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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer Reviewed
Title:
Quantum physics in neuroscience and psychology: A neurophysical model o f mind/brain
interaction
Author:
Stapp, Henry P.
Schwartz, Jeffrey M.
Beauregard, Mario
Publication Date:
06-01-2004
Publication Info:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Permalink:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4w8665vk
Keywords:
mind consciousness brainneuroscience neuropsychology quantum mechanics
Abstract:
Contemporary physical theory brings directly and irreducibly into the overall causal structure
certain psychologically described choices made by human beings about how they will act. This key
development in basic physical theory is applicable to neuroscience, and it provides neuroscientists
and psychologists with an alternative conceptual structure for describing neural processes.
QUANTUM PHYSICS IN NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY: A
NEUROPHYSICAL MODEL OF MIND/BRAIN INTERACTION
Jeffrey M. Schwartz
1
Henry P. Stapp
2**
Mario Beauregard
3, 4, 5*
1 UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, 760 Westwood Plaza, C8-619 NPI Los Angeles,
California 90024-1759, USA. E-mail: jmschwar@ucla.edu
2 Theoretical Physics Mailstop 5104/50A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-8162, USA. Email:
hpstapp@lbl.gov
3 Département de Psychologie, Centre de Recherche en Neuropsychologie Expérimentale
et Cognition (CRENEC), Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-Ville,
Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3C 3J7.
4 Département de Radiologie, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-
Ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3C 3J7.
5 Centre de recherche en sciences neurologiques (CRSN), Université de Montréal, C.P.
6128, succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3C 3J7.
_______________
*Correspondence should be addressed to: Mario Beauregard, Département de
Psychologie, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal,
Québec, Canada, H3C 3J7. Tel (514) 340-3540 #4129; Fax: (514) 340-3548; E-mail:
mario.beauregard@umontreal.ca
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
**This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy and
Nuclear Physics, of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-05CH11231
ABSTRACT
Neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behavior generally posits that brain
mechanisms will ultimately suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena.
This assumption stems from the idea that the brain is made up entirely of material
particles and fields, and that all causal mechanisms relevant to neuroscience can therefore
be formulated solely in terms of properties of these elements. Thus terms having intrinsic
mentalistic and/or experiential content (e.g., "feeling," "knowing," and "effort") are not
included as primary causal factors. This theoretical restriction is motivated primarily by
ideas about the natural world that have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for
more than three quarters of a century. Contemporary basic physical theory differs
profoundly from classical physics on the important matter of how the consciousness of
human agents enters into the structure of empirical phenomena. The new principles
contradict the older idea that local mechanical processes alone can account for the
structure of all observed empirical data. Contemporary physical theory brings directly
and irreducibly into the overall causal structure certain psychologically described choices
made by human agents about how they will act. This key development in basic physical
theory is applicable to neuroscience, and it provides neuroscientists and psychologists
with an alternative conceptual framework for describing neural processes. Indeed, due to
certain structural features of ion channels critical to synaptic function, contemporary
physical theory must in principle be used when analyzing human brain dynamics. The
new framework, unlike its classical-physics-based predecessor is erected directly upon,
and is compatible with, the prevailing principles of physics, and is able to represent more
adequately than classical concepts the neuroplastic mechanisms relevant to the growing
2
number of empirical studies of the capacity of directed attention and mental effort to
systematically alter brain function.
Key index words: mind, consciousness, brain, neuroscience, neuropsychology, quantum
mechanics.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
**This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy and
Nuclear Physics, of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-05CH11231
3
"[T]he only acceptable point of view appears to be the one that recognizes both sides of
reality --- the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical --- as
compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously."
Wolfgang Pauli, The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler
1. Introduction
The introduction into neuroscience and neuropsychology of the extensive use of
functional brain imaging technology has revealed, at the empirical level, an important
causal role of directed attention in cerebral functioning. The identification of brain areas
involved in a wide variety of information processing functions concerning
learning, memory and various kinds of symbol manipulation has been the subject
of extensive and intensive investigation (See Toga & Mazziotta 2000). Neuroscientists
consequently now have a reasonably good working knowledge of the role of a variety of
brain areas in the processing of complex information. But, valuable as these empirical
studies are, they provide only the data for, not the answer to, the critical question of the
causal relationship between the aspects of empirical studies that are described in
psychological terms and those that are described in neurophysiological terms. In the vast
majority of cases investigators simply assume that measurable-in-principle properties of
the brain are the only factors needed to explain eventually the processing of the
psychologically described information that occurs in neuropsychological experiments.
4
This privileging of physically describable brain mechanisms as the core, and indeed
final, explanatory vehicle for the processing of every kind of psychologically described
data is the foundational assumption of almost all contemporary biologically based
cognitive neuroscience.
It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that there is at least one type of information
processing and manipulation that does not readily lend itself to explanations that assume
that all final causes are subsumed within brain, or more generally, central nervous system
(CNS) mechanisms. The cases in question are those in which the conscious act
of willfully altering the mode by which experiential information is processed itself
changes, in systematic ways, the cerebral mechanisms utilized. There is a growing
recognition of the theoretical importance of applying experimental paradigms that
employ directed mental effort in order to produce systematic and predictable changes in
brain function (e.g., Beauregard et al. 2001; Ochsner et al. 2002). These willfully
induced brain changes are generally accomplished through training in, and the applied
use of, cognitive reattribution and the attentional re-contextualization of conscious
experience. Furthermore, an accelerating number of studies in the neuroimaging literature
significantly support the thesis that, again, with appropriate training and effort, people
can systematically alter neural circuitry associated with a variety of mental and physical
states that are frankly pathological (Schwartz et al. 1996; Schwartz 1998; Musso et al.
1999; Paquette et al. 2003). A recent review of this and the related neurological literature
has coined the term "self-directed neuroplasticity" to serve as a general description of
5
the principle that focused training and effort can systematically alter cerebral function in
a predictable and potentially therapeutic manner (Schwartz & Begley 2002).
From a theoretical perspective perhaps the most important aspect of this line of research
is the empirical support it provides for a new science-based way of conceptualizing the
interface between mind/consciousness and brain. Until recently virtually all attempts to
understand the functional activity of the brain have been based, at least implicitly, on
some principles of classical physics that have been known to be fundamentally false for
three quarters of a century. According to the classical conception of the world, all
causal connections between observables are explainable in terms of mechanical
interactions between material realities. But this restriction on modes of causation is
not fully maintained by the currently applied principles of physics, which consequently
offer an alternative conceptual foundation for the scientific description and modeling of
the causal structure of self-directed neuroplasticity.
The advantages for neuroscience and neuropsychology of utilizing the conceptual
framework of contemporary physics, as opposed to that of classical physics, stem
from five basic facts. First, terms such as "feeling," "knowing" and "effort," because they
are intrinsically mentalistic and experiential, cannot be described exclusively in terms of
material structure. Second, in order to explain the observable properties of large physical
systems that depend sensitively upon the behaviors of their atomic constituents the
founders of contemporary physical theory were led to introduce explicitly into the basic
causal structure of physics certain important choices made by human beings about how
6
they will act. Third, within this altered conceptual framework these choices are described
in mentalistic (i.e., psychological) language. Fourth, terminology of precisely this kind
is critically necessary for the design and execution of the experiments in which the data
demonstrating the core phenomena of self-directed neuroplasticity are acquired and
described. Fifth, the injection of psychologically described choices on the part of human
agents into the causal theoretical structure can be achieved for experiments in
neuroscience by applying the same mathematical rules that were developed to account for
the structure of phenomena in the realm of atomic science.
The consequence of these facts is that twentieth century physics, in contrast to classical
physics, provides a rationally coherent pragmatic framework in which the
psychologically and neurophysiologically described aspects of the neuroscience
experiments mentioned above are causally related to each other in
mathematically specified ways. Thus contemporary physics allows the data from
the rapidly emerging field of self-directed neuroplasticity to be described and understood
in a way that is more rationally coherent, scientific, and useful than what is permitted by
theories in which all causation is required to be fundamentally mechanical.
To explicate the physics of the interface between mind/consciousness and the physical
brain, we shall in this article describe in detail how the quantum mechanically based
causal mechanisms work, and show why it is necessary in principle to advance to the
quantum level to achieve an adequate theory of the neurophysiology of volitionally
directed activity. The reason, basically, is that classical physics is an approximation to the
7
more accurate quantum theory, and that this classical approximation eliminates the causal
efficacy of our conscious efforts that these experiments empirically manifest.
It will also be explained how certain structural features of ion conductance channels
critical to synaptic function entail that the classical approximation fails in principle to
cover the dynamics of a human brain. Quantum dynamics must be used in principle.
Furthermore, once the transition to the quantum description is made, the principles of
quantum theory must, in order to maintain rational consistency and coherency, be used to
link the quantum physical description of the subject’s brain to his stream of conscious
experiences. The conscious choices by human agents thereby become injected
nontrivially into the causal interpretation of neuroscience and neuropsychology
experiments. This caveat particularly applies to those experimental paradigms in which
human subjects are required to perform decision-making or attention-focusing tasks that
require conscious effort.
2. Practical ramifications of the altered conception of the causal structure of
self-directed neuroplasticity
Clarity is required about the sorts of neuroscientific reasoning that remain coherent,
given the structure of modern physics, and, contrastingly, the types of assertions that can
now be viewed as the residue of a materialistic bias stemming from a superceded physics.
Entirely acceptable are correlational analyses concerning the relationship between
mentalistic data and neurophysiological mechanisms. Examining the qualitative
and quantitative aspects of brain function, and doing detailed analyses of how they relate
8
to the data of experience, obtained through increasingly sophisticated means of
psychological investigation and subject self-report analysis (e.g., the entire Sep/Oct 2003
issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 10, Number 9-10, is dedicated to
these questions), are completely in line with fundamental physics. These activities are the
core of neuropsychological science. What is not justified is the presumption, either tacit
or explicit, that all aspects of experience examined and reported are necessarily causal
consequences solely of brain mechanisms. The structure of contemporary physics entails
no such conclusion. This is particularly relevant to data from first person reports
concerning active willfully directed attentional focus, and especially to data pertaining
to which aspects of the stream of conscious awareness a subject chooses to focus on
when making self-directed efforts to modify and/or modulate the quality and beam of
attention. In such cases the structure of orthodox quantum physics implies that the
investigator is not justified in assuming that the focus of attention is determined wholly
by brain mechanisms that are in principle completely well defined and
mechanically determined. Conscious effort itself can, justifiably within science, be taken
to be a primary variable whose complete causal origins may be untraceable in principle,
but whose causal efficacy in the physical world can be explained on the basis of the laws
of physics.
As already emphasized, the cognitive frame in which neuroscience research, including
research on cerebral aspects of behavior, is generally conducted contains within it the
assumption that brain mechanisms are in principle fully sufficient to explain all of
the observed phenomena. In the fields of functional neuroimaging this has led to
9
experimental paradigms that focus primarily on changes in brain activation as primary
variables used to explain whatever behavioral changes are observed --- including ones
understood as involving essentially cognitive and emotional responses. As long as one is
investigating phenomena that are mostly passive in nature this may be fully justified. A
person is shown a picture depicting an emotionally or perhaps a sexually arousing scene.
