I am going to talk about something that on the surface seems quite easily seen and defined and yet, when we get down to it, it eludes our grasp. The question that I am referring to seems almost trite: who are we? How do we function? What makes us tick?

The common view that has been promoted recently is that we are merely mechanical instruments that function along well-defined laws of physics and properties of matter. Let me be a little bit more specific.

The view being promulgated within our time is that it is the brain that is responsible for thinking and there is no other mechanism or organ that can produce thought within a human being. The brain is a material organ and therefore all thoughts and ideas of free will and decision making are totally controlled by matter which itself is under control of physical laws. The bottom line is that there is no free will, no morality – just physical matter that has existed for eternity.

Far from being a modern view based on science, this is a position that arises from a science that has fairly recently been discredited. I would call this the ‘Old Science’ as opposed to the ‘New Science’ that came to us at the beginning of the twentieth century and is now the dominant approach to studying nature.

The common argument that is often put forward to defend the position that the brain is the organ of thinking and reasoning is the obvious observation that once the brain is damaged, thought process are altered if not completely made to disappear. This is experientially demonstrated and seems to be built on a solid foundation. However, the ‘matter’ is not that simple. What I am going to try to do is persuade you that there is more to a human being than just the matter which constitutes the body of every person and thereby show that thinking is a lot more complicated than just the mere action of the brain and neuronal effects. In order to do this, I will do a little review of Old Science and show how it has failed.

Newtonian or Old Science has had brilliant success but the twentieth century showed up glaring problems in the Old Science and these became very apparent with the study of matter at the very large scale with the Theory of Relativity and with the world at the very tiny level with Quantum Mechanics.

What Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed was that there is no absolute space or time. Einstein demonstrated that space-time and the laws of motion can be defined only by reference to an observer. With relativity, the observer suddenly became an essential part of the world of physics. In other words, relativity started to hint at the importance of the observer in scientific measurements. The concept of total objectivity was starting to crumble; the scientist could no longer consider himself a detached spectator as had been proposed by the Old Science.

The other main attack on the Old Science came with the study of very small particles. We’ve all heard of atoms and these atoms consist of smaller pieces called electrons which are outside the nucleus which, itself, consists of protons and neutrons. Electrons are negatively charged whereas protons are positively charged (neutrons are neutral). We all know that positive and negative particles attract each other. So, how come electrons don’t collapse into the nucleus? That would be the end of the atom but we know that atoms exist.

What keeps the electrons from collapsing into the nucleus is that they are moving. An illustration of this effect is a pail filled with water. If I were to tip the pail, the water would spill out. However, if I tied the pail to a rope and swung the rope around, the water would not spill out. The centripetal force would counteract the force of gravity and this would cause the water to stay in the pail. Thus far, thus good.

The electron is in motion and this keeps it from collapsing into the nucleus. But here, we run into another problem. The Old Science predicts that motion in a direction other than in a straight line undergoes what is defined as acceleration. (Acceleration is formally defined as either change in velocity and/or change in direction of motion.) Acceleration is always accompanied by consumption of energy. So this moving electron would lose energy and eventually would collapse and again, no atom. However, this obviously does not happen. Every attempt by the Old Science to explain atoms failed and this resulted in a complete abandonment of Newtonian physics in trying to explain atoms.

In order to get an understanding about the structure and behavior of atoms, a New Science had to be invented which is called Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics was very successful in explaining how the atoms could exist over time. We do not need to go into the mathematical details here, but suffice it to say that the Old Science was seen to be a valid approximation but at the limits of the size of matter – very large or very small – it broke down and failed and this is where quantum effects became important.

Let me give you just one illustration of the difference between the Old Science and the New Science. The Old Science could tell you the velocity of a body and its exact location (something applied in anti-missile systems for example). But with an atom this is impossible to do.

Suppose we were out to measure the location and momentum of an electron. In order to locate something we have to interact with it but as soon as we have interacted with it by, for example beaming a photon of light at it, we will change the particle either in terms of energy or location because it is so small and light. The atomic world is very different in terms of properties and behavior from the world of our senses.

There was another startling point brought out by the New Science and this was the totally unexpected importance of the observer in scientific experiments. Different results are obtained depending on what the experimenter is trying to discover by setting up different experimental conditions. Is the electron a particle, the answer comes back: yes. Is the electron a wave: yes is the answer again.

What we are finding out is that we are living not in a ‘spectator universe’ but in a ‘participatory universe’. Eugene Wigner, a Nobel prize winner in physics came to the conclusion that mind – which the Old Science tried to banish completely saying it did not exist – is one of nature’s ultimate realities. He says: ‘It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness… There are two kinds of reality: the existence of my consciousness and the reality or existence of everything else….It is profoundly baffling that the existence of the first kind of reality could ever be forgotten.’ But there are still people who want to banish mind by saying it does not exist.

This realization of the importance of the observer in our interaction with the world has had a profound effect in changing fundamental beliefs in science. The neat world of Newtonian physics is not accurate and the universe is a lot more complicated than was even imagined in the past. Man’s thoughts, feelings and emotions are not just some inconsequential results of material laws. Human behavior cannot be totally explained by reference to instinct, physiology, chemistry or physics. And interestingly, all the hype about artificial intelligence is just that – it is hype which is built on an outdated science which denied the existence of mind. If there is no mind, then knowledge and thinking are indeed mechanical and obey physical laws and there is no reason why this cannot be transferred to machines. After all, when a brain is damaged thinking processes are interrupted or cancelled thereby showing that it is the material brain which is responsible for all of our reasoning processes. But, what if the brain is necessary but not sufficient for thinking?

Suppose that you are listening to a story on radio and the radio malfunctions and you can no longer listen to the story. Does this mean there is no ending for the story – that without the radio there can be no story. The radio is necessary for our enjoyment of the story but it is not sufficient.

Our brain works in the same way in that it is an organ that our minds use in order to interact with the world and with other people. If the brain is damaged, it does not mean that the mind is damaged or that it has disappeared. Old Science cannot accommodate the mind and tried to ban it, and those espousing artificial ‘intelligence’ still cling to the Old Science ignoring wilfully or through ignorance what the New Science has to say about the world and also about us. The reason for this is very simple. If there is such an entity as ‘mind’, then artificial ‘intelligence’ is not true intelligence in the full sense of the word and is just as misnamed as machines, with enormous capabilities for memory, are misnamed computers. And the best science that we have, one that has been tested many times and has come through with flying colors says – yes, there is such a thing as mind.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas