Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

To fully appreciate the significance of the basis problem mentioned by Zurek, and of the impact of quantum decoherence on fundamental issues, one needs to understand certain subtle aspects of the connection between classical and quantum mechanics. This chapter, which is more technical than the others, explains these aspects, and, with the aid of some pictures, their relevance to the basis and decoherence problems.

Scientists in different fields are free, to some extent, to use concepts that appear to work for them, without regard to other scientific disciplines. However, many of the greatest advances in science have come from unifying the treatments of neighboring realms of phenomena. We are now engaged a great scientific endeavor to rationally connect the neurophysiological and psychological aspects of the conscious brain. The problem is to understand, explain, or describe the connections between two realms that are conceived of - and are described in — two very different ways. What seems pertinent is that basic physics to an incredibly successful way to link these two realms. It seems reasonable to to apply the solution discovered by physicists to the parallel problem in neuropsychology. Why should there be such scorn in brain science for this natural and reasonable idea of bringing mind into neuropsychology in the same way that it was brought into physics in connection with the relationship between the empirically described and physically described aspects of scientific practice?

Upon completing my article entitled (Stapp 1972), I sent the manuscript to Heisenberg for his approval or reaction. He expressed general approval, but raised one point:

He continued:

At the end of the summer of 2006 Harald Atmanspacher conducted an interview of me that appeared in the September 2006 issue of J. Consciousness Studies (Volume 13, No. 6). Professor Atmanspacher raised many pertinent questions that had not been dealt with in my prior writings, and have not been adequately covered in the foregoing parts of this book. My answers added important details to my elaboration of von Neumann’s work. Atmanspacher’s formulations of his questions have been widely praised, and any attempt by me to re-structure the content of the interview would be inappropriate. I shall therefore, with his permission, and that of JCS, reproduce that interview here.

By the anthropic questions I mean the following three queries: These questions may lack answers that human minds can comprehend, or that our scientific investigations can find firm evidence to support. Still, these questions are being asked, within scientific contexts, and a science-based world view may be incomplete without some rationally coherent responses to them.

Philosophers have tried doggedly for three centuries to understand the role of mind in the workings of a brain conceived to function according to principles of classical physics. We now know no such brain exists: no brain, body, or anything else in the real world is composed of those tiny bits of matter that Newton imagined the universe to be made of. Hence it is hardly surprising that those philosophical endeavors were beset by enormous difficulties, which led to such positions as that of the ‘eliminative materialists’, who hold that our conscious thoughts must be eliminated from our scientific understanding of nature; or of the ‘epiphenomenalists’, who admit that human experiences do exist, but claim that they play no role in how we behave; or of the ‘identity theorists’, who claim that each conscious feeling is exactly the same thing as a motion of particles that nineteenth century science thought our brains, and everything else in the universe, were made of, but that twentieth century science has found not to exist, at least as they were formerly conceived. The tremendous difficulty in reconciling consciousness, as we know it, with the older physics is dramatized by the fact that for many years the mere mention of ‘consciousness’ was considered evidence of backwardness and bad taste in most of academia, including, incredibly, even psychology and the philosophy of mind.

How can our world of billions of thinkers ever come into general concordance on fundamental issues? How do you, yourself, form opinions on such issues? Do you simply accept the message of some ‘authority’, such as a church, a state, or a social or political group? All of these entities promote concepts about how you as an individual fit into the reality that supports your being. And each has an agenda of its own, and hence its own internal biases. But where can you find an unvarnished truth about your nature, and your place in Nature?