The relevant limbic and/or diencephalic structures are activated. The investigator
generally concludes that the observed brain activation has some intrinsic causal role in
the emotional changes reported (or perhaps, the hormonal correlates of those changes).
All is well and good, as far as it goes. And all quite passive from the experimental
subject's perspective --- all that's really required on his or her part is to remain
reasonably awake and alert, or, more precisely, at least somewhat responsive to sensory
inputs. But when, as happens in a growing number of studies, the subject makes an
active response aimed at systematically altering the nature of the emotional reaction ---
for example, by actively performing a cognitive reattribution --- then the demand that the
data be understood solely from the perspective of brain-based causal mechanism is a
severe and counter-intuitive constraint. It is noteworthy that this demand for an entirely
brain-based causal mechanism is nullified, in the quantum model developed here, by a
specified quantum effect, which will be described in detail below.
Surmounting the limitations imposed by restricting one’s ideas to the failed concepts of
classical physics can be especially important when one is investigating how to develop
improved methods for altering the emotional and cerebral responses to significantly
10
stressful external or internally generated stimuli. An incorrect assignment of the causal
roles of neurophysiologically and mentalistically described variables can impact
negatively on a therapist's selection of a course of treatment, on a patient's capacity to
recover, and on a neuroscientist's design of clinically relevant research programs.
In the analysis and development of clinical practices involving psychological
treatments and their biological effects the possession and use of a rationally coherent and
physically allowable conception of the causal relationship between mind and brain (or, if
one prefers, mentalistic and neurophysiological variables) is critical. If one simply
accepts the standard presumption that all aspects of emotional response are
passively determined by neurobiological mechanisms, then the theoretical development
of genuinely effective self-directed psychological strategies that produce real
neurobiological changes can be impeded by the fact that one is using a theory that
excludes from the dynamics what logically can be, and in our model actually are,
key causal elements, namely our willful choices.
The clinician's attention is thus directed away from what can be in many cases, at the
level of actual practice, a powerful determinant of action, namely the subject's
psychologically (i.e., mentalistically) framed commitment to act or think in specific
ways. The therapist tends to becomes locked into the view that the psychological
treatment of ailments caused by neurobiological impairments is not a realistic goal.
11
There is already a wealth of data arguing against this view. For instance, work in the
1990's on patients with obsessive compulsive disorder demonstrated significant changes
in caudate nucleus metabolism and the functional relationships of the
orbitofrontal cortex-striatum-thalamus circuitry in patients who responded to
a psychological treatment utilizing cognitive reframing and attentional refocusing as key
aspects of the therapeutic intervention (for review see Schwartz & Begley 2002). More
recently work by Beauregard and colleagues (Paquette et al. 2003) have demonstrated
systematic changes in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus
after cognitive-behavioral therapy for spider phobia, with brain changes significantly
related to both objective measurements and subjective reports of fear and aversion. There
are now numerous reports on the effects of self-directed regulation of emotional
response, via cognitive reframing and attentional re-contextualization mechanisms, on
cerebral function (e.g., Beauregard et al. 2001; Lévesque et al. 2003; Ochsner et al. 2002;
Paquette et al. 2003; Schwartz et al. 1996).
The brain area generally activated in all the studies done so far on the self-directed
regulation of emotional response is the prefrontal cortex, a cortical region also activated
in studies of cerebral correlates of willful mental activity, particularly those
investigating self-initiated action and the act of attending to one's own actions (Spence &
Frith 1999; Schwartz & Begley 2002). There is however one aspect of willful mental
activity that seems particularly critical to emotional self-regulation and that seems to be
the critical factor in it's effective application --- the factor of focused dispassionate self-
12
observation that, in a rapidly growing number of clinical psychology studies, has come to
be called mindfulness or mindful awareness (Segal et al. 2002)
The mental act of clear-minded introspection and observation, variously known as
mindfulness, mindful awareness, bare attention, the impartial spectator, etc. is a well-
described psychological phenomenon with a long and distinguished history in the
description of human mental states (Nyanaponika 2000). The most systematic and
extensive exposition is in the canonical texts of classical Buddhism preserved in the
Pali language, a dialect of Sanskrit. Because of the critical importance of this type of
close attentiveness in the practice of Buddhist meditation, some of its most refined
descriptions in English are in texts concerned with meditative practice (although it is of
critical importance to realize that the mindful mental state does not require any
specific meditative practice to acquire, and is certainly not in any sense a "trance-like"
state).
One particularly well-established description, using the name bare attention, is as
follows:
"Bare Attention is the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us
and in us at the successive moments of perception. It is called 'Bare' because it attends
just to the bare facts of a perception as presented either through the five physical senses
or through the mind . . . without reacting to them." (Nyanaponika 1973, p.30)
13
Perhaps the essential characteristic of mindful observation is that you are just watching,
observing all facts, both inner and outer, very calmly, clearly, and closely. To sustain this
attentional perspective over time, especially during stressful events, invariably requires
the conscious application of effort.
A working hypothesis for ongoing investigation in human neurophysiology, based on a
significant body of preliminary data, is that the mental action of mindful awareness
specifically modulates the activity of the prefrontal cortex. Because of the well
established role of this cortical area in the planning and willful selection of self-initiated
responses (Spence & Frith 1999; Schwartz & Begley 2002), the capacity of mindful
awareness, and by implication all emotional self-regulating strategies, to specifically
modulate activity in this critical brain region has tremendous implications for the fields
of mental health and related areas.
It might be claimed that the designs and executions of successful clinical practices (and
of informative neuropsychological experiments) that depend on the idea of the causal
efficacy of conscious effort, and which fit so well into the quantum conceptualization that
actually explains the causal efficacy of these efforts, could just as well be carried out
within the conceptual framework in which the causal efficacy of willfull effort is an
illusion, or is something very different from what it intuitively seems to be. But such a
claim is not easy to defend. Simple models that are consistent with basic intuition and
lead directly to experimentally demonstrable conclusions are better than philosophically
intricate ones that lead to the same conclusions. Of course, if it could be argued that the
14
simple model could not be true because it violates the basic principles of physics, while
the more intricate one obeys them, then there might be reasonable grounds for question or
dispute. But in the present case the reverse is true: it is the simple model that is built on
the basic laws of physics, and it is the arcane and philosophically difficult model, in
which our basic human intuition concerning the efficacy of mental effort is denied as not
being what it seems to be, that contradicts the laws of physics.
The major theoretical issue we address in this article is the failure of classical models of
neurobiological action to provide a scientifically adequate account for all of the
mechanisms that are operating when human beings utilize self-directed strategies for the
purpose of modulating emotional responses and their cerebral correlates. Specifically,
the assumption that all aspects of mental activity and emotional life are ultimately
explicable solely in terms of micro-local deterministic brain activity, with no superposed
effects of mental effort, produces a theoretical structure that both fails to meet practical
scientific needs, and also fails to accord with the causal structure of modern physics.
In the alternative approach the role played by the mind, when one is observing and
modulating one's own emotional states, is an intrinsically active and physically
efficacious process in which mental action is affecting brain activity in a way concordant
with the laws of physics. A culturally relevant way of framing this change is to say that
contemporary physics imbues the venerable and therapeutically useful term
"psychodynamic" with rigorous neurophysical efficacy.
15
This new theory of the mind-brain connection is supportive of clinical practice. Belief
in the efficacy of mental effort in emotional self-regulation is needed to subjectively
access the phenomena (e.g., belief in the efficacy of effort is required to sustain
mindfulness during stressful events). Moreover, a conceptual framework in which
psychologically described efforts have effects is needed explain to patients what they are
supposed to do when directing their inner resources to the challenging task of modifying
emotional and cerebral responses. Clinical success is jeopardized by a belief on the part
of either therapists or patients that their mental effort is an illusion or a misconception.
It takes effort for people to achieve therapeutic results. That is because it requires a
redirection of the brain's resources away from lower level limbic responses and toward
higher level prefrontal functions --- and this does not happen passively. Rather, it
requires, in actual practice, both willful training and directed mental effort. It is
semantically inconsistent and clinically counter productive to insist that these kinds of
brain changes be viewed as being solely an intra-cerebral "the physical brain changing
itself" type of action. That is because practical aspects of the activity of mind essential to
the identification, activation, application and use of directed mental effort are not
describable solely in terms of material brain mechanisms. The core
phenomena necessary for the scientific description of self-directed neuroplasticity are
processes that cannot be elaborated solely in terms of classical models of physics.
Furthermore, as we will see in detail in the following sections of this article, orthodox
concepts of contemporary physics are ideally suited to a rational and practically useful
16
understanding of the action of mindful self-observation on brain function. Classical
models of physics, which view all action in the physical world as being ultimately the
result of the movements of material particles, are now seriously out of date, and no longer
need be seen as providing the unique, or the best, scientifically well grounded paradigm
for investigating the interface between mind/consciousness and brain.
When people practice self-directed activities for the purpose of systematically altering
patterns of cerebral activation they are attending to their mental and emotional
experiences, not merely their limbic or hypothalamic brain mechanisms. And while no
scientifically oriented person denies that those brain mechanisms play a critical role in
generating those experiences, precisely what the person is training himself/herself to do is
to willfully change how those brain mechanisms operate --- and to do that requires
attending to mental experience per se. It is in fact the basic thesis of self-directed
neuroplasticity research that the way in which a person directs his attention, e.g.,
mindfully or unmindfully, will affect both the experiential state of the person and the
state of his/her brain. The existence of this close connection between mental effort and
brain activity flows naturally out of the dynamical principles of contemporary physics,
but is, within the framework of classical physics, a difficult problem that philosophers
of mind have been intensively engaged with, particularly for the past fifty years. The core
question is whether the solution to this problem lies in wholly in the eventual
development of a more sophisticated philosophy that is closely aligned with the classical
known-to-be-fundamentally-false conception nature, or whether the profound twentieth
century development in physics that assigns a subtle but essential causal role to human
17
consciousness can usefully inform our understanding of the effects of human
consciousness in neuropsychological experiments that appear to exhibit the causally
efficacious presence of such effects.
To appreciate the major conceptual changes made in basic physical theory during the
twentieth century one must be know about certain key features of the older theory.
3. Classical physics
Classical physics is a theory of nature that originated with the work of Isaac Newton in
the seventeenth century and was advanced by the contributions of James Clerk Maxwell
and Albert Einstein. Newton based his theory on the work of Johannes Kepler, who found
that the planets appeared to move in accordance with a simple mathematical law, and in
ways wholly determined by their spatial relationships to other objects. Those motions
were apparently independent of our human observations of them.
