Customer Reviews

The Quantum Self

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The idea of trying to define consciousness and understand it in a scientific context is something I'm highly interested in. This book has some great ideas which I find highly intriguing, but to be convincing the author needs a stronger foundaiton in science. For instance, she constantly refers to neurons as having "cell walls", but a freshman college science major would no that no animal cell has a cell wall, period. This leads me to wonder how informed Zohar may be on the other scientific issues, such as physics, in this book. That sais, I think she's on the right track, and thinking about the subject in the proper way. But i think we need to look for more authoritative scientific sources on the subject, such as Roger Penrose...

Zohar effectively breaks out of Conventional Wisdom's monologue on human consciousness with her "Quantum Self". It is sometimes a difficult task to use the language of today's thought to describe tomorrow's. It is understandable, therefore, when Zohar dips into her personal stash of religious metaphors to describe a world that is decidedly metaphysical.

A few religious references may come as an unpleasant surprise at first read, to the self-described universalist, but an open-minded reader will easily see the broader truths being espoused without marriage to a specific western or eastern point of view. It is impossible to stop an idea whose time has come. This book takes us a step closer to a unifying theory of consciousness, matter, and phases of existence.

I decided to write this review after I re-learned that all of our choices have a cost. I strongly advise you to read another book. This book discusses one of the more difficult questions in science and it does a poor job. It employs wrong scientific principles, logiacal fallacies, and (in later chapters) spiritual nonsense.

Briefly:
1) Bose Einstein condensate does not apply to human tissue.
2) Quantum effects are observed under far smaller scale than neurons. We don't act like our atoms.
3) Quantum theories of consciousness have been shown as highly unlikely.
4) The author gives a poor description of physics, psychology, and phylosophy.

I wish that I read a diffent book. There are several good thinkers. Here is an incomplete list: P.Churchland, D.Dennett, S.Pinker, T.Nagel.

The basis of this book is that consciousness can be explained as a Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms in the neurons. Interesting idea, sadly impossible. Bose-Einstein condensates can only exist at very low temperatures. The inside of the brain certainly doesn't qualify. The authors could've easily established the impossibility of their claim by looking up B-E condensates in any textbook on statistical mechanics.

This book is highly informative and thought provoking although some of the ideas behind it are confusing. For example, as someone else mentioned, neurones don't have cell walls, because no animal cells have cell walls. And also, the author does not explain the hypothetical Bose-Einstein condensate in the brain very well, even though the idea is one of the central ideas behind the book, nor why it has to be in the brain. The "Frohlich pumped system", if it is indeed responsible for consciousness, it would only require energy, which is existent throughout the human body. Moreover, it is unclear how such a pumped system would come about in the human body, and how it would have been created in the first place through evolution.

However, these shortcomings are more than made up by revolutionary ideas (even for now, a decade later), its interpretation of "relationship", and its reasonable scientific backing. No, the real reason I gave it a 4 stars and not 5 is because the middle chapters are kind of repetitive, culminating in a rather hideous chapter "Getting beyond narcissism" which was neither relevant nor philosophically sound. But the last couple of chapters were excellent, and I'd certainly recommend this to any open-minded science buffs (not to laymen, however).

Of the many books written about the new physics, this is one of the most precise, and is apparently unafraid of skepticism, which I respect even if it means instigating more erroneous rants about "New Ageist science" is rampant and the "real science" is not from an ill-informed skeptic.

This is a well-articulated presentation of the new emerging quantum worldview - a worldview that sees consciousness as a quantum mechanical phenomenon. Personally, the author help me to resolve some philosophical issues - namely, the mind/body problem, free will vs. determinism, the problem of the one and the many, and the God-world relationship. I highly recommend this book for those who are interested in integrating their spirituality with science. It will alter the way you see the world.

When I bought this book I was hoping the author had a cogent understanding of both physics and psychology - unfortunately, here was neither. As another reviewer pointed out Zohar bashes Reductionism too much, eg. "For quantum physics really to come into its own, and to replace not just Newtonian physics but also the whole Newtonian world view ...." Of course, any responsible quantum physicist writing on this topic would never suggest replacing Newtonian physics because this is impossible! However, many do advocate for a greater share of cultural/scientific investigation and awareness be given to the quantum/system/ecological/holist/emergence perspectives. Then on the very first page of her book Zohr calls for "... a new, quantum mechanical theory of consciousness...." A mechanical quantum theory? This is a contratiction of terms! Also, her pyschology is uneven and inaccurate. While I admire her spirit and intent for writing this book, I was very disappointed with the material and I would not recommend buying it. I think there are better books on the market about these areas of thinking.

The author, with the aid of her husband, speculates on a possible theory of consciousness that would tie this phenomena into quantum mechanics, and so resolve the apparent duality of consciousness and matter. Along the way, there is a lot of brilliant exploration into previous attempts to define consciousness and why they have failed. The author rejects the reductionist techniques of classical scientific inquiry and looks for a holistic definition that is quantum rather than mechanistic in nature.

