Science, Philosophy, and the Quantum Revolution | Avshalom Elitzur

All the scientific community ignores me. Afshalom aleichem, sir. Welcome to Hadalaiketsen. It's an honor and privilege to be here. So you've defended the view that all particles have a degree of consciousness. It's called panpsychism. Why do you defend that view? So I only defend that view. I can't probe it. But in order to explain that, we have to know what's the problem of consciousness. Why people think that consciousness is a problem. So usually people say, look, I've studied physics and I studied chemistry and biology and neurophysiology and I studied the way the human brain works and I know what is perception and what is thoughts and memory and so on and so on. But there is one strange thing. All these processes have a subjective ingredient. There is a subjective experience. And this subjective experience, which is consciousness, this has no explanation. In other words, the mind-body problem or the problem of consciousness is that science gives very good explanations to the operation of the brain. But we still are in the dark, just as we were 2000 years ago. Why is there a conscious experience accompanying each of them? So panpsychism, which is an old theory, says perhaps we missed something from the very beginning. You studied physics, you studied chemistry and you think that you know what matter is and what an atom is and what a particle is. Perhaps you don't. Perhaps each and every smallest unit of matter and energy has another quality to it that science doesn't know yet. But this is the kind of quality, the kind of proto-consciousness that later, when we have a functioning brain, then emerges as what we call consciousness. I like it. So what's the evidence for this view from quantum mechanics and fundamental physics? Very little. But I think if ever there is a good solution to the mind-body problem, to the mystery of consciousness and to many other related problems in human psyche, they will come from physics. Physics should be rich and complex enough to be capable of explaining this. Quantum mechanics tells you that when you take matter and energy to the smallest units, then the laws of physics, which were familiar to you and worked beautifully in classical physics, don't work anymore. And then you have a new reality, which is crazy, which is baffling, sometimes annoying, but it's very beautiful and very profound and gives you a lot of power, new technologies. Quantum mechanics tells you that what you thought about space and time is not the whole story. A particle can reside in many places at the same time. An action can walk backwards in time, just as it walks forward in time. So quantum mechanics is a revolution, which is only at the beginning. And I feel lucky, fortunate to belong to one of the groups that are exploring the next frontier. So how do you explain unified human consciousness on the panpsychic's viewpoint? So if every little particle in the universe has a degree of consciousness, how do they combine to form unified human experience? Frankly, I don't know. All I can say is that I like it. But why not defend the idealist view or own that there is this consciousness? Oh, so you know, there is a paper of mine, and this is a paper of mine, which I published in fewer versions. I have an argument in favor of interactionist dualism. Now, let me tell you, for a physicist, it's a severe problem. We know that there is something called consciousness, and that it cannot be reduced to the physical reality. This is the mind-body problem. So there are a few ways to deal with the problem. The oldest way is dualism, saying that there are two things. There is mind, there is matter, they're different. It goes with religion. God gave us soul, and it is something which is immaterial. And then there is materialism, which says it's just an illusion. Don't worry, everything is fine. Few weeks, months ago, Daniel Dennett passed away. So he was the guy who was saying, there is nothing strange about consciousness, there is no such thing. And his theory was so good that for some decades, he was going from one conference to another to explain to the world that he had finally solved the problem of consciousness. Ridiculous. But between them, there are theories that are called non-interactionist dualism. People like Chalmers, they say, I'm not going to be so stupid as to say that there is nothing mysterious about consciousness. There is. There is something called consciousness, which is a riddle. However, I don't want to be in conflict with one of the basic principles of physics, which is conservation laws, conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, and so on, and so on. The moment you say that a person does something because something non-material like consciousness interacts or affects their brain, actually, you're saying that conservation laws are somehow wrong. And you don't want to say that. Many years ago, I published a paper and I said, here I have a proof that something non-physical interferes with our brain. I called it a confession of a relaxed dualist. And I begged people, I said, I don't like this argument. Please give me a reputation. And nobody did. There is a guy named Chalmers, whom I mentioned, and he wrote in his first book, Elitzur says that here is an argument for dualism, but he's going too far. No, show me where I was wrong. So I was so pissed off by his ignoring me that I wrote another paper. You know, he talks about zombie. Zombie is an interesting thing. Here you are in front of me and you're happy and you're smiling. And, you know, you have conscious experiences. You laugh, you cry. And then I know, I'm sure about that, when you laugh or when you cry, you have the same experiences that I have when I laugh or cry. I can prove it. And a zombie, say, Simon Custer, who is a zombie, who is just doing exactly the same thing, smiles the same, touches his ear the same, everything the same, without having any conscious experience. As strange as it is, it is much more compatible with the laws of physics than to claim that there is something like consciousness, because consciousness is a mystery. So I considered the case in which there is a zombie Chalmers, and I called it charmless. And I showed a logical proof that if