Newton effectively assumed that all physical objects were made of tiny miniaturized
versions of the planets, which, like the planets, moved in accordance with simple
mathematical laws, independently of whether we observed them or not. He found that he
could then explain the motions of the planets, and also the motions of large terrestrial
objects and systems, such as cannon balls, falling apples, and the tides, by assuming that
every tiny planet-like particle in the solar system attracted every other one with a force
inversely proportional the square of the distance between them.
18
This force was an instantaneous action at a distance: it acted instantaneously, no matter
how far the particles were apart. This feature troubled Newton. He wrote to a friend
“That one body should act upon another through the vacuum, without the mediation of
anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to
another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man, who has in philosophical
matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” (Newton 1687: 634)
Although Newton’s philosophical persuasion on this point is clear, he nevertheless
formulated his universal law of gravity without specifying how it was mediated.
Albert Einstein, building on the ideas of Maxwell, discovered a suitable mediating
agent, a distortion of the structure of space-time itself. Einstein’s contributions made
classical physics into what is called a local theory: there is no action at a distance. All
influences are transmitted essentially by contact interactions between tiny neighboring
mathematically described “entities,” and no influence propagates faster than the speed of
light.
Classical physics is, moreover, deterministic: the interactions are such that the state of
the physical world at any time is completely determined by the state at any earlier time.
Consequently, according to classical theory, the complete history of the physical world
for all time is mechanically fixed by contact interactions between tiny component parts,
together with the initial condition of the primordial universe.
19
This result means that, according to classical physics, you are a mechanical automaton:
your every physical action was pre-determined before you were born solely by
mechanical interactions between tiny mindless entities. Your mental aspects are causally
redundant: everything you do is completely determined by mechanical conditions alone,
without any mention of your thoughts, ideas, feelings, or intentions. Your intuitive
feeling that your conscious intentions make a difference in what you do is, according to
the principles of classical physics, a false and misleading illusion.
There are two possible ways within classical physics to understand this total incapacity
of your mental side (i.e., your stream of consciousness thoughts and feelings) to make
any difference in what you do. The first way is to consider your thoughts, ideas, and
feelings to be epiphenomenal by-products of the activity of your brain. Your mental side
is then a causally impotent sideshow that is produced, or caused, by your brain, but that
produces no reciprocal action back upon your brain. The second way is to contend that
each of your conscious experiences --- each of your thoughts, ideas, or feelings --- is the
very same thing as some pattern of motion of various tiny parts of your brain.
4. Problems with classical physics
William James (1890: 138) argued against the first possibility, epiphenomenal
consciousness, by claiming that “The particulars of the distribution of consciousness, so
far as we know them, points to its being efficacious.” He noted that consciousness seems
to be “an organ, superadded to the other organs which maintain the animal in its struggle
for existence; and the presumption of course is that it helps him in some way in this
20
struggle, just as they do. But it cannot help him without being in some way efficacious
and influencing the course of his bodily history.” James said that the study described in
his book “will show us that consciousness is at all times primarily a selecting agency.” It
is present when choices must be made between different possible courses of action. He
further mentioned that “It is to my mind quite inconceivable that consciousness should
have nothing to do with a business to which it so faithfully attends.”(1890: 136)
If mental processes and consciousness have no effect upon the physical world, then
what keeps a person’s mental world aligned with his physical situation? What keeps his
pleasures in general alignment with actions that benefit him, and pains in general
correspondence with things that damage him, if felt pleasures and pains have no effect at
all upon his actions?
These liabilities of the notion of epiphenomenal mind and consciousness lead many
thinkers to turn to the alternative possibility that a person’s mind and stream of
consciousness is the very same thing as some activity in his brain: mind and
consciousness are “emergent properties” of brains.
A huge philosophical literature has developed arguing for and against this idea. The
primary argument against this “emergent-identity theory” position, within a classical
physics framework, is that in classical physics the full description of nature is in terms of
numbers assigned to tiny space-time regions, and there appears to be no way to
understand or explain how to get from such a restricted conceptual structure, which
21
involves such a small part of the world of experience, to the whole. How and why should
that extremely limited conceptual structure, which arose basically from idealizing, by
miniaturization, certain features of observed planetary motions, suffice to explain the
totality of experience, with its pains, sorrows, hopes, colors, smells, and moral
judgments? Why, given the known failure of classical physics at the fundamental level,
should that richly endowed whole be explainable in terms of such a narrowly restricted
part?
The core ideas of the arguments in favor of an identity-emergent theory of mind and
consciousness are illustrated by Roger Sperry’s example of a “wheel.” (Sperry 1992) A
wheel obviously does something: it is causally efficacious; it carries the cart. It is also an
emergent property: there is no mention of “wheelness” in the formulation of the laws of
physics, and “wheelness” did not exist in the early universe; “wheelness” emerges only
under certain special conditions. And the macroscopic wheel exercises “top-down”
control of its tiny parts. All these properties are perfectly in line with classical physics,
and with the idea that “a wheel is, precisely, a structure constructed out of its tiny atomic
parts.” So why not suppose mind and consciousness to be, like “wheelness”, emergent
properties of their classically conceived tiny physical parts?
The reason that mind and consciousness are not analogous to “wheelness”, within the
context of classical physics, is that the properties that characterize “wheelness” are
properties that are entailed, within the conceptual framework of classical physics, by
properties specified in classical physics, whereas the properties that characterize
22
conscious mental processes, namely the various ways these processes feel, are not
entailed, within the conceptual structure provided by classical physics, by the properties
specified by classical physics.
That is the huge difference-in-principle that distinguishes mind and consciousness from
things that, according to classical physics, are constructible out of the particles that are
postulated to exist by classical physics.
Given the state of motion of each of the tiny physical parts of a wheel, as it is conceived
of in classical physics, the properties that characterize the wheel - e.g., its roundness,
radius, center point, rate of rotation, etc., - are specified within the conceptual framework
provided by the principles of classical physics, which specify only geometric-type
properties such as changing locations and shapes of conglomerations of particles, and
numbers assigned to points in space. But given the state of motion of each tiny part of the
brain, as it is conceived of in classical physics, the properties that characterize the stream
of consciousness - the painfulness of the pain, the feeling of the anguish, or of the sorrow,
or of the joy - are not specified, within the conceptual framework provided by the
principles of classical physics. Thus it is possible, within that classical physics
framework, to strip away those feelings without disturbing the physical descriptions of
the motions of the tiny parts. One can, within the conceptual framework of classical
physics, take away the consciousness while leaving intact the properties that enter into
that theoretical construct, namely the locations and motions of the tiny physical parts of
the brain and its physical environment. But one cannot, within the conceptual framework
23
provided by classical physics, take away the physical characteristics that define the
“wheelness” of a wheel without affecting the locations and motions of the tiny physical
parts of the wheel.
Because one can, within the conceptual framework provided by classical physics, strip
away mind and consciousness without affecting the physical behavior, one cannot
rationally claim, within that framework, that mind and consciousness are the causes of
the physical behavior, or are causally efficacious in the physical world. Thus the “identity
theory” or “emergent property” strategy fails in its attempt to make mind and
consciousness efficacious, insofar as one remains strictly within the conceptual
framework provided by classical physics. Moreover, the whole endeavor to base brain
theory on classical physics is undermined by the fact that classical theory is unable to
account for behavioral properties (such as electrical and thermal conductivity, and
elasticity, etc.) that depend sensitively upon the behavior of the atomic, molecular, and
ionic constituents of a system, and brains are certainly systems of this kind, as will be
discussed in detail later.
Although classical physics is unable to account for observable properties that depend
sensitively on the behaviors of atoms, molecules, and ions, the classical theory is an
approximation to a more accurate theory, called quantum theory, that is able to account
for these observable macroscopic properties. But if classical physics is unable to account
for the moderately complex behavioral properties of most other large systems then how
24
can it be expected to account for the exquisitely complex behavioral properties of
thinking brains.
5. The quantum approach
Early in the twentieth century scientists discovered empirically that the principles of
classical physics could not be correct. Moreover, those principles were wrong in ways
that no minor tinkering could ever fix. The basic principles of classical physics were thus
replaced by new basic principles that account uniformly both for all the successes of the
older classical theory and also for all the data that is incompatible with the classical
principles.
The key philosophical and scientific achievement of the founders of quantum theory
was to forge a rationally coherent and practically useful linkage between the two kinds of
descriptions that jointly comprise the foundation of science. Descriptions of the first kind
are accounts of psychologically experienced empirical findings, expressed in a language
that allows us to communicate to our colleagues what we have done and what we have
learned. Descriptions of the second kind are specifications of physical properties, which
are expressed by assigning mathematical properties to space-time points, and formulating
laws that determine how these properties evolve over the course of time. Bohr,
Heisenberg, Pauli, and the other inventors of quantum theory discovered a useful way to
connect these two kinds of descriptions by causal laws, and their seminal discovery was
extended by John von Neumann from the domain of atomic science to the realm of
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neuroscience, and in particular to the problem of understanding and describing the causal
connections between the minds and the brains of human beings.
In order to achieve this result, the whole conception of what science is was turned
inside out. The core idea of classical physics was to describe the “world out there,” with
no reference to “our thoughts in here.” But the core idea of quantum mechanics is to
describe both our activities as knowledge-seeking and knowledge-acquiring agents, and
also the knowledge that we thereby acquire. Thus quantum theory involves, basically,
what is “in here,” not just what is “out there.”
This philosophical shift arises from the explicit recognition by quantum physicists that
science is about what we can know. It is fine to have a beautiful and elegant mathematical
theory about a really existing physical world out there that meets various intellectually
satisfying criteria. But the essential demand of science is that the theoretical constructs be
tied to the experiences of the human scientists who devise ways of testing the theory, and
of the human engineers and technicians who both participate in these tests, and eventually
put the theory to work. Thus the structure of a proper physical theory must involve not
only the part describing the behavior of the not-directly-experienced theoretically
postulated entities, expressed in some appropriate symbolic language, but also a part
describing the human experiences that are pertinent to these tests and applications,
expressed in the language that we actually use to describe such experiences to ourselves
26
and to each other. And the theory must specify the connection between these two
differently described and differently conceived parts of scientific practice.
Classical physics meets this final requirement in a trivial kind of way. The relevant
experiences of the human participants are taken to be direct apprehensions of the gross
properties of large objects composed of huge numbers of their tiny atomic-scale parts.
These apprehensions --- of, for example, the perceived location and motion of a falling
apple, or the position of a pointer on a measuring device --- were taken to be passive:
they had no effect on the behaviors of the systems being studied. But the physicists who
were examining the behaviors of systems that depend sensitively upon the behaviors of
their tiny atomic-scale components found themselves forced to introduce a less trivial
theoretical arrangement. In the new scheme the human agents are no longer passive
observers. They are considered to be active agents, or participants.
