The Structure Underlying Physical Reality
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:22
Well, first of all, I'd just like to make a small correction. That announcement, I was actually born about 10 miles outside England in Cardiff, Wales.
00:42
Now, you've heard mentioned several times at this meeting that the most exciting subject in physics at the moment is that in which the speaker is about to give, in which the speaker works. And that principle has been demonstrated several times,
01:03
and I hope it will be demonstrated again in this lecture. And my subject is, my recent research is the mind and the relation of the mind to physics. And I want to talk about some very interesting developments which have been taking place in the last few years, which
01:24
are in fact related to the kind of questions Professor Cooper was talking about yesterday. For example, some of the problems in interpreting quantum mechanics, where it seems that one cannot separate the system being observed from the observer who
01:41
observes it. And we seem to have a situation where the mind must be taken into account in describing a physical phenomenon. And quite generally, there are problems of relationship between mind and matter. There's also a problem of consciousness. How does it fit into our world view of physics?
02:03
And another important question, which seems to be perhaps more complicated than has been assumed in the past. And that question is that of the origin of intelligent behavior. So general direction of this work,
02:21
I think it is possible that it can be looked at as a logical progression of a sequence that we've had previously in physics, from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics. And I'd just like to sketch roughly what I mean by that. What I'm talking about is the question
02:41
of the relation of the observer, the person who does the experiment and observes nature. What is a part played by the observer in the physics? Now, in classical physics, one worried only about the observed system.
03:07
For example, in the laws of dynamics, the equations of dynamics in no way involved the behavior of the person who observed them. They were just equations purely about the observed system.
03:21
So in classical mechanics, the observer didn't appear. I've put him inside a dotted box. In quantum mechanics, the observer
03:41
has to be taken into account, because although one aspect of a theory that's indicated by Schrodinger's equation involved only the system that was being observed, when an observation was made, that observation changed the system being observed. And so one had some kind of interaction here.
04:00
But still, the observer himself is only described in a very incomplete manner. There is nothing in quantum mechanics to tell you what the observer would do under any given situation. Quantum mechanics would only tell you if the observer did something, what would happen.
04:21
So in quantum mechanics, there's still an incompleteness in that we know much more about the system being observed than about the observer. But it seems to be, in general, assumed that this isn't really important, that the observer is really made up of the same kind of stuff as a system under observation.
04:42
And it's purely a philosophical question trying to describe the behavior of the observer. But I think this is really probably completely a fallacious argument, because however one does quantum mechanics, an observer is always there.
05:02
And the fact that we get into the kind of difficulties that Professor Cooper talked about yesterday is almost certainly a reflection of the fact that quantum physics does not have a good description of the observer. And the kind of direction taken in my talk today will be that partly of the observer
05:21
and the mind of the observer in attempt to construct theories as to what are the dynamics of that part of nature. Now in the second half of the lecture, I'll be talking quite a bit about the mind itself. But as this sort of thing is probably unfamiliar to most of you, I'm going to lead
05:41
into the discussion of the mind, a more personal kind of phenomenon than that of an experiment which everybody can look at. So I'm going to, first of all, not talk about intelligent thinking observers, but about intelligent behavior.
06:10
Because intelligent behavior is something that we're all familiar with. It's something that one can watch. Whereas what goes on in the minds of an intelligent person is something that's much more elusive
06:20
and has, until recently, been very difficult to study. So what exactly do we mean by intelligent behavior? It's, in fact, not such a simple matter to define intelligent behavior. So we must, first of all, ask what are the general features of behavior that
06:41
could be considered intelligent. Perhaps I should just give an example of intelligent behavior so that we know the sort of thing we're talking about. An example, one might watch lots of ants running about, gathering food, moving material about, and so on.
07:01
There's no doubt when we see that that we seem to be observing some kind of intelligent behavior. But obviously, there are other examples like problem solving and so on. But I just want to talk about general features of intelligent behavior at this point.
07:20
And I'm going to give now a fairly basic and simple description of intelligent behavior, which is out of the time sequence of events that occur when a system is behaving intelligently. And I'm going to divide things up into five stages. We'll assume we start off before behavior has taken place.
