The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life by Evan Harris Walker

From the Publisher

For decades, neuroscientists, psychologists, and an army of brain researchers have been struggling, in vain, to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Now there is a clear trail to the answer, and it leads through the dense jungle of quantum physics, Zen, and subjective experience, and arrives at an unexpected destination. In this tour-de-force of scientific investigation, Evan Harris Walker shows how the operation of bizarre yet actual properties of elementary particles support a new and exciting theory of reality, based on the principles of quantum physics—a theory that answers questions such as "What is the nature of consciousness, of will?" "What is the source of material reality?" and "What is God?"

About the Author:
Evan Harris Walker, founder of the Walker Cancer Institute, has made major scientific contributions in astronomy, astrophysics, physics, neurophysiology, psychology, and medicine. Since he received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland in 1964, he has published more than a hundred papers in scientific journals and holds a dozen patents. He lives in Aberdeen, Maryland.

Publishers Weekly

Walker's ambitious, unorthodox treatise attempts to outline the basis for a new physics, one that recognizes consciousness as a fundamental part of reality. A widely published physicist, mostly in scientific journals, he reports having had a Zen enlightenment experience in 1966 while walking in an open field at the University of Maryland. This propelled him on a quest to rethink quantum mechanics, which he, like Einstein, found incomplete in its picture of an indeterminate cosmos. Electrons tunneling across the human brain's 23.5 trillion synapses create a vast network of potential interactions according to quantum mechanics, so neural impulses are generating our thoughts, emotions and perceptions, according to Walker's theory. Here, he sets forth what he claims is the cornerstone for a science of mind, complete with equations about the brain's workings. The most accessible, core part of the book is its juicy, vigorous account of the revolution in physics engendered by quantum theory and its replacement of the classical Newtonian worldview. Obsessed with mortality and whether the soul survives death (he believes "something of us must survive"), Walker lightens the load with personal interludes in which he reminisces about his high school girlfriend, who died of leukemia very young. Though deeply felt, these at times maudlin recollections feel out of place and detract from his presentation. This digressive, maverick tome, which opens the door to paranormal phenomena and God as "Quantum Mind," will appeal more to serious investigators and philosophical types than to general readers seeking the purported spiritual implications of the new physics. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

The nature of consciousness, which perennially troubles the minds of scientists and philosophers, is the subject of an ever-growing body of literature. Two of the latest entries approach the topic from different perspectives. Glynn, a professor of physiology and head of the Physiological Laboratory at Cambridge, offers a comprehensive summary of what we know about the brain--both its evolution and its mechanisms. Among the topics he covers are natural selection, molecular evolution, nerves and the nervous system, sensory perception, and the specific structures responsible for our intellect. Using the mechanisms involved in vision and speech as models, Glynn skillfully describes various neurological deficiencies that can lead to "disordered seeing" and problems with the use of language. He carefully distinguishes what we know through experimental evidence from what we know through the observation of patients with neurological damage. He also describes some of the major theories that attempt to explain why these structures arose. While his book concentrates on the structures that make up the mind, Glynn is well aware that some physical events appear explicable only in terms of conscious mental events--a situation that conflicts with the laws of modern physics. Only briefly, however, does he consider the various approaches that have been taken to deal with the issues of mind/body and free will. In contrast, this is the primary focus of The Physics of Consciousness. After reviewing the fundamentals of classic physics, Walker (who has a Ph.D. in physics) summarizes elements of the new physics in which our knowledge of space, time, matter, and energy are all dependent on the moment ofobservation. Walker explores the meaning of consciousness as a characteristic of the observer. In this context both the observer and the act of measurement are critical. In essence, Walker leads his reader on a journey through his concept of a "quantum mind," which can both affect matter (including other minds) and can be affected by other distant matter/minds. To break up what would otherwise be an extremely dense text, Walker also relates the very touching story of the loss of his high-school sweetheart to leukemia. Indeed, it is his memory of their relationship that drives Walker to seek an understanding of ultimate reality. At times, he has a tendency to be dogmatic--as when he concludes, "our consciousness, our mind, and the will of God are the same mind." While An Anatomy of Thought is appropriate for most academic libraries, the Physics of Consciousness will be most accessible to readers with some knowledge of advanced physics.--Laurie Bartolini, Illinois State Lib., Springfield Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Booknews

Part memoir, part meditation, part analysis<-->by a scientist (Ph.D. in physics, U. of Maryland, 1964) who has published for both scientific as well as popular audiences. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Where Have the Gods All Gone?