The participation of the agent continues to be important even when the only features of
the physically described world being observed are large-scale properties of measuring
devices. The sensitivity of the behavior of the devices to the behavior of some tiny
atomic-scale particles propagates first to the devices and then to the observers in such a
way that the choice made by an observer about what sort of knowledge to seek can
profoundly affect the knowledge that can ever be received either by that observer himself
or by any other observer with whom he can communicate. Thus the choice made by the
observer about how he or she will act at a macroscopic level has, at the practical level, a
profound effect on the physical system being acting upon.
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That conclusion is not surprising. How one acts on a system would, in general, be
expected to affect it. Nor is it shocking that the effect of the agent’s actions upon the
system being probed is specified by the quantum mechanical rules. But the essential point
not to be overlooked is that the logical structure of the basic physical theory has become
fundamentally transformed. The agent’s choice about how to act has been introduced into
the scientific description at a basic level, and in a way that specifies, mathematically, how
his or her choice about how to act affects the physical system being acted upon
The structure of quantum mechanics is such that, although the effect upon the observed
system of the agent’s choice about how to act is mathematically specified, the manner in
which this choice itself is determined is not specified. This means that, in the treatment of
experimental data, the choices made by human agents must be treated as freely chosen
input variables, rather than as mechanical consequences of any known laws of nature.
Quantum theory thereby converts science’s conception of us from that of a mechanical
automaton, whose conscious choices are mere cogs in a gigantic mechanical machine, to
that of agents whose conscious free choices affect the physically described world in a
way specified by the theory. The approximation that reduces quantum theory to classical
physics completely eliminates the important element of conscious free choice. Hence,
from a physics point of view, trying to understand the connection between
mind/consciousness and brain by going to the classical approximation is absurd: it
amounts to trying to understand something in an approximation that eliminates the effect
we are trying to study.
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This original formulation of quantum theory was created mainly at an Institute in
Copenhagen directed by Niels Bohr, and is called “The Copenhagen Interpretation.” Due
to the strangeness of the properties of nature entailed by the new mathematics, the
Copenhagen strategy was to refrain from making any ordinary sort of ontological claims,
but to take, instead, an essentially pragmatic stance. Thus the theory was formulated
basically as a set of practical rules for how scientists should go about the tasks of
acquiring, manipulating, and using knowledge. Claims about “what the world out there is
really like” were considered to lie beyond science.
This change in perspective is captured by Heisenberg’s famous statement:
“The conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has thus
evaporated not into the cloud of some obscure new reality concept, but into the
transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of the
particle but rather our knowledge of this behavior.” (Heisenberg, 1958a)
A closely connected change is encapsulated in Niels Bohr dictum that “in the great
drama of existence we ourselves are both actors and spectators.” (Bohr 1963: 15 and
1958: 81) The emphasis here is on “actors”: in classical physics we were mere spectators.
The key idea is more concretely expressed in statements such as:
"[T]he freedom of experimentation, presupposed in classical physics, is of course
retained and corresponds to the free choice of experimental arrangement for
29
which the mathematical structure of the quantum mechanical formalism offers the
appropriate latitude." (Bohr, 1958, p. 73}
Copenhagen quantum theory is about how the choices made by conscious human
agents affect the knowledge they can and do acquire about the physically described
systems upon which these agents act. In order to achieve this re-conceptualization of
physics the Copenhagen formulation separates the physical universe into two parts, which
are described in two different languages. One part is the observing human agent plus his
measuring devices. This extended “agent,” which includes the devices, is described in
mental terms - in terms of our instructions to colleagues about how to set up the devices,
and our reports of what we then “see,” or otherwise consciously experience. The other
part of nature is the system that the agent is acting upon. That part is described in
physical terms - in terms of mathematical properties assigned to tiny space-time regions.
Thus Copenhagen quantum theory brings “doing science” into science. In particular, it
brings a crucial part of doing science, namely our choices about how we will probe
nature, directly into the causal structure. It specifies the effects of these probing actions
upon the systems being probed.
This approach works very well in practice. However, the body and brain of the human
agent, and also his devices, are composed of atomic constituents. Hence a complete
theory ought to be able to describe these systems in physical terms.
30
The great mathematician and logician John von Neumann formulated quantum theory
in a rigorous way that allows the bodies and brains of the agents, along with their
measuring devices, to be shifted into the physically described world. This shift is carried
out in a series of steps each of which moves more of what the Copenhagen approach took
to be the psychologically described “observing system” into the physically described
“observed system.” At each step the crucial act of choosing or deciding between possible
optional observing actions remains undetermined by the physical observed system. This
act of choosing is always ascribed to the observing agent. In the end all that is left of this
agent is what von Neumann calls his “abstract ego.” It is described in psychological
terms, and is, in practice, the stream of consciousness of the agent.
At each step the direct effect of the conscious act is upon the part of the physically
described world that is closest to the psychologically described world. This means that, in
the end, the causal effect of the agent’s mental action is on his own brain, or some
significant part of his brain.
Von Neumann makes the logical structure of quantum theory very clear by identifying
two very different processes, which he calls Process 1 and Process 2 (von Neumann
1955: 418). Process 2 is the analog in quantum theory of the process in classical physics
that takes the state of a system at one time to its state at a later time. This Process 2, like
its classical analog, is local and deterministic. However, Process 2 by itself is not the
whole story: it generates a host of “physical worlds” most of which do not agree with our
human experience. For example, if Process 2 were, from the time of the Big Bang, the
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only process in nature, then the quantum state of the (center point of the) moon would
represent a structure smeared out over large part of the sky, and each human body-brain
would likewise be represented by a structure smeared out continuously over a huge
region. Process 2 generates a cloud of possible worlds, instead of the one world we
actually experience.
This huge disparity between properties generated by the “mechanical” Process 2 and
the properties we actually observe is resolved by invoking Process 1.
Any physical theory must, in order to be complete, specify how the elements of the
theory are connected to human experience. In classical physics this connection is part of a
metaphysical superstructure: it is not part of the dynamical process. But in quantum
theory a linkage of the mathematically described physical state to human experiences is
contained in the mathematically specified dynamics. This connection is not passive. It is
not a mere witnessing of a physical feature of nature. Instead, it injects into the physical
state of the system being acted upon specific properties that depend upon choices made
by the agent.
Quantum theory is built upon the practical concept of intentional actions by agents.
Each such action is a preparation that is expected or intended to produce an experiential
response or feedback. For example, a scientist might act to place a Geiger counter near a
radioactive source, and expect to see the counter either “fire” during a certain time
interval or not “fire” during that interval. The experienced response, “Yes” or “No”, to
32
the question “Does the counter fire during the specified interval?” specifies one bit of
information. Quantum theory is thus an information-based theory built upon the
preparative actions of information-seeking agents.
Probing actions of this kind are performed not only by scientists. Every healthy and
alert infant is continually engaged in making willful efforts that produce experiential
feedbacks, and he/she soon begins to form expectations about what sorts of feedbacks are
likely to follow from some particular kind of effort. Thus both empirical science and
normal human life are based on paired realities of this action-response kind, and our
physical and psychological theories are both basically attempting to understand these
linked realities within a rational conceptual framework.
The basic building blocks of quantum theory are, then, a set of intentional actions by
agents, and for each such action an associated collection of possible “Yes” feedbacks,
which are the possible responses that the agent can judge to be in conformity to the
criteria associated with that intentional act. For example, the agent is assumed to be able
to make the judgment “Yes” the Geiger counter clicked or “No” the Geiger counter did
not click. Science would be difficult to pursue if scientists could make no such
judgments about what they are experiencing.
All known physical theories involve idealizations of one kind or another. In quantum
theory the main idealization is not that every object is made up of miniature planet-like
objects. It is rather that there are agents that perform intentional acts each of which can
33
result in a feedback that may or may not conform to a certain criterion associated with
that act. One bit of information is introduced into the world in which that agent lives,
according to whether or not the feedback conforms to that criterion. The answer places
the agent on one or the other of two alternative possible branches of the course of world
history.
These remarks reveal the enormous difference between classical physics and quantum
physics. In classical physics the elemental ingredients are tiny invisible bits of matter that
are idealized miniaturized versions of the planets that we see in the heavens, and that
move in ways unaffected by our scrutiny, whereas in quantum physics the elemental
ingredients are intentional preparative actions by agents, the feedbacks arising from these
actions, and the effects of these actions upon the physically described states of the probed
systems.
This radical re-structuring of the form of physical theory grew out of a seminal
discovery by Heisenberg. That discovery was that in order to get a satisfactory quantum
generalization of a classical theory one must replace various numbers in the classical
theory by actions (operators). A key difference between numbers and actions is that if A
and B are two actions then AB represents the action obtained by performing the action A
upon the action B. If A and B are two different actions then generally AB is different
from BA: the order in which actions are performed matters. But for numbers the order
does not matter: AB = BA.
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The difference between quantum physics and its classical approximation resides in the
fact that in the quantum case certain differences AB-BA are proportional to a number
measured by Max Planck in 1900, and called Planck’s constant. Setting those differences
to zero gives the classical approximation. Thus quantum theory is closely connected to
classical physics, but is incompatible with it, because certain nonzero quantities must be
replaced by zero to obtain the classical approximation.
The intentional actions of agents are represented mathematically in Heisenberg’s space
of actions. Here is how it works.
Each intentional action depends, of course, on the intention of the agent, and upon the
state of the system upon which this action acts. Each of these two aspects of nature is
represented within Heisenberg’s space of actions by an action. The idea that a “state”
should be represented by an “action” may sound odd, but Heisenberg’s key idea was to
replace what classical physics took to be a “being” by a “doing.” I shall denote the action
(or operator) that represents the state being acted upon by the symbol S.
An intentional act is an action that is intended to produce a feedback of a certain
conceived or imagined kind. Of course, no intentional act is sure-fire: one’s intentions
may not be fulfilled. Hence the intentional action merely puts into play a process that will
lead either to a confirmatory feedback “Yes,” the intention is realized, or to the result
“No”, the “Yes” response did not occur.
35
The effect of this intentional mental act is represented mathematically by an equation
that is one of the key components of quantum theory. This equation represents, within the
quantum mathematics, the effect of the Process 1 action upon the quantum state S of the
system being acted upon. The equation is:
SÆS’ = PSP + (I-P)S(I-P).
This formula exhibits the important fact that this Process 1 action changes the state S of
the system being acted upon into a new state S’, which is a sum of two parts.
The first part, PSP, represents, in physical terms, the possibility in which the
experiential feedback called “Yes” appears, and the second part, (I-P)S(I-P), represents
the alternative possibility “No”, this “Yes” feedback does not appear. Thus an effect of
the probing action is injected into the mathematical description of the physical system
being acted upon.
The operator P is important. The action represented by P, acting both on the right and
on the left of S, is the action of eliminating from the state S all parts of S except the
“Yes” part. That particular retained part is determined by the choice made by the agent.
The symbol I is the unit operator, which is essentially multiplication by the number 1,
and the action of (I-P), acting both on the right and on the left of S, is, analogously, to
eliminate from S all parts of S except the “No” parts.
