Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer

Henry P. Stapp

Jun 2007 · Springer Science & Business Media

About this ebook

This book concerns your nature as a human being. It is about the connection of your mind to your body. You may imagine that your mind – your stream of conscious thoughts,ideas,andfeelings–in?uencesyouractions.Youmaybelieve that what you think a?ects what you do. You could be right. However, the scienti?c ideas that prevailed from the time of Isaac Newton to the beginningofthetwentiethcenturyproclaimedyourphysicalactionsto becompletelydeterminedbyprocessesthataredescribableinphysical terms alone. Any notion that your conscious choices make a di?erence in how you behave was branded an illusion: you were asserted to be causally equivalent to a mindless automaton. We now know that that earlier form of science is fundamentally incorrect. During the ?rst part of the twentieth century, that classic- physics-based conception of nature was replaced by a new theory that reproduces all of the successful predictions of its predecessor, while providing also valid predictions about a host of phenomena that are strictly incompatible with the precepts of eighteenth and nineteenth century physics. No prediction of the new theory has been shown to be false.

About the author

Author of over three hundred research papers on the mathematical,
physical, and philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics, and
a Springer book "Mind, matter, and quantum mechanics". Worked
personally with W. Heisenberg, W. Pauli, and J.A. Wheeler on these
issues. Invited author of entries about quantum theories consciousness
in several currently about to appear encyclopedias. Invited plenary
speaker at numerous international conferences.

For book cover:

Henry Stapp has spent his entire career working in frontier areas of theoretical physics. After completing his thesis work under Nobel Laureates Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain, he joined Wolfgang Pauli to tackle foundational issues. After Pauli's early death, he turned to von Neumann's ideas about the mathematical foundations of quantum theory. The essay 'Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics', that developed out of this work eventually evolved into Stapp's classic book bearing the same title. His deep interest in the quantum measurement problem led him to pursue extensive work pertaining to the influence of our conscious thoughts on physical processes occurring in our brains. The understandings achieved in this work have been described in many technical articles and now, in more accessible prose, in the present book.