# The strange link between the mind and quantum physics



## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170215-the-strange-link-between-the-human-mind-and-quantum-physics

I didn't copy and paste the entire thing.



> But here is the really odd thing.
> 
> If we place a detector inside or just behind one slit, we can find out whether any given particle goes through it or not. In that case, however, the interference vanishes. Simply by observing a particle's path - even if that observation should not disturb the particle's motion - we change the outcome.
> 
> ...





> Whenever, in these experiments, we discover the path of a quantum particle, its cloud of possible routes "collapses" into a single well-defined state. What's more, the delayed-choice experiment implies that the sheer act of noticing, rather than any physical disturbance caused by measuring, can cause the collapse. But does this mean that true collapse has only happened when the result of a measurement impinges on our consciousness?
> 
> That possibility was admitted in the 1930s by the Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner. "It follows that the quantum description of objects is influenced by impressions entering my consciousness," he wrote. "Solipsism may be logically consistent with present quantum mechanics."
> 
> Wheeler even entertained the thought that the presence of living beings, which are capable of "noticing", has transformed what was previously a multitude of possible quantum pasts into one concrete history. In this sense, Wheeler said, we become participants in the evolution of the Universe since its very beginning. In his words, we live in a "participatory universe."





> To this day, physicists do not agree on the best way to interpret these quantum experiments, and to some extent what you make of them is (at the moment) up to you. But one way or another, it is hard to avoid the implication that consciousness and quantum mechanics are somehow linked.
> 
> Beginning in the 1980s, the British physicist Roger Penrose suggested that the link might work in the other direction. Whether or not consciousness can affect quantum mechanics, he said, perhaps quantum mechanics is involved in consciousness.
> 
> ...





> He first got this idea when he started thinking about mental illness.
> 
> "My entry into the biochemistry of the brain started when I decided three or four years ago to explore how on earth the lithium ion could have such a dramatic effect in treating mental conditions," Fisher says.
> 
> ...





> But Fisher realised that the nuclei of the atoms of different lithium isotopes can have different spins. This quantum property might affect the way lithium drugs act. For example, if lithium substitutes for calcium in Posner molecules, the lithium spins might "feel" and influence those of phosphorus atoms, and so interfere with their entanglement.
> 
> If this is true, it would help to explain why lithium can treat bipolar disorder.





> At this point, Fisher's proposal is no more than an intriguing idea. But there are several ways in which its plausibility can be tested, starting with the idea that phosphorus spins in Posner molecules can keep their quantum coherence for long periods. That is what Fisher aims to do next.
> 
> All the same, he is wary of being associated with the earlier ideas about "quantum consciousness", which he sees as highly speculative at best.





> In 2016, Adrian Kent of the University of Cambridge in the UK, one of the most respected "quantum philosophers", speculated that consciousness might alter the behaviour of quantum systems in subtle but detectable ways.
> 
> Kent is very cautious about this idea. "There is no compelling reason of principle to believe that quantum theory is the right theory in which to try to formulate a theory of consciousness, or that the problems of quantum theory must have anything to do with the problem of consciousness," he admits.





> One particularly puzzling question is how our conscious minds can experience unique sensations, such as the colour red or the smell of frying bacon. With the exception of people with visual impairments, we all know what red is like, but we have no way to communicate the sensation and there is nothing in physics that tells us what it should be like.
> 
> Sensations like this are called "qualia". We perceive them as unified properties of the outside world, but in fact they are products of our consciousness - and that is hard to explain. Indeed, in 1995 philosopher David Chalmers dubbed it "the hard problem" of consciousness.


----------



## Dissonance (Dec 27, 2011)

I have no idea what the first part is about. How did they know the path changed when they aren't looking?


----------



## farfegnugen (Aug 16, 2010)

Quantum physics is an interesting but confounding and troubling subject for me. I am mostly lost and perplexed. Things so small and things so large seem to behave differently than how we interpret them in our reality and our results seem to say we can't decipher them using our reality, at least that's my understanding. Thanks for posting.


