science. Yet the relationship between the physical world and consciousness, so redolent with the subjective aromas of cultural norms, has actually vexed and fascinated science for centuries.
On the face of it, consciousness or perception seems wholly different from the atoms, forces, and cause-and-effect machinations of the cosmos. If today one tried to unite them all, one’s initial tendency would be to give primacy to the material universe and then to try to find a way in which consciousness sprang from it. For example, the brain is made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles—all known entities—and it operates by an electrochemical process whose nature is no longer mysterious. If our awareness is merely some sort of subjectively felt spin-off of all this, then it could indeed be incidental and secondary to the modern world’s self-operating model of reality, in which case you wasted your money purchasing this book. Science would have gotten away with exactly that model, had it not been for a little niggling matter that arose just over a century ago: quantum mechanics.
Basically—and this goes back more than two millennia to the days of Aristotle—an early issue was whether consciousness fundamentally belongs to a realm separate from the physical world. It wasn’t a preposterous idea. Believing so allowed those who wanted to explore things like free will, morality, spirituality, and (later) psychology to have one arena to themselves, whereas those dealing with the hows and whys of the physical cosmos had another. The two didn’t need to muddy the same waters.
If there was any connection or commonality between the two realms—of consciousness and the physical world—it was that the gods or the one God was universally assumed to have created both. This is why treatises on individual behavior, as well as the discoveries by “Natural Philosophers” like Newton, who successfully uncovered the logic and consistency for all physical motion, routinely cited the Creator. The practice only vanished during the past century. These days, neither your therapist nor your physics teacher is likely to bring up the Deity.
Even as late as the seventeenth century, René Descartes declared that two totally different realms inhabited the cosmos: mind and matter. He had his own good logic for saying so, because in order for mind and matter to interact, there must be an energy exchange. And no one had ever observed any object’s energy either shrink or grow simply because it was being observed. Naturally, if our minds do not affect matter, the reverse must also be true. And if the universe’s total energy never changes (which is true), then it seems to leave no room for one or more separate consciousnesses to have any energy at all, which implies that consciousness doesn’t even exist.
But it does, as Descartes illustrated with his most famous maxim. So from that point forward, scientists pretty much left consciousness alone. When halfhearted efforts to unite everything occasionally arose, they were always based on the primacy of the random and inert material world that presumably gave birth to awareness somehow. (This was sometimes called physical monism.) No one tried traveling the obverse route by attempting to argue that the material universe might arise from consciousness. This absence couldn’t be faulted. Consciousness was and still is perceived as almost ghostly— how could mere perception move a rock, let alone create a planet?
Thus the choice was clear among thinking people. The verdict in modern science was, and still is, stick with the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter. For centuries they’ve been regarded as inherently separate—or, in the view of a growing majority, consciousness somehow arises from an as-yet-undiscovered mechanism within material bodies, such as the structure or chemistry of the brain.
The motive behind asserting a duality between mind and matter was both noble and logical. Aristotle, desperately wanting to figure out how things work and desiring to uncover the physical rules of the cosmos, felt that removing the error-prone opinions of individual observers could only improve things. In short, he fought for objectivity. This essentially maintains that everything in the world is separate and independent from our minds. Isaac Newton very much liked this idea, too, and by the middle of the seventeenth century, his three laws of motion helped cement what we now call classical physics.
In France at around the same time, René Descartes was fully on board with this assumption of material realism, or causal determinism. (Those fancy terms merely refer to our standard model of the universe as provided by Newtonian physics. It’s simply the idea that all objects have mass and influence upon each other. Without the “pull” of all these myriad moving objects, everything else would remain at rest, or else continue traveling undisturbed, and we’d see no changes unfolding.) Remembering the harrowing travails of the likes of Galileo just a few decades earlier, Descartes figured that this assumption of material realism would let science proceed with the greatest safety and minimal interference from the Church. Let the Church have that other realm—of mind, consciousness, individual spirit, morality, societal rules, religious rituals, and whatever else they wanted—when it came to regulating personal behavior.
It worked. Science and the Church now had their own fiefdoms. The Newtonian–Cartesian view was that the cosmos is essentially a giant machine. Originally scientists paid a bit of lip service to the Deity, but essentially they viewed the universe as a giant, self-sustaining, three-dimensional game of billiards. If you knew the masses and speeds of each object, you could perfectly predict future positions and behavior, or even extrapolate in reverse and know where everything had been.
Similarly, in the next century, French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace surmised that if someone had sufficient intelligence and information, they could know everything about the universe just by observing the current positions and trajectories of all objects. Everything was determined by previous conditions. No mystery remained except, perhaps, for the small matter of ultimate origins. Not even God was necessary; indeed, Laplace omitted any mention of a deity in his writings on celestial mechanics.3
Such was the view of reality in the closing moments of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth. Each side pretty much kept its bargain. Science left religion alone and ignored consciousness as well. And religion considered science to be okay—after all, it explained how things moved and didn’t trespass into trying to figure out why or how the cosmos came to be.
As the Western world gained in living standards and concomitantly grew less religious, the scientific deterministic model became the new gospel. It was often called scientific realism, and who could argue with such a label? You’d have to be a nutcase to be antiscience or antirealism.
In sum, the universe was widely regarded as objective (existing independent of the observer), made of matter (which included energy and fields), ruled by causal determinism, and limited by locality. When it was even considered at all, consciousness or the observer was assumed merely to be part of the physical matter-based cosmos, having somehow arisen from it. That its origins or actual nature couldn’t be explained seemed to bother no one. A few lingering mysteries were deemed perfectly compatible with the material universe.
And this is where we’d still be if it weren’t for quantum mechanics.
That new branch of physics started quietly enough. Not much couldn’t be explained by classical physics until the closing years of the nineteenth century, but puzzles were starting to grow. Some were just plain odd. For example, a bonfire and the Sun were both deemed to be blazing fires. (The Sun’s true energy-releasing process of nuclear fusion wasn’t explained until Arthur Eddington did so in 1920.) If you stood too close to a bonfire while holding out a hot dog or a marshmallow on a stick, you’d jump back because your skin could grow painfully hot—certainly more uncomfortable than solar rays ever make you feel, even at midday. And yet despite the ample heat, a bonfire can never deliver a tan or “sunburn.” But why? This was unexplainable.
We’d known about ultraviolet (UV) rays since
