Corradini Antonella(Editor) - Quantum Physics Meets the Philosophy of Mind: New Essays on the Mind-Body Relation in Quantum-Theoretical Perspective

Early in the twentieth century a series of theoretical and experimental findings showed that the classical principles that work so well for large astronomical and terrestrial objects, fail to work for their atomic constituents! A new set of laws was found to hold for the atoms. But if we try to apply these atomic laws to the atomic constituents of us human observers, then we usually find that what we experience is altogether different from what the atomic theory predicts!

Specifically, the atomic laws generally entail that the brain of an observer will naturally evolve into a mixture of many different quantum components, each of which corresponds to a different perceptual experience. Yet only one of these perceptions occurs in any actual empirical instance. Consequently, the atomic theory, understood in the ordinary traditional way, fails to agree with experience.

The founders of quantum mechanics resolved this conflict between the atomic laws and human experience by abandoning the conceptual framework that Isaac Newton had created in the seventeenth century. That classical way of thinking had, for more than two centuries, been accepted by scientists as the proper foundation of science. But that approach excluded, as a matter of basic principle, any irreducible effect of our conscious thoughts on the behavior of the physically described aspects of the universe.

Orthodox quantum theory revokes that exclusion! It converts our conscious experiences from passive spectators to active participants in the creation of our future experiences.

The rational foundation of the new approach was the demand by the creators of quantum mechanics that science be anchored in what we know. But everything we know resides in our experiences. Hence the founders backed away from the idea that the aim of science is to comprehend the reality that lies behind our experiences . They focused instead on the structure of our experience itself.

In the words of Niels Bohr:

In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of phenomena but only to track down as far as possible relations between the multifold aspects of our experience (1934, 18).

Quantum theory was, therefore, originally offered not as theory of reality, as defined in some abstract classical sense. It was presented, rather, as a practical tool for making predictions about our future experiences on the basis of information derived from our past experiences. Thus human experiences became the basic realities of the theory: the basic realities were shifted from the objective to the subjective side of Tyndalls impassable gulf .

In this pragmatic approach, we observers arein order to make the theory useful to usrepresented within the theory in the way that we intuitively conceived ourselves, namely as psycho-physical agents that can form intentions based on our own reasons, emotions, and values, and can then physically act to implement those intentions. Von Neumanns orthodox formulation of the theory integrates these features into a rationally coherent understanding of nature itself, and our place within it.

In quantum theory our mental intentions are freely chosen, in the sense that they are not determined within the theory by prior physical properties. Thus these intentions are allowed by the theory, in its orthodox realistic version, to depend irreducibly on consciously felt values that are described in psychological rather than in physical terms! That means that quantum theory violates a core idea of classical mechanics: it allows our mental free choices to influence our physical actions, yet not be fully determined by prior physically describable properties. Thus the philosophy-of-mind concept of physicalism fails: the demand that all is physical is not only not entailed be contemporary basic physics; it is also strictly incompatible with the orthodox realistic formulation of it.