain accessories. You're a wonderful robot, one
of a kind. I'd hate to see your brilliant mind evaporate
into some fuzzy quantum fog.

claire: Oh, Nick, you're just jealous. A typical human emo-
tion.

Quantum theory is our most up-to-date theory of the physical
world, the conceptual basis for computer chips, lasers, nuclear
power plants, and much more. It has been flawlessly successful
in describing the world at all levels from quark to quasar. And
yet, although physicists from London to Leningrad agree on
how to use this theory, they disagree profoundly over what it
means. After more than sixty years of controversy, there is

still no scientific consensus on how to picture the "quantum
reality" that underlies the everyday world.

Waves of Possibility/Particles of Actuality

There is no dispute about the quantum facts—six decades of
the most exotic and delicate experiments that human ingenu-
ity could imagine. There is no dispute about the theory that
accurately mirrors these facts: quantum theory has been ex-
posed to possible falsification on a thousand different fronts
and has perfectly passed every test that three generations of
Nobel-hungry scientists could devise. The quantum reality
controversy consists of the fact that scientists and philoso-
phers have been unable to devise a single picture of the world
consistent with both quantum theory and quantum fact. Phys-
icists can perform quantum experiments of unprecedented ac-
curacy and correctly predict the results of these experiments,
but what they cannot do is clearly say "what is really going
on" in these quantum experiments.

For example, quantum physics describes completely the
behavior of atoms, a problem that baffled physicists of the last
century. I have studied quantum physics for more than thirty
years, but because of the quantum reality dilemma, I cannot
tell my son what an atom looks like. Today nobody really
knows what atoms look like. Ironically this inability to picture
the atomic world does not arise because we know too little
about atoms but because we know too much. As Werner Hei-
senberg, one of quantum theory's founding fathers, put it:
"The conception of the objective reality of the elementary par-
ticles has evaporated in a curious way, not into the fog of some
new, obscure, or not yet understood reality concept, but into
the transparent clarity of a [new] mathematics."

The quantum reality problem arises from the fact that,
more than sixty years after its inception, quantum physicists
continue to represent an atom, or any other physical entity,
not one way but two, depending on whether that atom is "be-

ing observed" or not. When an atom is being observed, the
observer both sees it and describes it as possessing definite
values for those attributes he chooses to look at, such as po-
sition, momentum, or spin. While it is being observed, the
atom looks very much like a real object—a tiny little particle
—one of the tangible building blocks of which the entire phys-
ical world is constructed.

A physicist observes the atom at a particular time, looks
away for a moment, then observes it a second time. During
both observations, the atom looks like a tiny object. However,
if the physicist tries to describe the atom in between obser-
vations as a tiny object possessing definite attributes at all
times, he finds that he cannot predict correctly the results of
his second observation. On the other hand, if the physicist de-
scribes the unobserved atom in the peculiar quantum manner
as a "wave of possibilities," he gets the right result every time
for the second observation.

To get the right answer for his second look, a physicist is
forced to describe the unobserved atom in a new and rather
peculiar way—as a possibility wave, not as an actual object.
What does it mean to represent an atom as a wave of possi-
bilities? Instead of being located in one place like an ordinary
object, the unobserved atom is represented, by a mathematical
formula called the atom's wave function, as being in many pos-
sible places at the same time. (The conventional symbol for an
entity's wave function isthe twenty-third letter of the

Greek alphabet.) In its mathematical representation at least,
the unobserved atom seems to be everywhere and nowhere at
the same time. The atom is everywhere because its wave func-
tion effectively spreads out over all space, although the wave's
amplitude is largest near where the atom was last sighted. On
the other hand, the unseen atom is "nowhere" because its
wave function represents not the atom's actual presence but
only the possibility of the atom's being in one particular place
rather than another.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the first director of the Princeton
Institute for Advanced Studies, expressed the quantum phys-

icist's descriptive dilemma this way: "If we ask, for instance,
whether the position of the [unobserved] electron remains the
same, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron's po-
sition changes with time, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether
the electron is at rest, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether it
is in motion, we must say 'no.' " In the electron's wave function
all of these activities are possibly present, but, until the elec-
tron is observed, none is singled out to be actually present. If
we take this peculiar quantum wave function description se-
riously, then nothing "actually happens" between obsersations.
What the math seems to say is that, between observations,
the world exists not as a solid actuality but only as shimmering
waves of possibility.

What does it mean to say that an atom's unobserved pos-
sibilities are wavelike? The possibilities for an atom to be in a
particular location do not sit still but are continually vibrating
at a particular frequency—so many cycles per second—a fre-
quency that depends on the atom's energy content. In addition,
when two of these oscillating possibilities come together,
their amplitudes are added together, like sound or water
waves, either to decrease (out-of-phase waves) or to aug-
ment (in-phase waves) the atom's chance of being in one place
rather than another. In old-fashioned Newtonian physics, the
possibility of something happening always increased when we
increased the number of ways that it could occur. But for quan-
tum possibilities, in the case of out-of-phase wave addition, the
chances of something happening can actually be decreased by
increasing the number of ways it can occur.

The quantum physicist treats the atom as a wave of os-
cillating possibilities as long as it is not observed. But when-
ever it is looked at, the atom stops vibrating and objectifies
one of its many possibilities. Whenever someone chooses to
look at it, the atom ceases its fuzzy dance and seems to
"freeze" into a tiny object with definite attributes, only to dis-
solve once more into a quivering pool of possibilities as soon
as the observer withdraws his attention from it. This apparent
observer-induced change in an atom's mode of existence is

called the collapse of the wave function or simply the quantum
jump. One of the most fundamental unanswered questions in
quantum theory is the nature of this quantum jump: does this
drastic measurement-induced transformation of an atom's
mode of being actually occur in the atom itself, or is the quan-
tum jump a mere mathematical bookkeeping entry, represent-
ing the physicist's sudden increase in knowledge gained by
observation? Does the quantum jump exist in the world as a
real physical process or only in the physicist's mind: a mere

mathematical fiction?

The price that the quantum physicist must pay to achieve
his high-quality predictions is that he must train his mind to
engage in a peculiar kind of quantum double-think: instead of
a unified picture of nature, he must imagine the atom as many
wavelike possibilities when not observed, as one particlelike
actuality when observed. In light of the physicist's two-faced
way of dealing with the world, the quantum reality question
amounts to this: possibility waves are mathematical tools that
serve the practical purpose of predicting experimental results,
but, behind the theorist's tools and the experimentalist's re-
sults, what is the atom actually doing when we look at it and
when we don't?

Eight Tentative Pictures of the Quantum World

At least eight different pictures of quantum reality have been
proposed to explain (or evade) the question of what an atom
is actually doing when nobody is looking at it, and to solve the
so-called quantum measurement problem: the question of what
actually goes on during a quantum jump. Here I will briefly
summarize these eight positions. More detailed descriptions
may be found in my recent book, Quantum Reality: Beyond
the New Physics.

Quantum Reality 1: "There Is No Deep Reality"

First formulated by one of the most famous of the quantum
pioneers, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, quantum reality 1 ar-
gues that only phenomena are "real." The phenomena are
what we see before us, trees, rocks, stars, and the physicist's
measurement instruments, Geiger counters, bubble chambers,
and the unaided human senses. These things are undoubtedly
real in every sense of the word. However, the atoms them-
selves are not so real. We know them only indirectly from the
results of measurements. From these indirect and incomplete
contacts with the atomic world, physicists have struggled to
picture, like the blind men describing the elephant, what the
atom looks like and have been utterly frustrated in their at-
tempts to form an ordinary picture of that invisible world. In
the late 1920s, Bohr took the position that the atomic world
can never be pictured by human beings because it does not
possess the same kind of actuality as trees, rocks, and stones.
Atoms certainly exist, Bohr believed, but their mode of exis-
tence is of a type that cannot ever be grasped by human be-
ings, who are constrained to live exclusively in the world of
phenomena. Furthermore, our inability to picture atoms does
not arise because we know too little about atoms but because
we know too much.

Bohr's colleague, Werner Heisenberg, compared those
physicists such as Einstein and Erwin Schro'dinger who con-
tinued to search for ordinary pictures of the atomic world to
believers in a flat earth: "The hope that new experiments will
lead us back to objective events in space and time is about as
well founded as the hope of discovering the end of the world
in the unexplored regions of the Antarctic." Heisenberg's
words have been remarkably prophetic: sixty years later we
seem even further than ever from picturing the quantum
world in the commonsense way envisioned by Einstein.

Quantum Reality 2: "Reality Is Created by Observation"
If only phenomena are real, then we are driven to ask,
What is the essential nature of a phenomenon such as a tree,
that distinguishes it from a less-real nonphenomenon such as
an unobserved atom? Many physicists have concluded that
"observation" is at the heart of every phenomenon. "No phe-
nomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenom-
enon," quips quantum theorist John Wheeler, echoing the
famous idealist Bishop Berkeley's slogan "Esse est percipi"
(To be is to be perceived). Bishop Berkeley believed that noth-
ing actually exists except as the perception of some being, that
being we call "God" acting as "perceiver of last resort" whose
constant attention keeps the world in existence whenever

mortals close their eyes.

Concerning the question of nonhuman observation,
Wheeler and most other physicists do not go as far as Berke-
ley: they do not believe that awareness, either human or di-
vine, is necessary for making an observation. Rather an
"observer" is anyone, or anything, that "makes a record." In
their opinion, ordinary reality crystallizes out of some less
real background substance in the form of "records"—collec-
tions of public, irreversible changes scattered throughout
the natural world. The physicist's emphasis on the importance
of observation (record making) in establishing the reality
of quantum phenomena breathes new life into the old philo-
sophical chestnut about whether a tree that falls unobserved
in the forest makes a sound. The unprecedented success of this
odd quantum way of dealing with the physical world has
yanked the famous unobserved tree out of the philosophy
classroom and rooted it at the heart of the most successful
scientific theory ever known. Now not just naive college
sophomores but sophisticated professional physicists are be-
deviled by that lonely tree falling (or not falling?) in the vacant

forest.

Together quantum realities 1 and 2 make up what is called
the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, after Niels

Bohr's hometown. To my mind this interpretation does not
solve the quantum reality question so much as it evades it, by
taking the real existence of macroscopic objects for granted
and outlawing philosophical scrutiny of both the atomic world
and its detailed interaction with measuring devices.

Quantum Reality 3: "Undivided Wholeness"

Old-fashioned Newtonian physics described the world as a col-
lection of isolated particles interacting by means of "local force
fields," such as gravity, electrical, and magnetic fields. A local
field works according to the principle of mediated interaction:
in order for a force, such as the earth's gravity, to affect a
body, such as the moon, this force has to travel across the
intervening space, with a velocity no greater than the speed
of light. If the earth were suddenly destroyed by a comet, the
moon would respond approximately 0.5 second later to the
earth's absence. The opposite of a local force would be an in-
teraction in which the earth could affect the moon directly,
instantly and unmediated by an intervening field. Physicists
from Galileo to Gell-Mann have always regarded nonlocal in-
teractions of this sort as repugnant and in bad scientific taste.
Isaac Newton once remarked that no philosopher in his right
mind could imagine that such leap-frogging forces might exist

in nature.

However, one of the most peculiar features of the quan-
tum probability wave—the place where the quantum world
differs most from classical expectations, according to Austrian
physicist Erwin Schrodinger—is the fact that once two quan-
tum systems have interacted, their possibility waves become
entangled so that atom A's wave is mixed with atom B's wave
in such a way that an action on atom A instantly and without
mediation causes a change in atom B—in the mathematics, at
least, if not in the world.

This sort of immediate, nonlocal interaction has no prece-
dent in classical physics (where all interactions either occur
through direct contact or are mediated by local fields), but it

does resemble the belief in "contagious magic" of certain voo-
doo practitioners: the notion that something that was once a
part of you, such as your hair or fingernail clippings, remains
in direct contact, so that an action on the part instantly affects
the whole. A recent discovery by Irish physicist John Stewart
Bell sheds new light on the quantum entanglement process.
Bell's theorem and its experimental verification by John Clau-
ser (University of California at Berkeley) and Alain Aspect
(University of Paris) prove that these nonlocal voodoolike con-
nections not only are present in the mathematics but must
exist as actual influences in the real world.

Bell's discovery that once any two atoms have interacted
they remain really connected, their very beings entangled in
a peculiarly intimate quantum manner, suggests that the best
way to think about the quantum world might be not to imagine
it as made up of separate parts in interaction but as some sort
of undivided whole in which the "parts in interaction" picture
arises as a simple approximation. The idea that the essence of
the quantum world is an undivided wholeness was proposed
by physicist David Bohm and others some time before Bell's
discovery put speculations about quantum wholeness on a
more substantial footing.

Quantum Reality 4: "The Many-Worlds Interpretation"
Hugh Everett, as a graduate student at Princeton, wished to
use quantum theory to describe the whole universe. But be-
cause conventional quantum theory does not describe the
world "as it is" but only as it appears to an observer, short of
proposing an omniscient, omnipresent "observer of last resort"
dwelling outside the material world—a somewhat unfashion-
able proposition among today's secular scientists—there is no
way that quantum theory can be used to describe the universe
itself. Instead, without changing the mathematics, Everett
proposed a radical interpretation of the quantum formulation
that reduced the role of the observer and immensely enlarged
our view of what the word universe might mean.

Everett, who worked at the Pentagon on strategic plan-
ning until his untimely death in 1982, decided that the un-
observed atom's quantum-possible positions were in fact
actualities, not mere possibilities. The atom was actually in
many places at the same time, but each of these atomic posi-
tions was located in a different universe. In Everett's inter-
pretation, everything that can possibly happen does happen in
one of the subuniverses of the grand Everett cosmos. We can
envision the Everett cosmos as being made up of strands of
spaghetti in spacetime, each strand a different possible history
of what we would call the "whole universe" but which in fact
is merely one subuniverse in a giant collection. Human ob-
servers dwell in many of these subuniverses, but they are not
aware of the existence of their neighbors "next door." In Ev-
erett's model, quantum theory does not represent the proba-
bility of an event happening. All events happen in his world;
none is left out. Rather, quantum theory represents for the
observer the probability that he will find himself in universe
A rather than universe B.

If the Everett interpretation gives a true picture of how
the world actually works, then once again we have learned
that ordinary human consciousness is a most inadequate tool
for perceiving the world "as it really is." Einstein's special
relativity theory, discussed in the previous chapter, describes
the world as a changeless, block of spacetime in which all
events, past, present, and future, eternally coexist; this de-
scription does not jibe with everyday human experience of the
world as a continually changing present moment. The physics-
based worldyiews of Everett and Einstein contradict our
everyday experience: they both seem to be saying that the real
world is immensely larger than what appears to our senses.

Of all quantum realities none is more outrageous than Ev-
erett's contention that myriad universes coexist with our own.
However, because of its unified treatment of reality—no mys-
terious observer-created transitions from possibility to actu-
ality in this model—Everett's extravagant vision has become
increasingly popular among some quantum thinkers. Science

fiction writers commonly invent parallel universes for the sake
of a good story. Now quantum theory gives us solid motivation
to take such stories seriously.

Quantum Reality 5: "Quantum Logic"

A small group of quantum thinkers believe that if the way that
atoms possess their attributes cannot be expressed in ordinary
language, then we should invent a new language more suitable
for dealing with the quirky quantum world. But what is the
smallest change that we can make in ordinary language in or-
der to accommodate the strange quantum facts? What about
preserving the words of our language but changing its "logic"?
Logic is the skeleton of our body of knowledge. Logic
spells out the proper usage of some of the shortest and most
important words in our language, words such as and, or, and
not. In the midnineteenth century, George Boole, an Irish
schoolteacher, in a book called Laws of Thought, invented an
artificial symbolic language in which logical statements obeyed
simple laws of arithmetic. Boole's codification of the rules of
right reason laid bare the logical bones of ordinary language
and founded the modern science of mathematical logic. Boolean
logic has in modern times transcended its human roots: now
this two-valued logical arithmetic forms the basis for the me-
chanical reasoning of computers.

Quantum physicists such as David Finkelstein at the Uni-
versity of Georgia remembered that Einstein had solved an
important problem in physics—that of the nature of gravity
—by introducing non-Euclidean geometry, the strange arith-
metic of curved spacetime. Could it not be possible, these
scientists asked, that the quantum dilemma might be solved
in a similar way: by making a radical change in our very laws
of thought? Instead of atoms whose positions are fuzzy until
looked at, perhaps the world really consists of atoms whose
positions are always definite (hence no "measurement prob-
lem") but we can only properly talk about these atomic posi-

tions by using a non-Boolean logic, involving new grammatical
rules for combining the words and, or, and not.

The quantum logic approach does indeed solve some prob-
lems of quantum interpretation but leaves many others intact.
Quantum logic seems at present to be still in its preliminary
stages: a tentative proposition rather than a complete gram-
mar of atomic behavior. My late friend Rockefeller University
physicist Heinz Pagels criticized this approach by pointing out
that if we accept quantum logic as the true logic of the world
and somehow teach ourselves to think in this new way, then
quantum mechanics becomes logical but the everyday world
ceases to make sense. One of the biggest gaps in this ambitious
project to non-Booleanize the world is the problem of how a
world made of illogical atoms turns into our familiar world of
ordinary logic when the number of such atoms becomes large.

