Shifting The Paradigm In Quantum Thinking

I’m sure you’re read and heard quite a bit quantum physics, the quantum field and how we are all connected. 

In today’s post I’d like to begin to reexamine this debate about how much control we really have over our life.

A controversy is raging today about the power of our minds. Intuitively we know that our conscious thoughts can guide our actions. Yet many of the chief philosophies of our time proclaim, in the name of science, that we are simply mechanical systems governed, fundamentally, entirely by impersonal laws that operate at the level of our microscopic constituents.

The question of the nature of the relationship between conscious thoughts and physical actions is called the mind-body problem. Old as philosophy itself it was brought to its present form by the rise, during the seventeenth century, of what is called ‘modern science’. The ideas of Galileo Galilei, Renˆe Descartes, and Isaac Newton created a magnificent edifice known as classical physical theory, which was completed by the work of James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein.

The central idea is that the physical universe is composed of “material” parts that are localizable in tiny regions, and that all motion of matter is completely determined by matter alone, via local universal laws. This local character of the laws is crucial. It means that each tiny localized part responds only to the states of its immediate neighbors: each local part “feels” or “knows about” nothing outside its immediate microscopic neighborhood. Thus the evolution of the physical universe, and of every system within the physical universe, is governed by a vast collection of local processes, each of which is ‘myopic’ in the sense that it ‘sees’ only its immediate neighbors.

The problem is that if this causal structure indeed holds then there is no need for our human feelings and knowing. These experiential qualities clearly correspond to large-scale properties of our brains. But if the entire causal process is already completely determined by the ‘myopic’ process postulated by classical physical theory, then there is nothing for any unified grasping of large-scale properties to do.

Indeed, there is nothing that they can do that is not already done by the myopic processes. Our conscious thoughts thus become prisoners of impersonal microscopic processes: we are, according to this “scientific” view, mechanical robots, with a mysterious dangling appendage, a stream of conscious thoughts that can grasp large-scale properties as wholes, but exert, as a consequence of these grasping, nothing not done already by the microscopic constituents.

The enormous empirical success of classical physical theory during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has led many twentieth-century philosophers to believe that the problem with consciousness is how to explain it away: how to discredit our misleading intuition by identifying it as product of human confusion, rather than recognizing the physical effects of consciousness as a physical problem that needs to be answered in dynamical terms.

That strategy of evasion is, to be sure, about the only course available within the strictures imposed by classical physical theory.

Detailed proposals abound for how to deal with this problem created by adoption of the classical-physics world view. The influential philosopher Daniel Dennett claims that our normal intuition about consciousness is “like a benign user illusion” or “a metaphorical by-product of the way our brains do their approximating work”.

Eliminative materialists such as Richard Rorty hold that mental phenomena, such as conscious experiences, simply do not exist. Proponents of the popular ‘Identity Theory of Mind’ grant that conscious experiences do exist, but claim each experience to be identical to some brain process. Epiphenomenal dualists hold that our conscious experiences do exist, and are not identical to material processes, but have no effect on anything we do: they are epiphenomenal.

Dennett described the recurring idea that pushed him to his counter-intuitive conclusion: “a brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by local mechanical disturbances.” This passage lays bare the underlying presumption behind his own theorizing, and undoubtedly behind the theorizing of most non-physicists who ponder this matter, namely the presumptive essential correctness of the idea of the physical world foisted upon us by the assumptions of classical physical theory.

It has become now widely appreciated that assimilation by the general public of this “scientific” view, according to which each human being is basically a mechanical robot, is likely to have a significant and corrosive impact on the moral fabric of society.

Dennett speaks of the Spectre of Creeping Exculpation: recognition of the growing tendency of people to exonerate themselves by arguing that it is not “I” who is at fault, but some mechanical process within: “my genes made me do it”; or “my high blood-sugar content made me do it.” [Recall the infamous “Twinkie Defense” that got Dan White off with five years for murdering San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.]

Steven Pinker also defends a classical-type conception of the brain, and, like Dennett, recognizes the important need to reconcile the science-based idea of causation with a rational conception of personal responsibility. His solution is to regard science and ethics as two self-contained systems: “Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning.

Only by recognizing them as separate can we have them both.” And “The cloistering of scientific and moral reasoning also lies behind my recurring metaphor of the mind as machine, of people as robots.”

But he then decries “the doctrines of postmodernism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism, according to which objectivity is impossible, meaning is self-contradictory, and reality is socially constructed.” Yet are not the ideas he decries a product of the contradiction he embraces? Self-contradiction is a bad seed that bears relativism as its evil fruit.

The current welter of conflicting opinion about the mind-brain connection suggests that a paradigm shift is looming. But it will require a major foundational shift. For powerful thinkers have, for three centuries, been attacking this problem from every angle within the bounds defined by the precepts of classical physical theory, and no consensus has emerged.

Two related developments of great potential importance are now occurring. On the experimental side, there is an explosive proliferation of empirical studies of the relations between a subject’s brain process — as revealed by instrumental probes of diverse kinds — and the experiences he reports.

On the theoretical side, there is a growing group of physicists who believe almost all thinking on this issue during the past few centuries to be logically unsound, because it is based implicitly on the precepts of classical physical theory, which are now known to be fundamentally incorrect. Contemporary physical theory differs profoundly from classical physical theory precisely on the nature of the dynamical linkage between minds and physical states.

William James, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, said of the scientists who would one day illuminate the mind-body problem: “the best way in which we can facilitate their advent is to understand how great is the darkness in which we grope, and never forget that the natural-science assumptions with which we started are provisional and revisable things.”

How wonderfully prescient!

It is now well-known that the precepts of classical physical theory are fundamentally incorrect. Classical physical theory has been superseded by quantum theory, which reproduces all of the empirical successes of classical physical theory, and succeeds also in every known case where the predictions of classical physical theory fail.

Yet even though quantum theory yields all the correct predictions of classical physical theory, its representation of the physical aspects of nature is profoundly different from that of classical physical theory. And the most essential difference concerns precisely the connection between physical states and consciousness.

The difficulty with the traditional attempts to understand the mind-brain system lies primarily with the physics assumptions, and only secondarily with the philosophy: once the physics assumptions are rectified the philosophy will take care of itself.

A correct understanding of the mind/matter connection cannot be based on a conception of the physical aspects of nature that is profoundly mistaken precisely at the critical point, namely the role of consciousness in the dynamics of physical systems.

Contemporary science, rationally pursued, provides an essentially new understanding of the mind/brain system. This revised understanding is in close accord with our intuitive understanding of that system: no idea of a “benign user illusion” arises, nor any counter-intuitive idea that a conscious thought is identical to a collection of tiny objects moving about in some special kind of way.

I suggest that this solution lies not in the invocation of quantum randomness: a significant dependence of human action on random chance would be far more destructive of any rational notion of personal responsibility than microlocal causation ever was.

The solution hinges not on quantum randomness, but rather on the dynamical effects within quantum theory of the intention and attention of the observer.

But how did physicists ever manage to bring conscious thoughts into the dynamics of physical systems?

That is an interesting tale.

Reference:

Attention, Intention, and Will in Quantum Physics – Henry P. Stapp, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory