Articles - The Chopra Foundation

A Better Way to Approach Pain, and America's Pain-Pill Epidemic

By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, and P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

You may have noticed headlines about the rise of prescription drugs as a major cause of addiction and death by overdose. Pain pills are overshadowed by illegal drugs like heroin and their dangers masked by a certain air of respectability. Yet America is in the midst of an epidemic of painkiller overuse as well as addiction. As a nation we constitute only about 5% of the world’s population, but we consume some 80% of the prescription drugs called opioids, the strongest and most addictive pain pills, that go by names like Vicodin, OxyContin, Dilaudid, codeine, and Percocet. We consume 99% of the global supply of a particular opioid called hydrocodone, which is used in combination with other drugs for pain relief but also cough suppression. In 2014 the FDA approved a new version of a pure hydrocodone despite the objections of its own medical advisory panel (which voted 12 to 2 against approval) and 30 states. Today opioid overdose deaths (one every 30 minutes) exceed deaths from motor vehicle accidents as well as the combined total of deaths by heroin or cocaine overdose.

How did we get here? The pain-relieving properties of opium have been known for thousands of years, but because of its dangerous side effects and addictive properties, it has generally been reserved for more severe forms of acute pain. This changed in the mid-90s when doctors became more lax about prescribing opioids over a longer period of time. Pharmaceutical companies launched marketing campaigns, and medical use of opioids in the US increased tenfold over the next two decades. This was a gamble between relieving the pain of patients and the risk of overuse, a gamble that obviously hasn’t paid off. Mounting evidence suggests that long-term opioid drug use triggers a vicious circle of continued pain and addiction. Citing the predictability of such an outcome, some counties in California and Illinois have sued the makers of opioid drugs for misinformation campaigns.

Pain has become the most common reason that people see doctors–more than 100 million Americans are reported to suffer from chronic pain, a number that exceeds the combined total of people suffering from diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia and stroke. Is there another way to resolve chronic pain besides the disastrous course we’re on?

The first step toward an alternative is to view pain as a mind-body experience that is highly subjective. As such it can often be approached through a phenomenon called “self-efficacy.” The brain contains many pain-relieving chemicals, and these can be triggered mentally, which is why taking a placebo leads to pain relief in a significant proportion of people. (The reverse is also true through the nocebo effect, where a harmless substance induces pain or fails to relieve it when the subject is told that this is the expected outcome.)

In a related example, people who thought they were getting expensive pain pills reported more pain relief than those who thought they were getting generic drugs even though both groups were given the same inactive placebo. Likewise, bigger placebo pills work better than smaller ones, and injected placebos work better than oral ones. In all of these findings, subjects are unwittingly calling upon the self-regulation of pain.

Nor is this just the mind playing a trick of us. Brain scans show that a placebo, when effective, changes the brain in the same way as do active pills, and these changes can be found in the spinal cord, not just the brain. The implications are strong for chronic pain over an extended period, too. Studies in arthritis patients have shown that the placebo effect can last over two years. In sum, self-efficacy is more powerful and more long-lasting than is generally realized, even among physicians.

If you suffer from chronic pain, where did it originate? Our latest understanding is that about half of our pain sensitivity is thought to be genetically determined and the other half by a mixture of variables: cultural and religious background, mood, past experiences with pain, and the surroundings (e.g. having a good support structure or not). Women feel pain differently from men, even as newborns, and are more likely to report painful medical conditions. African Americans tolerate experimental pain less than Whites, perhaps due to greater vigilance.

Some astonishing recent experiments at Oxford University have shown us a new way to treat pain using the inverted microscope, an instrument makes objects look smaller. The researchers showed that when people viewed their injured hands through an inverted microscope, they experienced less pain and even reduced swelling. What we see modulates how much pain we feel, more evidence that pain originates in the mind.

The point is that subjectivity plays a key role in the degree of pain each of us feels from the same stimulus. As the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius noted in the second century A.D., “if you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” That’s why a child who’s about to have some blood drawn can be distracted with a new toy and feel no pain, and why long-distance runners can work through their pain from a desire to win. Pain can thus serve as a strengthening activity, the “no pain, no gain” motto of athletes.