07:43
And we get the system is then in some kind of inactive state, not doing very much, just somebody sitting and doing nothing, for example. The intelligent person isn't actually doing anything.
08:01
Now the next thing that happens is the person discovers something to do, and should say that a goal is perceived. Obviously, we wouldn't expect intelligent behavior to occur if there were no goal. And it wouldn't start until the goal had been perceived.
08:22
Now the next stage is a somewhat more subtle one, which is connected with the question of motivation. Why does somebody actually start behavior leading to a goal? And this is one one thinks about it. It's due to, in fact, a relationship
08:42
between that person and the goal he intends to achieve. It is a kind of separation. For example, my goal may be to get some food because I'm hungry. And I'm aware of this possible situation of getting food. But I'm also aware that this situation is purely
09:02
an imaginary one. The possibility of food is in my mind. But I also know that I haven't got the food. So there's some kind of separation, and I say a discrepancy between the goal situation,
09:22
the situation I wish to reach, and the situation I'm in now. When this discrepancy is perceived, this leads to the actual behavior. Let's say that action occurs, which
09:40
proceeds towards the goal. For example, I go to the refrigerator and take some food out in intelligent action. And then the final stage is where the food has been gone and eaten. And then there's a return to an inactive state. But there's a difference between the final inactive state
10:02
and the initial inactive state in that something of value has been obtained in between, that of getting food, for example. So we can say that a very general description of intelligent behavior is these five steps with a beginning and a final inactive state where
10:21
the intelligence is latent. And the intelligence constitutes the process of getting from one state to another. And I think it would be clear to you, although this need in no way be indescribable according to the laws of physics, the kind of systems that have been discussed
10:44
by physicists in the past have not been so complicated as to contain this kind of behavior. So we're essentially talking about a particular kind of organization which is consistent with the laws of physics but has not been studied yet by physics.
11:06
Now let's focus a little more on the details of this. How does this intelligence operate? And I'm only going to deal with this in a very qualitative way. I want to make a particular point that the way
11:23
the intelligence works is to utilize the energy available in a particular way. If I want to get hold of some food, I have energy available to walk. But the intelligence consists in using that energy in a particular way. So intelligence is essentially a process
11:44
of making selections, a series of consistently good selections which lead in the end to a situation where something of value has been reached. Some of you will recognize this selection process as being very much like the Maxwell demon
12:03
that occurs in the Maxwell demon paradox. Well, I just mentioned that because it was in my summary. But I don't really want to go into detail into it. If one wants to talk in thermodynamic terms, one would say that an intelligent system creates
12:20
negative entropy. However, that's really a technical detail that I don't want to get involved into. I want to deal with something which is equivalent, which is that the source of intelligent behavior is information possessed by that intelligent system, which may be inherent in its particular structure.
12:43
An arbitrary structure one could think of would not show intelligent behavior. Systems only behave in an intelligent way if they have the right kind of structure. Let me elaborate on that point just a little. And I'm now going to give an example which is not that of a living system, just to show that intelligence
13:02
is a general phenomenon which need not be confined to living systems. And the system I want to talk about to illustrate intelligence is out of a guided missile which homes in on its target.
13:20
So we have a missile and some target or other. I'm now talking about the kind of missile which guides itself. It isn't just launched in a particular direction. It is self-guiding. And we can see, incidentally, another illustration of the fact that intelligence consists in guiding
13:41
the way energy is used. The energy which could propel the missile is used in a particular direction. We achieve this by having a particular structure which involves a sensory system. The missile has, for example, an infrared sensor which would detect its target by the heat it produces.
14:03
And this information is fed back to correct any errors the missile might make. And the point I want to emphasize here is that there's some small part of the whole system which constitutes the mechanism for intelligence. That is this feedback system.