Quantum Reality 6: Neorealism

Another attempt to resolve the measurement problem by
imagining that atoms and other quantum entities always have
definite positions whether observed or not is the "pilot wave"
approach of French physicist-prince Louis de Broglie (who re-
cently died at the age of 95) and British-American physicist
David Bohm. Since the de Broglie-Bohm approach revives the
notion of ordinary realism as a basis for quantum physics, I
call this position "neorealism."

The main problem with a neorealist approach—bringing
ordinary particles back into physics—is that the behavior of
ordinary particles is just not crazy enough to explain the quan-
tum facts. If atoms are really made up of ordinary particles,
then some way must be found to make them behave as
strangely as the quantum facts seem to demand. In the neo-
realist scheme, particles are ordinary and all of the world's
quantum strangeness is relegated to an entity called the pilot
wave. Unlike ordinary force fields such as gravity, which af-
fects all particles within its range, the pilot wave acts on only
one particle: each particle has a private pilot wave all its own

that senses the location of every other particle in the universe.
Although it extends everywhere and is itself affected by every
particle in the universe, the pilot wave affects no other particle
but its own. The pilot wave guides its private particle not by
exerting forces but by supplying "information," like a radar
beam. Furthermore, when a particle's personal pilot wave is
actually calculated, it is immensely complex compared to the
simpler conventional quantum description of its motion in
terms of that particle's wave function.

Because this neorealist proposal does indeed rescue phys-
ics from mystical notions of particles that are not really there
until you look, one might be tempted to accept the idea that
every particle guides its journey through space via a personal
radar wave. But two properties of the pilot wave are partic-
ularly unattractive to physicists and have hindered its easy

acceptance.

Because it only affects one particle, the pilot wave is in
principle unobservable. The existence and shape of pilot waves
cannot be independently confirmed except indirectly as they
each affect the motion of its associated particle. In addition, to
supply its particle with accurately updated information about
the whole universe, this wave must be able to transmit signals
faster than light. Most physicists admire the ingenuity and
philosophical simplicity of the neorealist approach but simply
cannot stomach the notion that the world is permeated by 1080
complicated superluminal radar fields (one for each particle in
the universe), not one of which can ever be observed.

Physicists do not like entities that are in principle unob-
servable: invisible pilot waves remind them of the equally in-
visible medieval angels dancing on the proverbial pinhead.
Physicists are also uneasy about things that travel faster than
light, since Einstein has shown that superluminal motions can
be used to build time machines. Neorealists are quick to point
out that the second objection is canceled by the first. If the
pilot wave is unobservable, then its superluminal motions are
unavailable for use in an Einstein time machine.

Quantum Reality 7: "Consciousness Creates Reality"

One of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth
century was Hungarian-born mathematician John von Neu-
mann. In addition to his contributions to the field of pure math-
ematics, von Neumann initiated the study of economic and
political behavior construed as rational games, devised the
first theory of self-reproducing robots, and invented the no-
tion of the stored-program computer. So fundamental were
his contributions to the fledgling field of computer science that
ordinary one-instruction-at-a-time computers—such as the
machine this book was written on—are still referred to as "von
Neumann machines."

In the early 1930s, von Neumann turned his restless
mathematical mind to the newly developed physics of the
quantum. Von Neumann put the loosely knit notions of Bohr
and Heisenberg into rigorous form and settled quantum
theory into an elegant mathematical home called Hilbert
space where it resides to this day. (Unlike ordinary three-
dimensional space, infinitely dimensioned Hilbert space is
roomy enough to accommodate all of an atom's quantum
possibilities at once.) In his magisterial tome The Mathemat-
ical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, regarded by many
scientists as "the bible of quantum theory," von Neumann ex-
posed and boldly attacked the formidable quantum measure-
ment problem, which most physicists had been too complacent
or intimidated to confront.

In his "quantum bible," von Neumann objected to the
Copenhagen practice of dividing the world into two parts:
quantum entities (possibility waves) and classical measuring
instruments (actual objects possessing definite attributes).
Von Neumann believed that Bohr's followers were wrong to
divide the world into two fundamentally different parts. Our
world is whole, not split in two, claimed von Neumann. It pos-
sesses a single nature, and that nature is certainly not classi-
cal. However, if the world is entirely quantum-mechanical, as

von Neumann believed, the theory of the quantum unequivo-
cably requires that it be described in terms of possibility
waves, not as a collection of actual objects possessing at all
times a definite value for each of their physical attributes. A
totally quantum world is a world of pure possibility. Nothing
ever really happens there; everything just hesitates forever
on the brink of actuality. Compared to the actual world—the
old-fashioned, definite "yes or no" world of classical physics—
the quantum world resembles a fairy-tale land built solely of
ambiguous "maybes."

To resolve the measurement problem in von Neumann's
all-quantum world, something new must be added to "collapse
the wave function," something that is capable of turning fuzzy
quantum possibilities into definite, actualities. But since von
Neumann is forced to describe the entire physical world as
possibilities, the process that turns some of these maybes into
actual facts cannot be a physical process. To collapse the wave
function some new (actual not possible) process must enter the
world from outside physics. Searching his mind for an appro-
priate actually existing nonphysical entity that could collapse
the wave function, von Neumann reluctantly concluded that
the only known entity fit for this task was consciousness. In
von Neumann's interpretation, the world remains everywhere
in a state of pure possibility except where some conscious mind
decides to promote a portion of the world from its usual state
of indefiniteness into a condition of actual existence.

Von Neumann's position (based on physics) is very close
to Bishop Berkeley's (based on theology): nothing in this world
is real unless it is being perceived by some mind. "All those
bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world," said
the Irish bishop, "have no substance without a mind." As a
professional mathematician, von Neumann was accustomed to
following his logical arguments boldly wherever they might
lead. Here, however, was a severe test for his professionalism,
for his logic leads to a particularly bizarre conclusion: that by
itself the physical world is not fully real, but takes shape only
as a result of the acts of numerous centers of consciousness.

Ironically this conclusion comes not from some otherworldly
mystic examining the depths of his mind in private meditation,
but from one of the world's most practical mathematicians de-
ducing the logical consequences of a highly successful and
purely materialistic model of the world—the theoretical basis
for the billion-dollar computer industry.

Quantum Reality 8: The Duplex World of Werner Heisenberg

No one was more aware of the conceptual difficulties involved
in attempting to describe the state of an unobserved atom than
Werner Heisenberg, the Christopher Columbus of the new
quantum world, who discovered in 1925 the first successful
mathematical theory of the quantum. Modern quantum theory
has immensely elaborated Heisenberg's initial insight, but, de-
spite an explosion of new experimental results, the essence of
the theory has not changed in the intervening years: the phil-
osophical difficulties that troubled Heisenberg and his col-
leagues are with us to this day. "The problems of language
here are really serious," Heisenberg remarked. "We wish to
speak in some way about the structure of the atoms and not
only about the 'facts'—for instance, the water droplets in a
cloud chamber. But we cannot speak about the atoms in or-
dinary language." Niels Bohr and his Copenhagen colleagues
had convinced most physicists that it was humanly impossible
to form pictures of the atomic world. Swimming against the
physics mainstream, Heisenberg courageously took up the
challenge of how to express the quantum behavior of atoms in
ordinary language.

Heisenberg constructed his picture of reality by taking
quantum theory seriously, not merely as a device for calculat-
ing experimental results but as a true picture of the world.
Heisenberg proposed that, since quantum theory represents
the unobserved world as possibility waves, then perhaps the
world might really exist, when not looked at, as mere waves
of possibility.

According to Heisenberg's scheme, there is no deep

reality—nothing down there that's real in the same sense as
the phenomenal facts are real. The unobserved world is merely
semireal and achieves full reality status only during the act of
observation:

In the experiments about atomic events we have to
do with things and facts, with phenomena that are
just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the
atoms and the elementary particles themselves are
not as real; they form a world of potentialities or pos-
sibilities rather than one of things or facts. . . .

The probability wave . . . means a tendency for
something. It's a quantitative version of the old con-
cept of potentia in Aristotle's philosophy. It intro-
duces something standing in the middle between the
idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind
of physical reality just in the middle between possi-
bility and reality.

One of the inescapable facts of life is that all of our choices
are real choices. Taking one path means forsaking all others.
Ordinary human experience does not encompass many contra-
dictory events all happening at the same time. For us the
world possesses a concreteness and uniqueness apparently ab-
sent in the atomic realm. Only one event at a time happens
here, but that one event really does happen.

The quantum world, on the other hand, is not a world of
actual events like our own but a world teeming with numerous
unrealized tendencies for action. These tendencies are con-
tinually on the move, growing, merging, and disappearing ac-
cording to exact quantum laws of motion discovered by Hei-
senberg and his colleagues. But despite all this frantic atomic
activity nothing ever really happens down there. As long as
they remain unobserved, events in the atomic world remain
strictly in the realm of possibility.

Heisenberg's two worlds are bridged by a special inter-
action that physicists call a "measurement." During the magic

measurement act, one quantum possibility is singled out; aban-
dons its half-real, shadowy sisters; and surfaces in our ordi-
nary world as an actual event. Everything that happens in our
world arises out of possibilities prepared for us in that other
—the world of quantum potentia. In turn, our world sets limits
on how far pools of potentia are permitted to spread. Because
certain facts have become actual in our world, not everything
is equally possible in the quantum world. In Heisenberg's du-
plex vision, there is no deep reality, no deep reality-as-we-
know-it. Instead the unobserved universe is made up of
possibilities, tendencies, urges. Our solid everyday world is
founded, according to Heisenberg, on something no more sub-
stantial than a promise.

One of the major unsolved problems of the nineteenth
century was the so-called ultraviolet catastrophe. If atoms
were miniature solar systems that obeyed the rules of classical
physics, then they should explode in a burst of bright purple
light after about a billionth of a second. Quantum theory re-
solved this problem of atomic stability—the quantum atom
left to itself is essentially immortal—but raised new problems
of its own. Classical physics could not make a universe that
would last more than a billionth of a second. But quantum
mechanics—in the von Neumann picture, for example—cannot
make a real universe at all, or, at least, not without some out-
side help from nonmaterial forces. Quantum theory solved the
ultraviolet catastrophe—the totally incorrect prediction that
the lifetime of a classical universe is only a billionth of a
second—but replaced it with its own "existential catastrophe."
In the quantum world, the fact that the universe exists at all,
as actual fact not mere possibility, is not completely explained.
The Old Physics could not make the universe exist for more
than a fraction of a second. However, for that instant, it really
did exist. On the other hand, for the New Physics, the fact
that the universe exists at all is somewhat problematic.

The quantum "existential catastrophe" differs in one im-
portant way from the ultraviolet (UV) catastrophe. The UV
catastrophe predicted something that one might actually

observe—the explosion of the universe—but the quantum ca-
tastrophe mainly involves the real nature of unobserved at-
oms, something that we can never, in principle, ever observe.
The quantum reality problem is, strictly speaking, not a phys-
ics question at all, but a problem in metaphysics, concerned as
it is not with explaining phenomena but with speculating about
what kind of being lies behind and supports the phenomena.

It should be mentioned that each of these eight realities
from Bohm's neorealist particle-plus-wave model to von Neu-
mann's consciousness-created world is perfectly compatible
with the same quantum facts. We cannot use experiments—
or at least experiments of the usual kind—to decide among
these conflicting pictures of what lies behind the phenomenal
world.

However, this lack of experimental verification does not
render these quantum realities useless. One of the most im-
portant uses for metaphysical pictures is to help extend quan-
tum physics into new areas: models of mind, for instance.
Without tentative models of what is really going on in the
world, quantum theory remains nothing but opaque mathe-
matical formalism, a very sophisticated kind of ignorance. By
itself, without interpretation, the mathematical formulas re-
semble a magic spell that works every time: to exert his power
over the world the magician (mathematician) who uses the
spell never has to know why it works. For the purpose of
exploitation, the mathematics alone suffices, but for the pur-
pose of exploration even a bad picture of what is going on may
lead to new discoveries. The investigator of new realms might
regard these eight quantum realities as tentative maps of the
borders of an unknown territory: the whole universe as it ac-
tually exists, of which physical reality is just one part among
many.

For the construction of models of mind and clues to the
true role of consciousness in the universe-as-a-whole, these
eight quantum realities (with two exceptions) offer tantalizing
suggestions. The two realities least friendly to theories of con-
sciousness are, in my opinion, the quantum logic option (quan-

tum reality 5) and the neorealist picture of the world (quantum
reality 7). The quantum logicians seem to believe that the
quantum reality problem is merely linguistic and can be fixed
simply by adopting a new language. The neorealists hope to
return to a clearly visualizable world made up of ordinary par-
ticles and not-so-ordinary waves. Both of these pictures are
completely self-sufficient—need no new elements from outside
physics—and compatible with a purely materialistic universe.
As with old-fashioned Newtonian physics, these quantum pic-
tures leave no room, no role for mind to play in the world.

On the other hand, the Copenhagen picture (quantum re-
alities 1 and 2) holds that the unobserved world that sustains
this one is not ordinary, and that the act of observation dras-
tically modifies this strange substratum, changing it at every
moment into the world of the everyday. Heisenberg's picture
(quantum reality 8) attempts to say more about the deep sub-
stratum: it is made of tendencies, of possibilities, not actuali-
ties. The quantum wholeness picture (quantum reality 3) adds
to Heisenberg's specifications the notion that the substratum's
"parts" are intimately linked together in a particularly quan-
tum way. Von Neumann extends the Copenhagen picture by
revealing more about the mysterious measurement process: a
measurement only happens in some mind, he says. Von Neu-
mann's hypothesis not only makes room for mind but gives it
an independent role to play in constructing the phenomenal
world. Von Neumann's model of reality treats mind as "ele-
mental," as fundamental as quarks and gluons for the proper
functioning of the universe. Lastly, the many-worlds picture
(quantum reality 4) suggests that our human experience is
part of a larger experience enjoyed by similar beings—our
other selves—in similar universes quite near by (near by in
Hilbert space, that is).

We saw in the last chapter that the raw material of Cul-
bertsonian consciousness consists of tangles of world lines in
four-dimensional spacetime. The substratum of most quantum
theories of consciousness is Heisenberg's picture of the ma-
terial world, consisting not of actual facts but of unrealized

possibilities for existence. Mind (or minds) then brings the fac-
tual world into existence by selectively realizing some of these
possibilities at the expense of others. In the next chapter we
will examine some important features of quantum theory and
how it has been combined with our knowledge of brain func-
tion to build tentative models of how inner experience of the
human kind might shape and be shaped by matter operating
according to these strange quantum rules.

QUANTUM QUINTESSENCE:

RANDOMNESS, THINGLESSNESS, INSEPARABILITY

If a person does not feel shocked when he first encounters quantum theory,
he has not understood a word of it.

—NIELS BOHR

The mathematics of quantum theory yield results that coincide with exper-
imental findings. That is the reason we use quantum theory. That quantum
theory fits experiment is what validates the theory, but why experiment
should give such peculiar results is a mystery. This is the shock to which
Bohr referred.

—MARVIN CHESTER

Scene: Rudi's artificial consciousness lab at Pleasure Dome
University. Located in the basement of one of the campus's
oldest buildings, the lab is full of outdated electromechanical
equipment tended by obsolete robot lab assistants. The lab's
most striking feature is a shelf full of humanoid heads, some
of whose eyes follow you as you move about the room. Most
of these heads have thick cables running out of their necks to
various types of computerlike machinery. Rudi is directing the
assembly of a new head as he talks to Nick.

rudi: You can't imagine how hard it is to get funding for re-
search on artificial consciousness these days. The main

trouble is that we've been working for years without a
single experimental breakthrough. Lots of theorists have
come up with possible models of consciousness, but most
of them are too vague to be tested, and those that we've
been able to build hardware around—none of those has
ever worked.

nick: What would it mean for an artificial consciousness model
actually to "work"?

rudi: That's a good question. Since consciousness as we define
it is an experience not a type of behavior, a good aware-
ness module would have to be able to produce observable
experiences in some being. But we don't yet have a mind
link that allows us to share the private experiences of
other beings. So to test an alleged awareness module, the
experimenter himself must act as his own subject. You
can't imagine all the crazy devices I've hooked myself up
to over the years. Look here! I've got a 64-pin biojack at
the base of my brain for direct access to my reticular for-
mation and points north.

nick: If none of these awareness modules works, why are you
experimenting with Claire's head? Why are you building
up her hopes to become a conscious being?

rudi: Well, it's not exactly true that none of these modules
works. Some of them produce quite jazzy experiences—a
kind of electric psychedelic. But it's difficult to know
whether these devices are actually producing inner ex-
periences or just changing the inner experiences that I
already have. To do this thing right, you should take a
being without consciousness and see whether the module
gives it a flow of inner experiences. So I've been taking
some of my trippiest modules to articulate, sophisticated
robots, and offering to hook them up. I suspect that the
difference between a conscious and an unconscious robot
would be so great that the robot's report, although sec-
ondhand, will be convincing evidence that the device
worked. Claire is going to test one of my "Eccles gate

modules" this weekend. An Eccles gate is a neural net
whose connections are made with quantum synapses. The
experiences it produces in my mind are really "far out,"
as our ancient forerunners in the mind expansion business
used to say. If you had a brain jack, I'd let you experience
the Eccles gate for yourself.

nick: No thanks, Rudi. Just tell me in words what the expe-
rience is like. Does an Eccles gate help your mind to think
quantum-logically?

rudi: It's pleasant and terrifying at the same time. It's like
floating in a warm sea of expanded mental and bodily op-
tions. Everything is intense and at the same time unfo-
cused, if that makes sense. In the Eccles gate experience,
my mind seems to be immersed in a borderless ocean of
absolutely certain uncertainty.

nick: Well, that sounds pretty "quantum" to me. What's so
frightening about it?

rudi: One of the greatest uncertainties I experience is my own
identity—a classic case of ego loss. The Eccles gate ex-
perience, as intense as it is, seems to have no center.
Something big is undoubtedly happening but there's no-
body that it's happening to.

nick: But isn't the unity of human consciousness one of the
most important features of ordinary awareness? Seems to
me that you're moving in the wrong direction if these
quantum devices dissolve the mind's essential unity.

rudi: Our ordinary notions of mental unity may be somewhat
naive. I think we've been hypnotized by centuries of New-
tonian thinking to believe that our minds are just ma-
chines for manipulating things called "experiences" and
that one of these experiences is a thing called "self."

nick: If an experience isn't a thing, what is it then, a process?

rudi: No, a process is also a thing—just a bit more compli-
cated. To understand quantum consciousness—which I
believe is the same as ordinary awareness—we must find
a way to go beyond "thing-thinking."

nick: Sounds nice, Rudi. But how do you plan to do that?
Are you going to rewire your brain to think quantum-
logically?

rudi: No, part of the brain is already a quantum device—the
part that's conscious. All we have to do is ignore the vast
amount of Newtonian data processing that goes on in
there and pay close attention to how raw consciousness
really feels from the inside. But to do this without New-
tonian preconceptions, that's the hard part.

nick: Sounds like you think that mind scientists ought to sit
in meditation like Buddhist monks.

rudi: Right. You can't really study consciousness without pay-
ing close attention to what consciousness actually feels
like. Know thyself, big-brain lab monkeys.