there is Chalmers and charmless, there must be a difference between them, a physical difference. So here is an argument in favor of interactionist dualism, which I hate, because I'm a physicist. I shouldn't support theories which accord well with religion or with mysticism. And Chalmers keeps ignoring me. You know what? All the scientific community ignores me. I mean, okay, I wrote papers on quantum mechanics, and it's nice, and you invite me to conferences, but what about my proof in favor of interactionist dualism? Stop ignoring me. Do you think that there are political forces in the scientific community that have repressed your ideas? No, I wouldn't go that far. They don't have enough... They are not intelligent enough to do that. They're just, you know, they're slow accepting new ideas. But it will come. I mean, do you really think the panpsychism resolves the mystery of consciousness better than materialism or better than... Yeah, that's because every physicist, if they are a good physicist, theoretical physicist, will tell you that there is still a huge mystery about the physical reality that we don't understand, okay? We think that we know what space is, what time is. We had relativity, special general relativity, quantum mechanics, telling us that those constituents of physical reality, matter, energy, space, and time are very strange, and we still... There are many things that we don't understand about them. For example, the passage of time. This is going to be the talk that I'm going to give immediately after this interview. There is something very strange about time. Time is moving. Time is passing. Now, in all the equations of physics, there is no mention of... Actually, this property of time, that it is flowing, that time is moving, that there is past, present, and future, and that we have been sitting here, we have been walking to this place, and we shall later walk from this place. So there are different times. According to physics, all those times coexist along time, just as different places along this river coexist along the river. This is the orthodox view. And everybody, you know, every person in the street will tell you that it's nonsense. Time is passing. Time is moving. And if physics doesn't recognize it, then physics must broaden and develop in order to incorporate this aspect of physical reality. You've also defended the idea of backwards causation, of events in the future causing events in the past. Why do you think that? This is a more advanced issue. I'm a quantum physicist, and I had the privilege of working, and I still have the privilege of working, with Yakir Aharonov, who is now celebrating 92, and he's still very active and makes us all very active because we always have new ideas. Yakir has formulated a new formalism of understanding quantum mechanics and studying quantum mechanics. The two-state vector formalism. And that formalism says something very profound. We always knew that when you make a measurement, you can know about quantum reality only by making measurements. And we always knew, that was the uncertainty principle, that when you make a measurement, you are causing a disturbance. You are affecting the particle that you measured. Now, this disturbance, this effect, goes forward in time. Trivial, right? If I throw a rock to the river, I'm going to have waves. After I throw a rock to the river, you never see something going backwards in time. In other words, you can think about waves converging here in the river and then ejecting back before I throw the rock there. Aharonov said, actually, this is what happens in quantum mechanics. When you make a measurement, measurement affects the quantum in both ways. One goes to the future, one goes to the past. Which means that when you study a particle during the time evolution between two measurements, there is a whole new physics there. So this is a kind of backward causation. It explains many things. Think about the EPR experiment. People say, I took one particle here, one particle there, which interacted in the past, I'm measuring this particle, and suddenly, at zero time, immediately, the other particle is somehow affected by that. That's strange. But if you think about space-time in four dimensions, you understand that the effects can go backwards to their common source, which was even yesterday, and then zigzag back to the present. So backward causation, first of all, makes many oddities of quantum mechanics much more understandable. But more than that, it yields several new predictions. And physical laboratories worldwide keep providing confirmations of these new predictions. So we live in a very exciting time in which there is a major revolution now underway. Is there a wider metaphysical view that best explains backwards causation? Can you incorporate it with panpsychism, for example? Are those two things compatible? Everything eventually connects with everything, I can tell you. I'm fortunate enough to take part in different research plans, even in different disciplines. Whether I'll live to see them converging, many of them, some of them, I hope so. Sometimes they do converge, and they seem to lead towards one profound theory. I wouldn't say theory of everything, because, you know, string theories proved us that there will be a theory of everything, and so far they're a theory of nothing. But yeah, we know that quantum mechanics and relativity, which look conflicting to one another, begin to converge, and together with other branches of physics, cosmology and so on. And that means that even issues related to us, living organisms or conscious organisms, somehow can be better understood in terms of this forthcoming theory. I mean, do you think that there will be one day a theory of everything? I mean, you said string theory is not a viable candidate, but does the human mind have the capacity to develop such a thing? Good question. You know that Stephen Hawking ended his famous book, A Brief History of Time. Soon there is going to be a theory of everything, and we shall understand the mind of God. I don't know. Frankly, I don't think... We can't even imagine a theory that tells you how the universe came about without you asking what happened before. And then comes another smart guy and says, well, there was another thing