----------



## sad1231234 (Jul 10, 2016)

I didnt read it but anything that suggests the mind may be linked to the quantum world seems to support biocentrism. We only know so much about our science and what we know now may be considered primative compared to the far future.


----------



## Paul (Sep 26, 2005)

There's nothing strange about it. Things can only be described in relation to a particular observation point in time and space. Observations must always take the observer into account. There can of course be no observation without an observer, that empirical duality is inescapable, so we have to work it into the equations.


----------



## CloudChaser (Nov 7, 2013)

This is all very interesting and an enjoyable read.

However the question I am sure we all want answered is, how can we factor in the influence of Donald Trump?


----------



## mt moyt (Jul 29, 2015)

so everything is an illusion, and some illusions are perceived in the same way by everyone. thats the only part i understood lol


----------



## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

Dissonance said:


> I have no idea what the first part is about. How did they know the path changed when they aren't looking?


Read the whole thing on the BBC link I didn't want to link all of it because I wasn't sure if it would be more then the post limit and couldn't be bothered.


----------



## Were (Oct 16, 2006)

Dissonance said:


> I have no idea what the first part is about. How did they know the path changed when they aren't looking?


----------



## sad1231234 (Jul 10, 2016)

I think we still have yet to discover a lot about the cosmos, these new discoveries in quantum physics seem like make-believe but maybe one day we'll understand in full detail the workings of the universe and we can delve deeper into fundamental laws of physics.


----------



## Erroll (Jan 18, 2016)

So if nobody's looking, the photon passes through both slits and displays an interference pattern with itself, as the light waves do constructive and destructive interference on each other, just like ocean waves. But if someone is looking, the photon goes through only one slit and it does not interfere with itself.

The experiment has been conducted a zillion times, and that's always what is observed. So we jump to the conclusion that it is consciousness which collapses the wave and makes the photon be a particle instead of a wave.

A wave does not happen at a time or a place. A wave propagates in all dimensions forever.

A particle happens at a particular time and place.

So the consciousness observes something that is all over the place all the time, but it observes it at an explicit time and at a particular place. Consciousness takes a still-snapshot of a thing that is continuous in time and space. And it is a subjective observation, which differs relative to different observers.

I do not believe that consciousness is collapsing some wave function, which is the Physics takeaway from this experiment.

I do believe, however, that the double slit experiment is evidence that time and space do not exist empirically. Objective reality exists outside of time and space. Time and space are artifacts of consciousness. Time and space are consciousnesses way of understanding causality. There is no objective time, no objective space. We live in a block universe where nothing ever happens. There is only causality, which we sense through the consciousness-created graph paper of space and time.

If anyone wants to read my theory of how consciousness works, please read my blog.
@causalset As a Physics PhD, what is your take on the double slit experiment and consciousness collapsing the wave function?


----------



## WillYouStopDave (Jul 14, 2013)

Don't know why but this kind of stuff always gives me bad vibes.


----------



## Erroll (Jan 18, 2016)

WillYouStopDave said:


> Don't know why but this kind of stuff always gives me bad vibes.


That's because reality lies under the vale of space and time. Our consciousness will not let us understand a timeless dimensionless universe. We can only interpret reality on the consciousness-created graph-paper of space and time.


----------



## WillYouStopDave (Jul 14, 2013)

Erroll said:


> That's because reality lies under the vale of space and time. Our consciousness will not let us understand a timeless dimensionless universe. We can only interpret reality on the consciousness-created graph-paper of space and time.


 I was thinking more along the lines of people shouldn't mess with things they don't understand. We've gotten ourselves into all kinds of trouble just screwing around with relatively simple stuff that we do (more or less) understand very well.


