...[T]here is a kind of responsibility which the scientists feel toward each other which you can represent as a kind of morality. What's the right way and the wrong way to report results? Disinterestedly, so that the other man is free to understand precisely what you are saying, and as nearly as possible not covering it with your desires. That this is a useful thing, that this is a thing which helps each of us to understand each other, in fact to develop in a way that isn't personally in our own interest, but for the general development of ideas, is a very valuable thing. And so there is, if you will a kind of scientific morality. I believe, hopelessly, that this morality should be extended much more widely; this idea, this kind of scientific morality, that such things as propaganda should be a dirty word. That a description of a country made by the people of another country should describe that country in a disinterested way. ... Advertising, for example, is an example of a scientifically immoral description of the products. This immorality is so extensive that one gets so used to it in ordinary life, that you do not appreciate that it is a bad thing. And I think that one of the important reasons to increase the contact of scientists with the rest of society is to explain, and to kind of wake them up to this permanent attrition of cleverness of the mind that comes from not having information, or not having information always in a form which is interesting.

Current scientific concepts are not adapted to focusing on subjectivity. Indeed, many of them have been carefully adapted to exclude it, much like cameras with a colour filter. [...] Galileo and Descartes saw how badly the study of objects had been distorted by people who treated these objects as subjects, people who credited things like stones with human purpose and striving. So they ruled that physical science must be objective. And this quickly came to mean, not just that scientists must be fair, but that they should treat everything they studied only as a passive, insentient object.

We know that abstraction made possible three centuries of tremendous scientific advance about physical objects. Today, however, this advance has itself led to a point where consciousness has again to be considered. Enquiries are running against the limits of this narrow focus. In many areas, the advantages of ignoring ourselves have run out.

This has happend most notoriously in quantum mechanics, where physicists have begun to use the idea of an observer quite freely as a casual factor in the events they study. Whether or not this is the best way to interpret quantum phenomena, that development is bound to make people ask what sort of an entity an observer is, since Ocam's Razor has so far failed to get rid of it. This disturbance, however, is only one symptom of a growing pressure on the supposedly subject-proof barrier, a pressure that is due to real growth in all the studies that lie close to it.