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Vieweg+Teubner eBooks

Towards a Science of Consciousness

Mark R. M. Towsey, Dhanjoo N. Ghista

Published Jan 1, 1996• 31 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Reading Paul Davies recent book The New Physics [6], one cannot help but marvel at the immense success of modern physics in describing the physical world. Yet that very success leads one reviewer [9] to pause and consider where amongst the successes “may lurk some tiny murkiness destined to become the seed of the next scientific revolution” just as the quantum behaviour of light turned out to be the seed which overthrew classical physics. Davies himself notes that the role of consciousness in a quantum observation still remains an unresolved issue, “..it may be that this frontier — the interface of mind and matter — will turn out to be the most challenging legacy of the New Physics.” [6, p6]

DOI
10.1007/978-3-322-85017-1_42

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Reading Paul Davies recent book The New Physics [6], one cannot help but marvel at the immense success of modern physics in describing the physical world. Yet that very success leads one reviewer [9] to pause and consider where amongst the successes “may lurk some tiny murkiness destined to become the seed of the next scientific revolution” just as the quantum behaviour of light turned out to be the seed which overthrew classical physics. Davies himself notes that the role of consciousness in a quantum observation still remains an unresolved issue, “..it may be that this frontier — the interface of mind and matter — will turn out to be the most challenging legacy of the New Physics.” [6, p6]
Introduction We saw in Part I that in addition to explaining consciousness there is another hard problem for the modern scientific worldview – understanding what quantum physics is telling us about reality. And if anything this one is harder. In philosophy of mind there is at least consensus enough for an orthodox position to exist (materialism), and a widespread expectation that it will be vindicated by future neuroscience. By contrast, in philosophy of physics all sides understand that quantum theory is compatible with a variety of metaphysical interpretations, and have little hope that new empirical discoveries will settle the matter. But both problems are “hard” in the sense that, despite tremendous intellectual effort over many decades, no clear progress has been made toward solving them. The basic idea of quantum consciousness theory is that bringing the two problems into contact may be the key to solving both (though I will be addressing only the mind–body problem in what follows). That this could be a novel idea attests to the fact that their philosophical discussions have evolved quite separately. While philosophers of physics have long been interested in the role of consciousness in the measurement process, they have engaged little with the mind–body problem per se; and philosophers of mind have been almost unanimous in dismissing the suggestion that consciousness has anything interesting to do with quantum physics. Social scientists might echo such skepticism, wondering how adding the problem of interpreting quantum theory to the problem of consciousness will help them . Besides piling up jargon and arcane debates, in moving to the sub-atomic level we are now even farther removed from the human world, and seemingly poised to engage in the most vulgar reductionism. Yet, naïvely one might expect the two problems to be related, for two reasons. The first is the intriguing analogies mentioned in Chapter 1 between the mental and quantum domains.
From the Publisher: A New York Times bestseller when it appeared in 1989, Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind was universally hailed as a marvelous survey of modern physics as well as a brilliant reflection on the human mind, offering a new perspective on the scientific landscape and a visionary glimpse of the possible future of science. Now, in Shadows of the Mind, Penrose offers another exhilarating look at modern science as he mounts an even more powerful attack on artificial intelligence. But perhaps more important, in this volume he points the way to a new science, one that may eventually explain the physical basis of the human mind. Penrose contends that some aspects of the human mind lie beyond computation. This is not a religious argument (that the mind is other than physical) nor is it based on the brain's vast complexity (the weather is immensely complex, says Penrose, but it is still a computable thing, at least in theory). Instead, he provides powerful arguments to support his conclusion that there is in the conscious activity of the brain that transcends computation - and will find no explanation in terms of present-day science. To illuminate what he believes this something might be, and to suggest where a new physics must proceed so that we may understand it, Penrose cuts a wide swathe through modern science, providing penetrating looks at everything from Turing computability and Godel's incompleteness, via Schrodinger's Cat and the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb-testing problem, to detailed microbiology. Of particular interest is Penrose's extensive examination of quantum mechanics, which introduces some new ideas that differ markedly from those advanced in The Emperor's New Mind, especially concerning the mysterious interface where classical and quantum physics meet. But perhaps the most interesting wrinkle in Shadows of the Mind is Penrose's excursion into microbiology, where he examines cytoskeletons and microtubules, minute substructures lying dee
It is widely accepted that consciousness at the start of the 20th century was considered mainly in the context of neurology and the mind-body problem belonged to the domain of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, later broadened by behavioural science and cognitive science. However, these disciplines cannot completely explain the correlation between mental activity and matter. \nChapter one starts by defining the difficulty of determining consciousness. A discussion of how philosophers (such as Descartes, Locke, Dennett and Nagel) attempted to describe this phenomenon leads to the conclusion that firstly, consciousness is indefinable and secondly, it continues to be a challenge for both – philosophy and science – to explain how subjective consciousness fits into the objective world. The following two parts of the chapter focus on the major philosophical theories of the mind-body problem. \nIn chapter two there is a focus on the mutual relation between philosophy and science, physics in particular. However, this project deals more with the implications of science for the philosophy of mind and mind-body problem than the science itself. The second enquiry of this chapter is to point out the difference in philosophical and scientific understanding of the word ‘substance’ (crucial to the mind-body problem). \nChapter three considers quantum theory, since the relation between mind and body started to be tackled from the completely new point of view, after the philosophers began to assimilate the implications of quantum physics. Firstly, there is a short introduction to quantum theory and the most significant points for philosophy and quantum mechanics issues are provided (such as quantum superposition, the measurement problem or the backward causation). Analysis of three prevailing theories is provided. \nThis project addresses the contribution of quantum mechanics to the studies of consciousness and matter and examines whether it helps in solving the mind-body problem.
n 1959, when Charles Percy Snow lamented the gap between natural sciences and humanities in his lecture "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" 1 , it was followed by persistent debates about the two cultures and many responses that attempted to find a mediation.Some scholars were looking for a third culture that could provide the missing link.One of them is John Brockman, who in 1995, -40 years after Snow's lecture -, announced popular sciences (that were continuously growing over the last decades) as the crucial synthesis.2 This does not seem out of place, considering the mass of new books about the development of natural sciences in the 20th century, written in a commonly comprehensible manner, that are published annually and see their second edition as soon as the second year.Popular scientists like Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, John Gribbin and Paul Davies have long since been placed in the average home's bookcase and are definitely read by non-scientists.Meanwhile it is almost part of a successful career as a famous physicist to write a popular scientific book (which by the way is on no account a phenomenon of I