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Introduction.
An article recently published by the Cornell psychologist Daryl J. Bem [11 in
a distinguished psychology journal has provoked a heated discussion in the
New York Times. Among the discussants was Douglas Hofstadter who
wrote that: "If any of his claims were true, then all of the bases underlying
contemporaty science would be toppled, and we would have to rethink
everything about the nature of the universe."
It is, I believe, an exaggeration to say that if any of Bern's claims were true
then "all of the bases underlying contemporary science would be toppled"
and that "we would have to rethink everything about the nature of the
universe". In fact, all that is required is a small change in the rules, and one
that seems reasonable and natural in its own right. The major part of the
required rethinking was done already by the founders of quantum
mechanics, and cast in more rigorous form by John von Neumann [2], more
than eighty years ago.
In classical mechanics one deals directly with physically described
properties alone: the evolution of the physically described universe is
deterministically governed by the physical variable themselves, and the role
of our minds is reduced to that of helpless spectators. Our empirical
knowledge can be viewed as simply a partial account of the full mechanistic
physical reality itself, and hence of no fundamental import.
In quantum mechanics the relationship between the physically described
aspects of the universe and our empirical knowledge of it is highly
nontrivial, and the role of our empirical knowledge, and the account of how
we acquire it, become, therefore, essential parts of the theory.
The founders of quantum mechanics already achieved a profound rethinking
about the nature of the universe, when they recognized that the
mathematically and physically described universe that appears in quantum
physics represents not the world of material reality contemplated in the
classical physics of Isaac Newton and his direct successors, but rather a
world of potentialities orpossibilities for our future acquisitions of
knowledge. It is neither irrational nor surprising that a scientific theory based
upon empirical (experienced) phenomena, and designed to allow us to
predict correlations between various empirical phenomena should
incorporate, as orthodox quantum mechanics does: 1), a natural place for
2