Although we know that our common-sense understanding of the world is merely fiction, the illusions stay with us. Science has entirely overturned what we know about the structure of the world. But rather than revising our picture of what reality is, we cling to a collage of incongruent shards. We preserve a false assemblage of images, one pasted upon another, so that we can keep unchanged the mental portrait of ourselves and of the world to which we are accustomed. We go about our business despite the fact that the world on which we base our lives is so much in question, so much a mystery.

Even when we have searched out some knowledge, and when we have penetrated into the jitterbug world of Mr. Zukav's Wu Li Masters or of Carl Sagan's billions and billions of everything, we are left with only so many more unanswered questions about reality. We want to know. We ask. We search for answers, and we are given a box with little pebbles inside. Is that what the world is? Little pebbles, big pebbles, pebbles in a vast box shimmering and shaking about. Have we our answer? Is reality only a box filled with pebbles? Is that it? Is it all just a little box of rocks that holds infinity inside and stretches to the edge forever?

We want to ask, "Is there a God? Does my life have meaning and purpose?" Science, we are told, says that even to ask about God is beyond its scope. But this is not true. Either there is no such thing as God, or science-which embodies our ability to reason-must be able to frame the question and provide us with answers.

We know that science has proved capable of giving us dependable, solid, objective answers. It is the one path that yields answers about the machinery of reality and shows that these answers are valid. When such questions are asked, science must answer.

To many scientists, however, God is only a memory from childhood: a put-off to questions they once asked themselves. "Where do I come from?" was left unanswered with, "From God." Yet perhaps, the great shortcoming of such questions is that the concept of God is so conventional that it too is apt to be as empty as that box scientists give us-that box filled with the universe and yet empty of meaning to what we have asked: "What is reality, really?"

THE OLD GODS

Let us go back to mankind's earliest times. Think of Homo habilis looking out into the cosmos, gazing into the blackness of a fearful night with sparkling wonder spread across the vaulting sky. Think of such a man alone in the night's stillness, looking at the stars. He blinks his eyes and wonders. His mind transcends the immediate hazards of the day, and he sees things in the sky that he cannot reach. He sees for the first time the edge of his own being and looks beyond, perhaps forming the first thoughts of some new understanding, the first thoughts of some new knowledge, and then he falls asleep. Somewhere in that early time, in a pattern of stars seen overhead, in the stirrings of an image in the bush, in a lifeless form that did not move from its forest bier, the first troubled, questioning thoughts came to early man and passed into oblivion.

But I can see another, later time, a time when another early man lay more sheltered in a cave sleeping. As the moon rolled in its changing orbit, its full face appeared in the entrance to the cave, its light filling the doorway and jolting the primitive being into a frightened awakening. Such an experience would deepen the mystery of the sky, perhaps forming a memory that would last until the experience recurred months later...

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Where Have the Gods
All Gone?

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand
And Eternity in an Hour.
—William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"

It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves. In order to put meaning back into our lives, we should recognize illusions for what they are, and we should reach out and touch the fabric of reality.

    Although we know that our common-sense understanding of the world is merely fiction, the illusions stay with us. Science has entirely overturned what we know about the structure of the world. But rather than revising our picture of what reality is, we cling to a collage of incongruent shards. We preserve a false assemblage of images, one pasted upon another, so that we can keep unchanged the mental portrait of ourselves and of the world to which we are accustomed. We go about our business despite the fact that the world on which we base our lives is so much in question, so much a mystery.

    Even when we have searched out some knowledge, and when we have penetrated into the jitterbug world of Mr. Zukav's Wu Li Masters or of Carl Sagan's billions and billions of everything, we are left with only so many more unanswered questions about reality. We want to know. We ask. We search for answers, and we are given a box with little pebbles inside. Is that what the world is? Little pebbles, big pebbles, pebbles in a vast box shimmering and shaking about. Have we our answer? Is reality only a box filled with pebbles? Is that it? Is it all just a little box of rocks that holds infinity inside and stretches to the edge forever?

    We want to ask, "Is there a God? Does my life have meaning and purpose?" Science, we are told, says that even to ask about God is beyond its scope. But this is not true. Either there is no such thing as God, or science—which embodies our ability to reason—must be able to frame the question and provide us with answers.