----------



## Were (Oct 16, 2006)




----------



## sad1231234 (Jul 10, 2016)

Erroll said:


> So if nobody's looking, the photon passes through both slits and displays an interference pattern with itself, as the light waves do constructive and destructive interference on each other, just like ocean waves. But if someone is looking, the photon goes through only one slit and it does not interfere with itself.
> 
> The experiment has been conducted a zillion times, and that's always what is observed. So we jump to the conclusion that it is consciousness which collapses the wave and makes the photon be a particle instead of a wave.
> 
> ...


Fascinating. I mean im sure we can come up with some good theories that go along with known science just with not much more than what we've observed from the double slit experiment and with a bit of thinking. It may not necessarily be magic but something simple that we have overlooked.


----------



## Brawk Shady (Jan 19, 2015)

@Errol So when the particle was observed to be going through one slit, and not interfering with itself in a snapshot of time, if it ceased to be observed, would it continue not interfering with itself, or would it interfere with itself, or would both results be possible?


----------



## novalax (Jun 7, 2013)

Brawk Shady said:


> @Errol So when the particle was observed to be going through one slit, and not interfering with itself in a snapshot of time, if it ceased to be observed, would it continue not interfering with itself, or would it interfere with itself, or would both results be possible?


Although, not 100% the same, I'd recommend you look into the quantum eraser experiment. Suppose a tagging device is attached by which we can know the "which path" information of the photon. Now if, just before the photon hits the detector screen, we eliminate the possibility of our knowledge of the "which path" information by erasing the mark registered by the tagging device, both possibilities that is the photon passed through the left slit and photon passed through the right slit should come back into play. Both histories should come back once again and interference pattern should reemerge. However, in orthodox quantum mechanics, there is something known as the "projection postulate". It is the idea that once one of the possibilities becomes actual at one position, the probabilities for actualization at all other positions becomes instantly zero. New information has appeared. Once the quantum system (the photon or electron) interacts with a specific detector at the screen, all other possibilities vanish. Its easier to think of the superposition of photons, not as a physical property, but as an abstract probability and detached information.


----------



## truant (Jul 4, 2014)

Erroll said:


> time and space do not exist empirically. Objective reality exists outside of time and space. Time and space are artifacts of consciousness. Time and space are consciousnesses way of understanding causality. There is no objective time, no objective space. We live in a block universe where nothing ever happens. There is only causality, which we sense through the consciousness-created graph paper of space and time.


Time and space are models of certain kinds of phenomenon. I would place causality in the same category. Believing that one thing 'causes' another thing is as much a mental abstraction as believing in an objective, empirical time and space. It's just a way of organizing certain kinds of experiences in consciousness.

The "strange link between the mind and quantum physics" is only a "strange link" because we have two models: "the mind" and "quantum physics" and these models come into conflict with one another. Because they're abstractions from experience, not real things. You can't stub your toe on a mind or trip over quantum physics; they're just ways we've collectively organized certain kinds of experiences.

In the same way, the "mind/body problem" is an artificial problem. There is, in fact, no problem at all. The problem arises from the way we're trying to force different kinds of experiences into different categories. When one observes one's own experience directly, there is no mind and there is no body; there are merely phenomenon which we try to sort into boxes. But since the phenomena themselves are abstractions (what is a "feeling"? It's an abstraction, a line drawn loosely around certain kinds of phenomena that arbitrarily separates it from everything it's connected to) we run into sorting conflicts and the frustration we experience at not being able to sort everything 'properly' creates this illusion that there is an unbridgeable division between mind and body.

But in reality there is no division; mind and body are just two abstractions we impose on experience. Reality is whole and undivided; all paradox is a result of trying to use imperfect models to understand perceived phenomena. It strikes me as painfully obvious that there is a connection between quantum physics and consciousness because in reality there is no division anywhere in the universe. The idea of "division" itself is an artifact of thinking.


----------



## Erroll (Jan 18, 2016)

truant said:


> Time and space are models of certain kinds of phenomenon. I would place causality in the same category. Believing that one thing 'causes' another thing is as much a mental abstraction as believing in an objective, empirical time and space. It's just a way of organizing certain kinds of experiences in consciousness.


