lbnl-56279toappearincambridgehandbookofconscio.docVIP

LBNL-56279 : To Appear in Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, Jan. 2007 Quantum Approaches to Consciousness. Henry P. Stapp Theoretical Physics Group Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 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 1. Introduction. Quantum approaches to consciousness are sometimes said to be motivated simply by the idea that quantum theory is a mystery and consciousness is a mystery, so perhaps the two are related. That opinion betrays a profound misunderstanding of the nature of quantum mechanics, which consists fundamentally of a pragmatic scientific solution to the problem of the connection between mind and matter. 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 to us 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 neuroscience, and in particular to the problem of understanding and describing the causal connections between the minds and the brains of human beings. The magnitude of the difference between the quantum and classical