14:21
Unless one had a feedback system which provided correction in the right way, the missile would have no choice of reaching its target. Now, in the same way, if we think about living intelligence systems, these contain their own structures which are much more complicated than those of a guided missile. And these structures are such a form
14:40
as to exhibit intelligent behavior. And we want to know how these structures can arise. When we ask this question, we find we can get into a paradox. Because there are two different answers to the origin of intelligence which at first time don't seem to be consistent with each other. These two answers are the ordinary description
15:03
in terms of laws of matter, the biologist's explanation. The biologist's explanation for how intelligence arises is evolution. And it's the mechanism of survival of the fittest. The most intelligent biological system will have a higher chance of survival.
15:20
And its genes will be passed on to the next generation. Mutations in the genes will cause gradual changes, giving rise to more and more intelligent and versatile species. And we get the kind of argument which the lake Jacques Monod has described in his book, Chance and Necessity. It appears that intelligence is purely an accident,
15:44
the chance of random fluctuations and the necessity inherent in survival of the fittest. So this is one answer. But now if you look at intelligence in a different way, supposing somebody has just, you've asked somebody a question and he thinks a bit and comes out
16:02
with an answer. And you ask him, how did you get that answer? Well, he'll say, well, I thought about it. And he'll tell you what his thoughts were. And we have a totally different explanation of how intelligence arises in terms of thoughts. So two explanations.
16:21
A system has evolved so it just happens to be able to obtain, to act intelligently. The other explanation is that a human being, at any rate, can think. And there seem to be laws of thought because we're in agreement as to what constitutes a valid argument or not. And so we can explain intelligent behavior
16:41
in a different way as being a result of the laws of thought. Now, obviously, we can reconcile the paradox if we're able to show that these are really the same thing. But before I do that, I want to, well, there's a question of which is more fundamental, the laws of thought, or the usual laws of physics that one puts into biology.
17:01
And I'm going to give an example which I think may convince a lot of you that laws of thought and consciousness are very basic and as basic as what we come across in physics. The illustration I'm going to give is this. Supposing you find yourself in a situation of danger, supposing you walk along the street
17:21
and you see somebody who appears to be acting in a rather threatening manner to you. What happens in your mind, your conscious experience, is that you sense, you have a feeling of danger. There's danger present. This is a purely conscious experience. And this feeling of danger is followed by a desire to escape the danger.
17:41
So we seem to have a sequence. It seems to be a sequence rather than the two things happening at the same time. The conscious feeling that there is danger is followed in time by the wish to escape. And I think probably most people would consider
18:00
that it was unimaginable that one would not be followed by the other, that one could feel there was danger and not wish to escape it. This seems to be a fundamental law of nature, a well-defined and consistent sequence of conscious experiences. Now, if this is the case, we must try and reconcile the evolutionary picture, or shall I
18:21
say the mechanistic picture, that I escape from danger because the neurons in my brain carry out certain processes. We must try and reconcile these two versions of the same phenomenon. And we can see roughly how this reconciliation can take place by saying that, in fact, it is not automatic
18:43
that I escape from danger. It will not always follow that if a person sees somebody he regards as a threat to himself, that he will escape. Because this could happen for two reasons. Either he didn't perceive the danger, or he wanted to escape but was unable to.
19:01
And we see that we must complete the whole system by having more stages. In fact, what we must have is a sensory system for perceiving danger. The system must be able to tell the person whether he is in fact in the presence of danger or not.
19:22
And there must be a motor system to allow escape. And now we can have the whole process of escape from danger as a three-step process. The person's sensory system tells him danger is present. We now have this law, danger leads
19:40
to wish to escape. And that wish to escape is implemented into the action of running away by the motor system. His messages come from his brain to his legs and cause him to run away. So we see there is, in fact, no incompatibility between the two descriptions. But we have to regard evolution as taking place in a different way.
20:01
Evolution must produce a good sensory system for detecting danger and a good motor system for allowing escape from danger. And evolution only has to make these systems effective. And the law of thought that I proposed that danger is followed by a wish to escape
20:21
remains intact throughout. This, what I've just said, probably raises certain questions in people's minds as to whether it's a good physical explanation. But we can see that this is, in fact, no problem, that as long as we're prepared to accept that phenomena like feelings of danger and wishes to escape are actual physical phenomena as well
20:43
as mental phenomena, then we can, in principle, get a physical explanation of the whole sequence of events. Well, that was really just to introduce the ideas that there can be laws of thought which are not inconsistent with the kinds of laws of physics as we know them.