You make a good point. It's hard to talk about causality outside of time and space. A ball rolls through space because a hand imparted kinetic energy to it. How does that causality work when there is no space for the ball to roll in, and the hand and the ball exist together in a singularity, and there is no time over which a stationary ball is struck and becomes a ball in motion. There can be no motion without space and time. There can be no cause and effect. Everything just is. It's as though motion over time never occurred, and what we experience as motion results from consciousness adding time and space to make sense of signals coming into the 5 senses. So causality is something that we imagine. Each person might attribute a different cause to an action. So that makes causality seem like an attribute of consciousness too.

But, looking at it from the consciousness perspective, something caused me to reach out and push the ball. I believe that causality chain extends all the way back to my first quickening in the womb. And, barring a free-will soul, that cause could only have originated in the environment that I experience with my senses, and learn everything from. So causality has its roots in the environment. Spacetime has its roots in consciousness. Maybe that's why I say that causality exists, but space and time do not. Because I believe that consciousness has a physical cause, and that cause is the environment, as experienced by the 5 senses, which molds us into the minds that we are. We are DNA programmed environmental sampling machines.



truant said:


> The "strange link between the mind and quantum physics" is only a "strange link" because we have two models: "the mind" and "quantum physics" and these models come into conflict with one another. Because they're abstractions from experience, not real things. You can't stub your toe on a mind or trip over quantum physics; they're just ways we've collectively organized certain kinds of experiences.
> 
> In the same way, the "mind/body problem" is an artificial problem. There is, in fact, no problem at all. The problem arises from the way we're trying to force different kinds of experiences into different categories. When one observes one's own experience directly, there is no mind and there is no body; there are merely phenomenon which we try to sort into boxes. But since the phenomena themselves are abstractions (what is a "feeling"? It's an abstraction, a line drawn loosely around certain kinds of phenomena that arbitrarily separates it from everything it's connected to) we run into sorting conflicts and the frustration we experience at not being able to sort everything 'properly' creates this illusion that there is an unbridgeable division between mind and body.
> 
> But in reality there is no division; mind and body are just two abstractions we impose on experience. Reality is whole and undivided; all paradox is a result of trying to use imperfect models to understand perceived phenomena. It strikes me as painfully obvious that there is a connection between quantum physics and consciousness because in reality there is no division anywhere in the universe. The idea of "division" itself is an artifact of thinking.


I agree. There is no division between the mind and the body. The mind is a physical mechanism. Sensors at different locations send electro-chemical signals to the spinal cord and the brain. The brain sends signals back to the sensors. The sensors work at different layers of fidelity and varying catchment areas. They send signals to the brain at different speeds. And signals flow constantly. And they are mixed together/integrated in the spinal cord and brain to yield an overall feeling, or quale, or quality. At that point, we lose track of specific times and places and so it seems like some spiritual world, but I believe that the overall feeling (love etc) is the product of the same body sensors that produces physical experience.


----------



## truant (Jul 4, 2014)

Erroll said:


> You make a good point. It's hard to talk about causality outside of time and space. A ball rolls through space because a hand imparted kinetic energy to it. How does that causality work when there is no space for the ball to roll in, and the hand and the ball exist together in a singularity, and there is no time over which a stationary ball is struck and becomes a ball in motion. There can be no motion without space and time. There can be no cause and effect. Everything just is. It's as though motion over time never occurred, and what we experience as motion results from consciousness adding time and space to make sense of signals coming into the 5 senses. So causality is something that we imagine. Each person might attribute a different cause to an action. So that makes causality seem like an attribute of consciousness too.
> 
> But, looking at it from the consciousness perspective, something caused me to reach out and push the ball. I believe that causality chain extends all the way back to my first quickening in the womb. And, barring a free-will soul, that cause could only have originated in the environment that I experience with my senses, and learn everything from. So causality has its roots in the environment. Spacetime has its roots in consciousness. Maybe that's why I say that causality exists, but space and time do not. Because I believe that consciousness has a physical cause, and that cause is the environment, as experienced by the 5 senses, which molds us into the minds that we are. We are DNA programmed environmental sampling machines.
> 
> I agree. There is no division between the mind and the body. The mind is a physical mechanism. Sensors at different locations send electro-chemical signals to the spinal cord and the brain. The brain sends signals back to the sensors. The sensors work at different layers of fidelity and varying catchment areas.  They send signals to the brain at different speeds. And signals flow constantly. And they are mixed together/integrated in the spinal cord and brain to yield an overall feeling, or quale, or quality. At that point, we lose track of specific times and places and so it seems like some spiritual world, but I believe that the overall feeling (love etc) is the product of the same body sensors that produces physical experience.