36
Notice that Process 1 produces the sum of the two alternative possible feedbacks, not
just one or the other. Since the feedback must either be “Yes” or “No = Not-Yes,” one
might think that Process 1, which keeps both the “Yes” and the “No” possibilities, would
do nothing. But that is not correct. This is a key point! It can be made absolutely clear by
noticing that S can be written as a sum of four parts, only two of which survive the
Process 1 action:
S = PSP + (I-P) S(I-P) + PS(I-P) + (I-P)SP.
This formula is a strict identity. The dedicated reader can quickly verify it by collecting
the contributions of the four occurring terms PSP, PS, SP, and S, and verifying that all
terms but S cancel out. This identity shows that the state S is a sum of four parts, two of
which are eliminated by Process 1.
But this means that Process 1 has a nontrivial effect upon the state being acted upon: it
eliminates the two terms that correspond neither to the appearance of a “Yes” feedback
nor to the failure of the “Yes” feedback to appear.
This result is the first key point: quantum theory has a specific causal process, Process
1, which produces a nontrivial effect of an agent’s choice upon the physical description
of the system being examined. [“Nature” will eventually choose between “Yes” and
“No”, but we focus here on the prior Process 1, the agent’s choice. Nature’s subsequent
choice we shall call Process 3.]
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5.1. Free choices
The second key point is this: the agent’s choices are “free choices,” in the specific sense
specified below.
Orthodox quantum theory is formulated in a realistic and practical way. It is structured
around the activities of human agents, who are considered able to freely elect to probe
nature in any one of many possible ways. Bohr emphasized the freedom of the
experimenters in passages such as the one already quoted above, or the similar
“The foundation of the description of the experimental conditions as well as our freedom
to choose them is fully retained.” (Bohr, 1958, p.90)
This freedom of choice stems from the fact that in the original Copenhagen formulation
of quantum theory the human experimenter is considered to stand outside the system to
which the quantum laws are applied. Those quantum laws are the only precise laws of
nature recognized by that theory. Thus, according to the Copenhagen philosophy, there
are no presently known laws that govern the choices made by the
agent/experimenter/observer about how the observed system is to be probed. This choice
is thus, in this very specific sense, a “free choice.” The von Neumann generalization
leaves this freedom intact. The choices attributed to von Neumann’s “abstract ego” are
38
no more limited by the known rules of quantum theory than are the choices made by
Bohr’s experimenter.
5.2. Nerve terminals, ion channels, and the need to use quantum theory in
the study of the mind-brain connection
Neuroscientists studying the connection of mind and consciousness to physical
processes in the brain often assume that a conception of nature based on classical physics
will eventually turn out to be adequate. That assumption would have been reasonable
during the nineteenth century. But now, in the twenty-first century, it is rationally
untenable. Quantum theory must be used in principle because the behavior of the brain
depends sensitively upon atomic, molecular and ionic processes, and these processes in
the brain often involve large quantum effects.
To study quantum effects in brains within an orthodox (i.e., Copenhagen or von
Neumann) quantum theory one must use the von Neumann formulation. This is because
Copenhagen quantum theory is formulated in a way that leaves out the quantum
dynamics of the human observer’s body and brain. But von Neumann quantum theory
takes the physical system S upon which the crucial Process 1 acts to be precisely the
brain of the agent, or some part of it. Thus Process 1 describes here an interaction
between a person’s stream of consciousness, described in mentalistic terms, and an
activity in his brain, described in physical terms.
39
A key question is the quantitative magnitude of quantum effects in the brain. They must
be large in order for deviations from classical physics to play any significant role. To
examine this quantitative question we consider the quantum dynamics of nerve terminals.
Nerve terminals are essential connecting links between nerve cells. The general way
they work is reasonably well understood. When an action potential traveling along a
nerve fiber reaches a nerve terminal, a host of ion channels open. Calcium ions enter
through these channels into the interior of the terminal. These ions migrate from the
channel exits to release sites on vesicles containing neurotransmitter molecules. A
triggering effect of the calcium ions causes these contents to be dumped into the synaptic
cleft that separates this terminal from a neighboring neuron, and these neurotransmitter
molecules influence the tendencies of that neighboring neuron to “fire.”
At their narrowest points calcium ion channels are less than a nanometer in diameter
(Cataldi et al. 2002). This extreme smallness of the opening in the calcium ion channels
has profound quantum mechanical implications. The narrowness of the channel restricts
the lateral spatial dimension. Consequently, the lateral velocity is forced by the quantum
uncertainty principle to become large. This causes the quantum cloud of possibilities
associated with the calcium ion to fan out over an increasing area as it moves away from
the tiny channel to the target region where the ion will be absorbed as a whole, or not
absorbed at all, on some small triggering site.
40
This spreading of this ion wave packet means that the ion may or may not be absorbed
on the small triggering site. Accordingly, the contents of the vesicle may or may not be
released. Consequently, the quantum state of the brain has a part in which the
neurotransmitter is released and a part in which the neurotransmitter is not released. This
quantum splitting occurs at every one of the trillions of nerve terminals. This means that
quantum state of the brain splits into vast host of classically conceived possibilities, one
for each possible combination of the release-or-no-release options at each of the nerve
terminals. Actually, because of uncertainties on timings and locations, what is generated
by the physical processes in the brain will be not a single discrete set of non-overlapping
physical possibilities but rather a huge smear of classically conceived possibilities. Once
the physical state of the brain has evolved into this huge smear of possibilities one must
appeal to the quantum rules, and in particular to the effects of Process 1, in order to
connect the physically described world to the steams of consciousness of the
observer/participants.
This focus on the motions of calcium ions in nerve terminals is not meant to suggest
that this particular effect is the only place where quantum effects enter into brain process,
or that the quantum Process 1 acts locally at these sites. What is needed here is only the
existence of some large quantum of effect. The focusing upon these calcium ions stems
from the facts that (1) in this case the various sizes (dimensions) needed to estimate the
magnitude of the quantum effects are empirically known, and (2) that the release of
neurotransmitter into synaptic clefts is known to play a significant role in brain dynamics.
41
The brain is warm and wet, and is continually interacting strongly with its environment.
It might be thought that the strong quantum decoherence effects associated with these
conditions would wash out all quantum effects, beyond localized chemical processes that
can be conceived to be imbedded in an essentially classical world.
Strong decoherence effects are certainly present, but they are automatically taken into
account in the von Neumann formulation employed here. These effects merely convert
the state S of the brain into what is called a "statistical mixture" of "nearly classically
describable" states, each of which develops in time, in the absence of Process 1 events, in
an almost classically describable way.
The existence of strong decoherence effects makes the main consequences of quantum
theory being discussed here more easily accessible to neuroscientists by effectively
reducing the complex quantum state of the brain to a collection of almost classically
describable possibilities. Because of the uncertainties introduced at the ionic, atomic,
molecular, and electronic levels, the brain state will develop not into one single
classically describable macroscopic state, as it does in classical physics, but into a
continuous distribution of parallel virtual states of this kind. Process 1 must then be
invoked to allow definite empirical predictions to be extracted from this continuous
smear of parallel overlapping almost-classical possibilities generated by Process 2.
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5.3 Quantum brain dynamics
A principal function of the brain is to receive clues from the environment, to form an
appropriate plan of action, and to direct and monitor the activities of the brain and body
specified by the selected plan of action. The exact details of the plan will, for a classical
model, obviously depend upon the exact values of many noisy and uncontrolled
variables. In cases close to a bifurcation point the dynamical effects of noise might even
tip the balance between two very different responses to the given clues, e.g., tip the
balance between the ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ response to some shadowy form. It is important to
realize that the exact values accounting for what in classical physics models are called
"dynamical effects of noise" are unknowable in principle. The contemporary physical
model accounts for these uncertainties in brain dynamics.
The effect of the independent “release” or “don’t release” options at each of the trigger
sites, coupled with the uncertainty in the timing of the vesicle release at each of the
trillions of nerve terminals will be to cause the quantum mechanical state of the brain to
become a smeared out cloud of different macroscopic possibilities, some representing
different alternative possible plans of action. As long as the brain dynamics is controlled
wholly by Process 2 - which is the quantum generalization of the Newtonian laws of
motion of classical physics - all of the various alternative possible plans of action will
exist in parallel, with no one plan of action singled out as the one that will actually be
experienced.
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Some process beyond the local deterministic Process 2 is required to pick out one
experienced course of physical events from the smeared out mass of possibilities
generated by all of the alternative possible combinations of vesicle releases at all of the
trillions of nerve terminals. As already emphasized, this other process is Process 1. This
process brings in a choice that is not determined by any currently known law of nature,
yet has a definite effect upon the brain of the chooser. The Process 1 choice picks an
operator P, and also a time t at which P acts. The effect of this action at time t is to
change the state S(t) of the brain, or of some large part of the brain, to
PS(t)P + (I-P) S(t) (I-P).
The action P cannot act at a point in the brain, because action at a point would dump a
huge (in principle infinite) amount of energy into the brain, which would then explode.
The operator P must therefore act non-locally, over a potentially large part of the brain.
In examining the question of the nature of the effect in the brain of Process 2 we
focused on the separate motions of the individual particles. But the physical structures in
terms of which the action of Process 1 is naturally expressed are not the separate motions
of individual particles. They are, rather, the quasi-stable macroscopic degrees of
freedom. The brain structures selected by the action of P must enjoy the stability,
endurance, and causal linkages needed to bring the intended experiential feedbacks into
being.
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These functional structures are likely to be more like the lowest-energy state of the
simple harmonic oscillator, which is completely stable, or like the states obtained from
such lowest-energy states by spatial displacements and shifts in velocity. These shifted
states tend to endure as oscillating states. In other words, in order to create the needed
causal structure the projection operator P corresponding to an intentional action ought to
pick out functionally pertinent quasi-stable oscillating states of macroscopic subsystems
of the brain. The state associated with a Process 1 preparatory intervention should be a
functionally important brain analog of a collection of oscillating modes of a drumhead, in
which large assemblies of particles are moving in a coordinated way. Such an enduring
structure in the brain can serve as a trigger and coordinator of further coordinated
activities.
5.4 Templates for action
The brain process that is actualized by the transition S(t)ÆPS(t)P is the neural correlate
of the psychologically intended action. It is the brain’s template for the intended action.
It is a pattern of neuroelectrical activity that if held in place long enough will tend to
generate a physical action in the brain that will tend to produce the intended experiential
feedback.
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5.5. Origin of the choices of the Process 1 actions
It has been repeatedly emphasized here that the choices of which Process I actions
actually occur are “free choices,” in the sense that they are not specified by the currently
known laws of physics. On the other hand, a person’s intentions are surely related in
some way to his historical past. This means that the laws of contemporary orthodox
quantum theory, although restrictive and important, are not the whole story. In spite of
this, orthodox quantum theory, while making no claim to ontological completeness, is
able to achieve a certain kind of pragmatic completeness. It does so by treating the
Process 1 “free choices” as the input variables of experimental protocols, rather than
mechanically determined consequences of brain action.