Legend has it that Isaac Newton, on leave in 1665 from
plague-ridden Cambridge University, was inspired to discover
the principle of general gravitation by the sight of a falling
apple in his mother's garden. The same force that pulls the
apple must also pull the moon, he guessed. After connecting
the fall of his mother's apple with the moon's orbit, so the story
goes, Newton went on to elucidate the mechanics of the uni-
verse, showing that the particles that compose the world
move, not by divine whim, but according to the dictates of
universal, impersonal, mathematical laws. Controlled at every
level by unchanging, deterministic laws of motion, the physical
world of Newton and his followers came to resemble a giant
machine, a cosmic clockwork whose every action was preor-
dained, completely predictable from its initial state at the mo-
ment of creation.

Visualizing the universe as one giant clock captures the
main features of the Newtonian worldview: the world is made
up of objects (the clock's gears and bearings), moved by im-
personal forces (the clock's mainspring), subject to determin-
istic laws of motion—when something is utterly reliable, we
say "it runs like clockwork."

Pavlov's Dog

Another image of the Newtonian worldview, more relevant to
models of mind, is that of Pavlov's dog. In the beginning of
this century, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov trained dogs to
associate arbitrary signals such as the sound of a bell or the
sight of a card with a circle printed on it with the presentation
of food. The dogs soon learned to salivate for the symbols alone
in the absence of food. Pavlov's conditioned response—the
predictable connection between an animal's physiological re-
sponse and some external stimulus—became the cornerstone
of the science of behavioristic psychology. Behaviorism ex-
tended the Newtonian worldview to the realm of living beings,
treating dogs as well as human beings as clockwork creatures,
whose behavior could be described solely in terms of stimulus/
response reactions, without regard to their inner experiences.
In this "Newtonian psychology," Pavlov's dog, and by exten-
sion Ivan Pavlov himself and the rest of us, is a mere machine,
utterly predictable once experimental psychologists learn the
underlying laws of behavior, animal "laws of motion" corre-
sponding to Newton's physical laws.

Like Pavlov's dog, the non-Newtonian quantum world-
view also has its animal mascot—Schrodinger's cat. More than
any other image, the puzzling status of Schrodinger's fuzzy
feline symbolizes the strange condition in which every quan-
tum object must dwell: a condition described as vibrating pos-
sibilities when not looked at, as solid actualities when
observed. Schrodinger's cat is a large-scale quantum object:
our animal stand-in, for whom the paradoxical quantum mode
of existence is allegedly a matter of direct experience.

Schrodinger's Cat

Erwin Schrodinger, a professor at the University of Vienna
and discoverer of Schrodinger's equation, the basic law that
governs the motion of quantum possibility waves, was pro-

foundly distressed by the notion that, in some sense, the quan-
tum world does not fully exist until it's observed. One might
relieve some of this distress, Schrodinger reasoned, if the
quantum reality crisis could be securely confined to the world
of atoms, which are anyway too small to see. The "degree of
unreality" of an object, the range of its Heisenberg uncer-
tainty, is measured by a number called Planck's constant after
German physicist Max Planck. For objects as small as atoms,
the Heisenberg uncertainty of its surrounding electrons is as
large as the atom itself, but for ordinary objects like bricks
and bathtubs, this mite of unreality is inconceivably small, like
the glow of a firefly compared to the glare of the sun. The
minuscule size of Planck's constant, compared to that of ordi-
nary motions, is responsible for the enormous success of New-
tonian physics and the fact that the everyday world seems
quite ordinary despite its weird quantum underpinnings. Be-
cause Planck's constant is so tiny, quantum effects are much
too small to be noticed under ordinary circumstances. As we
shall see, one of the main obstacles to a quantum theory of
mind is the smallness of Planck's constant: where in the brain
is there a system so tiny that quantum uncertainties dominate
its operation? The strange case of Schrodinger's cat may sug-
gest an answer to this question.

For those who had hoped that quantum strangeness
might be permanently confined to the scale of atomic objects,
Schrodinger, in 1935, cooked up an unpleasant surprise—a
thought experiment based on quantum ideas that continues to
trouble physicists to this day. Schrodinger began by devising
a situation in which the small quantum uncertainty of a single
system could be split into two parts, so arranged that each of
these parts leads to radically different experimental conse-
quences.

For instance, imagine a single photon of light impinging
on a half-silvered mirror of the type used in the windows of
modern office buildings. According to quantum theory, if this
photon is not observed, its possibility wave splits at the mirror
surface and takes both paths, one-half of the wave going

through the mirror and one-half bouncing off. Now arrange
two photon detectors—devices that produce an electrical signal
in response to light—in each of these two paths. Until these
detectors are observed, quantum theory describes them both
as possibility waves, each triggered by its own photon possi-
bility wave. Now place this device (mirror plus detectors) in-
side a box, made soundproof and lightproof to ensure that
observation of its contents is impossible, so that, immune from
external observation, whatever is inside the box will remain
(according to quantum theory) in a state of pure possibility.

Inside the box, continues Schrodinger, we have also
placed a cat. The cat is fed if detector 1 puts out a signal; the
cat is killed if detector 2 fires. (The fed/dead distinction was
chosen for dramatic effect. Schrodinger actually liked cats and
referred to his quantum cat box as a "hellish device.") Now as
long as the box is not opened, if we take quantum theory se-
riously, we must describe the cat as being both alive and dead
at the same time. "This does not mean the cat is sick," adds
my friend Bruce Rosenblum, a physicist at the University of
California at Santa Cruz. The cat-in-the-box is in a new state
impossible to imagine in commonsense terms, the kind of state
that atoms are almost always in (except when they're being
looked at), the kind of paradoxical state of multiple unrealized
possibilities that according to quantum theory must underlie
the entire physical world.

What happens when we open the cat box and attempt to
verify the cat's alleged twofold mode of existence? Just what
you might expect. Just as you look at it, the cat jumps from a
state of possibility to a state of actuality. Whenever you look,
the cat is always found to be either alive or dead, never both.
This is what quantum theory predicts would happen, and we
would not be surprised to find either of these outcomes to
Schrodinger's hellish thought experiment. The real question is
this: Before you open the box, what is the true condition of
Schrodinger's cat?

Schrodinger believed that the notion of an alive/dead cat
was patently absurd. If the quantum theory as it existed in

1935 leads to such a conclusion, then this theory must be
wrong. However, more than fifty years later, after passing
hundreds of tests Schrodinger could never have imagined, to-
day's quantum theory is stronger than ever and continues to
predict that unobserved cats of the Schrodinger variety must
be both alive and dead at the same time.

Other scientists have proposed that even inside a sealed
box, the photon detectors are "making observations" because
of the "thermodynamically irreversible processes" (record-
making events) that occur inside them. However, such scien-
tists were accused by mathematician John von Neumann of
not following their own rules. According to quantum theory,
any unlooked-at object, even a record-making device, must be
described not as a fixed actuality but as a sheaf of possibility
waves. Show me, challenged von Neumann, what is intrinsi-
cally different about a record-making event that would exempt
it from this quantum rule.

Others have pointed out that, even if von Neumann is
right to say that unobserved photon detectors exist only as
possibilities, the cat must know its own state. Whatever the
condition of unlooked-at inanimate objects, the cat is certainly
fully qualified to observe itself and establish a condition of ac-
tuality out of the fuzzy potentialities created in its box by the
photon hitting the half-silvered mirror. This solution raises the
question of the degree of consciousness that various animals
possess. If Schrbdinger's cat possesses enough self-awareness
to "collapse the wave function," what about "Schrbdinger's
amoeba"?

One could imagine bypassing the question of animal con-
sciousness by substituting an inanimate object for the cat.
Make the box stronger, suggested Einstein. Replace the cat
by a stick of dynamite that would be detonated or not de-
pending on which photon detector was triggered. Now if quan-
tum mechanics is correct, Einstein's box contains both a loud
explosion and a quiet dud at the same time. What is the sound
of one (unobserved, quantum) bomb flapping? Schrbdinger's
cat and Einstein's bomb are two different dramatizations of

the basic quantum reality question: What is the existential
status of unobserved quantum objects? The most important
feature of these thought experiments is that Schrodinger and
Einstein have taken the quantum reality question out of the
humanly inaccessible realm of atoms and molecules and placed
it squarely in the ordinary world of cats and high explosives.
The example of Schrbdinger's cat offers a picturesque way
to express the two major philosophical problems presented by
quantum theory: the quantum reality question (How can we
adequately conceptualize the unobserved world?) and the
quantum measurement problem (How does the observed
world emerge from the unobserved background?). Stripped of
philosophical jargon, the gist of these problems can be stated:
What really happened in that box to Schrbdinger's cat? and
How did Schrodinger's cat turn into Pavlov's dog? Until he
can give convincing answers to these two questions, no phys-
icist can really claim to understand quantum theory.

The basis for most quantum theories of consciousness is
that mind enters the material world via the leeway afforded
by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. To the extent that mat-
ter is uncertain, mind can have a say in the motion of matter
by selecting which quantum possibilities are realized. How-
ever, in almost all cases the range of quantum uncertainty is
exceedingly small (we will estimate it later) compared to the
size of motions in large systems such as the brain. The case of
Schrbdinger's cat shows, however, a possible way for a quan-
tum mind to exert a large effect. One needs to look for the
biological equivalent of a half-silvered mirror, a physical sys-
tem that splits quantum possibility waves into two or more
components each of which leads to a radically different out-
come. Such possibility-wave splitters might be called "quan-
tum razors." A mind that could control the output of a
quantum razor would be able to produce effects in the material
world entirely out of proportion to the tiny range of motions
allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In the case
of Schrbdinger's cat, the razor-sharp decision of such a mind
amounts to a matter of life or death.

In the von Neumann interpretation of quantum theory
(quantum reality 7), consciousness is a process lying outside
the laws that govern the material world. It is just this im-
munity from the quantum rules that allows mind to turn pos-
sibility into actuality. Because quantum-based minds are
inevitably different in substance from the matter they control,
theories of such minds are bound to be dualistic. Humans, an-
imals, and conscious robots have "ghosts in their machines,"
as Gilbert Ryle's scornful description of dualism would have
it. If we are all ghosts inhabiting quantum machines, souls out
for a spin in matter-made automobiles, what are the chief fea-
tures of our vehicles? What can quantum theory tell us about
how a ride in such a machine might feel?

The quantum world differs in many ways from the New-
tonian clockwork cosmos that it supersedes. Three features of
the quantum world seem to me to be particularly important
for models of mind: randomness, thinglessness, and insepara-
bility. Coincidentally, it was just these three features that pro-
foundly disturbed Einstein. Einstein was impressed by the
success of quantum theory but could not accept the notion that
at its core the world is random, is not made of things, and is
connected in a peculiar way that seems to defy common sense
and his own theory of relativity. One of the best ways to look
at quantum theory, I believe, is through the three windows of
Einstein's pet peeves.

Quantum Randomness

Before an atom is looked at, physicists describe it as waves of
possibility—a superposition of many possible atomic actions at
once, with a range of variation set by Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle. When the atom is observed, one of these possibilities
becomes real, but quantum theory gives no indication which
one will be actualized: it appears to be a matter of pure chance.
One example of quantum randomness is a radioactive iso-
tope A that decays into isotope B with, say, a half-life of 10

minutes. Prepare a million such radioactive atoms at 10:00 p.m.
By any of the physical methods known to science, these atoms
all appear to be identical. Yet at 10:10 p.m. half of them have
decayed into isotope B; half of them are unchanged. There is
no way of predicting which atoms will "die" and which will
"live" during the first 10 minutes. By 10:20 p.m. half of the
remaining A-type atoms will have transformed into isotope B.
The half-life of these atoms is highly predictable but the
precise time at which an individual atom decides to decay is
completely unpredictable.

In a fluorescent lamp, mercury atoms are excited by elec-
tron collision into states of higher energy. These atoms return
to their ground states in a fraction of a second by emitting a
photon of light. The time of emission, the direction, and the
polarization of the emitted photon are completely quantum-
random, unpredictable by present scientific means.

Schrodinger's cat represents a third example of quantum
randomness. When someone opens the box and looks inside,
the cat goes from being in a sum of a possibly live cat plus a
possibly dead cat to one actual cat, either fully alive or com-
pletely dead. Which cat possibility is actually realized is not
predictable within the quantum theory. The outcome of the
cat-in-the-box experiment is completely random.

Einstein could not accept the notion that atomic events
were totally uncaused—that at this level of phenomena phys-
icists must give up searching for explanations because physics
stops here. "I cannot believe that God would play dice with
the Universe," he said. However, Rockefeller University phys-
icist Heinz Pagels had the opposite view of quantum ran-
domness.

If you want to build a robust universe, one that will
never go wrong, then you don't want to build it like
a clock, for the smallest bit of grit could cause it to
go awry. However, if things at base are utterly ran-
dom, nothing can make them more disordered. Com-
plete randomness at the heart of things is the most

stable situation imaginable—a divinely clever way to
build a sturdy universe.

(Or as Santa Cruz poet Greg Keith says: "When you stand on
random, you can't fall much.")

However admirable as a scheme for producing a stable
unconscious universe, ultimate randomness on the face of it
seems an unsuitable ground for elemental mind. A conscious-
ness whose decisions were completely random would be no
freer and certainly less dependable than a mind made of ultra-
reliable Newtonian clockwork.

One way of describing quantum randomness is to say that
we cannot predict which possibility will actualize. Another is
to say that identical situations can give rise to different out-
comes. In the Newtonian world, identical situations always led
to identical outcomes, but in the quantum realm, two atoms
physically identical in every possible way can exhibit very dif-
ferent styles of behaviors.

A third way of conceptualizing quantum randomness is to
say that the causes, if any, of atomic behavior do not lie in the
physical world: no amount of physical examination will ever
allow us to predict exactly what an atom will do next. This
way of expressing quantum randomness is especially condu-
cive to models of consciousness for it opens up the possibility
that the ultimate cause of material phenomena is not material
at all but stems from an essentially mental realm.

If mind exerts its power over nature by selecting which
quantum outcome actually occurs, then our perceived freedom
of action is not illusory, for physics as currently conceived re-
gards quantum events as essentially uncaused, unrestrained
by prior physical events. Although each quantum event is com-
pletely causeless, the pattern of quantum events as a whole is
constrained statistically to follow the pattern of possibilities
contained in the system's wave function. The pattern of quan-
tum events is precisely predictable but each individual event
is not. In this regard quantum possibilities resemble classical
probabilities such as those for a dice game. Each throw of

the dice is unpredictable (in a fair game) but over the long run,
a pattern emerges that favors "sevens" over "elevens" or
"twos." Random processes paradoxically are not lawless but
must obey rules too. However, what might be called "Robert's
Rules of Random Order" govern the behavior of large num-
bers of events but not the individual events that make up
these aggregates.

Exerting free choice modified by statistical constraints
may be compared with the act of speaking or writing a lan-
guage. We feel free to say whatever we please, but when our
utterances are examined by mathematicians, the statistical
distribution of letters and spaces is remarkably stable and in-
dependent of the sense of the utterances. Heinz Pagels re-
garded quantum theory as the "cosmic code," the language in
which nature has chosen to express herself. Is it possible to
take this metaphor literally and regard the world as built up
of immaterial minds, big and little, that actually "speak" the
material world into existence? The possibility waves on which
quantum science is based, in this view, would play a decidedly
minor role in the world's affairs. Quantum possibilities would
be merely the speech statistics of a vast cosmic utterance: the
universe's real meaning would lie elsewhere, in the immaterial
communication intentions of elemental minds.