    We know that science has proved capable of giving us dependable, solid, objective answers. It is the one path that yields answers about the machinery of reality and shows that these answers are valid. When such questions are asked, science must answer.

    To many scientists, however, God is only a memory from childhood: a put-off to questions they once asked themselves. "Where do I come from?" was left unanswered with, "From God." Yet perhaps, the great shortcoming of such questions is that the concept of God is so conventional that it too is apt to be as empty as that box scientists give us—that box filled with the universe and yet empty of meaning to what we have asked: "What is reality, really?"

THE OLD GODS

Let us go back to mankind's earliest times. Think of Homo habilis looking out into the cosmos, gazing into the blackness of a fearful night with sparkling wonder spread across the vaulting sky. Think of such a man alone in the night's stillness, looking at the stars. He blinks his eyes and wonders. His mind transcends the immediate hazards of the day, and he sees things in the sky that he cannot reach. He sees for the first time the edge of his own being and looks beyond, perhaps forming the first thoughts of some new understanding, the first thoughts of some new knowledge, and then he falls asleep. Somewhere in that early time, in a pattern of stars seen overhead, in the stirrings of an image in the bush, in a lifeless form that did not move from its forest bier, the first troubled, questioning thoughts came to early man and passed into oblivion.

    But I can see another, later time, a time when another early man lay more sheltered in a cave sleeping. As the moon rolled in its changing orbit, its full face appeared in the entrance to the cave, its light filling the doorway and jolting the primitive being into a frightened awakening. Such an experience would deepen the mystery of the sky, perhaps forming a memory that would last until the experience recurred months later. Its appearance would spark a need to know what was happening in that subtle other world. Perhaps, wanting somehow to mark what had happened, he picked up a bone and a rock and scratched the first written record.

    Ten thousand years later, archaeologists searching the ancient ruins at Gohtzi in the Ukraine found the record he left. There in the ivory of a mammoth's tusk lay etched the incised marks he cut, charting the passing phases and movement of the moon.

    I can remember awakening suddenly in the middle of the night to see the shimmering face of the moon on just such a far excursion into the northern latitudes. It peered through the branches and around the corner of my bedroom window as if it had some intent to watch me. Had I not known better, I might have set markers to test the mind of this celestial voyeur. I might have repeated the same observations that my ancient forebears made at Clava, at Kintraw, at Ballachroy, at Avebury, and on the plain at Stonehenge.

    Five thousand years ago, our ancestors used small stones and wooden posts stuck in the ground to record the moon's excursions and the constancy of the celestial bodies. These stones and posts, like modern marks on paper, described celestial laws of motion, measured out man's course in the world, and marked his woman's cycles.

    These posts, the markers of one age, repeated through a thousand years, have become the tools of ritual and the talismans of the old gods our ancestors worshiped. These were gods in the sky—regular, dependable, knowable. They were worshiped, but they were always out of reach.

    The moon has wanderings. More than the sun, it has features, subtleties that suggest the mystical nature of imagination. But having recognized the moon as a goddess of the night, who then could fail to recognize the true carrier of power over life? Who then could fail to see the powerful eye of God?

    Think of that earliest time, the time of the Old Ones. This was a religion wherein people paid homage to a god who reigned over them and gave them warmth and life, a god they could see, who stood over them, looking at them with his one gleaming bright eye—the sun.

    But others in other times created other gods and other pictures of their idea of reality. Others in treacherous forest worlds saw gods frozen in wood awaiting the knife to carve them free. Stones awaited the chisel to liberate their power—a power over the mind, a power to throw terror back into the forest, a power of death. They created images, gods cut from their own imaginings. They made gods of wood and stone. They made images drawn of lines and paint upon the walls of caves. And the lines became words.

    What images flashed in the minds of those who painted the Lascaux caves a thousand generations ago? What thoughts beyond mere existence flickered in the minds of those of species Homo habilis who left their footprints in the soil at Olduvai five million years ago? Whatever structured the reality they imagined beyond what they could immediately see, those thoughts were the beginnings of what we are today. Those thoughts were the new trials offered in the struggle for survival.

