Description

How is mind related to matter? This ancient question in philosophy
is rapidly becoming a core problem in science, perhaps the most
important of all because it probes the essential nature of man himself.
The origin of the problem is a conflict between the mechanical conception
of human beings that arises from the precepts of classical physical
theory and the very different idea that arises from our intuition: the
former reduces each of us to an automaton, while the latter allows
our thoughts to guide our actions. The dominant contemporary approaches
to the problem attempt to resolve this conflict by clinging to
the classical concepts, and trying to explain away our misleading intuition.
But a detailed argument given here shows why, in a scientific
approach to this problem, it is necessary to use the more basic principles
of quantum physics, which bring the observer into the dynamics,
rather than to accept classical precepts that are profoundly incorrect
precisely at the crucial point of the role of human consciousness in
the dynamics of human brains. Adherence to the quantum principles
yields a dynamical theory of the mind/brain/body system that is in
close accord with our intuitive idea of what we are. In particular, the need for a self-observing quantum system to pose certain questions creates
a causal opening that allows mind/brain dynamics to have three
distinguishable but interlocked causal processes, one micro-local, one
stochastic, and the third experiential. The classical approximation
reduces this tripartite quantum process to a single deterministic local
process: setting Planck’s constant to zero eliminates the dynamical
fine structure wherein the effect of mind on matter lies.