Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness
Submitted by The GC on April 1, 2009 - 3:08pm.
Science
This site is interesting to explore, even if you're not interested in the book.
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The Quantum Enigma
I read some of the reviews at Amazon of the book, and while it looks quite interesting, I thought the reviewer who pointed to the authors taking as "common-sense" the notion that we have uncaused wills without taking into account neuroscience that suggests that all neuronal events are caused made a good point. (This was the customer review, Free Will & the Quantum Enigma, by B. Sandler.) This is not to suggest that the causal argument in favor of the physical world is correct, but rather that it is something that needs to be accounted for.
I went back and looked at the Consciousness thread as this issue came up in the discussion there (and is a central part of that article by Henry Stapp, "Quantum Interactive Dualism" which I linked at the top). What I like about Stapp's article and what seems missing in the book is an emphasis on the workings of consciousness as much as on quantum mechanics (though I'm not really being fair as I haven't read it--this is just my sense from reading the description-so I'm stressing "seems" ). I like the way Stapp made the two interdependent, while this seems to assume consciousness and then makes consciouness determinative of reality through quantum physics.
So that got me poking around on Amazon and I found that there's a book by Stapp that seems an elaboration of that article--it's called Mindful Universe. And I liked this description in one of the reviews:
"In his new book, Stapp insists that the 'causal closure of the physical,' in particular concerning quantum theory, is an untenable myth. He elaborates on ideas of Bohr, von Neumann, Heisenberg and, from a philosophical point of view, James and Whitehead to sketch a complex picture in which the physical and the mental are emphatically conditioned by each other."