The quantum self: Human nature and consciousness defined by the new physics

Zohar, Danah With I.N. Marshall

ISBN 10: 0688087809 ISBN 13: 9780688087807

Publisher: William Morrow, 1990

Synopsis

In The Quantum Self, Danah Zohar argues that the insights of modem physics can illuminate our understanding of everyday life -- our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world at large. Guiding us through the strange and fascinating workings of the subatomic realm to create a new model of human consciousness, the author addresses enduring philosophical questions. Does the new physics provide a basis by which our consciousness might continue beyond death? How does the material world (for instance, ugly inner cities) impinge upon our sense of self? Is there a subatomic wellspring from which our creativity, our empathy with others, and our feelings of unity with the inanimate world originate?
Most important, Zohar shows how the vitality of the new physics combats the alienation and fragmentation of twentieth-century life, and replaces it with a model of reality in which the universe itself may possess a type of consciousness, of which human consciousness is one expression.

About this title

Reviews

The authors of this heady discourse seek nothing less than a physics of human consciousness grounded in quantum mechanics. British philosopher Zohar and her husband, Marshall, a psychiatrist, argue that consciouness arises through the interaction of the fundamental building-blocks of mind (photons, virtual photons) and of matter (electrons, protons, neutrons). Out of the "correlated jiggling of molecules in neuron cell walls" (i.e., Bose-Einstein condensates), a human self emerges that is integrally linked to other selves, much as two particles, though light-years apart, may interact. Quantum physics, more than a metaphor, is used here as an explanatory tool, a means to help us go beyond the isolation and narcissism of modern culture. The authors take a perilous speculative leap from a recognition of the creativity built into all living systems to "our selves as co-authors of the world." Illustrated.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0688087809
• ISBN 13: 9780688087807
• Binding: Microfilm
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268