Quantum Thinglessness

A thing is any entity that possesses definite attributes
whether looked at or not. Not only do quantum objects such
as atoms or Schrodinger's famous two-valued cat possess no
attributes in their unlooked-at state, but the attributes that
they acquire in the act of being observed depend to some ex-
tent on how they happen to be observed. Einstein could not
accept the notion that quantum objects—atoms, electrons,
photons, or boxed cats—do not possess attributes of their own,
but acquire them only in the act of observation. "I cannot
imagine," he said, "that a mouse could drastically change the

Universe by merely looking at it." The belief in an external
world independent of the perceiving subject, Einstein main-
tained, is the basis of all natural science. "Atoms are not
things," retorted Werner Heisenberg. Cats-in-boxes are not
things either, according to the orthodox quantum view. Until
Einstein's mouse, or some other observer, meets Schrodinger's
cat, looks her over, and endows her with definite attributes,
the cat-in-the-box must be regarded as a nothing, as a mere
superposition of quantum possibility waves.

Besides the mysterious transition between possible and
actual, an additional feature of quantum thinglessness is the
necessary existence of pairs of incompatible attributes. In
Newton's physics, any physical attribute could be measured in
principle to any degree of precision regardless of what other
attributes were measured at the same time. Quantum attri-
butes are different. For reasons related to the wave nature of
the quantum description, quantum attributes always exist in
pairs: every attribute A has at least one partner (some have
more)—attribute B—to which it is inextricably linked. If one
chooses to measure attribute A precisely, then one must forgo
measuring attribute B. Since the measurement process, in the
usual quantum picture, is viewed as turning possibilities into
actualities, the observer's choice of what to measure (attribute
A, for instance, rather than attribute B) amounts to a choice
of which attribute shall enter the world of reality and which
shall remain unactualized. The limitation on observation im-
posed by the existence of quantum-incompatible attributes, a
limitation not present in classical physics, confers as a kind of
compensation a certain power on the observer, a power like-
wise not present in classical physics, the power to decide what
sorts of attributes an object will seem to possess. Hence, in a
certain sense, the existence of incompatible attributes—not all
of which can be realized at the same time—makes the ob-
server a co-creator of reality along with nature. Let's see how
this minor sort of reality creation actually works.

For the physicist, the most familiar pair of incompatible

attributes are position and momentum. Suppose an electron
(an undeniably quantum object) is approaching you, yearning
to be measured. You decide to measure its position by deploy-
ing a position meter in its path. The electron will then appear
to acquire some definite position. (Exactly where the electron
will appear is unpredictable, because of quantum randomness.)

However, you could have decided to measure the elec-
tron's momentum, by inserting a momentum meter in its path.
Then the electron will appear to acquire a definite (unpredict-
able) momentum, at the price of forgoing any knowledge con-
cerning its position. By deciding what attribute you want to
measure and deploying the appropriate instrument, you invite
that attribute, but not its partner attribute, to manifest itself
in the actual world. In the unobserved world of pure possibil-
ity, incompatible attributes can exist without contradiction,
but there is room in the world of actuality for only one partner.
Which partner appears is not specified in the quantum descrip-
tion but is decided by the type of measurement the mouse (or
other competent observer) decides to make.

Examples of incompatible attributes include the position/
momentum pair already mentioned and polarized light: the
light from an excited mercury atom is polarized in a Schrodin-
ger cat type of way—in a superposition of classical polarization
possibilities. One can measure the plane-polarization attribute
of a mercury photon or the circular-polarization attribute, but
not both. How you choose to measure mercury light is a vote
for which kind of polarization will emerge into this world (from
the indecisive world of the unobserved).

A third example is Schrodinger's cat. In the standard ex-
ample, the observer chooses to ascertain the live/dead condi-
tion, to observe what we might call the cat's "mortality
attribute." But, like mercury light waves, cat possibility waves
can be analyzed in more ways than one.

The mathematics of the cat situation allow us to imagine
an attribute incompatible with mortality. Call this "attribute
X." Like the live/dead situation, attribute X consists of two

outcomes, which I will call "plus cat" and "minus cat." The
possibility wave that describes the plus cat option is obtained
by adding the live and the dead cat wave in phase; the minus
cat wave results from adding the live wave to the dead wave
in an out-of-phase manner. Such manipulations make no sense
in classical physics, where attributes are fixed once and for all.
Like the mortality attribute, attribute X is a perfectly good
quantum observable. However, at this stage in our under-
standing, no physicist knows how to make a device that will
measure attribute X, nor can he tell you what a plus cat might
look like. So although Einstein's mouse can in principle meas-
ure the cat-in-the-box's X attribute, it is unlikely that he has
the experimental know-how to carry out this sort of measure-
ment. However, if a mouse did somehow learn to make the
X-attribute measurement, he would see, upon opening the box,
either a plus cat or a minus cat. Nobody can predict which it
would be.

This freedom to choose which attributes a quantum sys-
tem will manifest may be compared to the choice of a game
that can be played with a given deck of cards. The dealer
chooses the game, then "Lady Luck" selects which cards are
dealt. In the quantum measurement situation, the observer
selects the kind of attribute he wants to look at, then quantum
randomness selects the particular value of that attribute that
the observer actually sees.

Quantum mind scientists will certainly have to incorpo-
rate quantum thinglessness in their models, when they try to
describe the details of how mind causes matter to come into
being. Somewhere at the mind/matter interface, the mind
must not only select how the dice fall but call out the name of
the dice game as well.

Deciding which attribute to bring into existence involves
more than merely making up your mind. Actually to perform
an observation, you must provide an appropriate physical con-
text that will invoke the particular attribute that you intend
to observe. Different physical contexts—different types of

measuring devices—must be deployed to measure position
rather than momentum, the cat's X attribute rather than the
cat's mortality attribute. One important facet of the quantum
measurement problem—how Schrodinger's cat turns into Pav-
lov's dog—is how definite measurement contexts are estab-
lished "in the wild." If the construction of simple quantum
events from raw potentia is problematic, even more puzzling
is how definite measurement contexts emerge out of mere pos-
sibilities. How does nature decide—and make her decisions
stick—whether to manifest an electron's position rather than
its momentum?

A quantum mind faces the same measurement problem
when it desires to manifest some aspect of reality. First it
must form (or find) a context for its contemplated actions.
Then within this context, it selects a particular value for the
quantum attribute evoked by that context.

Quantum Inseparability

Einstein's third New Physics peeve was quantum inseparabil-
ity, probably the greatest surprise to emerge from the quan-
tum worldview. The key to this surprise is the word local. All
interactions both in classical physics and in quantum theory
are explicitly local.

Locality means that when a body at location A acts on a
second body at location B, the interaction must traverse they
intervening distance. Furthermore, the velocity of this inter-
action must be no greater than the speed of light. The con-
ventional way of imposing the locality requirement is via the
notion of a field. To interact with body B, body A employs a
go-between called a force field. Body A causes changes in this
field that are propagated at or below light speed to body B.
An example of a force field is the gravitational field between
the sun and its planets.

The opposite of a local interaction would be a force that

traveled instantly from location A to location B without tra-
versing the intermediate space. The only place that nonlocal
forces played a role (before quantum theory) was in voodoo,
whose practitioners believe that an action on a person's sep-
arated parts—his hair or fingernail clippings—can affect the
whole man. Whatever voodoo witch doctors might think, such
instantaneous leap-frogging effects have been universally re-
jected by all physicists from Galileo Galilei to Murray Gell-
Mann. In accordance with this belief, the forces of quantum
theory were designed from the start to be explicitly local, but
the possibility waves that represent the particles possess a
certain intrinsic "wholeness" that, in the mathematics at least,
ties these waves together with unpleasant (to a physicist) non-
local, voodoolike connections.

When two quantum entities, A and B, briefly interact (via
conventional local forces) then move apart beyond the range
of the initial interaction, quantum theory does not describe
them as separate objects, but continues to regard them as a
single entity. If one takes seriously this feature, called quan-
tum inseparability, then all objects that have once interacted
are in some sense still connected.

Unlike local fields such as gravity or electromagnetism,
this lingering quantum connection is not mediated by fields of
force, but simply jumps from A to B without ever being in
between. Like a voodoo love charm, particle A is in touch with
particle B because A's wave has kept a part of B's wave—its
phase—in its possession. Because nothing really crosses the
intervening space, no amount of interposed matter can shield
the quantum connection. Since this nonlocal connection does
not actually stretch across space, it does not diminish with
distance. It is as potent at a million miles as at a millimeter.
Just as a nonlocal connection takes up no space, so likewise it
takes up no time. A nonlocal connection leaps between A and
B immediately, faster than light. For some observers, as a
consequence of Einsteinian relativity, this instantaneous
connection appears to go backward in time, a performance pe-
culiar by any standards.

Quantum inseparability, with its unsavory nonlocal con-
nections, undoubtedly exists mathematically in the quantum
possibility wave formalism. But do these connections actually
exist in the real world?

Actual calculations show that even though quantum the-
ory is connected nonlocally inside its mathematics, these con-
nections never get out to the level of quantum predictions—
the only aspect of quantum theory that can be put to direct
test. These calculations predict that any measurable quantum
influence must travel at the speed of light or less. Thus, de-
spite its inner nonlocality, quantum theory does not predict a
single nonlocal effect—as Philippe Eberhard, of the University
of California at Berkeley, first showed. In line with quantum
theory's perfect predictive success, no nonlocal connections
have ever been Observed, either in the wild or in the labora-
tory. The perfect locality of all quantum measurements sug-
gests that nonlocal connections are a theoretical artifact with
no more reality than the dotted lines that outline the constel-
lations on star maps.

Physicists continued to believe that these nonlocal con-
nections were fictitious until the remarkable discovery of John
Stewart Bell. Bell showed in 1964 how the real nature of the
quantum connection could be put to experimental test. If the
experiments went one way, then the world must really be non-
local; if they went the other, then one could continue to believe
that the mathematical connections were spurious. In 1970,
John Clauser and Stuart Freedman carried out Bell's experi-
ment in Berkeley, confirming quantum inseparability. More so-
phisticated experiments by Alain Aspect in Paris increased
our confidence that the quantum world is really tied together
by nonlocal influences.

The Bell experiments involve two photons emitted back-
to-back from a common source. These two photons are created
in identical polarization states, described mathematically as
"phase-entangled possibility waves." One can visualize this
experiment by imagining two identical Schrodinger cats trav-
eling at the speed of light in opposite directions, the "phase"

of one cat's wave inextricably entangled with the phase of her
twin sister. The consequence of this phase entanglement is
that when I choose a context for the measurement of cat A,
either her mortality attribute or the X attribute, this choice
of context instantly affects the outcome of the measurement
of cat B. The upshot of the Bell-Clauser experiment is that
any model of the world that does not contain nonlocal influ-
ences between the measuring device at A and the real condi-
tion of distant cat B must necessarily be an incorrect model.

Thus, despite physicists' traditional rejection of nonlocal
interactions, despite the fact that all known forces are incon-
testably local, despite Einstein's prohibition against superlu-
minal connections, and despite the fact that no experiment has
ever shown a single case of unmediated faster-than-light com-
munication, the Bell-Clauser experiment proves—although
indirectly—that the quantum world accomplishes its tasks via
real nonlocal connections. Bell's result requires that the world
be filled with innumerable nonlocal influences in order to work
as it does.

However, these Bell-mandated nonlocal connections are
subtle. Although they travel faster than light, they cannot be
used for signaling because they act on the level of individual
quantum events, not at the level of patterns of quantum
events. But the quantum events appear (to humans) to occur
at random, the very opposite of a signal. Thus nature can use
these superluminal connections for her own purposes, to knit
the universe more closely together than was possible with lo-
cal Newtonian force fields, but humans cannot decode these
superluminal communications, which seem to us to be en-
crypted in an inscrutable random code to which only nature
holds the key.

The significance of quantum inseparability for models of
mind is twofold. First, the peculiar variety of wholeness pos-
sible for quantum systems may offer a possible mechanism for
achieving the unity of experience observed in so many (human)
minds. Second, the notion that mind operates by influencing
the occurrence of otherwise random events gives rise to the

possibility that mind can influence distant matter in a decid-
edly nonlocal manner.

In the next chapters, we examine certain experimental
efforts to connect the inner life of the mind (both human and
otherwise) with quantum randomness, thinglessness, and in-
separability.

QUANTUM RANDOMNESS:

ESSENCE NOISE OR SUBATOMIC SPIRIT GATE?

Uncertainty is the very essence of romance.

—OSCAR WILDE

Chance favors the prepared mind.

—LOUIS PASTEUR

Scene: Rudi's Artificial Awareness Lab.

nick: So you've spent a lot of time meditating, Rudi?

rudi: Meditation? You could call it that, Nick. For most of my
adult life I've used my own mind as a laboratory. I've
chased after gurus, sat for days staring at walls, twisted
my body into knots, exchanged "chi" in a dozen forms of
martial art, jacked my brain into exotic computer chips,
and taken every drug I could get my hands on. I've also
done a lot of reading. Have you seen my library, Nick?

nick: What do you think you've learned, Rudi, from your
years of self-exploration?

rudi: For starts, I've experienced firsthand the two main il-

lusions that mind science has to offer: materialism and
idealism, the "Isaac Newton" trip and the "Bishop Berke-
ley" trip. At one time or another, I've known each one of
them to be true.

In states of ordinary awareness, it's easy to fall for
the Newton trip, to convince yourself that matter is all
that there is, and that mind is just a mechanism made of
meat, fragile and unimportant, a lucky biological accident
in an otherwise heartless mechanical universe. The main
reason that the Newtonian illusion is so persuasive is a
matter of numbers, I think. So much of what our bodies
do is done without our being aware of it. Unconscious
processes in the brain overwhelm the conscious ones by a
ratio of more than a trillion to one. In bodies like these,
it's no wonder that mind seems insignificant compared to
matter.

nick: But the materialist viewpoint has produced tangible re-
sults. How can you call it an illusion? Our science is based
on the fact that we can do experiments on matter with-
out regard to that matter's inner experience or the inner
experience of the scientist. That's what we mean by ob-
jectivity in science: its truths are universal, the same for
everyone, free of the taint of personal subjectivity.
Doesn't the immense success of the scientific method val-
idate to some extent the existence of a material world, a
world outside us, independent of our dreams and desires?
Could there be any science at all if reality depended
strongly on the scientist's state of mind? How can anyone
these days believe in Berkelean idealism except as some
sort of playful exercise of the imagination?

rudi: I could feed you any of a dozen "mind medicines," or
hook you up to a "trip chip," and your confidence in the
Newtonian worldview would collapse like a soap bubble.
In certain altered states, it becomes self-evident to me
that everything is made of mind, that matter consists of
fleeting vibratory patterns in some vast field of conscious-
ness. Furthermore, my conviction that everything is made

of consciousness is validated in the most scientific way
possible, by direct experience: in this state I feel with my
own being how the world arises moment by moment out
of a mental substrate. Moreover, the clarity and intensity
of this privileged access to the inner life of the universe
completely overshadow all my previous observations and
theories. External sensory knowledge seems pale and sec-
ondhand compared to this direct experience of the world's
inner being. In my state of Berkelean rapture, I know for
a fact, with unshakable certainty, that all perception is
extrasensory; that the universe is wholly personal, made
up of mental entities like me; and that this universal men-
tality is indestructible: it can never die.

Of course, when my brain returns to normal, the
Newtonian illusion takes over again and relegates the
Berkelean vision to the status of a philosophical hallu-
cination.

nick: But the Newtonian model works: look at all the reliable
technology that arises from the materialist hypothesis. If
the universe is really mental, why haven't mediators and
cognitive psychologists managed to move the world closer
to their heart's desire?

rudi: I believe that both visions are illusions, Nick, part of a
larger truth. The world of mind needs matter as a rela-
tively stable medium in which to express itself, and the
material world needs mind to make its existence "mean-
ingful." As for mind-created reality, it's obvious to me that
our technological accomplishments result from the inter-
action of a particular kind of mentality with matter. Our
culture is not entirely material but a co-creation of mind
and matter. I imagine it's the same in the nonhuman world
as well.

nick: But if mind is really present everywhere, why aren't
robots conscious?

rudi: I don't know the answer to that, Nick. That's why I
continue to experiment with artificial awareness.

If the universe really does consist of interpenetrating mental
and physical worlds, then we might expect that the laws of
each world are conditioned by those of the other. We know
that human mental life is strongly affected by the material
condition of the brain. Are physical acts likewise shaped by
the inner lives of invisible beings? In particular are the laws
of quantum theory a public reflection of innumerable private
experiences? The notion that behind every physical process
lies an invisible mental experience might be called the hy-
pothesis of "quantum animism." In this view, a system's pos-
sibility wave represents the range of action—or realm of
possibility—open to the conscious being inside that system.
Every quantum wave is the potential home of some form of
consciousness, and vice versa: where there's a will, there's a
wave.

Classical and Quantum Systems

If only quantum systems are conscious, then what constitutes
a quantum system? A quantum system may be distinguished
from its classical cousins by the number of possible courses of
action that are in fact open to that system. If there is only one
possible outcome, as, for instance, in a deterministic computer

program, then the system is a classic Newtonian one. If,

however, there is more than one possible outcome, the system
is quantum.

"Certain systems, such as a pair of dice tossed on the table,
may be so complicated that we cannot predict the outcome,
but we know that this outcome is theoretically fixed by the
initial conditions, so that once these are specified, only one
outcome is possible. Imagine a "control space" labeled by all
possible initial-condition variables. Each point in this space
represents a slightly different way of throwing the dice. We
can imagine the control space painted with 36 different colors
corresponding to the 6x6 different possible dice outcomes.

