Abstract
In classical physics, all change in nature is believed to take place in an unbroken chain of cause and effect. In quantum physics, change is believed to be irreducibly probabilistic and most fundamentally random. Neither classical physical determinism nor orthodox quantum indeterminism is consistent with causally efficacious conscious minds. If either is correct, we humans are robots with no free will. For a way out of this meaninglessness, recent progress toward a subtler nonlocal causal wave model including real mind is overviewed. The model is in the direction of Sankhya ontology and Yoga epistemology in the ancient holistic Vedic account, which we will see is rich enough for rational explanation and empirical validation of free will.
Abstract
In classical physics, all change in nature is believed to take place in an unbroken chain of cause and effect. In quantum physics, change is believed to be irreducibly probabilistic and most fundamentally random. Neither classical physical determinism nor orthodox quantum indeterminism is consistent with causally efficacious conscious minds. If either is correct, we humans are robots with no free will. For a way out of this meaninglessness, recent progress toward a subtler nonlocal causal wave model including real mind is overviewed. The model is in the direction of Sankhya ontology and Yoga epistemology in the ancient holistic Vedic account, which we will see is rich enough for rational explanation and empirical validation of free will.
The evolution of the human mind through natural selection mandates that our conscious experiences are causally potent in order to leave a tangible impact on the surrounding physical world. Any attempt to construct a functional theory of the conscious mind within the framework of classical physics, however, inevitably leads to causally impotent conscious experiences in direct contradiction to evolution theory. Here, we derive several rigorous theorems that identify the origin of the latter impasse in the mathematical properties of ordinary differential equations employed in combination with the alleged functional production of the mind by the brain. Then, we demonstrate that a mind–brain theory consistent with causally potent conscious experiences is provided by modern quantum physics, in which the unobservable conscious mind is reductively identified with the quantum state of the brain and the observable brain is constructed by the physical measurement of quantum brain observables. The resulting quantum stochastic dynamics obtained from sequential quantum measurements of the brain is governed by stochastic differential equations, which permit genuine free will exercised through sequential conscious choices of future courses of action. Thus, quantum reductionism provides a solid theoretical foundation for the causal potency of consciousness, free will and cultural transmission.
Quantum theory is open to different interpretations, and this paper reviews some of the points of contention. The standard interpretation of quantum physics assumes that the quantum world is characterized by absolute indeterminism and that quantum systems exist objectively only when they are being measured or observed. David Bohm's ontological interpretation of quantum theory rejects both these assumptions. Bohm's theory that quantum events are party determined by subtler forces operating at deeper levels of reality ties in with John Eccles ' theory that our minds exist outside the material world and interact with our brains at the quantum level. Paranormal phenomena indicate that our minds can communicate with other minds and affect distant physical systems by nonordinary means. Whether such phenomena can be adequately explained in terms of nonlocality and the quantum vacuum or whether they involve superphysical forces and states of matter as yet unknown to science is still an open question, and one which merits further experimental study.
Quantum physics provides a good candidate for a mathematical entity, namely, the quantum state vector in the Hilbert space. The causal potency problem originates from determinism: In classical physical theories there are fundamental constituents entering in the mathematical description of the physical laws that govern deterministically the dynamics of physical systems. Since only these fundamental constituents are causally potent to affect the deterministic behavior of physical systems, consciousness has to appear as a fundamental constituent of the physical theory as well. Existentialism clashes seriously with determinism. Classical deterministic physics allows no free will and no objective morality. Classically, functionalism leads to epiphenomenalism because the generated conscious experiences are unable to change the already predetermined future dynamics of the brain. In quantum physics, however, the quantum indeterminism in the dynamics of quantum systems provides a multitude of possible outcomes from the measurement process.
In the context of theories of the connection between mind and brain, physicalism is the demand that all is basically purely physical. But the concept of "physical" embodied in this demand is characterized essentially by the properties of the physical that hold in classical physical theories. Certain of these properties contradict the character of the physical in quantum mechanics, which provides a better, more comprehensive, and more fundamental account of phenomena. It is argued that the difficulties that have plaged physicalists for half a century, and that continue to do so, dissolve when the classical idea of the physical is replaced by its quantum successor. The argument is concretized in a way that makes it accessible to non-physicists by exploiting the recent evidence connecting our conscious experiences to macroscopic measurable synchronous oscillations occurring in well-separated parts of the brain. A specific new model of the mind-brain connection that is fundamentally quantum mechanical but that ties conscious experiences to these macroscopic synchronous oscillations is used to illustrate the essential disparities between the classical and quantum notions of the physical, and in particular to demonstrate the failure in the quantum world of the principle of the causal closure of the physical, a failure that goes beyond what is entailed by the randomness in the outcomes of observations, and that accommodates the efficacy in the brain of conscious intent.
Since Descartes' dualism, with his res extensa and res cogitans, six fundamental problems in the philosophy and natural history of mind are these: 1. how does mind act on matter? 2. If mind does not act on matter is mind a mere epiphenomenon? 3. What might be the source of free will? 4. What might be the source of a responsible free will? 5. Why might it have been selectively advantageous to evolve consciousness? 6. What is consciousness? I approach the first five of the above six problems based on two physical postulates. First the mind-brain system is a quantum coherent, but reversibly decohering and recohering system. This allows me to answer 1) above, mind does not act causally on brain at all, rather it acausally decohers to classicity (for all practical purposes), hence has consequences for brain and body as matter. Epiphenomenalism is averted. A quantum mind, because it is acausal on Copenhagen including Born, yields a free will, but a merely random free will, not a responsible free will. Second, the most radical part of this article proposes that the quantum classical interface is not always describable by a law: specifically in a special relativity setting, no function, F, maps the present state of the system mind-brain into its future. In its place is a nonrandom yet lawless process. I seek in this non-random yet lawless process a source for a responsible free will. Finally, if the quantum-classical boundary can be non-random yet lawless, then no algorithmic simulation of the world or ourselves can calculate the real world, hence the evolutionary selective advantages for evolving consciousness to know it may be great. I make no progress on problem 6, the hard problem of qualia.
Two mysteries -loosely connected?The Authors who have suggested a deep connection between the solution of the mind-body problem and the understanding of quantum mechanics are too numerous to list.But what exactly would be the alleged structural fit between these two deeply puzzling theoretical issues?Can a genuine philosophical issue -which by its very nature is conceptual in nature -ultimately be resolved by advances in the empirical sciences?The connection is all too often asserted to lie in the subjects confounding natures, but the mere fact that two problems are of equal impenetrability to the human mind does not imply that there is a profound interdependence between the two.There is however an obvious way in which quantum mechanics might have a bearing on the philosophical mind-body problem: if quantum mechanics implies that for some physical events there is no physical cause, then at least the very strong variants of the so-called "principle of causal closure" of the physical realm lose much of their corroborative underpinning in physics as practiced by real physicists as such, and are thus constrained to the speculative physicalism advanced by metaphysicians.However, unless one assumes a strong version of the principle of sufficient reason, which would exclude chance events in principle, even events supposedly not caused by some physical cause are not immediately thereby caused by some nonphysical cause.Moreover the fact is that not all of the interpretations of quantum mechanics imply indeterministic 'choices' of events: neither the many-worlds interpretation nor a Bohmian hidden variable interpretation assume indeterminism.Even in the most obvious theoretical nexus