The idea that consciousness might result from a Frolich-type Bose-Einstein condensate within the cell walls of the neurons is very intriguing. They just might be on to something here, though there is no evidence as yet to back this idea. Beyond that, one has to ask: are they charting consciousness here, or only the apparatus by which consciousness interacts with the physical? In other words, would such a mechanism be the software of consciousness, or only the hardware that operates the software. For my part, I believe any successful theory of consciousness must seriously consider out-of-body, near-death and past-life regression experiences, particularly certain well-documented experiences that cannot be reconciled with a consciousness that is only a resulting phenomena of brain mechanics.

For me, one of the most stimulating avenues of discussion in this book is that we are defined by our relationships. The concept and importance of intimacy in this book is worth the entire book in itself. It certainly helped to change my views on this subject.

This book posed serious structural challenges for me. One of the things I enjoy best about non-fiction is scanning the table of contents and that part of this book held great promise when I first cracked it open. I had been reading Betty Toole's 'Ada, Enchantress of Numbers,' and Zohar's treatise on the nature of quantum processes being an apt metaphor for thought was mentioned in the introductory pages. I read that passage to my husband and, the next morning, he had laid his copy of 'The Quantum Self' on the kitchen table before he left for work. I picked it up somewhat greedily and began to dig in.

The first 130 pages of the book I was able to hang with tolerably well. Not a physicist by trade, I didn't have trouble-- as other reviewers did before me-- with her contention that Einstein-Bose condensates were a plausible structure in the brain due to their alleged inability to form above cryogenic temperatures. She did make some allowance for this mechanistic problem with her description of Frolich's pumped system (also something mentioned by another reviewer who felt some of the criticisms of this book were too narrow and skeptical.)

Sometimes my mind is so open, my brain might up and fall out (little consciousness joke, there.) I approach books dealing with esoteric subject matter with a pronounced suspension of skepticism. The seeming irreconcilable states (wave/particle duality as a metaphor for individual/collective existence) which Zohar focused on throughout the book were not the flies in the ointment of this reviewer.

So. Now that I've mentioned what I didn't have trouble with, I shall move on to what was, for me, quite problematic. About halfway through the book, the quotes at the beginning of the chapter became more and more obtuse. The words which comprised the chapters themselves began to feel quite impenetrable. Rather than feeling illumination as I progressed, I began to sense a sort of breaking down of concepts which grew not into coherent argument but dissipation. It's entirely possible that I am simply overexposing myself, at the moment, to the topic of consciousness and the working of the brain so this text may just be the right book at the wrong time, but I don't believe this to be the case.

I note, specifically, the chapter on the quantum 'I am' in relationship to others as a point of strict departure which made me feel as though, where one minute I was wading into some fairly deep waters, the next minute I was not out to sea (which would have made sense) but dropped onto an intellectual landscape made instead of something else entirely. (Shifting sand? Vapor vortices?) I don't know, the point I'm failing to make with any kind of efficiency is that, rather than feeling like a foundation was being laid over which an edifice of thought could be built, I felt like the conceptual framework stretched out like light just over the event horizon.

The book grew formless, the ideas less structured, the concepts less clear. I want to insert the caveat that it could just be my own mindset, at the moment, but I've read enough to know when a book sheds an increasing light and this one just didn't.

I can't recommend it to many. I suppose I recommend it to the adventurous? The reader looking to take on an increasingly obfuscated journey not unlike a conversation with a somewhat fringe character on the other side of midnight? Your call. I literally tossed this book on the bed with frustration when I was through.

Danah Zohar (born 1945) is a management thought leader, physicist, philosopher and author, who is active in management education and consultancy. She is also the author of Spiritual Intelligence (Bloomsbury Paperbacks), Spiritual Capital: Wealth We Can Live by, Quantum Society, Israel, the land and its people (Macdonald countries ; 19). etc.

She wrote in the Preface to this 1990 book, "This book began primarily as an exercise in metaphor but, as it unfolded, metaphor gave way increasingly to evidence, or to what is at least well-grounded speculation about the actual physics of human psychology and its moral and spiritual implications."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"A vision of reality that holds truck with instantaneous action-at-a-distance, or nonlocality as it is more properly called (the principle that something can be affected in the absence of a local cause), has obvious mystical overtones." (Pg. 34)
"There is only one basic kind of matter, all things---animate and inanimate---are made of it, some of this matter has the undoubted capacity for conscious life, and at the quantum level at least there is a creative dialogue between matter and consciousness. This dialogue means that the observer's conscious mind actually influences the material development of that which he observes." (Pg. 57)
"If 'the brain is a hologram perceiving and participating in a holographic universe,' who is looking at the hologram? The hologram itself is nothing but an unusual sort of photograph, which can't on its own be doing any sort of perceiving. So in asking who or what supplies the consciousness... one is driven to assume either that this must come from outside... or that the physics of the hologram can account for the unity of conscious perception. Obviously, it can't." (Pg. 74)
"A quantum mechanical model of consciousness, then, gives rise to a picture of our overall mental life that is neither entirely like a computer nor entirely like a quantum system---indeed, not entirely 'mental.'" (Pg. 90)
"Crudely put, mind is relationship and matter is that which it relates. Neither, on its own, could evolve or express anything; together they give us ourselves and the world." (Pg. 236)