But even all of this -- electrochemical signals, the brain, the mind, signal flow, quale, etc. -- all of these are _models_ of phenomenon. 'Mind' is the word we use for certain kinds of experiences, 'brain' is the word we use for other kinds of experiences ... and then we try to fit them together. But they were never divided. We're taking two abstractions and trying to work out the connection but there is nothing to work out _in fact_, only in theory.

Reality just is; it is ultimately, utterly mysterious; that doesn't mean we can't create increasingly accurate models of it, but all of the "puzzles" that arise (eg. "the strange link between the mind and quantum physics") are artifacts of the models we use to describe it. They turn up when two (or more) conceptual models fail to interact in a way that we expect. Our model of mind is wrong in some way, and/or our model of physical reality is wrong in some way, such that when we try to understand how they work together we run into logical paradoxes (like the observer effect).

Brain and mind are not separate. Brain matter is the physically manifested portion of certain phenomenon _that are also mental_. We've sliced an arbitrary line through these phenomenon and now we're trying to stitch them back together, but all we're really doing is describing different parts of the same thing.

It's like we believe that John Smith, the doctor, and John Smith, the father, are two separate people and we're trying to figure out how they can both occupy the same space and time. (How do they manage to stay in sync?! Lol.) Our models create a problem which doesn't exist anywhere in reality. We _think_ mind and brain are separate (it's the function of thought to divide them), so we have the _puzzle_ of trying to figure out how they interact. But a thing can be both mental and physical just like John Smith can be both a doctor and a father. Whether we call him one or the other depends on which of his activities we're observing. They're like two ends of the same stick: if you pull one end (matter) the other end (mind) comes along with it. People who believe in a soul are like people who believe that if you kill John Smith the doctor John Smith the father can still attend all his children's birthday parties; but people who believe that the mind is an epiphenomenon are like people who believe that John Smith the father is an epiphenomenon of John Smith the doctor.

Finding consciousness at the lowest levels of matter is just scraping the bottom of the barrel of experience and finding more wood, or going all the way around the world and finding yourself back where you started. At some point, because everything is ultimately connected (one, undivided), you will end up going all the way around human experience. But that doesn't necessarily imply anything metaphysical. It just illustrates that there is a limit to how deeply you can explore things.


----------



## Erroll (Jan 18, 2016)

truant said:


> But even all of this -- electrochemical signals, the brain, the mind, signal flow, quale, etc. -- all of these are _models_ of phenomenon. 'Mind' is the word we use for certain kinds of experiences, 'brain' is the word we use for other kinds of experiences ... and then we try to fit them together. But they were never divided. We're taking two abstractions and trying to work out the connection but there is nothing to work out _in fact_, only in theory.


The way I see it, the brain is the hardware and the mind is the software. The brain and body specifications are in the DNA within each cell. The mind grows out of thebrain/body's experience of the environment. The brain/body is the experience machine. The mind is the sum total remembered experiences. The environment determines which molecules the DNA will synthesize to bring about experience.



truant said:


> Reality just is; it is ultimately, utterly mysterious; that doesn't mean we can't create increasingly accurate models of it, but all of the "puzzles" that arise (eg. "the strange link between the mind and quantum physics") are artifacts of the models we use to describe it. They turn up when two (or more) conceptual models fail to interact in a way that we expect. Our model of mind is wrong in some way, and/or our model of physical reality is wrong in some way, such that when we try to understand how they work together we run into logical paradoxes (like the observer effect).