    This clash between early man and nature has woven a pattern of fact and illusion. Evolution and the pressure of survival have endowed us with an ability to understand and to reason, and this has filled us with questions about meanings and values in life. In our search, we have carved stone god answers. Our carved gods have failed us and have been replaced. The worship of Og, Bodb, Llaw; Njord, Woden, Ing, or Sif; and of Horus, Osiris, Amen-Ra, Min, or Thoth has gone. Adad, Ashur, Baal, and Gibil are gone, as are Nintoo, Nusku, Shala, and Sin. Zeuses and Aphrodites have rotted into the soil, and the Jupiters and Venuses are scattered, broken marble busts and torsos that line vacant halls as epitaphs to a world that is now gone. Our fathers struggled against these gods and found their victory.

    It was the genius of Abraham, I believe, to have met and triumphed over the superstition of a hundred ages, over the false demands of false gods' priests. Abraham put down his knife. No Baal would take this man's son Isaac. In his act of defiance against religious superstition, he became the father of a new way of faith in a God that spoke more rationally and lovingly to His people. He created a new vision of God: that God, to be worshiped, must have greater love for His subjects than even a father for his son. Somewhere in Abraham's mind or in his heart, some voice did say, "Lay not thine hand upon the lad." Tribes, nations, and peoples have come to follow this Abraham, who was the seed of the three great religions that worship the unseen God—God of the burning bush, God of the Passover, God who parted the sea, God who felled the walls of Jericho—this God who made man in His own image.

    Abraham created a new view of the world, a view in which the world of our daily concerns is the creation of a power, a mind, and a spirit that governs our lives, just as God governs the universe. It is a view of reality divided into two parts: God and His creation. It is a view of God who leads His special people, the people of the nation of Israel and ultimately the peoples of all the nations of earth. But what can we believe of this God who would not save His own people from the Holocaust. If there is a God, how distant is He? If there is a God of creation governing the incredible expanse of this universe, what care has He for me? Where is He now for me this moment as I search, hoping to find that whisper of her still-living mind somewhere? Where is this God?

    The questions are ancient. The Israelite nation answered with their faith. The Greeks answered with their mind. The Greeks, who with the philosophies of their time could hardly hope to explain the workings even of this world's machinery, certainly could not argue against the existence of some power that would have created the world. But what of it? For the Greeks, there was little to show that whatever God or gods existed had any concern for people and their problems. One might seek after some favor with offerings to some lesser divinity, but to the analytical Greek mind, a supreme God was beyond appellations.

    It was into this learned and skeptical Greek world that Christianity appeared as an answer to the question of the relationship between people and God. Christ, the only begotten Son of God, was born into this world to give testimony to His love for each individual person. How incredible is the idea that God could be so infinite in dimension that He could create the universe and yet know the personal needs of an ordinary individual. Jesus came into this world, as an answer to the prophecies of Isaiah, to give wondrous signs, to suffer the death of crucifixion, and then to rise from the dead—showing at once the personal love and infinite sovereignty of God. Paul carried the message to the Greeks and throughout the Roman world: Virgin birth, the lame made to walk, the sightless to see, the dead to rise, and on the third day His own resurrection. This is the faith and the reality that have guided the Christian world for nearly two thousand years.

    Now all that has changed. Demons do not cry in the winter wind. Baal does not look down from the sky with one bright eye and take the first-born child. And the walls of our modern Jericho can be brought down by better means than the gods of old ever possessed.

    The stone gods did not protect the ancients and were discarded, and the God of the Jews did not protect Jews either. With the advance of science, our knowledge of physics, and an understanding of evolution, we find our explanations elsewhere. The God of Abraham no Monger suffices in the secular city.

    The story of Jesus is surely inspiring. He surely lived, and he certainly sacrificed His own life for some cause. But what of the rest of His story can we believe in? When we look into the laws of physics, the mechanisms of biology, or the facts of medical practice, where is there any reason to believe that Jesus could make a blind man see or miraculously cure a beggar lame from birth? Do you believe this myth of a virgin birth? Do you believe that some god came down to earth to father anyone? Do you really believe that Lazarus, dead until his body stank from decay, was raised from the dead by anyone? Can anyone who claims to be rational today—when religion no longer serves as an explanation of where we come from or how we got this way—believe that anyone was raised from the dead?