Religion and spiritual background play their part, too. Researchers at Oxford University used brain scans to study how religious beliefs affect the pain response. Subjects were shown either an image of the Virgin Mary by a 17th-century Italian painter or a nonreligious painting by Da Vinci (Lady with an Ermine). After looking at each image for half a minute, they were given mild electric shocks and asked to rate their pain. Devout Catholics and atheists responded to pain similarly after seeing the Da Vinci painting, but devout believers rated their pain lower after seeing the Virgin Mary. Brain scans showed that the devout Catholics were engaging more of their ventromedial cortex, a brain region known to be involved in the placebo effect, which apparently made their pain less threatening.

In Hinduism pain affects the body, arising from a person’s karma, but it doesn’t touch the soul or higher self. In the Bhagavad-Gita Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna that “weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it…the self is indestructible and timeless.” An understanding that all pain is temporary gives believers mental strength to put it in proper context and to cope without falling into depression or self-blame. The nonreligious can achieve similar levels of coping through mindfulness, yoga or various forms of meditation. A 2011 randomized controlled three-month study of Iyengar yoga in 313 patients with back pain showed that how their backs functioned at 3, 6, and 12 months was superior to the usual medical-care group if they took up yoga.

Love is another potent pain reliever. Studies have shown that a 20-second hug can relieve pain and stress as effectively as prescription drugs; it also acts on nerve cells to release pain-relieving brain chemicals such as oxytocin and endorphins.

The upshot is that pain management has come a long way since the era when the placebo effect was shrugged off by most doctors as “not real medicine.” Placebos trigger a person’s own brain to relieve pain, but this happens unwittingly–the element of self-deception is present. Removing this element ruins the placebo effect, but it opens the way for conscious, self-aware techniques. Clearly we are not suggesting that anyone should take pain lightly or that you should treat any medical pain entirely on your own. No one should stop taking prescription opioid painkillers abruptly, either. What we are suggesting is that the long-term solution to America’s opioid drug epidemic lies in changing the self-efficacy environment. Painkillers should come after a patient has explored the power of the mind-body connection, keeping up the search for the best and most efficacious techniques. The field of self-care is burgeoning, and pain should become a central part of that if we want to end our dependency on drugs whose prolonged overuse is so dire.

Photo credit: heartcurrents.com

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers including Super Brain, co-authored with Rudi Tanzi, PhD. He serves as the founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. Take a moment to check out ‘Self Directed Biological Transformation Initiative – SBTI’ on Indiegogo and share it with your friends. Get perks, make a contribution, or simply follow updates. If enough of us get behind it, we can make ‘Self Directed Biological Transformation Initiative – SBTI happen!

P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina and a leading physician scientist in the area of mental health, cognitive neuroscience and mind-body medicine.

Naïve Realism, Or the Strange Case of Physics and Fake Philosophers (Part 2)

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Menas Kafatos,PhD

Scientists have assigned the role of Mister Answer to science, the source of knowledge on every subject. This is peculiar because science does not accept a complete body of knowledge at any one time as final, therefore no answer can be final. This is how science progresses. Scientists though often forget that and they go on as if their current knowledge is all there is to know. By the very nature of science, some subjects are beyond science. Does this mean they are beyond knowing? That’s a tricky and at times disturbing question. Doubts arise on many fronts. Can science tell us what it means to be human, or how molecules developed the ability to think, as they seem to do in the brain? These are questions that science was never meant to be able to answer. It does not mean they are not valid and fundamental. However, the most troubling issue is whether science can continue to perform its most basic function, describing the nature of reality. As we saw in the first post of this series, there’s every indication that reality is becoming more mysterious, not less, as one probes deeper into it.

Some leading scientists are on record dismissing philosophy as “junk,” “useless,” and “an obstacle to progress,” because philosophy consists purely of thinking while science produces hard facts, experiments, and provable findings. Yet in its disdain for so-called “metaphysics,” these scientists have become over confident. It turns out that there are three areas where philosophy is likely to resurge in a new guise, bringing answers about reality that all of us need to know, including the most advanced scientists.

The first area has to do with how we know what we know, which is called epistemology. How do you know a rock is hard and heavy, the sun is hot, and a red rose is red? You use the five senses, which seem to be trustworthy in the everyday world. This trust is called naïve realism, and as the first post revealed, the five senses are totally untrustworthy in the quantum domain. The fact that a rock can be reduced to a cloud of vibrating energy that in turn is only describable as a smear of probabilities knocks naïve realism off its pedestal. Even more devastating is the fact that the brain, which we rely on to know everything about the world, isn’t a privileged object. Like a rock, it too can also ultimately be reduced to a smear of probabilities, undercutting our assumption that what the brain reports is true knowledge.