I agree. We only know reality through our senses. And our senses only communicate information that is important for our survival. Thus, we don't see a gorilla on the basketball court, because we have learned that gorillas do not appear during basketball games. Our senses observe only what they have been taught to observe; stuff that impacts us. So what we see is not necessarily what is out there. How can we know reality when we are locked in bone boxes, without any windows, detecting reality only via electro-chemical impulses in the brain, from sensor cells?



truant said:


> Brain and mind are not separate. Brain matter is the physically manifested portion of certain phenomenon _that are also mental_. We've sliced an arbitrary line through these phenomenon and now we're trying to stitch them back together, but all we're really doing is describing different parts of the same thing.


Brain is the substrate of mind. Although there is no proof that thoughts emanate from brains, numerous correlates of consciousness have been detected. They can tell that increased blood flow to the amygdala indicates a person is feeling fear. For me, these correlates of consciousness are too numerous and have been witnessed too many times in relation to feelings, that it might as well be considered as a fact, even though we can not know for sure if things like amygdala cells produce this or that cascade of molecule synthesis, that react with other cells and other memories to produce fear.



truant said:


> It's like we believe that John Smith, the doctor, and John Smith, the father, are two separate people and we're trying to figure out how they can both occupy the same space and time. (How do they manage to stay in sync?! Lol.) Our models create a problem which doesn't exist anywhere in reality. We _think_ mind and brain are separate (it's the function of thought to divide them), so we have the _puzzle_ of trying to figure out how they interact. But a thing can be both mental and physical just like John Smith can be both a doctor and a father. Whether we call him one or the other depends on which of his activities we're observing. They're like two ends of the same stick: if you pull one end (matter) the other end (mind) comes along with it. People who believe in a soul are like people who believe that if you kill John Smith the doctor John Smith the father can still attend all his children's birthday parties; but people who believe that the mind is an epiphenomenon are like people who believe that John Smith the father is an epiphenomenon of John Smith the doctor.


Double slit experiment, quantum entanglement, electron cloud, quantum jumps in electron energy levels; all kinds of strange **** happens when we describe the world with our physics models. With our math, infinities of numbers exist between any two numbers, and we say that anything multiplied by itself zero times is equal to 1, and a point is a location without dimension. All kinds of crazy stuff come out of our models, which are accurate to an extent, but become silly at some point (just how long is the coast of england? Do we measure from space, or do we measure with a microscope, and is a measurement at any level truly accurate?) When you look at Chaos Theory, it is always an iterative setup; the output from one loop feeds in as input to the next iteration of the loop. When you have a setup like this minuscule differences in the initial conditions lead to totally different outcomes (Einstein said that the compounding of interest was his greatest discovery). We can not be 100% accurate on any measurement, so we can not set the initial conditions for a specified outcome accurately; and no matter the how microscopic error, it will become manifest with enough iterations of the cycle.



truant said:


> Finding consciousness at the lowest levels of matter is just scraping the bottom of the barrel of experience and finding more wood, or going all the way around the world and finding yourself back where you started. At some point, because everything is ultimately connected (one, undivided), you will end up going all the way around human experience. But that doesn't necessarily imply anything metaphysical. It just illustrates that there is a limit to how deeply you can explore things.


True. The best we can do is our best hypothesis, based on our best knowledge at any given time. These guesses seem to work in the limited circumstances we encounter in doing the job our DNA was meant to do; to sample the environment and accommodate ourselves to it. We will never know everything, even if we lived forever and had optimum brain power and eons of experience. It's like we're bowling in the dark. Roll the ball down the dark alley and listen to see if we hit anything, and judge from the sound how many pins fell.