21:01
And the rest of my talk, I want to talk about recent investigations into the laws of thought. These developments are based on a technique which has become available for studying the mind in some detail and for doing often the possibility of doing reproducible experiments.
21:22
And these developments are probably not very well known to most of you. Just say a bit about the history of these developments and mention the people who are responsible for it. The person who initiated these developments is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who actually studied physics
21:44
at a university in India. And after his study of conventional physics, he then studied traditional ideas about the nature of the mind, Eastern ideas about the nature of the mind.
22:01
And he was also able to observe the experiences himself on which the whole apparatus of the Eastern description of the mind are based. And about five years ago, he got the idea that it would be very fruitful to talk to physicists who knew much more about current developments than him
22:20
and try to synthesize these two approaches. And let's mention the people mainly responsible. Professor Larry Domash is one of these. And the person who is probably most qualified to link the two approaches is Professor George Sudarshan, who,
22:44
besides being very knowledgeable about the conventional Eastern thought, has also made a number of contributions in ordinary physics in the area of field theory. And a lot of what I'm going to say is based on what's come out of these collaborations.
23:01
But first of all, let me say about the experimental technique by which one observes or tries to find out the laws of the mind. So there's a technique known as transcendental meditation. And I'm not going to say very much about this, apart from what's of interest to the physicist.
23:22
I think the two points of most immediate interest are first that in this meditative state, one can observe one's mind in the same sort of way. When one has sufficient training, one can observe what is going on in one's mind in the same sort of way as one can observe, for example, what goes on in the room.
23:43
Now, this may sound a little strange, but to try and make it seem more, try to give a better understanding of this, I can remind you of something which most people do on many occasions. And that is they enter the dream state of consciousness.
24:01
And of course, we're aware that when one dreams, the whole dream is generated by the mind. And yet, one can observe what's going on in the dream as if it were really happening. But one can't do very good research in the dream state because of the way memory works. When one is dreaming, one has very little memory
24:21
of what is happening in the real world. One forgets about reality when one is dreaming. And in the same way, when one has come out of a dream, one very quickly forgets what happens in the dream. So while the dream state would offer the possibility of observing in some detail as to how the mind works, and of course,
24:41
people such as Freud concerned with psychoanalysis have tried to use the dream state to study the mind, it's really not so easy to do so. But the meditative state is free from this drawback in that one, although one is perceiving various forms of mental images, one is also in control
25:00
of what is happening, one can make a mental note of what is happening, and one can do experiments of the kind that I'll be talking about in a moment. Now perhaps I can summarize this point about the nature of what one can observe in a meditative state by a little sketch
25:21
comparing ordinary physics with this kind of physics. In ordinary physics, one has an observer, and he observes the world. It's the observer and the world outside him. And the kind of physics one is doing in a meditative state is just the same, except that we have what you could think of
25:42
as the observer's mind and what goes on in it outside him. And the only difference, well, there are a couple of ways in which this is less informative than physics. One cannot do quantitative measurements because one cannot stick meters into one's mind. Let's see, what was the other thing?
26:02
Well, I don't think that was an important point. Oh, yes, I remember it was. The difference between observing one's own mind and observing the world is that when one is doing an experiment in the world, more than one person can watch the experiment at a given time, whereas when one is doing experiments in one's mind,
26:21
only one person can watch. But this is not an essential objection to this kind of physics because all that's necessary is that different people should be able to reproduce the experiment. We don't normally confirm our experiments by having three people taking readings at the same point. And the only thing that matters is whether different people can put their minds
26:41
in the same states and do the experiments and compare the results which come out. So I think this is a perfectly satisfactory situation as long as one finds reproducible phenomena to occur. The second aspect about this technique is that it appears to be possible for people to put their minds into a reproducible state
27:02
if they've had enough experience. It's basically a state in which thoughts are absent. It's a little more complicated than that. Just to give an analogy, I don't want to go into the details, but it's like being able to work, from the metal physicist's point of view, it's like being able to do experiments
27:21
with a pure metal or single crystal rather than something which has got a tangle of dislocations in it. And one of the processes which occurs as a result during the technique is a change similar to that of getting rid of dislocations in a metal. In fact, the mind appears to act something like a fluid. It is able to propagate waves of various kinds
27:43
which are transformed in well-defined ways. So we have in principle the possibility of getting reproducible results. And a large number of people involved in the kind of experiment where for a period of six months they are trained intensively in this technique and may spend something like two hours
28:03
getting to the right state. And they're then being asked to do experiments such as trying the effects of introducing a particular thought and seeing what happens. So it looks like we may soon be able to get fairly reproducible experiments, but these will of course only be qualitative like the experiments, like many of the experiments done in biology.