Neuroscience is entirely based on the premise that the brain can do things a rock cannot do, yet if the brain and a rock are embedded in the same quantum domain, where did the brain acquire its ability to know anything? What is the difference between the elementary particles in a rock from the elementary particles in a brain? None whatsoever. Brain scientists would argue that it is the incredible complexity of the brain that makes it different but incredible complexity in machines created by man does not make them capable of even the tiniest of thought, or feeling for that matter. Science has offered no credible answer, and the vast majority of scientists would be baffled by the possibility that the brain doesn’t in fact know anything, any more than a rock does. Rather, it’s the mind, using the brain to express itself, that knows, just as Mozart, knowing music, used the piano to express himself. (more…)

Naïve Realism, Or the Strange Case of Physics and Fake Philosophers

By Deepak Chopra, MD In a most unexpected way, physics has started to criticize its own sense of reality. Noted figures are speaking out against other noted figures, and heads are being knocked. A prime example: In the blog section of Scientific American, the highly respected South African physicist and cosmologist George Ellis says, quite bluntly, “The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy.” In the same vein, the esteemed British physicist Sir Martin Rees made a headline in 2010 that read “We shouldn’t attach any weight to what Hawking says about God.”

Stephen Hawking has been quoted around the world for saying that God isn’t necessary to our understanding of creation. Lord Rees, former president of the Royal Society and sometimes labeled “Britain’s greatest scientist,” expressed himself pointedly: “I know Stephen Hawking well enough to know that he has read very little philosophy and even less theology, so I don’t think we should attach any weight to his views on this topic.”

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Is a Mind-Element Needed to Interpret Quantum Mechanics? Do physically undetermined choices enter into the evolution of the physical universe? Part 3

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Henry Stapp, PhD

Our previous two posts on the role of mind in nature have argued that rational analysis of the empirical evidence entails that the world is not only influenced by ideas, but consists of them. Of course, the everyday experience of a physical reality made of things that seem solid can be very compelling, especially when combined with the classically held understanding of subatomic particles orbiting around one another like small planets. This view, which everyone is familiar with, supports the existence of a real external world independent of mind. When you stub your toe on a rock, you don’t feel it’s like stubbing your toe on an idea. Indeed, as Erwin Schrödinger, a principal founder of quantum mechanics, remarked; “It comes naturally for the simple man of today to think of a dualistic relationship between mind and matter as an extremely obvious idea. … But a more careful consideration …[leads to the conclusion] that surrender of the notion of the real external world, alien as it seems to everyday thinking, is absolutely essential.”

Schrödinger knew, based on empirical evidence that at the basic level a subatomic particle doesn’t behave like a tiny planet but like a smear of possibilities. Our experience of the solidity of day-to-day reality–for example the hardness of a rock–is mathematically explained in terms of the rock’s elementary particles being just such smears of possibilities. Schrödinger had a huge advantage over the preceding German idealist philosophers like Hegel, who posited that reality was more like an idea than a thing. They had arrived at this conclusion on the basis of logic alone, without the critical empirical evidence. That evidence was supplied by experiments done during the 20^th century.

Empirical evidence ought to be persuasive to scientists, but mainstream opinion in science is often governed more by socio-political forces and personalities than by rational thinking based on the data. Nowhere is this more evident than in present-day neuroscience, where in spite of the strong evidence for quantum effects in biological systems and in the brain, workers doggedly adhere to the physicalism that Francis Crick called for decades ago (i.e., reducing all the mind to physical processes in the brain and nothing more).

To rationally settle this issue one needs an adequate conceptual framework. Finding one is not easy, however. That’s because the dynamics involved is described in three different incompatible languages. The empirical data is expressed in terms of the concepts of classical physics, while the mathematical machinery needed to explain the detailed structure of that data is couched in the very different mathematical language of quantum physics. Then there is the question of the possible physical effects of our thoughts, ideas, and feelings, which are described in a third language, the language of psychology. According to classical physics, mental events can be left out of the determination of physical properties. But according to orthodox quantum mechanics, our mental intentions play an essential role in the determination of brain behavior.