    In his book God and the New Physics, Paul Davies surveys the necessity of the God hypothesis to explain our existence and the nature of the universe in light of recent advances in physics. He points out that just as evolution theory removed the need to assume God to explain the variety of life forms, physics has recently been able to search back to the very moment of the beginning of time and give us an understanding of even the origin of the universe itself. The successes here have brought science within reach of explaining everything that exists—and the existence of everything—without God. Davies offers one central, telling argument. More than anything else, Davies attacks the idea that God must be assumed to exist to explain the existence of the universe, of matter, of space, or indeed of time. Davies asks rhetorically, "Why this universe, this set of laws, this arrangement of matter and energy? Indeed, why anything at all?" Because physics now has been able to trace the start of the universe back to the moment of the beginning of space and time, matter and energy in a singularity, and map out the course of the future to the far distant heat-death of the universe with no need to invoke God as its creator, where is there any need for God? Davies says, "There is no need to attribute the cosmic order ... to the activity of a Deity." Darwinism removed the need of God to create the species, and it might seem that modern physics is removing any need to invoke God in order to explain any aspect of the universe. The role of God in the order of things is gone. If that is the answer, then that is the answer. And what Davies describes is a good rendering of modern scientific thought.

* * *

I drive past an Episcopal church, much like many whose stained-glass windows look out over the Maryland countryside, and think of the gentler, more certain times its congregations have witnessed. These times were troubled, surely, by crises of life, crises of death, crises of depressions, and crises of wars. Yet they did not suffer the crisis of meaning itself. That church, with its stained-glass windows, always stood there to remind those gentler ones that their struggles had meaning and their questions an answer. And now it is a part of the past.

    A few years ago, vandals smashed one of those beautiful early nineteenth-century stained-glass windows. Modern physics has no place for any deity, and the message rings even in the ears of the vandal in the street: "There is no sacrilege—only the moment, only the event."

    In The Seduction of the Spirit, Harvey Cox paints the change that has come over society. Cox tells us of his days growing up in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

Whenever I peeked in the half-open doors of St. Patrick's while on my way to Stackhouse's grocery store or the post office, I'd catch a glimpse of a mysterious darkness broken only by an even more mysterious flickering red lamp. Catholic playmates assured me in hushed tones that Jesus Christ Himself was up there on the altar. We didn't even have an altar, let alone one with Christ Himself on it. Many times I would like to have ventured into the dim recesses of St. Patrick's, but I was scared. It seemed so foreboding, so dark and awesome.

By high school it was a commonplace among the rest of us that it was just plain useless to argue with Catholics about religion, because no matter what you said, they knew they were right, or at least they seemed to know.

Today, decades later, when I talk honestly to Catholics, I get the feeling that, although they belong to the Catholic Church, they know now how I felt then. For now, even on the inside of their church, that serene assurance is gone. So is that secure conviction that it all goes back directly to God Himself.

    Drive through Malvern today. St. Patrick's is aging. It has become an anachronism even to its few parishioners who drag in their children. The world has passed Malvern by and left St. Patrick's in its past. Believers still frequent the place, but the old faith has lost its hold on their souls. And the children leave to search out the secular world's video stores in Philadelphia and beyond. St. Patrick's no longer gives its people quite that same sure faith that they need if they are to believe today.

    Today people need proof in order to believe, and they deserve that proof. The degeneration in the values of our society is not due to the waywardness of the people or to the affluence that permits a lax morality. It is not the secular city or drugs or a rebellious youth that has caused society to drift away from God. It is, instead, the message of science borne on the wings of our fast technology. It is the thinking of intellectuals of a century ago that has come down to the streets. The ideas that are today a matter of academic speculation begin tomorrow to move armies and topple empires.

    It is the perceptions of our science, the tenets of modern physics so well summarized by Davies, that now instruct our futures—into the streets. But it is all wrong.

* * *

I remember her. I remember Merilyn. I remember her so terribly much. I remember her as she looked at me, asking me questions with her eyes. I remember her as she looked quizzically at me, asking with one eyebrow raised, asking. And I answered with my eyes, answering her question of love. I put my arms around her; I kissed her, I felt her body in my hands. I pressed her against me. "I love you," I said. "I love you." And she answered, her words sparkling, "That's funny, I love you, too!"

    That had been a year earlier. That had been before she was about to die.

* * *

Harvey Cox writes "I have tried to make clear that metaphysical operations cannot be muted by the secular age, but that metaphysical systems will neither again integrate whole societies nor still men's persistent questions as once they did." But Cox is dreadfully wrong. There are answers. The truth does exist, and when the truth is honestly sought, with a mind that is ready to accept the truth, whatever the truth turns out to be, then the answers do come, and the answers change people.

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Excerpted from the physics of consciousness by EVAN HARRIS WALKER. Copyright © 2000 by Evan Harris Walker. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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