28:23
But nevertheless, these should be pretty useful for trying to construct quantitative theories of the mind and entering areas of physics which we have not previously been able to reach. Now, I'm gonna talk mainly about two of these phenomena and possible interpretations of these phenomena.
28:42
Now, I should say that although these are now experiments which it has only been possible to do quite recently, there are ancient records which were not understood until these experiments were done, which seem to be talking about exactly the same kind of phenomena.
29:01
They are records known as the Vedas, which were thought just to be essentially myths, but it is now found out that they can be considered alternatively as explanations for what happens when one does experiments with consciousness. So there's this interesting link
29:21
between very ancient traditional knowledge and modern experiments. And the phenomena I'm gonna be talking about are in fact described in these verses known as the Vedas. Now, the first phenomenon is known as the relationship between name and form, the name-form relationship.
29:48
What is done in these observations is one goes into the meditative state and waits till the mind has settled down. There are various cues which tell the person when he's reached the right state. And then he introduces a particular word.
30:04
So it'll be as if a thought is introduced into the mind. Let me go back to my sketch. The state which one reaches in order to do this is that in which the observer is not generating lots of thoughts about all his worries and so on,
30:22
all those thoughts have disappeared. And also, he has become very sensitive to what has happened in his mind, a phenomenon which is just analogous to dark adaptation. When one goes into the dark, one becomes more sensitive to light. In the same way, when one has been in this state for a long time, one becomes more sensitive
30:41
to very faint thoughts, which would normally be in the subconscious. So the experiment is essentially that of injecting a thought and seeing what happens. What is found is if one uses particular words, one gets various phenomena, which may be visual or feelings and so on. So, for example, I don't know if people,
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it's said that some people can do this but not others, but I'll use an English word to illustrate this. One would imagine the sound rose, and one would then see visual images which would look like the rose. Now, that particular example may not work. One seems to need to use the right kinds of words
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to get these effects. But the essential phenomenon is that when one puts in a particular word and that thought dies away, and as it dies away, an image of some kind appears. And people who have not studied the ancient writings find phenomena which can be connected with those
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which have been talked about in the past. Well, now let's take this phenomenon and try to look at it as physicists. What we're doing is perturbing a system, the mind or consciousness, and that is having specific effects. Well, the way to look at this,
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which seems to make it comprehensible, is to suppose that when the person is generating suppose he is choosing the word rose, when he generates a particular sound, we must imagine that that is causing certain processes to take place in his mind, and that will change the state of his mind,
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and I'll draw a vector to indicate that change. He then stops imagining that sound and goes on to the next sound, and we then expect his mind to go in a different direction, and so on. Now, this word will, if his mind is in the right state, this word will reverberate in his mind, and we're gonna get some process like that
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as it dies away. So we could understand this phenomenon by saying that the final state produced is the limit point under this applied perturbation. This idea of a cycle which goes to a limit is something which is well known in a number of phenomena in physics,
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and to make it clearer, I'd just like to give you a couple of examples. One example is an experiment that is done in school physics. One has a glass tube containing powder, and one excites the tube by rubbing it on the outside.
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One finds if the intensity is right that the powder piles up in little heaps at the nodes of the wave, and in terms of this explanation, the points where the powder gathers are just the limit cycles of motion under the influence of the sound. So in fact, we have a concrete illustration of a process I'm suggesting occurs here.
