QM experiment

Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 01:01:23 -0800
From: Ezio Insinna <emi2@world-net.sct.fr>
To: quantum-d@teleport.com
Subject: QM experiment

Stanley Jeffers mentions that 

> claims advanced by a research group at Princeton lead by Professor 
> Robert Jahn that human internationality can produce a marginal
> but statistically significant physical effect on systems that are 
> inherently probabilistic. 

and Jack Scarfatti that

> Brian Josephson has suggested that living matter is able to 
> use nonlocal quantum connections in a way that transcends the 
> statistical predictions of orthodox quantum mechanics. Henry 
> Stapp has published a detailed mathematical model of "intent" 
> in accord with Josephson's qualitative idea. 

finally Stanley Jeffers suggests that we should

> try to make more suggestions of actual experiments that could be 
> performed to give us insight into the nature of consciousness.

In one of my previous postings, I have tried to draw the attention 
on the possible emergence of synchronistic events in quantum systems.
Pauli, in fact, expressely said that 

"Modern physics reintroduces the observer as a small god of 
 creation in his microcosm, with the ability of (at least 
 partial) free choice and mostly uncontrollable effects on 
 the observed object. However, if such phenomena depend 
 on how (the experimental condition) they are observed, why 
 couldn't there exist also phenomena (extra corpus) [i.e. 
 in quantum systems] which depend on the person who observes 
 them (i.e. on the psychic quality of the observer)?" 

 (Pauli, Letter to Jung of Dec. 23rd, 1947, in Meier, 1992)
  
>From this viewpoint, individual quantum events, which quantum 
physicists try to eliminate by the use of statistical calculations, 
may sometimes become the place for the emergence of synchronistic 
occurrences. Synchronistic events are in fact endowed with meaning, 
i.e. in scientific terms, they carry "information". The issue of 
Schroedinger's cat experiment would matter for the observer and 
would no longer be a meaningless chance event. In a letter to Jung 
of May 27, 1953, Pauli said more explicitly :

"It was in 1931 when I met you personally for the first 
 time.  At that time I experienced the unconscious as a new 
 dimension. Shortly after my marriage in 1934 and at the 
 end of my analytical treatment.... I had the following dream, 
 with which I was occupied for many years:

"A man looking like Einstein draws a figure on a cardboard....
 ....This (the content of the figure) stood in a manifest 
 connection with the controversy (with Einstein) and was a 
 kind of answer of the unconscious. It showed quantum 
 mechanics, and official physics at large, as the one-
 dimensional fraction of a two-dimensional more meaningful 
 world, the second [complementary] dimension of which could 
 only be represented by the unconscious and the archetypes. 
 Today I believe in fact, that eventually the same archetype 
 may manifest itself in the choice of an experimental set-up 
 by the observer as well as in the result of the measurement 
 (similarly to the throwing of dice in J. B. Rhine's experiments)." 

 (Pauli, in Meier, 1992)

When Pauli mentions the concept of archetype, he means a mathematical 
entity capable of inducing order within disordered physical (dynamical) 
systems.  In order to render Jung's (Pauli's) concept of archetype 
more accessible to the scientific community I have compared it to a 
mathematical attractor (Insinna, 1992, 1996a, 1996b). Those attractors 
might thus manifest themselves in any dynamical system capable of 
amplifying (via nonlinear microscopic fluctuations) some synchronistic 
events occurring at the quantum level.

As Pauli further suggested, Bohr's original concept of complementarity 
should be enlarged as to englobe mind-body interactions. Therefore, 
in Pauli's interpretation the system under observation may mirror the 
psychic state of the observer in a complementary fashion. Synchronicity 
would manifest itself within the individual events occurring in every 
quantum system. 

In my contribution to Tucson I (1994), I suggested an experiment that 
could be implemented in order to test Pauli's viewpoint and verify if 
mind-matter interactions exist or not at the quantum level. At the 
same time, the role and the extension of consciousness would also be 
clarified. In that experiment, the pulses generated by two quantum 
sources are the object of qualitative investigations. That is, one 
should look for the occurrence of synchronous pulses and regularities 
in both the quantum systems under observation. Simultaneously, one 
should monitor the unconscious activity of the observer and examinate 
the possible emergence of archetypal images.

The experiment was run for the first time during two months in 1994 
and the results were encouraging. Some peculiar regularities and a 
high number of synchronous pulses showed up during that first attempt. 
The results were largely above the expected probability. However, 
scientific rigour did not allow me to publish the results and I have 
been looking for some physicists interested in repeating the experiment 
with a more formal protocol.The university of Louvain in Belgium is 
now planning to repeat it and I would be happy to forward the necessary 
information to other physicists interested in this simple but very 
promising experiment.

As a last word, I would like to stress the fact that qualitative 
investigations of quantum individual events (the "noise") in a quantum 
system (let alone the unconscious activity of the observer) have never 
been attempted. Undoubtedly, in contemporary science, the qualitative 
influence of the unconscious psyche of the observer has no place and no 
meaning.However, a holistic view of the universe should englobe not 
only the conscious but also the unconscious personality which, IMMO 
accounts for at least 50 percent of our psychic activity.   

References :

-Insinna, E. M., 1992. Synchronicity and Coherent Excitations in MT. 
Nanobiology, Vol.1, 2. p. 191-208 - Proceedings of the NATO  Advanced 
Research Workshop (Tucson, 1991).

-Insinna, E.M., 1996. Synchronicity and the Emergence of Non-local 
Information in Quantum Systems. In Toward a Science of Consciousness, 
S. R. Hameroff, A. Kaszniak and A. Scott eds. MIT Press/Bradford Books. 
April 1996

-Insinna, EM, 1996. Synchronicity, Information Processing and Mind-Body 
Interactions. 14th International Congress on Cybernetics, Namur, 
Belgium. In press

-Insinna, E.M., 1996. Cytoskeleton, Quantum Mechanics and Cognition.
In Nature, Cognition and System. Vol.3. A. Carvallo ed. Kluwer 
Academic, Holland

-Jung, C.G., 1987. "Synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle". 
ARK Paperbacks, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, London.

-Laurikainen, K.V., 1988. "Beyond the Atom". The Philosophical Thought 
of Wolfgang Pauli. Springer, Berlin.

-Maier, C.A., 1992.  W. Pauli und C.G. Jung. Springer, Berlin


Ezio M. Insinna
Bioelectronics Research Association
e-mail : emi2@world-net.sct.fr