----------



## truant (Jul 4, 2014)

Erroll said:


> The way I see it, the brain is the hardware and the mind is the software. The brain and body specifications are in the DNA within each cell. The mind grows out of thebrain/body's experience of the environment. The brain/body is the experience machine. The mind is the sum total remembered experiences. The environment determines which molecules the DNA will synthesize to bring about experience.
> 
> I agree. We only know reality through our senses. And our senses only communicate information that is important for our survival. Thus, we don't see a gorilla on the basketball court, because we have learned that gorillas do not appear during basketball games. Our senses observe only what they have been taught to observe; stuff that impacts us. So what we see is not necessarily what is out there. How can we know reality when we are locked in bone boxes, without any windows, detecting reality only via electro-chemical impulses in the brain, from sensor cells?
> 
> ...


"Hardware and software" is a model of the brain/mind connection. It's still dividing mind from matter and opposing them, and as long as you have that division you're going to have the mind/matter paradox. There is no division between physical matter and consciousness. There _can't_ be, because reality has to be whole and undivided. The division exists _only_ in our thinking. Separating them is like separating John Smith the doctor from John Smith the father.

"Mind" is a concept, a collection of certain observed phenomena (conscious states) and "matter" is a concept, a collection of other observed phenomena. There will always be physical correlates for every mental phenomenon because you can't have mind without matter; but you also can't have matter without mind. There is _always_ a mental correlate to every physical phenomenon -- the appearance of the physical object to consciousness. The appearance of the object to consciousness is an indivisible experience. If you remove the consciousness, you remove the object; if you remove the object, you remove the consciousness (of the object).

We've taken this unitary phenomenon and created an artificial intellectual distinction between them which doesn't exist anywhere in reality; just like the division between John Smith the doctor and John Smith the father doesn't exist. The paradox arises from an error introduced by the way we think about experience.

No matter what conscious experience you go after, you will be able to find (eventually) the physical basis in the brain -- the complex electrochemical sequences in neural architecture -- but it's arbitrary that we say that these physical states _cause_ the mental state. The causal direction: physical brain state -> conscious experience, is a conclusion drawn from our existing model. It's as accurate (or inaccurate) to say: conscious experience -> physical brain state because _they occur simultaneously_. If two things occur simultaneously, it's incorrect to say that one causes the other. That's like saying John Smith the doctor causes John Smith the father.

In certain cases, of course, it will be more practical to think in one way (eg. medicating mental illness) and in other cases it will be more practical to think in another way (eg. CBT). The reason why both forms of therapy can be effective (or ineffective) is because every phenomenon is both mental and physical. If you want to change something, you can grab one end of the stick or the other. The mind/body paradox is created by the delusion that mind and body are two separate sticks running parallel. In fact, there's a single stick. You can't pull one end without moving the other.

No matter where you look in your experience, whether it's "outside" in nature, or "inside" in consciousness, you will never find anything that isn't both mental and physical. Mental and physical aren't separate things; they're positions on unitary phenomena, like the top and bottom of a ball, or the left and right end of a stick.


----------



## Erroll (Jan 18, 2016)

truant said:


> "Hardware and software" is a model of the brain/mind connection. It's still dividing mind from matter and opposing them, and as long as you have that division you're going to have the mind/matter paradox. There is no division between physical matter and consciousness. There _can't_ be, because reality has to be whole and undivided. The division exists _only_ in our thinking. Separating them is like separating John Smith the doctor from John Smith the father.
> 
> "Mind" is a concept, a collection of certain observed phenomena (conscious states) and "matter" is a concept, a collection of other observed phenomena. There will always be physical correlates for every mental phenomenon because you can't have mind without matter; but you also can't have matter without mind. There is _always_ a mental correlate to every physical phenomenon -- the appearance of the physical object to consciousness. The appearance of the object to consciousness is an indivisible experience. If you remove the consciousness, you remove the object; if you remove the object, you remove the consciousness (of the object).
> 
> ...