Such a mismatch could be compared to investigators showing up at the scene of a wreck by the highway where a car has landed in a snow bank. One investigator, being a classic physicalist, says that the cause of the wreck was a sudden swerve of the car’s tires on the icy road. Another investigator, a quantum physicist, produces a set of calculations derived from Schrödinger’s equation that pinpoints the statistical probability of the car winding up where it landed. A third investigator, a psychologist, points to the driver’s recent divorce, which led him to heavy drinking as emotional compensation. Three different descriptions are derived from the same event. Without a doubt, no matter which alternative you choose, the simple matter of physical cause and effect is no longer so simple.

The crucial question is whether the choices that you and I make in daily life are determined by purely mathematical rules. John von Neumann’s 1932 book, The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, says no: The orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics requires the observer’s “ego” to enter into the unfolding of reality in a way that lies outside and beyond the known mathematics. In everyday life we certainly feel that the things we do, think, and say aren’t fixed by the laws of physics. According to classical mechanics, however, these feelings are illusions, whereas in orthodox quantum mechanics these feelings represent an awareness of the true nature of reality.

There are, of course, non-orthodox formulations of quantum mechanics, but they fail to meet the demands of its founders that the theory encompass the realities we know actually exist, namely our conscious experiences. (Who falls in love as a result of gravity, thermodynamics, and Newton’s laws of motion?) The main alternatives to the orthodox approach not only fail to bring our conscious experiences into their foundational structure, but they fail to explain rationally how a person’s known experiences can arise from physically described reality–the physical description contains no hint of their existence. There is no scientific virtue in avoiding all mention of our personal experience when science is supposed to be based on empirical (i.e., experienced) evidence. The offered alternatives actually tend to extol the fact that they lack any mention of consciousness in their foundations, instead of recognizing this as a likely fatal flaw. Yet that flaw is built into a theory based essentially on the concepts of classical mechanics, from which all connections to our experiences have been systematically removed.

Possible explanations of reality keep proliferating–with some truth it’s been said that there are as many quantum theories as quantum physicists. Actually, there are probably more theories than theorists, because when you confront a physicist who holds an unorthodox view, he soon changes to another view, recognizing that his prior view is not completely defined. As he shifts to ever new positions, the discussion goes nowhere.

But one can classify the existing theories as idealist, materialist, and dualist. Orthodox quantum mechanics is the prime dualist theory. But, as we have argued in the previous two articles, it essentially reduces to idealism when you analyze it. If we must choose between idealistic monism or physicalistic monism then it must be idealism. At the end of the day, the only realities that we really know exist are our ideas. That’s the basic point behind all idealisms. Even physical descriptions, as far as we can know them, are inventions of the human mind.

This last point is worth elaborating upon.

The scientific description of reality is essentially mathematical. To reduce Nature to a set of regular, universal “principles,” Newton applied mathematics to things located in a four-dimensional space-time filled with an infinity of points. (Imagine any location you’ve ever been in your life located on a three-dimensional chess board, with the addition of time as a fourth dimension.) The basic idea of classical (Newtonian-type) mechanics is that every fundamental property can be located at such a real place: these real points are where the basic realities of Nature reside. But how well does this idea fare when we demand compatibility with the quantum empirical facts, which are fundamentally incompatible with the basic concepts of classical physics?

In classical mechanics a “really existing” 4-D continuum of points provides the places for the assumed-to-exist real particles to be. In quantum mechanics we again use a 4-D continuum of locations, but as we’ve discussed, these are locations only of possibilities. In the switch from classical to quantum, the points of the 4-D continuum lose their status as the places where real things can be, becoming places where potentialities exist for experiences of seemingly real things to appear if an observer looks for them there. This is the crucial shift made by the founders of quantum mechanics and by von Neumann in order to cope rationally with the mysterious twentieth-century empirical findings. In so doing, space-time points were reduced to parts of an idea-like reality.

The persuasiveness of seeing the universe as mind-like isn’t new, and skeptics find themselves scoffing at the thoughts of some of the most distinguished physicists of the modern era. “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” (Planck quoted in the Observer, 25 January 1931). The usual ploy among skeptics is to dismiss anyone who talks this way as a bad thinker or else a once-notable scientist who has lost it. But in truth the shoddiest thinking is among physicalists themselves, because their thinking is rooted in the classical concepts that have been found to be grossly incompatible with twentieth century empirical findings.