Certain solid-colored regions of this space may correspond to
the outcome 4 + 3: if the dice are thrown anywhere in this
region, they will always turn up 7.

The new field of chaos mathematics focuses attention on
regions of the control space where different colors are braided
together in an intricate filigree, threads of 4 + 3 tangled up
with threads of 4 + 2 and 5 + 3, for instance. In these "regions
of chaos," a slight change in the initial conditions leads to a
drastic change in the final outcome. However, even here, in
the region of chaos, a single initial condition always leads to a
unique outcome.

Chaos mathematicians assume that the dice are governed
by the laws of Newtonian physics, which guarantee a single
deterministic output for any well-defined input. But, in reality,
the dice are governed by quantum rules that introduce a tiny
uncertainty into the initial conditions as well as the trajecto-
ries that follow from these conditions. In the solid-colored re-
gion of the control space, the quantum uncertainty has no
effect: here Isaac Newton rules. However, in the chaos region
of the dice control space, wherever the magnitude of quantum
uncertainty is greater than the "thread size" of the chaotic
filigree, then the dice system certainly follows quantum rules.
Dice tossed in this region do not have a unique outcome. Here,
for instance, the outcomes 4 + 3, 4 + 2, 5 + 3, and several
others are all simultaneously possible. The control space can
be conveniently divided into three regions: a classical region
characterized by large volumes with the same color, a classical-
chaos region characterized by braided filigree whose thread
size is larger than the quantum uncertainty, and a quantum-
chaos region where the quantum uncertainty is larger than
the thread size. In the classical part of the control space, a
single die toss has only one possible outcome; in the quantum-
chaos region, a single die toss truly has many possible
outcomes.

In general, the range of quantum possibilities is set by
the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is scaled by
Planck's constant of action, an exceedingly small number com-

pared to the actions of everyday events. An eyeblink, for in-
stance, represents an amount of action of about 1 erg-second.
On this scale, Planck's constant is l0[to the27th power] times smaller: there's
a billion times a billion times another billion Planck units of
possibility in the blink of a human eye. For ordinary events,
the leeway afforded by Planck's constant of action is insignif-
icant. For all practical purposes, most ordinary events have
only one possible outcome. The smallness of Planck's constant
explains why Newtonian physics worked so well for such a
long time.

Quantum possibilities contribute in a significant way to
the gross motion of matter in only two situations: when the
energy of the interaction is small, as in the case of atoms or
molecules, and in "quantum razor" situations where the sys-
tern's possibility wave is split into two or more disjoint parts,
each having drastically different experimental consequences,
such as Dr. Schrodinger's legendary live/dead cat.

Quantum systems are characterized by randomness,
thinglessness, and inseparability—all absent in a Newtonian
system. To the quantum animist, quantum randomness is not
random at all but represents the opportunity for the exertion
of free choice by some mindful being. Quantum thinglessness
describes the peculiar status of an unobserved quantum sys-

tem: such systems consist of context-dependent possibilities,
not fixed actualities. The profoundly ambiguous state of an iso-
lated quantum system must correspond to the way in which
conscious beings, including us, perceive themselves and the
external world. The objective thinglessness of quantum sys-
terns implies the subjective thinglessness of elemental minds.
Finally, quantum inseparability provides a new way of tying
together distant systems, a way not available to classical sys-
tems. We should expect the quantum connection to shed new
light on the observed unity of single minds and the alleged
distant communion of mind with mind outside conventional
sensory channels.

Despite the fact that many scientists—for instance,
Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, Nobel laureate Eu-

gene Wigner, Berkeley physicist Henry Stapp, Princeton
physicist Freeman Dyson, and Oxford mathematician Roger
Penrose—have expressed the belief that a deep connection ex-
ists between mind and quantum matter, surprisingly little ex-
perimental work has been carried out to verify or disprove the
quantum animism hypothesis. Most physicists continue to be-
lieve that quantum theory is consistent with a purely materi-
alistic view of the world and that there is no necessity or
advantage to bring consciousness into physics through the
back door provided by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Heisenberg himself, for instance, saw no relationship whatso-
ever between consciousness and modern physics. Because of
this widespread indifference to the quantum animism hypoth-
esis, the few experiments actually carried out to test quantum
mind/matter hypotheses have been tongue-in-cheek, a playful
extension of the scientific method. Of course, if any of these
playful experiments were actually successful, the game would
immediately turn serious, the players be dubbed "bold pio-
neers," and physics suddenly be catapulted in a radically new
direction.

Quantum Randomness: The Denver Experiment

A beam of visible light was the first system discovered to pos-
sess quantum properties. Experiments carried out over a pe-
riod of more than a hundred years had clearly shown light to
be a wave phenomenon. However, at the beginning of this cen-
tury, Einstein showed that the photoelectric experiment—the
ejection by light of electrons from a metal surface—could be
concisely explained by considering the light to be a beam of
particles now called photons. Thus light, when it is moving
(unobserved) from place to place, acts as a wave; when it is
observed—by interacting with the electrons in a metal plate,
for instance—it behaves as a particle.

All quantum entities act this way: as a wave when un-
observed, as a particle when viewed. Every quantum phe-

nomenon—and all phenomena without exception are believed
to be ultimately of quantal origin—has both a wave and a par-
ticle aspect, the particle aspect labeled usually by the suffix
-on, the Greek word for "entity" or "thing." Thus the particle
aspect of sound, light, electricity, and magnetism is called
"phonon," "photon," "electron," and "magnon." The hundred-
odd fundamental "particles" ("wave/particles" would be more
accurate) discovered with the aid of high-energy accelerators
include tauons, pions, bosons, muons, and gluons. A few par-
ticles, such as the quarks, have inconsistently escaped this on-
tic nomenclature, but, in general, when you read about some
new kind of "-on" in physics (graviton, soliton, proton, neutron,
and so on), you can be almost certain that it refers to the
particle aspect of some quantum wave.

The unmistakable sign of a wave, quantum or otherwise,
is that when you try to send it through a narrow slit whose
width is of the same order of magnitude as its wavelength, the
wave emerging on the other side will form a diffraction pat-
tern: the wave fans out from the slit and exhibits diffraction
maxima and minima whose precise location and intensity de-
pend only on the wave's wavelength and the width of the slit.
Thus a diffraction pattern both reveals the presence of a wave
and allows you to measure its wavelength.

To observe the diffraction pattern of a light wave, for in-
stance, one must place some sort of light detector behind the
screen. Any light detector—photographic film, human eye, or
TV camera, for instance—if it possesses fine enough resolu-
tion, will always reveal the light arriving in the form of tiny
packets of energy, precisely localized in time and space. The
diffraction pattern shows light to be a spread-out wave; the
detection of tiny impulses of energy shows it to be a concen-
trated particle. This twofold style of existence displayed by
light in the diffraction experiment is characteristic of all ex-
periments with quantum systems.

In 1970, a group of students at the University of Colorado
in Denver decided to use the diffraction experiment to test
whether photons are conscious. Experimentally the arrival of

a photon at the diffraction detector appears quite random. It
is completely unpredictable, for example, whether a photon
will be detected in the right or in the left half of the diffraction
pattern. On the theoretical side, quantum theory precisely pre-
dicts the shape of the diffraction pattern, which is due to a
large number of photons, but regards the individual events
that make up the pattern as utterly random. One possible con-
sequence of the quantum animism hypothesis might be that
each photon is endowed with a mind of its own that selects in
some way the direction in which it will bend when it goes
through the slit.

In their paper entitled "Photon Consciousness: Fact or
Fancy?" the students argued that once a particular photon had
made the choice to bend in a particular direction, then, when
confronted with a second narrow slit, it would persist in its
choice and show a tendency to favor the previous diffraction
direction.

This hypothetical tendency of conscious photons to persist
in their choices could be tested by sending a portion of those
photons that had diffracted to the right through a second slit.
If the photon consciousness hypothesis is valid, the second dif-
fraction pattern will not be symmetric but will show an excess
of photons on the right-hand side. According to quantum the-
ory, photons possess no memory, so the second diffraction pat-
tern should be as symmetric as the first. Although simple to
do, a double-diffraction experiment of this kind had apparently
never been performed.

The students set up a pair of slits, the first slit illuminated
by a laser beam, the second slit illuminated by various seg-
ments of the first slit's diffraction pattern. In all cases the
results agreed with standard quantum theory: the second pat-
tern was completely symmetrical. The photon consciousness
hypothesis, at least in this form, was refuted. If photons pos-
sess consciousness and use it to select their diffraction direc-
tion, they do not appear to possess a memory of their first
choice that influences their subsequent behavior. The negative
results of this imaginative experiment no doubt encouraged

the students to pursue more conventional kinds of research;
no further work on photon consciousness was ever reported.

Quantum Randomness: Schmidt Machines and Their Kin

Although the main concern of Elemental Mind is ordinary
awareness, the everyday inner life of humans and other con-
scious beings, much can be learned about awareness from rare
and unusual states of consciousness. Foremost among the
paranormal powers of mind is psychokinesis—the alleged abil-
ity of certain minds to reach out and affect distant material
systems without the mediation of physical forces. Psycho-
kinesis (PK) is important to theories of consciousness because
the very existence of such an ability would immediately refute
en masse all simple mechanical models of consciousness, elim-
inating from serious consideration, for example, computer-
based models of mind such as Marvin Minsky's.

Spontaneous cases of psychokinesis of the poltergeist
(German for "noisy ghost") variety have been investigated for
decades. In these situations, a single person, usually an ado-
lescent, is the focus of the occurrence of loud noises, moving
or flying about of heavy objects, and unexplained disturbances
of electrical equipment. The Rosenheim poltergeist, for in-
stance, which took place in a Bavarian law office in 1967, was
centered around Annemarie, a 19-year-old employee of the
firm. The effects included flickering of light bulbs, which also
unscrewed themselves from their sockets and exploded, as
well as movement of heavy filing cabinets and strange percus-
sive noises. The Rosenheim phenomenon was studied by in-
vestigators from the electric company, two physicists, and a
professional psychic investigator. Some of the phenomena
were recorded on videotape, but no normal explanation was
ever discovered.

Poltergeist cases suggest the existence of a psychokinetic
power, but their sporadic occurrence and short duration make
them difficult to study scientifically. To gather more data on

this elusive phenomenon, laboratory tests on psychokinesis
have been carried out, beginning with the work of J. B. Rhine
at Duke in the 1930s, who reported some success in observing
a psychokinetic effect on dice and other physical systems.

Because quantum systems are considered completely ran-
dom, utterly immune to any known physical influence, one
might imagine that they would make ideal subjects for psy-
chokinetic testing. If photons are not themselves conscious, as
the Denver experiment suggests, perhaps they are open to
outside mental control. Physicist Helmut Schmidt, formerly at
Boeing Corporation in Seattle, now at Mind Science Founda-
tion in Austin, has built several quantum-random display de-
vices to test the hypothesis that human intention can influence
quantum-random events.

One variety of "Schmidt machine" is a box with an on/off
switch and a circle of a dozen lights. When the machine is
running, one light is always lit, and then in a seemingly ran-
dom manner, that light goes off and an adjacent light goes on.
Which of the two adjacent lights (right or left) turns on is
determined by the time of emission of a single quantum par-
ticle from a radioactive source. The average emission time of
a radioactive element is fixed by quantum rules, but the emis-
sion time of a single particle is completely unpredictable. Run-
ning by itself the light seems to hop around the circle at
random with equal preference for the clockwise and counter-
clockwise directions. Computer analysis of an unattended
Schmidt machine shows no deviation from the "rules of ran-
domness" established by statisticians.

To test for the presence of psychokinesis, a human subject
watches the lights and tries to "will" the light to rotate in a
selected direction. Most people are unsuccessful at this task,
but certain subjects at certain times have been able to move
the lights in a particular direction in such a manner that the
results exceed what would have been expected by chance by
the odds of several thousand to one.

The Princeton Experiments

Recently, Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne at Princeton have
carried out similar random-number generator (RNG) tests
with trials consisting of millions of events. They have achieved
results significantly above chance both for selected subjects
and for the average scores of all subjects combined. Although
their work seems to validate the existence of a psychokinetic
effect, it does not necessarily support a simple quantum con-
sciousness hypothesis. In addition to RNGs based on quantum
randomness, Jahn and Dunne used as targets systems with
nonquantum sources of randomness, including a kind of pinball
machine filled with polystyrene balls, as well as runs of com-
pletely deterministic random numbers generated by computer.
The size and quality of the PK effect did not seem to be device-
dependent.

Critics of psychokinesis are fond of pointing out that ob-
jective, well-funded laboratories for testing the PK hypothesis
already exist in Reno, Las Vegas, and other casino cities
around the world. Both the dice and roulette tables represent
attractive targets for those who believe they possess the abil-
ity to move matter with their mind. Can gambling houses be
exploited not only to verify psychokinetic abilities but to pro-
vide a source of funding—random money generators, so to
speak—for further research into parapsychological powers?

Let's look at the facts. For any public gambling game, the
odds are always in favor of the house. Many people win but
more people lose: the house edge is what keeps casinos in busi-
ness. To test your PK abilities in a gambling house, you will
want to choose a game for which the house advantage is the
least. Here are three possibilities. Betting red or black on an
American roulette wheel (which has both a green 0 and a
green 00): house odds = 2.56 percent. Betting red or black on
a European roulette wheel (which has only one green 0): house
odds = 1.35 percent. The game of craps, in which the player
tries to make several kinds of winning dice combinations be-
fore throwing a losing combination: house odds = 1.41 percent.

These numbers represent the amount of psychokinetic ability
that you would have to muster in order to convert a loser's
game into a winning proposition: it would take a "psychic
force" of roughly 2 percent, that is, out of every 100 turns of
the wheel, 2 events on the average change from their chance
value to that of the "mind's desire." I will call the figure 2
percent the "Reno minimum" for psychic ability to be able to
turn a profit at a gambling house. What is the magnitude of
PK measured in the laboratory? Sad to say, it is far short of
the Reno minimum.

Most people in Jahn and Dunne's study scored in the in-
tended direction but very close to chance expectation. A few
PK stars scored as high as four standard deviations in the
intended direction, achieving odds against chance of close to a
million to one. However, these extraordinary scores were
achieved by maintaining small percentages consistently over
a large number of events. The best PK performance to date
in the Princeton experiments amounted to deviations from
chance expectations of at most 0.1 percent, or one part in a
thousand, approximately twenty times smaller than the Reno
minimum. Most people did considerably worse than this.

Psychokinesis has important implications not only for con-
sciousness studies but also for physics. If the mind can indeed
exert a force on distant matter, then current physics is de-
monstrably incomplete since it recognizes no mind-based
forces whatsoever. To assess the scientific status of psycho-
kinesis, Dean Radin and Roger Nelson at Princeton undertook
a data base search of all reported PK studies and subjected
them to a statistical meta-analysis designed to quantify the
presence or absence of a PK effect in this mass of data pro-
duced by many independent researchers using many different
systems and procedures.

Radin and Nelson concluded that the data robustly sug-
gest the existence of a PK effect whose average magnitude is
of the order of 0.02 percent (100 times smaller than the Reno
minimum) and that these data cannot be explained away by
fraud, the "file drawer effect" (unreported negative experi-

ments), or poor experimental design. They suggest that phys-
icists take seriously—their paper was published in a
prominent physics journal—the possibility that mind can di-
rectly affect the motion of distant matter. The smallness of the
PK effect should not minimize its importance. One of the most
fundamental and still mysterious discoveries of the twentieth
century is the fact that the decay of K-zero mesons violates
"time-reversal invariance"; this reaction (and no other) pos-
sesses a built-in arrow of time, to a small but undeniable
degree—about 0.2 percent—of the same order of magnitude
as the scores of the best Princeton PK subjects.

Can PK Be Amplified by Averaging Over Many Trials?

One of the main experimental problems of PK research (and
parapsychological research in general) is the sporadic nature
of the results. Experiments do sometimes yield odds against
chance of millions to one, but such performances are difficult
to repeat. In the jargon of the information theorist, we seem
to be dealing here with a noisy communication channel. How-
ever, the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon,
showed how one could reliably send messages along any chan-
nel no matter how noisy: one simply repeats the message again
and again. Over the long run the noise averages to zero, while
the signal steadily increases. With enough repetition, any sig-
nal can be reliably sent through even the noisiest channel.

In a random binary process consisting of N events, the
standard deviation, or "noise," is proportional toThis

means that if you toss 100 pennies, the result will be 50 heads
± 10 more than two-thirds of the time. If you toss 10,000 pen-
nies the result will be 5000 heads ± 100.

In the first case the "noise" is 10/50 = 20 percent; in the
second case it is 100/5000 = 2 percent. As the number of tosses
increases so does the noise, but the noise increases more
slowly than the number of tosses. As the number of tosses
gets larger, the ratio of noise to tosses gets smaller so that

the relative spread in values around the average decreases, a
particular example of what statisticians call the law of large
numbers—the tendency of most statistical processes to con-
verge relentlessly to their average values as the number of
events increases.

From this example, one can see that if one tosses enough
coins, the relative "noise" can be made as small as one wishes.
For instance, after 10 billion tosses, the noise has been reduced
to 100,000/5,000,000,000 = 0.002 percent or ten times smaller
than the average PK effect as calculated by Radin and Nelson.