before, but then the question will emerge again. There could be something either to physical reality, to the universe or to physical reality, or a certain limitation of the human mind, that there will always be something outside of our understanding that we will have to make another revolution, another revolution and explore. And the universe keeps giving us surprises all the time. Frankly, let's hope that it will keep surprising us. I was going to ask you, why do you think there's something rather than nothing and whether that's a question for philosophy rather than physics? Well, here is what is so beautiful in physics. For many years, philosophy and science were separated for good reasons. Philosophy says let's give answers to the questions only by thinking, while science says we need experiments. Each of them in itself becomes barren after a while. The combination between them is fruitful. Physics, especially theoretical physics, relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology, are actually branches, are actually philosophies or branches of philosophy, but they are unique in that nature herself is part of the debate. Not only philosophers arguing between themselves, which can go for centuries, but every once in a while they ask the universe, what do you think about it? Here we are making an observation, we are making an experiment. And what do you know? The universe is kind enough to answer sometimes. There is a beautiful paper by, and I recommend it to everyone, by Eugene Wigner. It goes like this. The title is On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics to the Explanation of Natural Sciences, something like that. It begins with the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics. And there he asks a question that we keep asking ever since Plato. How come that when you deal with mathematics, mathematics deals with abstract things? They don't exist. I mean, there is no square root. There are no minus numbers or imaginary numbers. I mean, there are either pears or apples or people or prime ministers, but pure numbers or all kinds of strange numbers do not exist. So this is a fiction of the human mind. Plato asked many years ago, how can we explain the fact that people who are dealing with these apparently imaginary things, these are the people who build bridges that do not collapse. These are the people who build ships or spacecrafts that come back to us. I mean, if you know mathematics, then you deal better with physical reality. How is it? So Wigner asked this question. I don't know. I don't think he even tried to answer it, but he ends with a very religious tone. He says that this effectiveness is a gift that we don't understand, neither deserve. We should appreciate this gift and try to deserve it. Do you think that panpsychism and many of the things we've talked about today have ethical implications? I mean, in general, do physical theories, theories about the universe have ethics? Before that, no, before that, the question whether animals have consciousness, whether they suffer, plants and so on, I hope that they don't. But animal welfare, animal rights, the way humanity treats other species is a disgrace. The fact that we are going to a calamity, we are now 8 billion people, soon we are going to be 9 billion people. Stupid people, stupid governments keep ruining our biosphere. This is part of this arrogance. So before you go to panpsychism, whether there is some consciousness to matter, please let's acknowledge that there is life and conscious experience is there not only for mammals, for high organisms, but to many living creatures and we should learn how to respect them in order to survive on this planet. Do you think that we are going to survive as a species? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. The calamity is so horrible. The calamity that we inflict on this biosphere is so horrible that many scientists now warn that we may have... It's too late. What I can say to the young generation, we failed. We failed, my generation failed, scientists, leaders, philosophers, we failed in protecting this world. Fight for it. When I say fight for it, be revolutionary. And I would even condone, even justify violence, other acts. When you see that governments do not do what they should do to save the biosphere and save humanity from this calamity, the young generation have to understand that we failed and they must act and act much better and much more fiercely than we acted. And what are the current conflicts for you that are most pressing, that you think we need to act immediately towards, young people in particular? Look at the governments today. Look at the governments. Dictatorships, you can understand why they should be so stupid, why they should be so selfish. But how would you explain the fact that the greatest nation, the strongest nation in the world, the United States, had a creature like Trump being president and there is a chance that he will be president again? I mean, we are facing a danger to the whole of humanity. The climate crisis, the pollution, the population explosion. This is stupidity, greed, disrespect for science, going after all kinds of other theories. You're having in this festival, you're going to have this charlatan, Zizek. I mean, people are going after all kinds of weird people. There is science. Science is sincere. Science is self-reflective. Science is humble. And science is trying to teach us to be humble, to appreciate the beauty of nature, of the universe. We better do that as soon as possible. I mean, is there any hope? There is. We are both Jewish and we know that in Judaism, you should never lose hope. Even if there is a sword on your neck, never despair. And last question relating to the Judaism. Would you like to comment on any of the events in Israel right now? The state of Israel is now in the worst moment in its history. And in one of the worst moments in the history of the Jewish people ever since the Holocaust. If we don't come back to our senses, throw out this gang, criminal gang that took over Israel, and begin a new path of freedom and peace with the Palestinians, we are doomed. I hope that the Israeli people will understand that for the sake of our children. Thank you very much, Avshalom. It's been a pleasure.