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Abstract

From the time of Isaac Newton until about 1925 science relegated consciousness to the role of passive viewer: our thoughts, ideas, and feelings were treated as impotent bystanders to a march of events wholly controlled by microscopically describable interactions between mechanically behaving microscopic basic elements. The founders of quantum mechanics made the revolutionary move of bringing conscious human experiences into basic physical theory in a fundamental way. After two hundred years of neglect, our thoughts were suddenly thrust into the limelight. This was an astonishing reversal of precedent because the enormous successes of the prior physics were due in large measure to the policy of excluding all mention of idea-like qualities from the formulation of the physical laws.