Sweeney’s lament here was that words could not express the full complexity of his feelings and thoughts. The contested usage of technical terms is also endemic in discussions of two of the most profound scientific mysteries: the mind/body problem and the ultimate nature of physical reality. There are still scientific communities that deny the existence/importance of these (and any) scientific mysteries; this will be discussed below. Henry Stapp’s research is exceptional in contemporary science in trying to encompass and combine both mysteries.
Sweeney’s lament here was that words could not express the full complexity of his feelings and thoughts. The contested usage of technical terms is also endemic in discussions of two of the most profound scientific mysteries: the mind/body problem and the ultimate nature of physical reality. There are still scientific communities that deny the existence/importance of these (and any) scientific mysteries; this will be discussed below. Henry Stapp’s research is exceptional in contemporary science in trying to encompass and combine both mysteries.
Among philosophers in particular the principle of complementarity has been considered an unreasonable limitation of natural science, and Niels Bohr’s exposition of the inevitability of a statistical description when accounting for atomic phenomena has been regarded as a renouncement directly opposed to the very spirit of scientific investigation. Indeed, fundamental limitations in the range of applicability of the causal spacetime description of physical phenomena do exist, but quantum physics is precisely the generalization of the conceptual frame of classical physics which has converted these limitations into a springboard for investigations which are among the most fruitful in the history of science. Far from raising a barrier for scientific investigation, quantum physics has extended the scope of natural science to a degree that was unimaginable before its advent. Natural science now encompasses such different objects as the constituents of atoms, processes in remote galaxies, and psycho-chemical phenomena in man. Biochemistry and psychopharmacology, for instance, both rely on one of the most important results of quantum physics: the periodical system of the elements, which is fundamental to all modern chemistry. Furthermore atomic physics and chemistry are basic sciences for technology and thus contribute to the continuous development of instruments of observation for all branches of natural science.
The capacity to acquire and use fully complex language systems made the members of our species fully conscious and self-aware beings in the vast cosmos. But this enormous privilege came with a price. After our ancestors began to live storied lives in a linguistically based symbolic universe, the world that previous generations experienced as an integrated and undivided whole split into two worlds—an inner world where the self that is aware of its own awareness exists and an outer world in which this self seeks to gratify its needs and establish a meaningful sense of connection with other selves. And this explains why the most fundamental impulse in the storied lives of fully modern humans has always been to close the gap between these inner and outer worlds by integrating all seemingly discordant parts of a symbolic universe into a meaningful and coherent whole. The narrative that has consistently served this function is religion. But during the first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, another narrative emerged called Newtonian or classical physics that also promised to bridge the gap between self and world by integrating all of the seemingly discordant parts of the physical universe into a coherent and meaningful whole. In this physics, one universal force, gravity, governs the motion, interaction, and blending of indestructible atoms or mass points. And since the laws of gravity were completely deterministic, it was assumed that all events in the cosmos are predetermined by the forces associated with these laws and that the future of any physical system could be predicted with absolute certainty if initial conditions are known. In the worldview of classical physics, human beings were cogs in a giant machine and linked to other parts of this machine in only the most mundane material terms. The knowing self was separate, discrete, and isolated from the physical world, and all the creativity of the cosmos was exhausted in the first instant of creation. As physicist Henry Stapp points out, “Classical physics not only fails to demand the mental, it fails to even provide a rational place for the mental.
In the late 21th century, the concept of Quantum Consciousness arose, joining theories and concepts from the disciplines of Philosophy, Neuropsychology, and Quantum Physics. The Preface of Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics (Henry P. Stapp. 1993) states, “Nature appears to be composed of two completely different kinds of things; rock-like things and idea-like things. The first is epitomized by an enduring rock, the second by a fleeting thought. A rock can be experienced by many of us together, while a thought seems to be long to one of us alone” (Stapp, 1993 p. vii). Stapp refers to the mind-body problem, not as a problem, but as a connection; the mind-body connection. Descartes believed the mind and body could be separate and act separately. Stapp embellishes Descartes philosophy of “I think, therefore I am” through Quantum Physics by connecting the mind to the body; calling it the mind-body connection. Stapp states that nature is composed of two different things, rock-like things and idea-like things. I believe that rock-like things and idea-like things do not differ, but are one and the same. This paper explores the philosophies of Descartes, the contents of a thought and the ways in which neuropsychology and Quantum Physics help illuminate the question: do thoughts contain matter?
For many years, Henry Stapp and I have been working separately and independently on mind-centered interpretations of quantum theory. In this review, I discuss his work and contrast it with my own. There is much that we agree on, both in the broad problems we have addressed and in some of the specific details of our analyses of neural physics, but ultimately we disagree fundamently in our views on mind, matter, and quantum mechanics. In particular, I discuss our contrasting opinions about the nature and randomness of quantum events, about relativity theory, and about the many-minds idea. I also suggest that Stapp's theories are inadequately developed.
Contemporary physics finds itself pondering questions about mind and consciousness, an uncomfortable area for theorists. But historically, key figures at the founding of quantum theory assumed that reality was composed of two parts, mind and matter, which interacted with each other according to some new laws that they specified. This departure from the prior (classical-physicalist) assumption that mind was a mere side effect of brain activity was such a startling proposal that it basically split physics in two, with one camp insisting that mind will ultimately be explained via physical processes in the brain and the other camp embracing mind as innate in creation and the key to understanding reality in its completeness. Henry Stapp made important contributions toward a coherent explanation by advocating John von Neumann’s orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics. von Neumann postulated that at its basis, quantum mechanics requires both a psychological and physical component. He was left, however, with a dualist view in which the psychological and physical aspects of QM remained unresolved. In this article, the relevant issues are laid out with the aim of finding a nondual explanation that allows mind and matter to exist as features of the same universal consciousness, in the hope that the critical insights of Planck, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, von Neumann, and Stapp will be recognized and valued, with the aim of an expanded physics that goes beyond physicalist dogma.