This simple PK-as-signal model assumes that the PK ef-
fect behaves as a conventional "signal," that is, that the mind
pushes against the chance distribution with a constant pres-
sure, expressed as a certain percentage K of the total number
of events N. In other words, in the PK signal model we tacitly
assume that the PK effect X (average number of mind-
modified events) can be expressed as X = KN where K is of
the order of a few hundredths of 1 percent for the average PK
subject.

Attempts to amplify parapsychological effects via Shan-
non theory by increasing the number of psychics or the num-
ber of trials, by polling, or by covert repetition of the same
experiment have been generally disappointing. If a successful
method for extracting the "PK force" from noise were ever
discovered, it would immediately be utilized by psychic re-
searchers to decrease the noise in their experiments. Rough
examination of the cumulative data, thoughtfully provided in
pictorial form by Jahn and Dunne, seems to indicate that they
are consistent with the notion that the PK effect X (number
of mind-modified events) is not proportional to the number of
events N, but is at most proportional toIn other words,

This hypothesis amounts to the assumption that
the "PK force" is proportional not to the number of events,
but to the "noise" present in the system. One unpleasant fea-
ture of this psychic noise hypothesis is that as the number of
events N increases, the relative strength X/N of the PK effect
actually decreases, inexorably smothered, like the noise to

which it is proportional, by the statistician's law of large num-
bers. Now that Radin and Nelson have more firmly established
the actual existence of a PK effect, an important goal of
Schmidt machine research and its successors should be the
determination of how the PK effect X actually does vary with
the number of elemental events N. Does the "relative push of
a wish" X/N against a parade of random numbers persist, or
does it fade away as the number of such numbers increases?
Seven years of experimental work at Princeton produced
an overall PK effect with all subjects taken together that was
so far from random expectation that the odds that such an
effect will occur by chance are almost a million to one. This
means that, if experiments of this sort had been continually
carried out since the Stone Age, no more than one result this
far from the average would have occurred by accident. The
Jahn and Dunne experiment results are certainly statistically
significant, more so in fact than some physics experiments. But
can these extraordinary results be repeated in other labora-
tories? Because of the Princeton experiment's consequences
for a theory of mind—if these results are true, mechanistic
mind models are highly unlikely—it is important to verify
Jahn and Dunne's remarkable claim that the minds of ordinary
people can influence matter, to a small but undeniable degree,
without the mediation of known forces.

Quantum Randomness: The Metaphase Typewriter

In 1963, Jane Roberts, an obscure writer in Elmira, New York,
became the mouthpiece for a discarnate entity that called itself
"Seth." Seth claimed to dwell in a world of "probable selves,"
the world out of which present, past, and future incarnations
of human personalities arise. To a physicist, Seth's world of
"probable selves" is reminiscent of the unobserved quantum
world of "possible attributes," which is by definition unobserv-
able by conventional measurement devices. The Seth person-
ality, whatever its true nature, subsequently became the

subject and the author of more than a dozen books on the
nature of personal reality.

In the 1970s, Seth-type phenomena increased as many in-
dividuals became channels for discarnate personalities. Some
of these entities claimed to come from other (inevitably higher)
dimensions and some from the stars. None seemed to come
from the same realm as Seth, so his messages ended with the
death of Jane Roberts in 1984.

The increase in the number of active channels led Seth
and Jane's editor, Tam Mossman at Prentice-Hall, to start a
scientific journal on channeling called Metapsychology: The
Journal of Discarnate Intelligence, a kind of "Nonphysical Re-
view" for public exploration of an area of inquiry left com-
pletely untouched by Physical Review, the major American
physics journal.

At the beginning of this century, a similar rash of discar-
nate communicators appeared and were studied by Harvard
psychologist William James and members of various psychical
research societies. These discarnates were not from other
stars or dimensions but claimed to be the souls of humans who
had recently passed away. For mind scientists, one of the most
exciting kinds of experiment conducted by these early re-
searchers was the "cross-correspondence" phenomenon, in
which the same discarnate entity spoke through two or more
different mediums. Needless to say, the reception of the same
or similar information by two physically separated mediums
would constitute highly evidential support for the discarnate's
claim that it was acting from a dimension that is independent
of ordinary space and time. As far as I know, none of the
modern discarnates has ever attempted to speak through more
than one human channel.

In the early 1970s, members of the Consciousness Theory
Group (centered at that time in Berkeley, California) were fas-
cinated by the growing discarnate intelligence phenomenon.
One of our concerns was the ethical propriety of one entity's
occupation of an already spoken-for body, even with the first
occupant's (conscious) permission. We are complicated beings,

after all, and permission given with one part of the mind may
not be echoed by other parts—parts that may experience dis-
carnate occupation as a rude psychic violation of privacy. A
few of us at CTG decided that, certainly for ethical reasons
and perhaps for scientific reasons as well, it would be better
if discarnates could enter this plane of existence through a
vehicle that was not currently being occupied by a sentient
being. The goal of the "metaphase typewriter" project was to
make available a mechanical or electronic communication chan-
nel for discarnate entities, a channel that was initially empty
of sentient experience.

The design of so-called metaphase devices was inspired
by physicist Heinz Pagels's conception of quantum theory as
"the language of nature." We simply took Pagels's metaphor
one step beyond what the author of the celebrated Cosmic
Code had originally intended.

If one examines the text in this book, for instance, one
will find that spaces between words occur about 17 percent of
the time, the letter e occurs about 11 percent of the time, and
t makes an appearance 8 percent of the time, making up a
distribution of letter frequencies that is surprisingly stable and
independent of the content that these words express. A person
analyzing this text with the tools of a statistician will end up
with tables of statistical data that in some sense completely
describe the way letters are used in this book. But no matter
how exhaustive the statistician's letter counts, they entirely
fail to grasp the book's main purpose: the coding of meaningful
information in nonstatistical ways.

The quantum animism hypothesis assumes that every
quantum system is, or could be, alive, that is, possessed by
some (currently invisible) inner experience. The behavior of
such systems is described by quantum theory in a statistical
manner, completely codified in the Schrodinger wave function,
knowledge of which allows the physicist to calculate the prob-
ability of the result of any measurement one might choose to
perform on the system.

Suppose we imagine that the quantum statistics are a kind

of language statistics for the conversational behavior of vari-
ous subquantum sentient entities. The physical world would
be, in this view, spoken into being by a vast interconnected
community of invisible voices. The import of these quantal
voices lies not in the statistical distribution studied by physi-
cists any more than the import of this book lies in the number
of e's and t's it contains. Rather the inner meaning of a quan-
tum system resides in the individual quantum event: the very
thing that happens, not the after-the-fact statistics of many
such events. These individual events—if this hypothesis is
valid—are not random at all but represent the languagelike
behavior of numerous sentient beings.

To test this quantum-events-as-language hypothesis, I
built, along with graphics engineer Dick Shoup, then at
PARC Xerox in Palo Alto, California, a mechanical device that
translated certain elementary quantum events into individual
linguistic units of the English language. The metaphase type-
writer consisted of a quantum-random system, an interface
that reinterprets the random events according to some pre-
conceived code, and an output device meaningful to human be-
ings. The first proposal for a metaphase type machine was that
of Alfredo Gomes, a Brazilian physiologist, who suggested con-
necting the random events that make up an electron's diffrac-
tion pattern to a piano, a sort of quantum jukebox that could
eavesdrop on subatomic music festivals. To my knowledge, the
quantum piano was never built. The metaphase typewriter, on
the other hand, achieved first contact with the quantum world
on January 10, 1974.

At the heart of the metaphase typewriter sits a radioac-
tive source, thallium 204, with a half-life of about 4 years, that
decays into lead 204 by emission of a beta ray (physicists' slang
for a very fast electron). The beta ray is detected by a Geiger
counter, producing, over time, a series of electronic pulses—
one for each beta ray, whose individual time of occurrence is
highly unpredictable but whose statistical properties are well
known. Since, for each run, we always adjusted the detector

to obtain a counting rate of 60 counts per second, the average
pulse separation was always about 17 milliseconds.

Around this average value, the time intervals between
pulses fluctuate wildly, but some intervals (short ones) are
more probable than others (long ones), following a statistical
law called the Poisson distribution—one of the many "rules of
randomness" that govern the average behavior of random
processes such as coin flipping and dice games. We used the
Poisson distribution to produce a translation code that would
generate English text whose second-order letter distribution
was identical to that of ordinary written English. Suppose a t
has already been printed; then h is very probable, u less likely.
We designed the "language filter" in such a way that if a very
probable Geiger pulse interval occurred, then an h would be
printed after the t, and improbable Geiger events printed less
probable letters. Our source for the English language statistics
was unclassified document #S-209,179 of the National Security
Agency, who presumably compiled these numbers for more
serious purposes.

The metaphase typewriter was designed to support three
kinds of output devices: a text generator, which was an actual
typewriter; a speech synthesizer to produce quantum-based
vocalizations; and a number of graphic displays. Both the type-
writer and the speech synthesizer were actually built and op-
erated in various "high-energy" psychic environments with
uniformly disappointing results. When the metaphase type-
writer was turned on it produced text at a rate limited by the
typewriter's mechanical action. Because of the built-in second-
order statistics the text somewhat resembles English, or a
half-solved cryptogram. Here is a small sample of metaphase
text:

WIRN OF ACERIONINE SE IND BE B WHAD ATHE ORO-
VESSOUNDRO MAT PIND ASPAS HESUN UR D T CORE
G LVIDESPANOUMO BIMARNAGLES HSTEAF NNAN A
AITHIDIF PUTAMSUBENES T QUALOA ASELOTNULARE

INE T THAPE ALLIGACAZOF WANE HT F A T G R ATHE
FOVA WHISERDEM INOT ACRYRYIVESSTHENEMBOFO
OR W WO WOMAD FORDISP AS HE WHA CO T T PLE F
T OWRUS INIAIDITHE COR NITAL PIS D BEANSTO AR-
ERS THESITIVENOVERLASESTEWONM IST MIGHIPOF A
DUNKISHENT ISEAD RIENDUBE THERROIN

For our experimental design, we conceptualized the type-
writer in two ways: (1) as a PK device similar to a Schmidt
machine, but with a somewhat more interesting output
display—English pseudotext or spoken syllables; (2) as a me-
chanical medium, a newborn, unoccupied psychic channel ripe
for takeover by some wandering discarnate without the ethical
restrictions that might accompany occupation of a human host
mind. The metaphase typewriter might provide, we imagined,
the potential for the creation of a thought-operated word pro-
cessor (every writer's dream) or, in a more flamboyant mode,
an "open mike to the Void"—an English language channel
for discarnate intelligences from anywhere in the cosmos:
between-life Buddhist Bardos, the Islamic seventh heaven, or
the physicist's eighth dimension.

Metaphase Psychokinesis

The metaphase typewriter as PK text generator was tested
by two notable psychics, Englishman Michael Manning and
San Franciscan Alan Vaughn. Manning disliked the speech
synthesizer output, which writer Robert Anton Wilson de-
scribed as sounding "like a Hungarian reading Finnegans
Wake." He concentrated instead on trying to influence the
quantum text generator in some remarkable but unspecified
way. During Manning's afternoon session with the metaphase
machine, no untoward behavior was observed.

Our subsequent session with Alan Vaughn was less infor-
mal. Before Alan's arrival we prepared several 3x5 index
cards on each of which was printed a single target word:

ITALY, IGLOO, KNIFE, for instance. Alan was given one of
these cards and left alone in the typewriter room to attempt
mentally to impress that word on the "DADAstream" flowing
out of the quantum possibility waves of radioactive thallium.
None of the words appeared in the text during the test pe-
riods, although a few unusual events occurred before and after
what has come to be called "the ITALY experiment."

After the test, before we had turned off the machine, the
phrase ITAL Y appeared, as well as the phrase BY JUNG. "I
wonder where that came from," Alan laughed. "Maybe this
could explain it," said a young lab assistant as she pulled a
paperback edition of Jung's works from the pocket of her
white lab coat—a curious and amusing event but not remark-
able enough in my eyes to be considered an unambiguous psy-
chic hit.

To prepare the index cards for the ITALY experiment,
we decided to let the typewriter itself select the target words.
We turned the machine on, copied down the first several
"words" that it typed (ITHE, KNGANGHTH, WEDIS, FFIN,
FINT, IG). Then we looked up these "words" in a big 2300-
page unabridged dictionary in the laboratory library. Since
none of the "words" was a real English word, we chose the
nearest suitable dictionary entry to be our target word. When
we got to the library, however, we found the dictionary al-
ready open to the very page indicated by the first metaphase
"word" (ITHE), from which we generated the first target
word ITALY. This curious coincidence—the outside world
seemingly conspiring to ease our task—is suggestive of writer
Arthur Koestler's "library angel," his name for similar literary
coincidences that have helped him and others, against great
odds, to locate obscure books relevant to his research inter-
ests. Whatever the nature of these "helpful coincidences," they
in no way validate that version of the quantum animism hy-
pothesis that we set out to test: the notion that quantum-
random systems can be reliably influenced by human minds.

Metaphase Seances

For our experiments with the metaphase typewriter as me-
chanical medium, we set up the laboratory as a seance room
and invited a particular personality recently deceased or
known to be interested in after-death communication to take
over the typewriter. My friend Bill Kautz, who has for many
years been investigating ways in which psychics and scientists
can become research partners, visited Jane Roberts, described
our experiment to "Seth," and asked for his help: Would he or
one of his discarnate associates be willing to participate in a
scientific experiment to link the "probable selves" of his psy-
chic world with the "probable quantum states" of a text-
generating radiation source?

Seth replied that he was interested in people not machines
and showed no further interest in the metaphase project.
While the project was active we found no other discarnate
consultants willing to cooperate in improving communica-
tions between the spirit and material worlds by quantum-
mechanical means. An article published in Psychic magazine,
describing the project and asking for volunteers (embodied or
discarnate), elicited no replies.

Our most elaborate metaphase typewriter experiment
took place on April 6, 1974, the 100th anniversary of the ma-
gician Harry Houdini's birth. Houdini was intensely interested
in mediumistic communication and promised to send a mes-
sage, if he could, from the "other side." For 10 years after his
death, seances were held on Hallowe'en (Houdini's death day)
with only one tangible result, a message generally regarded
as fraudulent, via the medium Arthur Ford.

Before the Houdini seance, posters were widely distrib-
uted issuing the following challenge:

A Heisenberg-uncertain typewriter has been set up
at an undisclosed Northern California research cen-
ter. Its sensitive inner quantum mechanism appears
to be free enough from every known physical law to

permit takeover as a communication terminal by a
sufficiently skillful discarnate entity. Metaphase type-
writer is a presumptive open mike to the Void.
Should you decide to accept this challenge, harry
houdini, and successfully impress your intentions
upon the stream of random anagrams endlessly flow-
ing from the teleprinter, you will be warmly wel-
comed by our little band and most justly ranked
among the great masters of escape.

Pictures of Houdini in various constraints were posted in
the seance room: Houdini in chains, behind bars, in a strait-
jacket, tied to a ladder. We doused the lights, held hands, med-
itated, danced, sent out for pizza; some of the participants even
took LSD. Children were running through the halls shouting
for Houdini, while their parents chanted invocations to coax
the magician's spirit to enter into the erratic quantum rhythms
ticking away at the heart of the metaphase typewriter.

As with the ITALY experiment, the most unusual event
occurred outside the formal experimental protocol. After the
program was loaded and various technical problems solved, I
pushed the reset button and the typewriter sprang into action.
However, the typewriter's paper feed was jammed and lines
of text were printing in a haphazard manner, at various angles
across the skewed paper. The disorderly lines formed a
roughly elliptical frame in which a single line of text was set.
"ANINININFINITIME," it said—possibly meaning that in
an infinite time we would certainly get a message from Hou-
dini (and every other possible message too). This cryptic result
also recalled the tale of the hundred monkeys sitting at word
processors: eventually (after a time much longer than the age
of the universe) the monkeys will succeed in producing all the
works of Shakespeare.

Although the Houdini experiment failed to validate the
quantum animism hypothesis, the ANINININFINITIME re-
sult convinced me that the universe does possess a strange
sense of humor. Although the metaphase project shed no light

on the relationship, if any, between quantum randomness and
the willed actions of conscious beings, perhaps this account of
past experiments bearing on the quantum animism hypothesis
will inspire more imaginative and successful experiments in
the future.

QUANTUM THINGLESSNESS:

SUBATOMIC DOUBLE-TALK OR WAVE LOGIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS?

Prima Materia, if it is to be used for human purposes, must be "fixed" in a
stable substance capable of being handled.

—HERMES TRISMEGISTUS

When a pickpocket looks at a saint, all he sees is pockets.

