Note on Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness

F. Beck, Technische Hochschule Darmstadt

The first issue of JCS published an interview with Roger Penrose on his recent book Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Clark, 1994). In it Professor Penrose, among other subjects, presented his views on the role of quantum mechanics on our way towards a better understanding of brain functioning and its relation to consciousness. In this note we comment on some aspects of his reasoning.

Richard A. Mould

Elemér Elad Rosinger

There have lately been a variety of attempts to connect, or even explain, if not in fact, reduce human consciousness to quantum mechanical processes. Such attempts tend to draw a sharp and fundamental distinction between the role of consciousness in classical mechanics, and on the other hand, in quantum mechanics, with an insistence on the assumed exceptional character of the latter. What is strangely missed, however, is the role of human consciousness as such in the very discovery or creation of both of these physical theories. And this a priori role is far more important than all the possible a posteriori interplays between consciousness and the mentioned two theories of physics, interplays which may happen during one or another specific experiment, measurement, and so on. In this regard it is suggested that the specific features human consciousness may exhibit during interactions with quantum mechanical systems may as well have other explanations which do not appear to be less plausible, or less well founded.

Max R. Bennett

Emmanuel E. Haven

Dejan I. Raković, M. Dugić

We give a brief account on the existing strategies in quantum-mechanical approaching the problem of consciousness. To a list of distinguished approaches we add the next plausible notion: when treated quantum- mechanically, consciousness should be modeled as an open quantum system. This notion is tightly connected to the von Neumann's collapse (wave packet reduction). Here we strongly emphasize that the problem of the collapse cannot be resolved within the quantum mechanics of open quantum systems (or: decoherence theory). Some clues in this regard are briefly outlined.