BOOK REVIEW : Quantum Leap in the New Physics

The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics by Danah Zohar in collaboration with I.N. Marshall (William Morrow: $19.95; 324 pp).

When you say that a dancer is graceful, can you put your finger on that quality of gracefulness? Can you define it? Is it something in the dancer, or is it something in your head?

Similarly, if a person is a good comedian, is it possible to give a full explanation of what makes him funny? It’s a subtle combination of timing, use of language, facial expression and whatnot, but it’s difficult to say exactly what that combination is. Some people can tell a joke, and some people can’t.

In both examples (and many others), a mere statement of the facts--how one person dances or another tells a joke--does not explain the special qualities we attribute to them, just as a statement of the rules of chess does not explain the pattern and thrill of a chess game. It’s the relationship of the elements that makes the thing come to life. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

That is one of the key insights underpinning “The Quantum Self,” Danah Zohar’s imaginative effort to solve the mind/body problem by the use of quantum physics. Body is matter and mind is relationship, she concludes. In the language of 20th Century physics, body is particles and mind is waves. Reality is both, and they are inextricably entwined.

To step back: The mind/body problem, which is as old as the hills, asks how mental life--consciousness--arises from mere matter--the brain. How does the flesh and blood inside your head create the little voice that is reading these words and thinking about them? Is the brain special, or does all matter have this property? If so, are rocks somehow conscious? Are electrons?

In the Western philosophical tradition, these questions were brought into sharp focus by Descartes, who posited mind-body dualism: Matter and mind are two separate things, a view that remains the common-sense notion and that most people intuitively believe. Descartes’ view got a big push from Newtonian physics, which appeared to give a full explanation of the world of matter without touching the world of mind.

In this century, of course, Newtonian physics has given way to quantum physics, with all its bizarre, paradoxical implications about the nature of reality. These implications have spawned a cottage industry in the philosophy of physics. Countless trees have given their lives to produce books about “quantum physics and holism, quantum physics and Eastern mysticism, quantum physics and healing, quantum physics and psychic phenomena,” as Zohar notes.

“The Quantum Self” is in that tradition, but it’s the first one I’ve read that doesn’t make me think the author should be horsewhipped. On the contrary, it is a very thoughtful book, rooted in science but speculative in disposition, which raises many questions and offers an intriguing array of answers. Zohar does not make outrageous claims, and she does not spin off into the “twilight zone.”

For one thing, Zohar, who holds degrees in physics and philosophy from MIT, gives a very good description of the bedeviling current state of thought on the mind/body problem. Materialism holds that matter is all there is. Idealism, the opposite view, holds that there is a real world but that mind is what puts it together. (Materialists would argue that gracefulness is a property of the dancer. Idealists would say we invent it.)

Zohar rejects both views. “Something is deeply wrong with all the traditional approaches to the mind/body problem,” she writes. In her view, quantum mechanics holds the key. At its minutest level, the brain operates on quantum mechanical principles of duality and uncertainty.

If you ask a physicist whether light is a particle or a wave, he will look uncomfortable and say it’s both. Sometimes light behaves like a wave, and sometimes it behaves like a particle. That is what is meant by quantum duality. Zohar says the brain operates the same way.

“Consciousness, or the mental, is , at the most primary level of existence, a pattern of active relationships, the wave side of the wave/particle duality,” she writes. “Similarly--and this is much easier to understand--the physical side of life originates in the particle side of that duality.”

This seems to be a fruitful view, either as a metaphor of the way the mind works or, if it turns out to be supported by experimental evidence, as an actual description of what’s going on between our ears.

What I don’t understand is why Zohar’s position should not be called materialism. After all, quantum physics is a law of nature. It is not mysticism. If quantum mechanics explains consciousness, that is yet one more example of a physical explanation of mental phenomena.

In the end--in the unlikely event there is an end to knowledge--physics will explain biology. Zohar’s book is a step in that direction.