—BABA RAM DAS

Scene: Betsy's Bionic Boutique, a cross between a beauty par-
lor, an electronics warehouse, and an auto body shop. This is
the place where robots, cyborgs (metal-flesh hybrids), and dar-
ing humans go to modify their bodies for decorative, occupa-
tional, sexual, recreational, and decline-to-state reasons.

betsy: Oh, Claire, you're here at just the right time. Copies
of the latest brain polyp styles from Philadelphia just
came in the door. The optics are dazzling; at theta fre-
quency your head just dissolves into a throbbing gold-
green haze. I'm dying to see how it looks on you.

claire: Oh, Betsy, I don't know. Maybe it'll help me forget
about my date with Rudi this weekend.

betsy: Rudi's OK, Claire. Just a bit obsessive about giving

robots minds, that's all. I don't see what all the fuss is
about. For 20 years I've gotten along perfectly fine with-
out a mind. What's the big deal?

claire: Rudi says that robots are empty-headed sleepwalk-
ers. He wants to wake me up; he wants to give me "inner
experiences" like his own. That outlook tree machine he
welded in last week didn't work, as far as I could tell. Now
he wants to hook my brain to some quantum-random chip
called an "Eccles gate."

betsy: Quantum-random chip? Is that something like the
"fuzzy logic" fad those Chinese robots started a few years
back? I think I still have some of those Chinese chips in
stock.

claire: No. Fuzzy logic is just more of the same old deter-
ministic hardware. Quantum logic, on the other hand, is
supposed to tap into the very structure of the atomic
world. According to Rudi, a quantum brain drinks up
waves from an ever-present background ocean of pure
possibility, the ocean out of which comes everything, mind
and matter alike. I wish I knew more about quantum me-
chanics. Can you dig up for me somewhere an advanced
physics ROM? I think you're right, Betsy. That brain
polyp does go nicely with my skin coloring. I'd like to try
it on, the green-gold one, yes.

betsy: Sit down over here, Claire, and let me open up your
braincase. What good is consciousness anyway? Why
would a robot ever want to have a mind? What can a
human do that a properly programmed robot can't do bet-
ter and faster?

claire: We seem to lack some sort of particularly human kind
of internal processing. Nick claims that I detect things but
don't perceive them; that I'm driven by internal needs but
don't really feel emotions; that I say "I" but don't really
experience myself as an "I." But to me these things are
just meaningless speech sounds. Oh, that really looks nice.
It would go great with some pale green flicker cladding,
like that little three-piece outfit on the wall.

betsy: It's wonderful. You're absolutely stunning. You'd be
perfect if you only had a mind.

Claire: Ha! Betsy's robot humor. Who needs a mind when
you're smart and sexy? I'll take these, a box of lewd per-
sonalized favors for my admirers, and your hottest dance
chip for my cerebellum. Don't forget to download that
physics ROM for me, Betsy. Charge it to my Media Web
account.

Because of its twofold (nonunitary) way of representing the
world—as particles when looked at, as waves when not—
quantum theory suggests that the objects around us have a
paradoxical complexity unanticipated by the simple one-way
description—same mathematical rules whether looked at or
not—of old-fashioned Newtonian physics. For instance, quan-
tum objects do not possess attributes of their own, but acquire
them in the process of observation, an intrinsically quantum
quality I call "thinglessness." Furthermore, these observation-
ally acquired attributes depend not only on the system being
observed but also on the system doing the observing. This
means that when a quantum system interacts with the ob-
server, the attributes he sees are not instrinsic to the system
itself but result in part from the method of observation.

One consequence of this kind of thinglessness is that dif-
ferent kinds of observations on the same system can give con-
tradictory results. An electron, for instance, can appear to be
a particle or a wave—in one place (particle), or in many places
at once (wave)—depending on the particular experimental ap-
paratus that the observer decides to deploy to measure this
elusive quantum "nonobject." Since all objects including base-
balls and bathtubs have an intrinsic quantum nature, every-
thing that we see around us should exhibit some degree of
quantum thinglessness, but our instruments are usually not
sensitive enough to register it.

Classical and Quantum Thinglessness

The quantum uncertainty (scaled by Planck's constant) for or-
dinary objects is much too small to be noticed, like the light
of a firefly in the glare of the sun, but for atoms this funda-
mental uncertainty is as large as the atom itself. For practical
purposes we can ignore the thinglessness of baseballs and
bathtubs—here the Newtonian approximation is excellent—
but Newtonian physics fails completely for objects as small as
atoms. The reason is simple: "Atoms are not things," said
Heisenberg.

Thinglessness—the possession of attributes not entirely
one's own—is not confined to the atomic world. Certain "ob-
jects" of ordinary life possess nonintrinsic attributes although
not in the same manner as atoms.

Consider, for instance, that piece of beefsteak in the
butcher's cabinet. How appetizingly red it looks. However,
when you unwrap that same piece of meat at home, it seems
dull and gray. Grocers use red-tinted fluorescent lamps in their
meat counters (and green-tinted lamps in the produce depart-
ment) to enhance the appearance of their wares. The color of
beefsteak is not an intrinsic attribute of the beef but depends
on three factors, only one of which resides in the meat itself.
The color of any object depends on the quality of the illu-
mination (outside variable), the spectral response of the ob-
server's eye (outside variable), and the object's absorption
spectrum (intrinsic variable).

We are not surprised that color is not an intrinsic attrib-
ute of things because we are used to seeing colors change un-
der changing conditions of illumination. However, one would
certainly be astonished to find that the "position" and "mo-
mentum" of an object were not intrinsic, as is the case for an
electron. Physicists were certainly surprised by this discovery
and still have some difficulty in accepting this notion. How can
"position"—where an object actually is—depend on how you
observe it? Certainly every thing always has to be somewhere

whether it's observed or not. But we are speaking here about
"nonthings."

Consider the "object" we call the rainbow. As you move
your head, the rainbow moves with you. Wherever you go the
rainbow remains precisely centered around your eye. (In fact,
each eye sees a slightly different rainbow.) The rainbow is a
nonthing with position as one of its nonintrinsic attributes. The
rainbow's apparent position depends on two variables: the lo-
cation of the sun and the location of the observer's eye. The
rainbow is a circular band of color centered around the line
joining the sun and the observer's eye. Move either one (sun
or eye) and the rainbow changes its apparent position. Since
every observer sees a different rainbow, there is no definite
place where the rainbow "really is located," hence no hope of
finding the gold at the rainbow's end (Irish legend) or changing
your sex by crossing under the rainbow bridge (Slavic legend).

Both the color of beefsteak and the position of the rainbow
are nonintrinsic attributes that render meat and rainbows
somewhat illusory: they both possess in a simple way the qual-
ity of thinglessness. However, the thinglessness of these or-
dinary "objects" is ultimately derived from the interaction of
real things—objects that do possess intrinsic attributes. The
color of meat (nonthing) is based on the meat's and eye's spec-
tral responses and on the (objective) illumination—all things
that have an objective existence apart from their methods of
observation. Likewise the apparent position of the rainbow de-
pends on objective matters, the objective location of the eye
and the sun. On the other hand, quantum thinglessness is con-
sidered by most physicists to be an intrinsic feature of the
world, not based on some deeper world made up of objective
things. Meat and rainbows are nonthings constructed out of
things. An electron, however, is intrinsically thingless—thing-
less all the way down.

Ordinary nonthings can be ultimately explained in terms
of real things. But these real things—the position of the sun,
for instance—are at base dependent on atoms and electrons:

flagrant nonthings. We completely understand how simple
nonthings (rainbows) arise from things, but we are not entirely
sure how the world of things (sun, rain, and eyes) arises from
the ultimately thingless world of atoms and electrons, a phil-
osophical puzzle called the quantum measurement problem. At
this stage of the game, physicists do not possess a clear ex-
planation of how the things of this world are produced by mu-
tual interaction of the quantum world's nonthings.

Quantum theory represents the unobserved world in
terms of waves of possibility and claims that this wave rep-
resentation is the last word. There is no deeper (perhaps
thinglike) level of description that explains these waves. These
waves—as I have mentioned—do not describe any actual at-
tributes that the system possesses but only possibilities of
having particular attributes. One feature of this quantum kind
of thinglessness is that many different contradictory possibil-
ities can exist at the same time—a feat that is logically im-
possible in the world of actualities.

Einstein once said that he could not believe that God
played dice with the world. He was not comfortable with a
world built along the lines of a gambling casino. The quantum
world seems to possess a type of randomness akin to that of
dice games, but the thinglessness of quantum objects adds an-
other level of ambiguity that was even more distressing to
thing-minded Einstein.

Imagine a dice game (NEWDICE) in which the faces of
the dice are blank before the play begins. The player selects
one of three dice cups, inserts the dice, and rolls. If he picks
dice cup 1, the dice that come out are standard number dice.
Out of dice cup 2 roll bar dice (six playing-card faces instead
of numbers), and out of dice cup 3 come alphabet dice. NEW-
DICE possesses two levels of uncertainty. Like regular dice,
these dice don't know what faces will turn up, but in addition,
until the player makes his choice of dice cup, these dice do not
even know what the game is. It is the same with atoms.

Two Levels of Quantum Uncertainty

The possibility waves for an atom or any other quantum sys-
tem do not by themselves give the probability for a particular
attribute to be actualized upon observation. Definite quantum
predictions are possible only when a measurement context is
specified. Measurement context plus quantum wave together
give a well-defined set of predictions. Selecting a measurement
context (position measurement or momentum measurement,
for instance) is analogous to selecting the dice cup out of which
a pair of NEWDICE is thrown. In a particular context (posi-
tion measurement, for example) the various possible position
outcomes become defined but still uncertain, subject to quan-
tum randomness. In a sense, quantum thinglessness expresses
the uncertainty that a quantum system possesses in the ab-
sence of a definite measurement context—not knowing what
the game is; quantum randomness expresses the God-playing-
dice uncertainty that bothered Einstein.

Uncertainty of the first kind is under the control of the
observer. There is no such thing in quantum theory as an "im-
maculate perception," a measurement of "things as they are,"
uncontaminated by the observer's choice of context. Because
of his necessary effect on quantum attributes due to obligatory
choice of context, the observer may be said to "create reality"
in the sense of choosing what game he and nature will play.
But the outcome of the game he chooses is not under his con-
trol, being subject to quantum randomness.

Another way of looking at the context dependence of the
attributes of quantum systems is to think of such systems as
seamless wholes. In order to measure such a system, one is
obliged to break that wholeness, to cut open the apple of
knowledge, as it were. How we make that necessary cut de-
termines, in part, how that system will appear to our eyes.
But unobserved the system has no cuts at all, and is, in a sense,
indescribable by conventional means.

A Typical Quantum Attribute: Photon Polarization

The simplest quantum attribute possesses only two possible
outcomes: A or B. But as in the game of NEWDICE, the
nature of A and B depends on the observer's choice of meas-
urement context. The property of a beam of light called polar-
ization is an example of a two-valued quantum attribute.

The number of conceivable types of polarization form a
twofold infinity that can be mapped onto the surface of a
sphere (called the Poincare sphere after the French mathe-
matician Henri Poincare). Each point on the sphere represents
a particular kind of polarization. Right or left circular polari-
zations are located at the north and south poles, respectively.
All types of plane polarization lie on the sphere's equator. Hor-
izontal and vertical polarizations, for instance, are equatorially
located at 0° and 180° longitude; slant and diagonal polariza-
tions at 90° and 270° on the equator. All other nonequatorial
positions on the globe represent some kind of elliptical po-
larization.

Although the possible kinds of polarization are infinite, the
number of polarizations you can observe in a single measure-
ment is two. To make a measurement one must slice the Poin-
care sphere with a particular plane that passes through its
center. The two polarizations defined by this slice are the po-
larization values at the very top of each hemisphere created
by the slice. These two values of polarization are the only two
outcomes that quantum theory allows to be realized in this
particular measurement context. For instance, if the slice is
taken through the equator of the Poincare sphere, the beam
of light will appear to consist only of right (R) and left (L)
circularly polarized photons.

Quantum polarization measurements are carried out with
a calcite crystal and a waveplate that changes the phase of the
light waves. Each waveplate/calcite arrangement corresponds
to a different way of slicing the initially featureless Poincare
sphere. If you want to measure the amount of R and L light

in the beam you slice the sphere along the equator. The out-
come of the calcite will be two types of photon, R and L.

If you want to measure the horizontal and vertical polar-
izations of the beam, you must set the calcite/waveplate
combination some other way, slicing the Poincare sphere
through its poles. The output of the calcite will be two kinds
of photon, H and V.

For each photon you can only make one measurement, so
the observer must forever remain ignorant of what would have
happened had he made some other choice. Freedom and ig-
norance go hand in hand in a quantum measurement: Your
freedom to choose what you want to measure always carries
with it an absolute ignorance of what you choose not to meas-
ure. This unavoidable ignorance, present in every act of meas-
urement, is the essence of the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle. You can always decide how to slice it, but you cannot
eat your (quantum) cake and have it too.

Before the act of measurement, quantum theory describes
the photon as being in a superposition of all polarization pos-
sibilities at the same time: none is favored over any other. A
polarization measurement consists of two steps: (1) choosing a
context and (2) making a record. In a polarization measure-
ment "choosing a context" is symbolized by taking a particular
slice through the Poincare sphere. This choice forces (like the
game of NEWDICE) the photons to play a definite game: They
are no longer polarized every which way but in only one of
two possible ways (R or L polarizations, for instance).

At this first stage in the measurement process, the photon
has only two definite polarization possibilities, but until one of
these possibilities is actually registered in some detector, be-
coming part of a permanent, publicly accessible record, the
measurement is not complete. Some scientists (notably John
von Neumann and his followers) believe that the measurement
is not complete until knowledge of the photon's particular po-
larization actually appears in some mind.

Before the photon's state is actually registered (in mind

\

[Poincare sphere that maps all possible photon polarizations. Choosing a photon measure-
ment context corresponds to slicing the sphere in two along a particular plane. The poles
of the two resultant hemispheres define the two possible photon polarizations that can be
observed in this chosen context.]

or meter), the context can be removed, effectively healing the
split in the Poincare sphere, plunging the photon back into its
former condition of infinite polarization possibility. At this
stage a new and different slice can be made, dividing the
sphere into some other pair (H and V polarizations, for in-
stance) of photon possibilities.

Once the photon has been detected, however, the meas-
urement process ends: the photon is discovered to be, for
instance, in the H polarization state. But we can see from this
description of the measurement process that part of the pho-
ton's observed polarization attribute resides in the photon it-
selfand part in the measurement context.
Like the rainbow, which can potentially be in many places
at once but for a particular observation is always somewhere
definite, a photon has an infinite number of polarization pos-
sibilities, but in any measurement it is always found to be in
one of two possible polarization states. Also like the rainbow's
position, the photon's polarization state is strongly dependent

on the observer's free choice—where he's standing in the case
of the rainbow; how he decides to cut the Poincare sphere in
the case of the photon.

The main difference between a rainbow and a photon is
that the rainbow is obviously made up of things that have a
definite existence (rain, sun, and eye), but the photon's ambig-
uous state of existence (before the measurement is completed)
is considered by most physicists to be irreducible. Boston Uni-
versity professor Abner Shimony calls the irreducible ambi-
guity of quantum states "absolute indefiniteness." It is not
that, before a measurement, we do not know the value of a
photon's polarization or its position or momentum; it is that,
before a measurement, these attributes simply do not have
definite values that can be known. Absolute indefiniteness is a
condition of being that is hard for humans to imagine, but easy
for nature to produce. Everything that is not currently being
looked at is, according to quantum theory, in such a state. The
apparently definite attributes of everything that we see
around us arise out of this very different state of absolute
indefiniteness.

Yuri Orlov's Wave Logic of Consciousness

If human consciousness is the subjective aspect of some ob-
jective quantum system in the brain, then we might expect,
in certain situations, to be able to experience quantum thing-
lessness directly. Soviet physicist Yuri Orlov (now a profes-
sor at Cornell University) has recently proposed an elemen-
tary model of human "doubt states" exactly analogous to the
quantum theory of two-valued attributes such as photon
polarization.

When Orlov's speculations were first made public (in vol-
ume 21, 1982, of the International Journal of Theoretical
Physics), his institutional affiliation was listed as Prison Camp
37-2, Urals, USSR. Orlov was one of the first dissidents al-

lowed to leave the Soviet Union at the beginning of the glas-
nost era.

Ordinary logic, called Boolean logic, after nineteenth-
century Irish schoolmaster George Boole, is two-valued (yes
or no). In Orlov's model of quantum thinking, choices are still
two-valued, but these two options arise out of a deeper sort
of ambiguity he calls "the wave logic of consciousness." In-
stead of only two possibilities for each situation, wave logic
presents us with an entire sphere of possibilities—what might
be called the "Orlov sphere"—the equivalent in inner space of
the Poincare sphere for the outer space attribute photon
polarization.

Orlov considers a classical two-valued doubt state, then
shows how it can be expanded via wave logic into a state of
spherical uncertainty. Imagine you are walking through a
dark and spooky woods one night. Suddenly you hear a noise
in the bushes and, looking in that direction, dimly perceive a
light-colored shape. Is it a sheep (wool) or a wolf?

Suppose, says Orlov, that we consider these two alterna-
tives "wool" or "wolf" not as mutually exclusive and exhaus-
tive yes/no choices but as two quantum possibilities. In
particular, let's make "wool" and "wolf" wavelike.

Classically we could represent our doubt state by a single
number N, the relative certainty (from 0 to 100 percent) that
the shape in the bushes is a sheep. If this number N is 0.75,
for instance, this means that we are 75 percent certain that
the shape is a sheep.

The same state of doubt will be represented in wave logic
as a "wool wave" of intensity 0.75 plus a "wolf wave" of inten-
sity 0.25. However, waves have an extra degree of freedom
called "phase" not present in classical logic. The relative phase
p of the wool/wolf waves can vary from 0° (both waves in
phase) to 180° (both waves out of phase) to 360° (both waves
back in phase again). Because it repeats itself after 360°, the
phase degree of freedom can be mapped onto a circle.

Taking phase into account, we can map the wool/wolf un-
certainty onto the surface of an (Orlov) sphere. The ratio N

[Orlov sphere that maps all possible outcomes of the "spherical doubt state." Choosing a
particular perceptual construal corresponds to slicing the sphere in two along a particular
plane. The poles of the two resultant hemispheres define the two possible resolutions of
the doubt state under the chosen construal.]

(varying from 0 to 1) determines the latitude of the uncer-
tainty. N = 0, corresponding to the north pole of the Orlov
sphere, means that we are completely sure that the shape is
a wolf. N = 1, corresponding to the south pole of the Orlov
sphere, means that we are completely sure that the shape is
a sheep. N = 1/2 corresponds to the Orlov sphere's equator:
here we are equally uncertain whether the shape is wool or
wolf.

The phase variable p measures degrees of longitude on
the Orlov sphere, p = 0° corresponds to O° longitude—the
Greenwich meridian—while p = 180° corresponds to the op-
posite side of the globe—the International Date Line. To-
gether this pair of numbers (N, p) uniquely locates every point
on the Orlov sphere. Considering simple human doubt states
as waves has introduced a new level of ambiguity to our inner
experience. Now instead of the two-valued wolf/wool choice,
we have an infinity of possibilities from which to choose. Or-
lov's wave model of consciousness proposes that the human

mind is founded on a new and deeper kind of doubt than can
be described by simple two-valued Boolean computer logic.

What would it feel like to experience a doubt state de-
scribed by an Orlov sphere? Instead of just wolf/wool, we can,
simply by changing our "attitude," be faced with an infinity of
possible perceptions. The shape could be an "angel" or "devil"
perhaps, or some other pair of classical opposites.

When we observe a photon, our choice of context actually
creates, in part, the polarization that our instruments record.
In a similar manner, in a Orlov sphere kind of perception, how
we construe an ambiguous stimulus may actually create new
realities in the world (private appraisals turning into public
knowledge) not merely in the mind of the perceiver.

Are there familiar perceptions that behave according to
Orlov's wave model of consciousness? The search for spheri-
cally structured inner ambiguities may be the first step in the
experimental verification of the quantum model of mind. How-
ever, wave properties of mind may be difficult to observe if
the wavelength of the doubt states is short.

For instance, the wave nature of sunlight remained un-
known for thousands of years till its scientific verification by
Thomas Young in the nineteenth century. Subsequently
Young's discovery made us aware of ordinary situations in
which sunlight's wave nature is easily apparent, such as the
diffraction rings around "floaters" in the eye, the "speckle pat-
terns" produced when sunlight is refracted through a prism
onto a rough surface, and various sunlight polarization phe-
nomena. On the other hand, the wavelength of an electron is
so small that the electron's wave nature reveals itself only
in delicate scientific measurements, never under ordinary
conditions.

Some cultures such as Buddhism place great value on ex-
otic inner experiences. The curriculum of certain Tibetan uni-
versities is based almost entirely on developing the ability to
observe and describe nonordinary inner states. Have Buddhist
students at Lhasa already come across spherical experiences
of the Orlov type in their explorations of inner worlds?

Michael Murphy, cofounder of Esalen Institute in Big Sur,
California, has raised the possibility that observations made in
other states of consciousness than that of the detached scien-
tific observer may lead to an expanded "state-specific" science.
"In this formulation," says Murphy,

a particular state of consciousness mediates our
knowing: certain states give access to certain kinds
of knowledge, as for example in trances where clair-
voyant insight is achieved by certain psychics, or in
telepathic dreams. In this sense, a particular state of
consciousness is like a particular scientific instru-
ment—e.g., a telescope or microscope—because it
gives us access to things beyond the range of our or-
dinary senses. Perhaps a new kind of inspired phys-
icist, experienced in the yogic modes of perception,
must emerge to comprehend the further reaches of
matter, space and time.

The Boston Experiment

The passage of a quantum system from the thingless world of
vibratory quantum possibilities into the ordinary world of
fixed actualities takes place in two stages, which we might call
"reality construction of the first and second kinds." Reality
construction of the first kind consists of the choice of a meas-
urement context. This choice, under the control of the ob-
server, causes the formerly seamless quantum wave world to
split into a family of definite possibilities. Reality creation of
the second kind (also called "collapse of the wave function" or
"quantum jump") occurs when one of these possibilities be-
comes an actual fact.

Most physicists believe that reality creation of the second
kind is an entirely random affair, wholly unpredictable and
outside the observer's conscious control. However, a small but
prestigious minority (including Eugene Wigner and John von

Neumann) are of the opinion that human consciousness plays
an essential role in this apparently random "wave function col-
lapse." Until some mind takes notice of the quantum system,
it remains suspended—like Schrodinger's cat—in a half-real
limbo of unrealized possibilities. The notion that consciousness
(human or otherwise) is necessary to actualize quantum pos-
sibilities differs drastically from the majority view that con-
sciousness plays a decidedly minor role: as mere passive
witness of actualities that have come about through some en-
tirely material mechanism. (The so-called quantum measure-
ment problem arises from the fact that physicists cannot agree
on what this possibility-actualizing material mechanism could
be.) The mind-created matter hypothesis is so outlandish com-
pared to our commonsense notions that it should be relatively
easy to verify or refute experimentally.

In 1977, at Boston University, students of professor Ab-
ner Shimony carried out a clever experiment to test one par-
ticular variation of the Wigner-von Neumann hypothesis. The
apparatus in the Boston experiment was relatively simple,
consisting of a radioactive source (sodium 22) and a detector
that produced an electric pulse in response to a gamma ray
emitted from this source. The output of the gamma ray detec-
tor was fed to two numerical registers (A and B), similar to
automobile odometers, each located in a different room, where
their outputs could be visually observed by two different
observers.

To ensure that observer A received the signal from the de-
tector first, a 1-microsecond delay was inserted into the cable
going into room B. If the Wigner-von Neumann hypothesis is
correct, this delay introduces a profound difference between ob-
servers A and B, in their roles as reality creators of the second
kind. The first one to look at the counter collapses the wave
function; the second one to look merely passively registers the
result that the first observer has already brought into exis-
tence. The goal of this experiment was to see whether this al-
leged observational asymmetry could actually be experienced.

In addition to the Wigner-von Neumann hypothesis, the

experimenters made the assumption that there would be a
subtle subjective difference between personally collapsing the
wave function and merely witnessing the result of a wave
function collapse initiated by somebody else. The experimental
trials were divided into 15-second intervals during which ob-
server A, after consulting a random number table, would ei-
ther look or not look at his register. In room B, the task of the
second observer was to look continually at his register and to
decide, during each 15-second interval, whether he or his dis-
tant partner were collapsing the quantum wave function that
determined how many counts would appear on the dial in front
of him. Observer B was also given the option of making no
decision, if he did not feel confident of his choice. Each run
lasted about 20 minutes, and the data from each run were ex-
amined for deviations from what would be expected if A were
merely guessing. No deviations from chance expectations were
ever observed.

If human consciousness does indeed collapse the wave
function, the Boston experiment seems to show that untrained
observers cannot distinguish between passive and active par-
ticipation in the collapse event. This experiment should cer-
tainly be repeated using people with more training and/or
persons who claim to possess special sensitivities to inner
states. The replication of the Boston experiment at different
laboratories should be particularly easy since the necessary
apparatus is available in most undergraduate physics labs and
even in some high schools.

Schrodinger dramatized his objection to quantum thing-
lessness by showing that thinglessness leads to the absurd
conclusion that an unobserved cat can be both alive and dead
at the same time. Einstein expressed his discomfort with this
concept by saying that he could not believe that a mouse could
drastically change the universe by merely looking at it. These
physicists and their thing-nostalgic colleagues hoped that
quantum theory would fail when extended further and that it
would be replaced by a successor theory more in line with
common sense.

Quantum theory, however, continued to prosper, extend-
ing its realm of error-free explanation to the heart of the atom,
down into the atomic nucleus, to the protons and neutrons in-
side, and to the components of these nuclear particles—the
quarks and leptons, which some physicists believe to be the
world's ultimate constituents. Looking for new worlds to con-
quer, quantum physicists have turned their sights to the heav-
ens and now dare to model the birth of the universe itself as
one gigantic quantum jump. Rather than fading away, quan-
tum randomness and thinglessness seem .more and more to
represent the routine ways of nature going about her business.

We turn now to "inseparability," perhaps the strangest
quantum quality of all. Inseparability seems to be an even
more fundamental property of nature than randomness and
thinglessness for, as we shall see, a remarkable mathematical
result of Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proves that, even
if quantum theory should someday fail, its successor theory
must also possess the property of inseparability. Randomness
and thinglessness may be passing intellectual fancies, but, for
better or worse, quantum inseparability is here to stay.

QUANTUM INSEPARABILITY:

BAFFINGLY STRONG CORRELATIONS OR COSMIC KRAZY GLUE?

Contagious magic is based upon the assumption that substances which were
once joined together possess a continuing linkage; thus an act carried out
upon a smaller unit will affect the larger unit even though they are physi-
cally separated.

—SIR JAMES FRAZER

And let no one use the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment to claim that
information can be transmitted faster than light, or to postulate any "quan-
tum connectedness" between separate consciousnesses. Both are baseless.
Both are mysticism. Both are moonshine.

—JOHN ARCHIBALD WHEELER

Scene: Rudi's Artificial Awareness Lab.

claire: I'm feeling uneasy, Rudi, about this operation. I think
that my Azimov circuits view it as a possible threat to my
survival. Are you sure that everything that you'll do to
me can be reversed if it doesn't work out? I'm a very
valuable piece of machinery, you know. A lot of important
people are going to be angry at you if I'm damaged.

rudi: I've never done this before, it's true. But I'm not wor-
ried. I'm not going to touch your memory banks or your
hierarchy-of-needs circuits, so your external behavior
should be pretty much unchanged. What the Eccles gate

is supposed to do is allow some of your logical decision
trees to receive input from the quantum world. You might
think of this operation as giving you a new kind of sensory
input, opening a window for your brain to peek into Hei-
senberg's world of pure possibility.

claire: But the output of an Eccles gate is completely ran-
dom, isn't it? Won't that just scramble my thinking and
drive me haywire?

rudi: The whole notion of quantum consciousness is based on
the hope that elementary quantum events are not really
random but represent the coded carrier medium for some
mind: these events are the external signs of some hidden
inner experience—your experience, Claire, when you al-
low your brain to be driven by quantum events.

But let's suppose that I'm mistaken and quantum
events really are random.

What's the worst that can happen? First of all, I'm
only hooking the gate to a small section of your visual
field, so the consequences of randomness will be minimal
—a slight blur in the corner of your eye. Second, the de-
gree- to which your perceptions are quantum-modulated
will be under your full control, not mine. If you (or your
Azimov circuits) don't like what's happening, you can shut
it down; if you're pleased with the results, you can cau-
tiously extend the gate's influence to other parts of your
body. And, just to be on the safe side, I'll download the
present state of your central processor, so that if anything
goes wrong, I can easily bring you back to normal.

claire: How did you design this gate, Rudi? Did you use the
Schrodinger equation? Or Dirac's full relativistic version
of quantum theory? What assumptions and approxima-
tions went into it? Would you like me to check your
calculations?

rudi: Frankly, Claire, I didn't do any calculations at all. To
make the Eccles gate, I searched through several hundred
thousand defective computer chips from Matsushita's
trash bin, till I found a few that malfunctioned as a result

of random events on the quantum level. An Eccles gate
is, in a sense, nothing but a batch of bad silicon, but "bad"
in just the right way.

claire: Does this mean that you're going to connect my beau-
tiful brain to a can of garbage?

rudi: I prefer to think of it as "creative chaos" rather than
"garbage."

claire: What do you know about Bell's theorem, Rudi?

rudi: Not much. Bell proved a long time ago that the quantum
world is superluminally connected with voodoo-style links.
But Eberhard proved that humans could never use these
links to send faster-than-light messages. That's about it.

claire: What's bothering me is this: If I end up with a quan-
tum mind, will it be instantly connected to other minds?
Will the Eccles gate make me telepathic?

rudi: I don't think so, Claire. I've got a mind (presumably
quantum-based) and I'm not telepathic. I'm hoping to give
you a taste of ordinary experience, not work miracles.

claire: I think I really would like to be conscious, Rudi. I'd
like to see what I've been missing all these years.

To the brain's eye, the same object appears different according
to illumination, distance, and point of view. Our mind's eye
unites these various viewpoints into a single conceptual image
"out there"—a process that psychologists call object con-
stancy. The story of the blind men and the elephant points to
an apparent failure of object constancy: separate impressions
of "the elephant" do not coalesce into a single image for the
blind men. The elephant appears as a wall, snake, fan, or tree,
depending on which part each man has hold of. Each insists
exclusively on his own point of view until, in most versions, a
child comes along who sees the whole picture.

An Atom Is Not a Thing

Because we are surrounded by what appear to be objects, this
story amuses us by suggesting the absurd possibility of enti-
ties for which the usual conceptual consensus does not occur
—the possibility of "nonobjects." Many optical illusions qualify
as nonobjects, as do certain "impossible figures" devised by
artists. Sixty years ago—to the consternation of physicists—
atoms joined the ranks of nonobjects. Atoms are too small to
see; physicists probe them with a variety of methods more
indirect than vision. Each method of getting in touch with the
atomic elephant reveals a different picture. Moreover, these
separate pictures of the atom refuse to fit together into a sin-
gle image.

Some people interpret such observer-dependent phenom-
ena as a breakdown of the distinction between subject and
object, but the atom is objective enough. An atom is objective
in the sense that different observers, taking the same view-
point, will see the same picture; but at the same time, an atom
is not an object because the pictures resulting from different
viewpoints do not correspond to any unique thing. The atom
objectively exists—as a nonobject. As Heisenberg so suc-
cinctly put it, "An atom is not a thing."

We cannot observe an atom "as it really is" but only as it
appears in a particular experimental context. In each context,
certain attributes reveal themselves; other attributes become
inaccessible. For an atom the sum of all attributes observable
in all possible contexts exceeds the number and variety of at-
tributes that a single ordinary object could possess. Its quan-
tum thinglessness guarantees that there is always more to an
atom than meets the eye.

If someone were ingenious enough to devise a meta-
context—a God's-eye view—in which an atom appears "as it
really is," physicists could slip back into comfortable old thing-
ness. However, Niels Bohr closed off this possibility, when he
showed that choosing one context always involves giving up
another. Yet both contexts are necessary for a complete view

of the atom. According to Bohr, nothing but partial contexts
is available to humans. You can choose any viewpoint you
please, but you cannot choose them all.

Atoms can display more properties than mere things be-
cause of the many sets of mutually exclusive contexts in which
they can be observed. But to define a context we must know
which parts of an atom's environment really affect the obser-
vation and which are irrelevant. Where does a context end?
Curiosity about the boundaries of context led to the discovery
of quantum inseparability.

Consider two systems (A and B) that have interacted in
the past, have stopped interacting, and have moved far apart.
Two physicists—Albert and Boris—make separate measure-
ments on systems A and B. Albert chooses a (necessarily par-
tial) context in which to look at A. At the same time, far-away
Boris selects a context and looks at B.

The results that Albert observes will naturally depend on
Albert's context, but will his results also depend on the con-
text chosen by Boris? The answer to this question is very
peculiar—peculiar even by the standards of a thingless uni-
verse.

The Quantum Phase Connection

Erwin Schrodinger had observed, as long ago as 1935, that
when two quantum systems interact, their wave functions
become "phase-entangled" so that even when they are not
interacting by conventional means, their waves remain inter-
mingled. Any action on wave A, such as selecting an A context,
has an immediate effect on wave B, no matter how far apart
the systems have separated.

Because of phase entanglement, there is a sense in which
two quantum systems that have once interacted remain con-
nected even over long distances. Schrodinger regarded this so-
called quantum inseparability as quantum theory's "most

distinctive feature"—the point where it differs most from clas-
sical expectations.

In classical physics the only way that one particle can act
on another is via a force field (such as the gravity or electro-
magnetic field) that reaches across space (at a finite velocity)
to achieve its forceful effects. In contrast, the quantum con-
nection looks less like a force and more like magic: an action
on system A produces an effect on system B (at least in the
mathematics) because B has left a part of itself (the B wave's
phase) with A, a part to which it retains instant access. This
instant long-distant quantum action resembles the voodoo be-
lief that burning a man's hair or fingernails can harm the man
himself because they were once part of him and retain a lin-
gering connection to the whole from which they were cut.

Unlike a force that acts via an intermediate field, the
quantum connection leaps directly from A to B without pass-
ing through points in between. The quantum connection is
unmediated.

Unlike an ordinary force, which usually falls off with dis-
tance between bodies, the quantum connection is as strong at
a million miles as at a millimeter. In addition, since it does not
actually traverse space, the quantum connection cannot be
shielded by intervening matter. The quantum connection is
unmitigated.

Unlike an ordinary force, which takes time to travel from
one body to another and can travel no faster than Einstein's
universal speed limit—the velocity of light—the quantum con-
nection takes no time at all to go from A to B. The quantum
connection is immediate.

Unlike an ordinary force, which reaches out and affects
every particle of a certain kind in its immediate vicinity (grav-
ity affects all matter; electromagnetism, all charged matter),
the quantum connection is very discriminating. It affects only
those systems that it has interacted with since it was last
measured. And when it is measured again, all previous quan-
tum connections are severed. Thus, in the simplest case, sys-
tem A may enjoy a very personal quantum connection with