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Another example of the same phenomenon is the process used for demagnetizing tape. To demagnetize tape, you apply an oscillating magnetic field which is allowed to die away, and this produces the state of zero magnetization in the tape. So what I'm suggesting here is a well-defined phenomenon
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that is well-known in physics, and we can better understand this phenomenon of the name-form relationship by saying that it is ultimately the same phenomenon. So the final state of a system will be that which is stable under this particular oscillation, just as the points where the powder gathers
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in this experiment are the points where the powder is stable under the influence of the sound field. Well, one can go on speculating a bit, assuming this is true. Now, these are in no sense a theory of what's going on. All I want to do is to say
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that if one assumes certain connections between these phenomena and the phenomena of physics, these would give rise to equations which have the same structure as those we have in quantum mechanics. But of course, to be able to say this as an exact theory, one would have to do a large amount of difficult calculation.
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But it's interesting to see what can be done. And the connection that it's tempting to make is to say that there is a direct relationship between the sound field, these are the imagined sounds rather than the real sound, and the wave function in quantum mechanics.
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The reason why I suggest this connection is that one has linear equations in both sound and for the wave function in quantum mechanics. So that fits nicely. And also, of course, if the sound patterns were periodic, one would have a reason for introducing a phase
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and having a complex wave function. So this would seem to be a plausible possibility. And one can in fact go on along the same lines and suggest an explanation for the effects of an observation in quantum mechanics. I'm talking about the eigenvalue equation,
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which says what happens to the system after an observation is made. And one can explain that by saying that we have a two-step process of the same kind, as I've just mentioned. Let me just remind you that this thing, A, this psi is the state of a system
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in this equation, and A is the observation being made. The A is a property of the observer and the psi a property of the system. Now, as I said, one could account for this result by saying that this process I've indicated here occurs twice. We can say that the observer, by observing,
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is generating particular thoughts. And these are impressed on the system of observation and produce a particular wave pattern in that system and our observation. So here are the observer's, here's the observer's mental activity, and this is the activity corresponding to sound of a system.
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So this wave will be A and this will be psi, and then this wave will itself generate the particular phenomenon. So we have a two-step process between the observer and the world. And now this equation can be accounted for if we suppose that we have,
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well, to put it briefly, it's as if the propagation characteristics of a system were changed. So instead of having one wave equation for sound, one had a modified wave equation. So if we assume that we get that this connection is described by an equation such as the following,
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which is more or less the same as what happens in the quantum mechanical theory of observation, then we can say that this condition will be reached when we have a wave function psi which has a time dependence like this. We recognize that this is just the condition for the wave psi to go around a limit cycle.
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It's periodic. So one could explain quantum mechanics by saying that the results of a measurement is for the observer's perturbation to drive the system being observed into a periodic state, and then that system will generate the phenomenon perceived by the senses. I think it's quite interesting that the same limit cycle phenomenon
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occurs in both explanations. There's a paper by Sudarshan, which I don't have time to go into, which discusses these possibilities in some detail. Sudarshan's suggestion is that we do not observe the actual state of a system, but what we observe are the processes that go on in it, and he is then able to justify
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further features of quantum mechanics besides those I've mentioned. Well, I want to leave that name-form relationship. It seems to offer the chances of extending quantum mechanics, as I say, the mechanics of observation in quantum mechanics. Now I want to talk about a second phenomenon which relates to an explanation of intelligent behavior.
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You remember I said earlier that we could account for intelligent behavior on a fundamental basis by saying there were certain selected sequences of thoughts. Example I gave is that the experience of being in danger is followed by the wish to escape,
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and the next set of observations suggest a simple way in which this could arise. Now, this observation is one which only a few people can do at the moment. It requires years of training before the mind has become sensitive enough, and so as regards its reproducibility,
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the situation isn't too good at the moment, but in the future there may be more people who can develop their minds to be sensitive enough to observe these phenomena, but I think what one can do is to suppose that the phenomena are universal and explore their consequences and see if these seem to be reasonable.