In quantum physics the “free choices” made by human subjects are regarded as
subjectively controllable input variable. Bohr emphasized that “the mathematical
structure of the quantum mechanical formalism offers the appropriate latitude” for these
free choices. But the need for this strategic move goes deeper than the mere fact that
contemporary quantum theory fails to specify how these choices are made. For if in the
von Neumann formulation one does seek to determine the cause of the “free choice”
within the representation of the physical brain of the chooser one finds that one is
systematically blocked from determining the cause of the choice by the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle, which asserts that the locations and velocities of, say, the calcium
ions, are simultaneous unknowable to the precision needed to determine what the choice
will be. Thus one is faced not merely with a practical unknowability of the causal origin
46
of the “free choices,” but with an unknowability in principle that stems from the
uncertainty principle itself, which lies at the base of quantum mechanics. There is thus a
deep root in quantum theory for the idea that the origin of the “free choices” lies not in
the physical description alone, and for the consequent policy of treating these “free
choices” as empirical inputs that are selected by agents, and enter into the causal structure
via Process 1.
5.6 Effort
It is useful to classify Process 1 events as either “active” or “passive.” Passive Process
1 events are attentional events that occur with little or no feeling of conscious effort.
Active Process 1 events are intentional and involve effort. This distinction is given a
functional significance by allowing “effort” to enter into the selection of Process 1 events
in a way that will now be specified.
Consciousness probably contributes very little to brain dynamics, compared to the
contribution of the brain itself. To minimize the input of consciousness, and in order to
achieve testability, we propose to allow mental effort to do nothing but control “Attention
Density”, which is the rapidity of the Process 1 events. This allows effort to have only a
very limited kind of influence on brain activities, which are largely controlled by physical
properties of the brain itself.
The notion that only the Attention Density is controlled by conscious effort arose from
an investigation into what sort of conscious control over Process 1 action was sufficient
47
to accommodate the most blatant empirical facts. Imposing this strong restriction on the
allowed effects of consciousness produces a theory with correspondingly strong
predictive power. In this model all significant effects of consciousness upon brain activity
arise exclusively from a well known and well verified strictly quantum effect known as
the Quantum Zeno Effect.
5.7. The Quantum Zeno Effect
If one considers only passive events, then it is very difficult to identify any empirical
effect of Process 1, apart from the occurrence of awareness. In the first place, the
empirical averaging over the “Yes” and “No” possibilities in strict accordance with the
quantum laws tends to wash out all effects that depart from what would arise from a
classical statistical analysis that incorporates the uncertainty principle as simply lack of
knowledge. Moreover, the passivity of the mental process means that we have no
empirically controllable variable.
But the study of effortfully controlled intentional action brings in two empirically
accessible variables, the intention and the amount of effort. It also brings in the important
physical Quantum Zeno Effect. This effect is named for the Greek philosopher Zeno of
Elea, and was brought into prominence in 1977 by the physicists Sudarshan and Misra
(1977). It gives a name to the fact that repeated and closely-spaced observational acts can
effectively hold the “Yes” feedback in place for an extended time interval that depends
upon the rapidity at which the Process 1 actions are happening. According to our model,
48
this rapidity is controlled by the amount of effort being applied. In our notation the effect
is to keep the “Yes” condition associated with states of the form PSP in place longer than
would be the case if no effort were being made. This “holding” effect can override very
strong mechanical forces arising from Process 2. It’s a case of mind over brain matter!
The “Yes” states PSP are assumed to be conditioned by training and learning to contain
the template for action which if held in place for an extended period will tend to produce
the intended experiential feedback. Thus the model allows intentional mental efforts to
tend to bring intended experiences into being. Systems that have the capacity to exploit
this feature of natural law, as it is represented in quantum theory, would apparently enjoy
a tremendous survival advantage over systems that do not or cannot exploit it.
6. Support from psychology
A person’s experiential life is a stream of conscious experiences. The person’s
experienced “self” is part of this stream of consciousness: it is not an extra thing that lies
outside what the person is conscious of. In James’s words (1890: 401) “thought is itself
the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond.” The experiential “self” is a slowly
changing “fringe” part of the stream of consciousness. This part of the stream of
consciousness provides an overall background cause for the central focus of attention.
The physical brain, evolving mechanically in accordance with the local deterministic
Process 2 can do most of the necessary work of the brain. It can do the job of creating, on
the basis of its interpretation of the clues provided by the senses, a suitable response,
49
which will be controlled by a certain pattern of neural or brain activity that acts as a
template for action. But, due to its quantum character, the brain necessarily generates an
amorphous mass of overlapping and conflicting templates for action. Process 1 acts to
extract from this jumbled mass of possibilities some particular template for action. This
template is a feature of the “Yes” states PSP that specifies the form of the Process 1
event. But the quantum rules do not assert that this “Yes” part of the prior state S
necessarily comes into being. They assert, instead, that if this Process 1 action is
triggered---say by some sort of “consent”---then this “Yes” component PSP will come
into being with probability Tr PSP/Tr S, and that the “No” state will occur if the “Yes”
state does not occur, where the symbol Tr represents a quantum mechanical summation
over all possibilities.
If the rate at which these “consents” occur is assumed to be increasable by conscious
mental effort, then the causal efficacy of “will” can be understood. Conscious effort can,
by activation of the Quantum Zeno Effect, override strong mechanical forces arising from
Process 2, and cause the template for action to be held in place longer than it would be if
the rapid sequence of Process 1 events were not occurring. This sustained existence of the
template for action can increase the probability that the intended action will occur.
Does this quantum-physics-based conception of the origin of the causal efficacy of
“Will” accord with the findings of psychology?
50
Consider some passages from ''Psychology: The Briefer Course'', written by William
James. In the final section of the chapter on attention James(1892: 227) writes:
“I have spoken as if our attention were wholly determined by neural conditions. I
believe that the array of things we can attend to is so determined. No object can
catch our attention except by the neural machinery. But the amount of the
attention which an object receives after it has caught our attention is another
question. It often takes effort to keep the mind upon it. We feel that we can
make more or less of the effort as we choose. If this feeling be not deceptive, if
our effort be a spiritual force, and an indeterminate one, then of course it
contributes coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result. Though it
introduce no new idea, it will deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of
innumerable ideas which else would fade more quickly away.”
In the chapter on will, in the section entitled ''Volitional effort is effort of attention''
James (1892: 417) writes:
“Thus we find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask
by what process is it that the thought of any given action comes to prevail stably
in the mind.”
and, later
51
“The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most 'voluntary,' is to
attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. ... Effort of attention
is thus the essential phenomenon of will.”
Still later, James says:
“Consent to the idea's undivided presence, this is effort's sole
achievement... Everywhere, then, the function of effort is the same: to keep
affirming and adopting the thought which, if left to itself, would slip away.”
This description of the effect of will on the course of mental-cerebral processes is
remarkably in line with what had been proposed independently from purely theoretical
considerations of the quantum physics of this process. The connections specified by
James are explained on the basis of the same dynamical principles that had been
introduced by physicists to explain atomic phenomena. Thus the whole range of science,
from atomic physics to mind-brain dynamics, has the possibility of being brought
together into a single rationally coherent theory of an evolving cosmos that is constituted
not of matter but of actions by agents. In this conceptualization of nature, agents could
naturally evolve in accordance with the principles of natural selection, due to the fact that
their efforts have physical consequences. The outline of a possible rationally coherent
understanding of the connection between mind and matter begins to emerge.
52
In the quantum theory of mind/consciousness-brain being described here there are
altogether three processes. First, there is the purely mechanical process called Process 2.
As discussed at length in the book, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics (Stapp
1993/2003: 150), this process, as it applies to the brain, involves important dynamical
units that are represented by complex patterns of brain activity that are “facilitated” (i.e.,
strengthened) by use, and are such that each unit tends to be activated as a whole by the
activation of several of its parts. The activation of various of these complex patterns by
cross referencing---i.e., by activation of several of its parts---coupled to feed-back loops
that strengthen or weaken the activities of appropriate processing centers, appears to
account for the essential features of the mechanical part of the dynamics in a way that is
not significantly different from what a classical model can support, except for the
existence of a host of parallel possibilities that according to the classical concepts cannot
exist simultaneously.
The second process, von Neumann's Process 1, is needed in order to pick out from a
chaotic continuum of overlapping parallel possibilities some particular discrete
possibility and its complement (The complement can be further divided, but the essential
action is present in the choice of one particular “Yes” state PS(t)P from the morass of
possibilities in which it is imbedded). The third process is Nature’s choice between “Yes”
and “No.” Nature’s choice conforms to a statistical rule, but the agent’s choice is, within
contemporary quantum theory, a “free choice” that can be and is consistently treated as
an input variable of the empirical protocol.
53
Process 1 has itself two modes. The first is passive, and can produce temporally
isolated events. The second is active, and involves mental effort.
Active Process 1 intervention has, according to the quantum model described here, a
distinctive form. It consists of a sequence of intentional purposeful actions, the rapidity of
which can be increased with effort. Such an increase in Attention Density, defined as an
increase in the number of observations per unit time, can bring into play the Quantum
Zeno Effect, which tends to hold in place both those aspects of the state of the brain that
are fixed by the sequence of intentional actions, and also the felt intentional focus of
these actions. Attention Density is not controlled by any physical rule of orthodox
contemporary quantum theory, but is taken both in orthodox theory and in our model to
be subject to subjective volitional control. This application in this way of the basic
principles of physics to neuroscience constitutes our model of the mind-brain connection.
6.1. Support from psychology of attention
A huge amount of empirical work on attention has been done since the nineteenth
century writings of William James. Much of it is summarized and analyzed in Harold
Pashler’s 1998 book “The Psychology of Attention.” Pashler organizes his discussion by
separating perceptual processing from post-perceptual processing. The former type
covers processing that, first of all, identifies such basic physical properties of stimuli as
location, color, loudness, and pitch, and, secondly, identifies stimuli in terms of
categories of meaning. The post-perceptual process covers the tasks of producing motor
54
actions and cognitive action beyond mere categorical identification. Pashler emphasizes
[p. 33] that the empirical “findings of attention studies… argue for a distinction between
perceptual attentional limitations and more central limitations involved in thought and the
planning of action.” The existence of these two different processes with different
characteristics is a principal theme of Pashler’s book [e.g., pp. 33, 263, 293, 317, 404].
A striking difference that emerges from the analysis of the many sophisticated
experiments is that the perceptual processes proceed essentially in parallel, whereas the
post-perceptual processes of planning and executing actions form a single queue. This is
in line with the distinction between “passive” and “active” processes. The former are
essentially a passive stream of essentially one-shot Process 1 events, whereas the “active”
processes involve effort-induced rapid sequences of Process 1 events that can saturate a
given capacity. This idea of a limited capacity for serial processing of effort-based inputs
is the main conclusion of Pashler’s book. It is in accord with the quantum-based model,
supplemented by the condition that there is a limit to how many effortful Process 1 events
per second a person can produce, during a particular stage of his development.