I do not believe that all matter is conscious. Only matter that is arranged in accordance with a DNA blueprint. The matter is arranged just so, in order to allow consciousness. But they are not arranged spatially or over a period of time, since (per my thinking) space and time do not exist in the physical world.

So we don't really have a language to talk about a world devoid of space and time. All the separations and sequences are additive to raw sensed reality; products of consciousness. So mind and brain are the same thing in the sense that everything is contained in a timeless, dimensionless point universe (big bang never happened).

But our brain separates out information needed for our survival, in order to suss out relationships that we use to determine causation. We can not imagine causation without time and order, because consciousness always operates under the veil of time and space. So we really have no way of explaining how there are relationships and causes, outside of space and time. Our mind presents us with separations and sequences, and these lead to all of the paradoxes inherent in talking about parts of an elementary universal whole.

In short, I agree with what you say. But there will always be paradoxes in trying to explain things that we can not directly access. We always experience separation in time and space. We can't experience anything as a universal whole. The best we can do is to say that the universe consists of information that body sensors read as time and space. Like John A Wheeler's 'it from bit'. The mind builds perceived reality from electro-chemical signals feeding in from the sensory apparatus.


----------



## Milco (Dec 12, 2009)

There are many different models for quantum physics and nobody really knows the correct one, but the Copenhagen interpretation is almost undoubtedly wrong.
Conscious, human observation is not special in modern quantum mechanics, and assuming it to be will obviously lead to problematic ideas.


----------



## phosgene (Jan 22, 2014)

I'd be very careful taking a pop-science article at face value. First of all, Penrose's ideas about the role of quantum mechanics in consciousness are definitely not mainstream science and he is considered to be something of a crackpot on this issue. Secondly, an observation need not have a conscious observer - it's just something that forces a system to take on a single state. Third, quantum mechanics is extremely hard to understand. If you don't have some kind of expertise in it, you're probably talking nonsense.


----------



## scarpia (Nov 23, 2009)




----------



## Post_Punk_Proclivity (Oct 12, 2008)

The post-modernist mechanistic understanding of reality is problematic because it rules out any possibility of a purely anthropocentric interpretation of the universe and extols the virtues of scientific methodology in its place. The main issue with that is that science as a form of intellectual enquiry is suddenly exempt from all laws of subjectivity and thus we interpret anything in the "real" world as completely seperate from our theological stories, our ideologies and our projections of meaning.There exists a doctrine that runs so immensely deep within the roots of our culture that we have more or less become stuck in this way of interpreting reality. It's a concern because we are required (for the sake of any authority on the subject) to discuss the hard problem of consciousness and its relation to quantum mechanics through a lense which assumes that matter is only capable of behaving within the laws of said methodology and that any mysterious quality about it is simply a product of our current understanding of its mechanistic workings.

To me, it seems to be getting clearer and clearer that there is much more to matter than what science alone says, and perhaps even what it is capable of ever saying. It would seem that if consciousness is possible from inert building blocks we call atoms and quarks and neutrinos and so forth, that perhaps a type of sentience can exist within matter at the base level. Moreover, it then stands to reason that as you increase the size and complexity of these creations from the aformentioned building blocks that more diverse and intricate forms of consciousness are made possible. I am also of the contention that mind and physical being are one in the same, so in a way I agree with the propositions of a couple of posters here and certain aspects of reductionism but I also disagree in another sense that our current understanding of reality isn't purely just a production of a machine-like computer that projects and contorts everything as it goes along but rather there is a complex interaction there between the physical universe and the consciousness it is capable of creating. 

I often struggle to grapple with some of these concepts so I won't attempt to elaborate too deeply, but in summation I merely opine that physical matter is capable of much more than perhaps what modern science and physics gives it credit for. The conditioned mind doesn't like anything that appears irrational or fantastical though, and so often such ideas of Animism and the likes are met with much derision by the established orthodoxy. Pretty much anything that doesn't fit into the established model is scorned upon.


----------