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Now, this is an extremely complicated field. I'm not familiar with very much of it myself, but what I have looked at seems fairly convincing, and so a lot more than I'll be able to say here, but the observation is different from the previous one in that in the previous situation, the observer himself introduced a perturbation into his mind. He imagined a sequence of sounds.
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Now, the phenomenon I'm gonna talk about now is what happens spontaneously when the observer does not disturb the system, and what he finds is very well-defined sequences of sounds are perceived in his mind. These sounds, in fact, are those which have previously been written down as evaders,
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and so the suggestion is that the people who wrote down evaders had, in fact, reached a state of consciousness where they could just perceive these sounds in their mind in the same way as a mathematician perceives mathematical thoughts. At the lowest level, one just has a sequence of sounds like this is the most fundamental one,
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and what we have here are that the laws of mechanics of this particular state of the mind, whatever they may be, seem to have the consequence of causing sound to evolve in a particular way. It's like Maxwell's equations where an electric field changes into a magnetic field and then a magnetic field back into an electric field,
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so if these are general phenomena, we have a general property of a mind with the property that sounds evolve into each other in particular ways. What happens is that these, this is the first word, and that this gets elaborated into later sounds. What the description is that the vibrations
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get more and more elaborated, like one would first of all perceive an R, and then a R, G, and Agni, Agnimile, and so on. This gets gradually extended, and one then finds that these go into whole words, and it's as if each of these sounds
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was equivalent to an idea, and when this sound evolves, one has actual words which are amplifications of what that idea means, and when one looks into detail, and I've only looked at it, not looked at it in much detail myself, just the first few words, but they seem to fit this picture, is that this first thing represents
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the sequence I wrote up at the beginning. The R is a quiescent state where nothing is happening, and then there's a sudden G, and that quiescent state is stopped, and this corresponds to a goal being perceived, and then we get onto a situation where there's a progression towards a goal, and then there's just a relatively inactive hum at the end,
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so one can say that there's, we can regard these sounds as ideas which correspond to the processes that we perceive as intelligent behavior, and the later verses can be considered as detailed descriptions of how the intelligent behavior occurs,
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and they are, in fact, quite close to the kind of structures which have been built up by people working in artificial intelligence in order to construct intelligent systems. I've obviously only been able to sketch this work in the barest detail here, but it does seem to be a very consistent picture, even though it's a qualitative one,
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one doesn't have exact numbers. Now, here I've been talking about laws of thought, and one can go on to discuss how the laws of physics come about. Well, I won't go into that in much detail, as there's not much time, and in fact, one hasn't been able to derive things like Maxwell's equations yet, but there are hundreds of thousands,
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well, something like 10,000 verses, and it's just possible that there might be physics that we know about contained within, but that must be a task for the future to study these verses. But the essential point is that I've talked here about a relationship between sound and form, and as this becomes elaborated,
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one gets the sound being elaborated into language and forms being elaborated into physics, and the connection is rather as if just the fact that the description of physics causes the physics to take place. It's just as if saying Maxwell's equations caused electromagnetic field to occur,
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obeying Maxwell's equations, and one can, in fact, explore these connections and find that this connection is borne out, at any rate, qualitatively. So I think this may be a very interesting topic for future research. Well, I think I can't close this lecture without referring to the possibility
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of practical applications of these ideas. As some of you may know, Morishi Mahesh Jogi, the person responsible for this research, has suggested that laws of consciousness may determine the behavior of society, and I can't go into this in any detail,
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but the point, according to this description of intelligence, is that intelligence is determined partly by learning from the outside, but partly by these laws of intelligent behavior. And I think all I can say at this point is that these ideas seem to be worth taking very seriously.
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I think they've been misunderstood to a large extent because people have not been aware of the amount of detailed thinking which has gone into arriving at these results, and they've only heard various proclamations, but I think they certainly deserve to be taken very seriously. But to get back to summarize about basic physics,
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we have here what seem to be reproducible phenomena which in the future will be studied more and more as the experiments are done with more and more people, and they do seem to link up in a fairly well-defined way with the physics that we know about, and I think it's likely that in the future we may be seeing extensions of physics,
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the quantum theory, in this kind of direction. Thank you very much.