Equally strong are statements from the eminent British astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington: “The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind.” “To put the conclusion crudely – the stuff of the world is mind-stuff”. “It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference – inference either intuitive or deliberate.” (Eddington, 1928, The Nature of the Physical World, Chapter 13)

In 1961 Erwin Schrödinger wrote in the same vein and at length.

“… it comes naturally to the simple man of today to think of a dualistic relationship between mind and matter as an extremely obvious idea. … But a more careful consideration should make us less ready to admit this interaction of events in two spheres—-if they really are different spheres; for the … causal determination of matter by mind …would necessarily have to disrupt the autonomy of material events, while the …causal influence on mind or bodies or their equivalent, for example light…is absolutely unintelligible to us; in short, we simply cannot see how material events can be transformed into sensation or thought, however many text-books… go on talking nonsense on the subject.

“These shortcomings can hardly be avoided except by abandoning dualism. This has been proposed often enough, and it is odd that it has usually been done on a materialistic basis. ….But it strikes me that …surrender of the notion of the real external world, alien as it seems to everyday thinking, is absolutely essential.

“…If we decide to have only one world, it has got to be the psychic one, since that exists anyway (cogitate—-est). And to suppose that there is interaction between the two spheres involves something of a magical ghostly sort; or rather the supposition itself makes them into a single thing.” (Schrödinger, My View of the World, pp. 61 -63)

Einstein arrives at essentially the same conclusion about the mental character of the reality implicit in standard quantum theory. This is something he complains about, however, as when he says that “What I dislike about this kind of argumentation is the basic positivistic attitude, which from my point of view is untenable, and which seems to me to come to the same thing as Berkeley’s esse est percipi.” [To be is to be perceived.] (Einstein: Philosopher-Physicist, Schilpp, p. 669)

But despite his opposition to such a view, it is undeniable that our observations are the basis of science. Einstein was never able to incorporate quantum phenomena into his classical physics-type view of Nature. When the absolutely unavoidable facts of non-locality (i.e., faster-than-light effects) are included in what must be explained, the physicalist ontology advocated by Einstein (the view that the universe of physical objects exists in and of itself) collapses. One is invited to consider instead the alternative proposed by von Neumann’s rationally coherent orthodox quantum mechanical conception. As we’ve seen, this conception both physical and psychological, but the universe presents an overarching reality that is fundamentally mental in character.

Photo credit: www.veooz.com

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers including” Super Brain,” co-authored with Rudi Tanzi, PhD. He serves as the founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. Join him at The Chopra Foundation Sages and Scientists Symposium 2014. www.choprafoundation.org

Henry Stapp is a theoretical physicist at the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, specializing in the conceptual and mathematical foundations of quantum theory, and in particular in the quantum aspects of the relationship between our streams of conscious experience and the physical processes occurring in our brains. Stapp worked closely with Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and John Wheeler, and is author of two books on the quantum mechanical foundation of the connection between mind and matter: “Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics;” and “Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer.” These works lay the foundation for a science-based approach to the question of human free will. His new book “On the Nature of Things: Human presence in the world of atoms” will be available soon. He thanks his son, Henry Pierce Stapp IV, for help in the presentation of ideas appearing in this series of articles.

Is a Mind-Element Needed to Interpret Quantum Mechanics? Do physically undetermined choices enter into the evolution of the physical universe? Part 2

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Henry Stapp, PhD

The time is ripe for a theory of cosmic mind to be seen by all scientists, not as a speculative notion that conflicts with basic scientific principles, but as a necessary part of a rational science- based understanding of ourselves and nature. The earlier idea, cemented into science by the work of Isaac Newton, was that mind belongs to subjective reality “in here” while physics deals with objective physical reality “out there” and that latter by itself was the proper subject of physical science. The undoing of this separation is one of the fascinating sagas of modern quantum theory. Yet even if you are an outsider to the intricate mathematics of quantum mechanics, you can sympathize with the frustration of scientists who use their minds every day without really knowing what the mind is or where it came from.