Examination of Pashler's book shows that this quantum model accommodates naturally
all of the complex structural features of the empirical data that he describes. Of key
importance is his Chapter Six, in which he emphasizes a specific finding: strong
empirical evidence for what he calls a central processing bottleneck associated with the
attentive selection of a motor action. This kind of bottleneck is what the quantum-
55
physics-based theory predicts: the bottleneck is precisely the single linear sequence of
mind-brain quantum events that von Neumann quantum theory describes.
Pashler [p. 279] describes four empirical signatures for this kind of bottleneck, and
describes the experimental confirmation of each of them. Much of part II of Pashler's
book is a massing of evidence that supports the existence of a central process of this
general kind.
The queuing effect is illustrated in a nineteenth century result described by Pashler:
mental exertion reduces the amount of physical force that a person can apply. He notes
that “This puzzling phenomenon remains unexplained.” [p. 387]. However, it is an
automatic consequence of the physics-based theory: creating physical force by muscle
contraction requires an effort that opposes the physical tendencies generated by the
Schröedinger equation (Process 2). This opposing tendency is produced by the Quantum
Zeno Effect (QZE), and is roughly proportional to the number of bits per second of
central processing capacity that is devoted to the task. So if part of this processing
capacity is directed to another task, then the applied force will diminish.
The important point here is that there is in principle, in the quantum model, an
essential dynamical difference between the unconscious processing carried out by the
Schröedinger evolution, which generates via a local process an expanding collection of
classically conceivable experiential possibilities, and the process associated with the
sequence of conscious events that constitute the willful selection of action. The former
56
are not limited by the queuing effect, because Process 2 simply develops all of the
possibilities in parallel. Nor are the stream of essentially one-shot passive Process 1
events thus limited. It is the closely packed active Process 1 events that can, in the von
Neumann formulation, be limited by the queuing effect.
The very numerous experiments cited by Pashler all seem to be in line with the
quantum approach. It is important to note that this bottleneck is not automatic within
classical physics. A classical model could easily produce, simultaneously, two responses
in different modalities, say vocal and manual, to two different stimuli arriving via two
different modalities, say auditory and tactile: the two processes could proceed via
dynamically independent routes. Pashler [p. 308] notes that the bottleneck is
undiminished in split-brain patients performing two tasks that, at the level of input and
output, seem to be confined to different hemispheres. This could be accounted for by the
necessarily non-local character of the projection operator P.
An interesting experiment mentioned by Pashler involves the simultaneous tasks of
doing an IQ test and giving a foot response to a rapidly presented sequence of tones of
either 2000 or 250 Hz. The subject's mental age, as measured by the IQ test, was reduced
from adult to 8 years [p. 299]. This result supports the prediction of quantum theory that
the bottleneck pertains to both “intelligent” behavior, which requires complex effortful
processing, and the simple willful selection of a motor response.
57
Pashler also notes [p. 348] that “Recent results strengthen the case for central
interference even further, concluding that memory retrieval is subject to the same discrete
processing bottleneck that prevents simultaneous response selection in two speeded
choice tasks.”
In the section on “Mental Effort” Pashler reports [p.383] that “incentives to perform
especially well lead subjects to improve both speed and accuracy”, and that the
motivation had “greater effects on the more cognitively complex activity”. This is what
would be expected if incentives lead to effort that produces increased rapidity of the
events, each of which injects into the physical process, via quantum selection and
reduction, bits of control information that reflect mental evaluation. Pashler notes
[p.385] “Increasing the rate at which events occur in experimenter-paced tasks often
increases effort ratings without affecting performance. Increasing incentives often raises
workload ratings and performance at the same time.” All of these empirical connections
are in line with the general principle that effort increases Attention Density, with an
attendant increase in the rate of directed conscious events, each of which inputs a mental
evaluation and a selection or focusing of a course of action.
Additional supporting evidence comes from the studies of the stabilization or storage of
information in short-term memory. According to the physics-based theory the passive
aspect of conscious process merely actualizes an event that occurs in accordance with
some brain-controlled rule, and this rule-selected process then develops automatically,
with perhaps some occasional monitoring. Thus the theory would predict that the process
58
of stabilization or storage in short term memory of a certain sequence of stimuli should
be able to persist undiminished while the central processor is engaged in another task.
This is what the data indicate. Pashler remarks [p.341] that “These conclusions contradict
the remarkably widespread assumption that short-term memory capacity can be equated
with, or used as a measure of, central resources.” In the theory outlined here short-term
memory is stored in patterns of brain activity, whereas consciously directed actions are
associated with the active selection of a sub-ensemble of quasi-classical states. This
distinction seems to account for the large amount of detailed data that bears on this
question of the relationship of the stabilization or storage of information in short-term-
memory to the types of tasks that require willfully directed actions [pp. 337-341]. In
marked contrast to short-term memory function, storage or retrieval of information from
long-term memory is a task that requires actions of just this sort [pp. 347-350].
Deliberate storage in, or retrieval from, long-term memory requires willfully directed
action, and hence conscious effort. These processes should, according to the theory, use
part of the limited processing capacity, and hence be detrimentally affected by a
competing task that makes sufficient concurrent demands on the central resources. On the
other hand, “perceptual'” processing that involves conceptual categorization and
identification without willful conscious selection should not be interfered with by tasks
that do consume central processing capacity. These expectations are what the evidence
appears to confirm: “the entirety of...front-end processing are modality specific and
operate independent of the sort of single-channel central processing that limits retrieval
and the control of action. This includes not only perceptual analysis but also storage in
59
STM (short term memory) and whatever processing may feed back to change the
allocation of perceptual attention itself [p. 353].”
Pashler speculates on the possibility of a neurophysiological explanation of the facts he
describes, but notes that the parallel versus serial distinction between the two
mechanisms leads, in the classical neurophysiological approach, to the questions of what
makes these two mechanisms so different, and what the connection between them is
[p.354-6, 386-7].
After considering various possible mechanisms that could cause the central bottleneck,
Pashler [p.307-8] concludes that “the question of why this should be the case is quite
puzzling.” Thus the fact that this bottleneck and its basic properties seems to follow
automatically from the same laws that explain the complex empirical evidence in the
fields of classical and quantum physics means that the theory being presented here has
significant explanatory power for the experimental data of cognitive psychology.
Further, it coherently explains aspects of the data that have heretofore not been
adequately addressed by currently applicable theoretical perspectives.
These features of the phenomena may be claimed by some to be potentially explainable
within a classical-physics-based model. But the possibility of such an explanation is
profoundly undermined by the absence from classical physics of the notion of conscious
choice and effort. These consciousness-connected features, so critical to a coherent
60
explanation of the psychology of human attention, are however already existing and
specified features of the causal structure of fundamental contemporary physical theory.
7. Application to neuropsychology
The quantum model is better suited to the analysis of neuropsychological data than
models based on the classical approximation. For, just as in the treatment of atomic
systems, the quantum approach brings the phenomenologically described data directly
into the dynamics, in place of microscopic variables that are in principle unknowable.
Quantum theory injects directly into the causal structure the phenomenal descriptions that
we human beings use in order to communicate to our colleague the empirical facts. It
thereby specifies a useful and testable causal structure, while evading the restrictive
classical demand that the causal process be “bottom up”--- i.e., expressible in terms of
local mechanical interactions between tiny mindless entities. The Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle renders that ideal unachievable in principle, and the banishment of that
microlocal “bottom up” determinism opens the door to the quantum alternative of
injecting the phenomenologically described realities directly into the causal structure in
the way that is both allowed by and described by contemporary physical theory.
Quantum physics works better in neuropsychology than its classical approximation
precisely because it inserts knowable choices made by human agents into the dynamics in
place of unknowable-in-principle microscopic variables. To illustrate this point we apply
the quantum approach to the experiment of Ochsner et al. (2002).
61
Reduced to its essence this experiment consists first of a training phase in which the
subject is taught how to distinguish, and respond differently to, two instructions given
while viewing emotionally disturbing visual images: ATTEND (meaning passively “be
aware of, but not try to alter, any feelings elicited by”) or REAPPRAISE (meaning
actively “reinterpret the content so that it no longer elicits a negative response”). The
subjects then perform these mental actions during brain data acquisition. The visual
stimuli, when passively attended to, activate limbic brain areas and when actively
reappraised, activate prefrontal cerebral regions.
From the classical materialist point of view this is essentially a conditioning
experiment, where, however, the “conditioning” is achieved via linguistic access to
cognitive faculties. But how do the cognitive realities involving “knowing,”
“understanding,” and “feeling” arise out of motions of the miniature planet-like objects of
classical physics, which have no trace of any experiential quality? And how do the
vibrations in the air that carry the instructions get converted into feelings of
understanding? And how do these feelings of understanding get converted to conscious
effort, the presence or absence of which determine whether the limbic or frontal regions
of the brain will be activated?
Within the framework of classical physics these connections between feelings and brain
activities remain huge mysteries. The materialist claim (Karl Popper called this historicist
prophecy “promissory materialism”) is that someday these connections will be
62
understood. But the question is whether these connections should reasonably be expected
to be understood in terms of a physical theory that is known to be false, and to be false in
ways that are absolutely and fundamentally germane to the issue. The classical
conception demands that the choices made by human agents about how they will act be
determined by microscopic variables that according to quantum theory are indeterminate
in principle. The reductionist demand that the course of human experience be determined
by local mechanical processes is the very thing that is most conclusively ruled out by the
structure of natural phenomena specified by contemporary physical theory. To expect the
mind-brain connection to be understood within a framework of ideas so contrary to the
principles of physics is scientifically unsupportable and unreasonable.
There are important similarities and also important differences between the classical
and quantum explanations of the experiments of Ochsner et al. (2002). In both
approaches the atomic constituents of the brain can be conceived to be collected into
nerves and other biological structures, and into fluxes of ions and electrons, which can all
be described reasonably well in essentially classical terms. In the classical approach the
dynamics must in principle be describable in terms of the local deterministic classical
laws that, according to those principles, are supposed to govern the motions of the
atomic-sized entities.
The quantum approach is fundamentally different. In the first place the idea that all
causation is fundamentally mechanical is dropped as being prejudicial and unsupported
either by direct evidence or by contemporary physical theory. The quantum model of the
63
human person is essentially dualistic, with one of the two components being described in
psychological language and the other being described in physical terms. The
empirical/phenomenal evidence coming from subjective reports is treated as data
pertaining to the psychologically described component of the person, whereas the data
from objective observations, or from measurements made upon that person, are treated as
conditions on the physically described component of the person. The apparent causal
connection manifested in the experiments between these two components of the agent is
then explained by the causal connections between these components that is specified by
the quantum laws.
