Part 3 of Stapp's Lecture on The Physics of Consciousness

4.On The Thesis That `Mind Is Matter'.

Faced with the centuries-old problem of reconciling the thoughtlike and matterlike aspects of nature many scientists and philosophers are turning to the formula: `mind is matter'.(9) However, this solution has no content until one specifies what matter is. The need to define `matter' is highlighted by the extreme disparity in the conceptions of matter in classical mechanics and quantum mechanics.

One might try to interpret the `matter' occurring in this formula as the `matter' that occurs in classical physics. But this kind of matter does not exist in nature. Hence the thesis `mind is matter', with matter defined in this way, would seem to entail that thoughts do not exist.

The thesis that `mind is matter' has been attacked on the ground that matter is conceptually unsuited to be identified with mind. The main rebuttal to this criticism given in ref. 9 is that one does not know what the psychological theory of the future will be like. Hence it is conceivable that the future theory of mind may not involve the things such as `belief', `desire' and `awareness' that we now associate with mind. Consequently, some future theory of mind could conceivably allow us to understand how two such apparently disparate things as mind and matter could be the same.

An alternative way to reconcile a theory of mind with the theory of matter is not through some future conception of our mental life that differs so profoundly from the present- day one, but rather through the introduction the already existing modern theory of matter. Let me elaborate.

The main objection to the thesis that mind is matter as contrasted to the view that mind and matter are different aspects of a single neutral reality is based on the fact that each mind is known to only one brain, whereas each brain is knowable to many minds. These two aspects of the mind/brain are different in kind: a mind consists of a sequence of private happenings, whereas a brain consists of a persisting public structure. A mind/brain has both a private inner aspect, mind, and a public outer aspect, brain, and these two aspects have distinctive characteristics.

In the quantum description of nature proposed by Heisenberg reality has similarly, two different aspects. The first consists of a set of `actual events': these events form a sequence of `happenings', each of which actualizes one of the possibilities offered by the quantum dynamics. The second consists of a set of `objective tendencies' for these events to occur: these tendencies are represented as persisting structures in space and time. If we correlate thoughts with high-level quantum events in brains, as suggested by von Neumann, Wigner, and others, then we can construct a theory that is a dual-aspect theory of the mind/brain, in the sense that it correlates the inner, or mental, aspects of the mind/brain system with `actual events' in Heisenberg's picture of nature, and it identifies the outer, or material, aspects of the mind/brain with the `objective tendencies' of Heisenberg's picture of nature.

Sarfatti Comment: I would have thought the opposite, that the outer or material aspects are the localized actual events and that the inner or mental aspects are the nonlocal objective tendencies. For example, an individual 'actual quantum event' might be the material detection of a single photon in a small region of a photographic emulsion. On the other hand, Stapp means by an 'actual event', the mental perception of that particular detection by a conscious, or several conscious observers. This perception is the collapse of the wave function of the entire brain.

What is the rate of this collapse? How may we measure it? Clearly, it has to do with our perception of the flow of time. The rate of collapse decreases with the age of the brain resulting in our experience that time flies faster as we get older. The rate of collapse is tied to some metabolic rate in the brain perhaps.

Perhaps, the mental-material duality reverses as we pass from low-level inanimate observables of single particles to top-level collective observables of large numbers of particles in a living organism. That is, the low-level observable is unchanged by the collapse of the wave function, but the top-level observable is changed by the collapse. The low-level observable conforms to the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics, but the top- level observable does not, hence intention. It seems to me that our conscious experience is precisely the change in the top-level observable induced by the collapsing quantum jump of the wave function of the top-level observable. Our conscious experience demands a violation of the orthodox statistical predictions seen, for example, in the Aspect experiment. This is why transistors and classical computers are not conscious. The non-orthodox shift in the nature of the observable induced by the actualization, using the Heisenberg picture, is what Roger Penrose is pointing to in his use of the term "OR" in Shadows of the Mind.

The final 'Omega Point' observer would be Frank Tipler's "God", in the far future of the universe at the end time of the Big Crunch, who finally completes the actualization of the universe retroactively in a grand Borgesian cosmic delayed choice. Sir Fred Hoyle wrote a paper about precisely that. The March 1995 Scientific American has a profile of Hoyle by John Horgan in which Hoyle says that he sees purpose, meaning and intention in the fundamental structure of the universe. That is the fundamental hypothesis of the New Physics of Consciousness that the PCRG initiated at the Esalen Institute on the cliffs of Big Sur, California overlooking the Pacific Ocean in 1975.

This theory might, on the other hand, equally well be construed as a theory in which `mind is matter', if we accept the criteria for intertheoretic reduction (10) proposed in reference 9. For this quantum theory of the brain is built directly upon the concepts of the contemporary theory of matter, and it appears(5) to be able to explain in terms of the laws of physics the causal connections underlying human behavior that are usually explained in psychological terms. Yet in this theory there is no abandonment of the normal psychological conception of our mental life. It is rather the classical theory of matter that is abandoned. In the terminology used in reference 9 folk psychology is retained, but folk physics is replaced by contemporary physics.

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