Some physicists attempted to bypass the thorny issue of mind by dividing Nature into two physical realms, the microscopic (the small scale where quantum mechanics has been triumphant) and the macroscopic (the large scale where everyday objects obey the laws of classical physics). The microscopic description is designed to include all of the micro-physical elements from which all physical things are made. To assert that this description fails for large things and is replaced by another needs careful explaining. The standard answer, in brief, is that the macro-description is not a description of physical reality itself, but is rather a description of our perceptions of that reality, and that the laws of nature entail that the act of perceiving it not only informs us, but also alters the world itself in a way that brings it into concordance with our collective experience. These alterations are the famous quantum “collapses”.

But these reactions of the world of physically described micro-elements to our acts of perceiving mean that the micro-physical (quantum) part of nature is more mind-like in its behavior than matter-like. When new information is acquired, or appears in an observer’s stream of consciousness, the world of micro elements makes a sudden global jump to a new structure compatible with the new information. But that kind of jump is how “ideas” behave: they suddenly acquire a new form compatible with the new information. Thus the physically described micro-structure is fundamentally “idea-like” in character.

This sudden jump is “global”: it extends in principle over all of physical space at an instant of time. The behavior of the micro world is therefore more “idea-like” than matter-like also in this global sense. In the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics this sudden change in the physical state is due to an action made by “nature”. It is as if the global micro-world is an idea in nature’s mind, and that nature, in response to the observer’s probing of the physical world, changes her mind.
A second problem pertains to another “instantaneous” aspect of quantum mechanics. Within that theory one can consider a class of well defined and often actually performed experiments in which two experimenters working in far-apart labs can each arrange to have last minute choices made as to which of two alternative possible measurements will be made in their respective labs. It can rationally argued that these choices of what to measure can be considered “free”, in the sense of not depending upon the system being measured. The two experiments are performed at the same time in the two far-apart labs. Then it can then be proved that the truth of these empirically verified predictions of quantum mechanics cannot be reconciled with the demand that, for each of the two regions, the outcome there cannot depend on the free choice made at essentially the same instant in the faraway region about which experiment will be performed in that faraway region.

This conclusion is incompatible with the idea that the physically described systems are essentially matter-like, with the velocity of transfer of information therefore limited to less than or equal to the speed of light. Once again the behavior of the quantum mechanical features of the physically described world is incompatible with the idea that that those physical features reside, in and are carried by, matter. These features behave is as if they were ideas in a globally cognizant mind that can instantly know, when choosing an empirical outcome in one region, which experiment is being performed at essentially the same instant in very far away region.

There is, of course, strong resistance in science to jumping from these “as ifs” to the serious alternative of building a contemporary-science-based theory of nature on a conjunction personal minds carrying our conscious experiences and an objective mind carrying the quantum mechanically described properties, with the detailed properties of these minds specifically tailored to explain empirical data. Such a theory is, in fact, apart from choice of words, what quantum mechanics already is!

Another problem with dividing Nature into microscopic quantum-physics parts and macroscopic classical-physics parts is that classical physics assumes the observer is passive. As you watch snow fall or a tree grow, your observation supposedly doesn’t influence those processes. Yet this seemingly simple assumption has a hidden dimension. How do you know that snow is falling or a tree is growing? Through your mind, which delivers the only version of reality that human beings can possibly know and experience. Trees and snow, along with everything else in the perceived macroscopic world, exist as experiences created mentally, although we don’t know how. We know only that the idea that our perceptions match an unperceived reality is unprovable. So unless physics includes a theory of mind it can’t declare some reality “out there” is somehow connected to our experience “in here.”

The dual aspect of quantum behavior, both physical and psychological, is included in the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics devised by the brilliant Hungarian-American theorist John von Neumann. The fact that the known physical laws for the physical state of the particles can’t explain how they behave is critical here. Something beyond the physical state is involved.

Von Neumann’s quantum mechanics is explicitly dualistic. But the trouble with a conception of nature composed of two fundamentally different parts is the resulting impossibility of understanding the connection between the parts. The fact that in orthodox quantum mechanics the physical part turns out to be basically idea-like converts the nominal dualism into an idealistic monism. This conclusion, which has been reached by many if not most of the greatest philosophers of the past, but which had been hard to reconcile with science, now appears to be entailed by the orthodox principles of quantum physics.

(To be cont.)