The quantum laws, insofar as they pertain to empirical data, are organized around
events that increase the amount of information lodged in the psychologically described
component of the theoretical structure. The effects of these psychologically identified
events upon the physical state of the associated brain are specified by Processes 1
(followed by “Nature’s statistical choice” of which of the discrete options specified by
Process 1 will be experienced.) When no effort is applied, the temporal development of
the body/brain will be roughly in accord with the principles of classical statistical
mechanics, for reasons described earlier in connection with the strong decoherence
effects. But important departures from the classical statistical predictions can be caused
by conscious effort. This effort can cause to be held in place for an extended period a
pattern of neural activity that constitutes a template for action. This delay can tend to
cause the specified action to occur. In the Ochsner experiments the effort of the subject to
“reappraise” causes the “reappraise” template to be held in place, and the holding in
64
place of this template causes the suppression of the limbic response. These causal effects
are, via the Quantum Zeno Effect, mathematical consequences of the quantum rules.
Thus the “subjective” and “objective” aspects of the data are tied together by quantum
rules that directly specify the causal effects upon the subject’s brain of the choices made
by the subject, without needing to specify how these choices came about. The form of the
quantum laws accommodates a natural dynamical breakpoint between the cause of
willful action, which are not specified by the theory, and its effects, which are specified
by the theory.
Quantum theory was designed to deal with cases, in which the conscious action of an
agent – to perform some particular probing action - enters into the dynamics in an
essential way. Within the context of the experiment by Ochsner et al. (2002), quantum
theory provides, via the Process 1 mechanism, an explicit means whereby the successful
effort to “rethink feelings” actually causes - by catching and actively holding in place -
the prefrontal activations critical to the experimentally observed deactivation of the
amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. The resulting intention-induced modulation of limbic
mechanisms that putatively generate the frightening aversive feelings associated with
passively attending to the target stimuli is the key factor necessary for the achievement of
the emotional self-regulation seen in the active cognitive reappraisal condition. Thus,
within the quantum framework, the causal relationship between the mental work of
mindfully reappraising and the observed brain changes presumed to be necessary for
emotional self-regulation is dynamically accounted for. Furthermore, and crucially, it is
accounted for in ways that fully allow for communicating to others the means utilized by
65
living human experimental subjects to attain the desired outcome. The classical
materialist approach to these data, as detailed earlier in this article, by no means allows
for such effective communication. Analogous quantum mechanical reasoning can of
course be utilized mutatis mutandis to explain the data of Beauregard (2001) and related
studies of self-directed neuroplasticity (see Schwartz & Begley, 2002).
8. Conclusions
Materialist ontology draws no support from contemporary physics, and is in fact
contradicted by it. The notion that all physical behavior is explainable in principle solely
in terms of a local mechanical process is a holdover from physical theories of an earlier
era. It was rejected by the founders of quantum mechanics, who introduced crucially into
the basic dynamical equations choices that are not determined by local mechanical
processes, but are attributed rather to human agents. These orthodox quantum equations,
applied to human brains in the way suggested by John von Neumann, provide for a causal
account of recent neuropsychological data. In this account brain behavior that appears to
be caused by mental effort is actually caused by mental effort: the causal efficacy of
mental effort is no illusion. Our willful choices enter neither as redundant nor
epiphenomenal effects, but rather as fundamental dynamical elements that have the
causal efficacy that the objective data appear to assign to them.
A shift to this pragmatic approach that incorporates agent-based choices as primary
empirical input variables may be as important to progress in neuroscience and
psychology as it was to progress in atomic physics.
66
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Appendix: Other Interpretations
This work is based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory, and von
Neumann’s extension of it. The Copenhagen Interpretation is what is, in essence, both
taught in standard quantum physics courses and used in actual practice. This
interpretation brings the human agent into the dynamics at a crucial point, namely to
resolve the “basis” problem, i.e., to pose some particular physical question. This entry of
the agent’s “free” choice is the basis of the present work.
Many of the physicists who are most acutely interested in the logical and physical
foundations of quantum theory reject the Copenhagen interpretation, which is basically
epistemological, and have sought to invent alternatives formulations that can be regarded
as descriptions of what is really going on in Nature. The three most-discussed alternatives
are the ones associated with the names of Roger Penrose, Hugh Everett, and David
Bohm. In order to provide a broader conceptual foundation for understanding and
assessing the Copenhagen-von Neumann approach used here we shall compare it to those
other three.
All three of the alternative approaches accept von Neumann’s move of treating the
entire physical world quantum mechanically. In particular, the bodies and brains of the
agents are treated as conglomerations of such things as quantum mechanically described
electrons, ions, and photons.
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Penrose (1994) accepts the need for conscious-related Process 1 events, and wants to
explain when they occur. He proposes an explanation that is tied to another quantum
mystery, that of quantum gravity.
Suppose the quantum state of a brain develops two components corresponding to the
“Yes” and “No” answers to some query. Penrose proposes a rule, based on the
gravitational interaction between these two parts, that specifies roughly how long before
a collapse will occur to one branch or to the other. In this way the question of when the
answer “Yes” or “No” occurs is given a “physical” explanation. Penrose and his
collaborator Hameroff (1996) calculate estimates of this typical time interval, on the basis
of some detailed assumptions about the brain. The result is a time on the order of one-
tenth of a second. They argue that the rough agreement of this number with time intervals
normally associated with consciousness lends strong support to their theory.
The Penrose-Hameroff model requires that the quantum state of the brain has a property
called macroscopic quantum coherence, which needs to be maintained for around a tenth
of a second. But, according to calculations made by Max Tegmark (2000), this property
ought not to hold for more than about 10
-13
seconds. Hameroff and co-workers (Hagen,
2002) have advanced reasons why this number should actually be on the order of a tenth
of a second. But twelve orders of magnitude is a very big difference to explain away, and
serious doubts remain about whether the Penrose-Hameroff theory is technically viable.
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If all aspects of the collapse process were similarly determined in an essentially
mechanical way, then there would be in quantum mechanics, as in classical physics,
nothing for consciousness to do. But Penrose (1994) argues that the effects of
consciousness cannot be purely algorithmic: it cannot be governed by a finite set of rules
and operations. His argument is based on the famous incompleteness theorem of Gödel.
However, the logical validity of his argument has been vigorously challenged by many
experts, including Hillary Putnam (1994), and Penrose’s conclusion cannot be deemed
absolutely secure. Also, it is peculiar that the question of when the event occurs should be
essentially algorithmic, while the process itself is non-algorithmic.
However, Penrose’s overall aims are similar to those of the approach made in this
paper, namely to recognize that the Process-1-related features of quantum mechanics are
dynamically very different from the local mechanistic dynamics of classical mechanics,
or of its quantum analog, Process 2. This differing character of Process 1, which is
closely connected to conscious awareness, seems, on its face, to be signaling the entry of
an essentially non-mechanical consciousness-related element into brain dynamics.
Everett (1957) proposed another way to deal with the problem of how the quantum
formulas are tied to our conscious experiences. It is called the Many-Worlds or Many-
Minds approach. The basic idea is that Nature herself makes no choices between the
“Yes” and “No” possibilities: both options actually do occur. But, due to certain features
of quantum mechanics, the two streams of consciousness in which these two alternative
answers appear are dynamically independent: neither one has any effect on the other.
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Hence the two incompatible streams exist in parallel epistemological worlds, although in
the one single ontological or physical quantum world.
This many-minds approach is plausible within the framework provided by the quantum
mathematics. It evades the need for any real choices between the “Yes” and “No”
answers to the question posed by the Process 1 action. However, von Neumann never
even mentions any real choice between “Yes” and “No”, and the founders of quantum
theory likewise focus attention on the crucial choice of which question shall be posed. It
is this choice, which is in the hands of the agent, that the present paper has focused upon.
The subsequent choice between “Yes” and “No” is normally deemed to be made by
nature. But it is enough that the latter choice merely seems to be made in accordance with
the quantum probably rules. The real problem with the many-minds approach is that its
proponents have not yet adequately explained how one can evade the Process 1 choices.
This difficulty is discussed in detail in Stapp (2002)
David Bohm’s pilot-wave model (Bohm, 1952) seems at first to be another way of
evading the problem of how to tie the formulas of quantum mechanics to human
experiences. Yet in David Bohm’s book with Basil Hiley (Bohm, 1993) the last two
chapters go far beyond the reasonably well defined pilot-wave model, and attempt to deal
with the problem dealt with in the works of Stapp (1990) and of Gell-mann and Hartle
(1989). This leads Bohm into a discussion of his concept of the implicate order, which is
far less mathematically well-defined than his pilot-wave model.
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Bohm saw a need to deal with consciousness, and wrote a detailed paper on it (Bohm,
1990, 1986). His proposals go far beyond the simple well defined pilot-wave model. It
involves an infinite tower of pilot waves, each controlling the level below. The engaging
simplicity of the original pilot-wave model is lost in this infinite tower.
The up-shot of all this is that the structure of quantum theory indicates the need for a
non-mechanistic consciousness-related process, but that the approaches to quantum
theory that go beyond the pragmatic Copenhagen-von-Neumann approach have serious
yet-to-be-resolved problems. We, in this paper, have chosen to stay on the safer ground
of orthodox pragmatic quantum theory, and explore what can be said within that
framework.
However, in this addendum we will now stray very briefly from our strict adherence to
the pragmatic stance, in order to get a glimpse into what seems to us to be the pathway
beyond contemporary pragmatic science that is pointed to by the structure of
contemporary physics.
The core message of quantum theory appears to be that the basic realities are
“knowables”, not “beables”: they are things that can be known, not realities that exist yet
cannot be known. This conclusion can be strongly defended by a detailed analysis of
quantum theory, but this is not place to do so. However, given this premise, the program
of passing from the anthropocentric set of pragmatic rules to a conception of the greater
reality in which our streams of human consciousness are imbedded takes on a different
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complexion. If Nature herself is built of knowables, then the acts of knowing with which
we are familiar should be special cases of a pervasive set of similar acts: the world should
somehow be built of such acts, and of a substrate that is suited to be acted upon by such
acts, but that supports, as a matter of principle, only what can become known by other
acts. Acts of knowing become, then, the primitives of Nature herself, along with the
substrate upon which they act. Conscious acts of probing must also be encompassed.
This way of understanding the meaning of quantum theory opens the door, in principle,
to the formulation of rules that allow the choices of which probing actions are taken to
depend not exclusively on the current condition of the physically/mathematically
described substrate---i.e., the current state of the brain---but also on prior acts of
knowing. Thus it could well be, as James’s remarks suggest, that a mechanical rule
determines which thought is initially caught, but that felt properties of the consequent act
of knowing can influence the rapidity of follow-up repetitions of the probing action.
It is not our intent to propose in this appendix some testable proposal along these lines.
We merely note that quantum theory seems naturally to point to this route to an
understanding of the reality that lies behind our human-knowledge-based science.
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Acknowledgements
The work of the second-named author (HPS) was supported in part by the Director,
Office of Science, Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics, Division of High Energy
Physics, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC03-76SF00098. The
work of the third-named author (MB) was supported in part by a scholarship from the
Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec (FRSQ).
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