great inspiration from the Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner. Wigner had really worried about the role of consciousness in quantum theory and he in fact argued that human consciousness was needed to complete a physical action on the world. Quantum theory is this dance of possibilities and play of probabilities, but how do we go from probable outcomes to one actual outcome? Wigner came up with a very different answer than most – that human
consciousness acts on the world and causes those probabilities to collapse into one real outcome. Now that’s a pretty radical statement. This was not from a long haired hippy at Esalen – this was from a European émigré trained in engineering and who had worked on the Manhattan Project – a practical, practical guy who had bravely pursued some very unorthodox ideas. The Fundamental Fysiks group just thought this was fascinating. Could human consciousness be molding the world of matter in some direct way? And if not – why not? And others inverted the question to ask how matter shapes consciousness, which is where something like LSD comes into play. Substances could clearly have a profound impact on consciousness – not just on grey matter per se, but on perceptions of reality. So with people like Wigner suggesting that consciousness may actively change the nature of matter, there was this amazing swirl of questions that some of the group got very excited about.