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A tremendous burgeoning of interest in the problem of consciousness is now in progress. The grip of the behaviorists who sought to banish consciousness from science has finally been broken. This shift was ratified, for example, by the appearance several years ago of a special issue of Scientific American entitled (August 2002).

In the introduction to his book the philosopher of science Mario Bunge (1967, p. 4) said:

From the time of Isaac Newton until about 1925 science relegated consciousness to the role of passive viewer: our thoughts, ideas, and feelings were treated as impotent bystanders to a march of events wholly controlled by microscopically describable interactions between mechanically behaving microscopic basic elements. The founders of quantum mechanics made the revolutionary move of bringing conscious human experiences into basic physical theory in a fundamental way. After two hundred years of neglect, our thoughts were suddenly thrust into the limelight. This was an astonishing reversal of precedent because the enormous successes of the prior physics were due in large measure to the policy of excluding all mention of idea-like qualities from the formulation of the physical laws.

Many neuroscientists who study the relationship of consciousness to brain processes want to believe that classical physics will provide an adequate rational foundation for that task. But classical physics has bottom-up causation, and the direct rational basis for the claim that classical physics is applicable to the full workings of the brain rests on the basic presumption that it is applicable at the microscopic level. However, empirical evidence about what is actually happening at the trillions of synapses on the billions of neurons in a conscious brain is virtually nonexistent, and, according to the uncertainty principle, empirical evidence is unable to justify the claim that deterministic behavior actually holds in the brain at the microscopic (ionic) scale. Thus the claim that classical determinism holds in living brains is empirically indefensible: sufficient evidence neither does, nor can in principle, exist.

The feature of a brain state that tends to produce some specified experiential feedback can reasonably be expected to be a highly organized large-scale pattern of brain activity that, to be effective, must endure for a period of perhaps tens or hundreds of milliseconds. It must endure for an extended period in order to be able to bring into being the coordinated sequence of neuron firings needed to produce the intended feedback. Thus the neural (or brain) correlate of an intentional act should be something like a collection of the vibratory modes of a drumhead in which many particles move in a coordinated way for an extended period of time.

A crucial question now arises: How does this dynamical psycho-neurological connection via process 1, , but not answer it, allow a person’s effort to influence his or her physical actions?

A great deal has happened in psychology since the time of William James. However, many psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who intended to stay in tune with the basic precepts of physics became locked to the ideas of nineteenth century physicists and failed to acknowledge or recognize the jettisoning by twentieth century physicists of classical materialism and the principle of the causal closure of the physical. Thus while the physicists were bringing effects attributed to the conscious intentions of human agents into the dynamical description of the physically described world, mainline psychologists, embracing behaviorism, sought to remove such features even from psychology, and most philosophers of mind followed suit.

The most direct evidence pertaining to the effects of conscious choices upon brain activities comes from experiments in which consciously controlled cognitive efforts are found to be empirically correlated to measured physical effects in the brain. An example is the experiment of Ochsner et al. (2001). The subjects are trained how to cognitively reevaluate emotional scenes by consciously creating and holding in place an alternative fictional story of what is really happening in connection with an emotion-generating scene they are viewing.

Increased interest in quantum mechanical theories of mind has been kindled by two recent books by Roger Penrose. These books, , and , along with a paper by Hameroff and Penrose (1996), propose a quantum theory of consciousness that, like the present one, is based on von Neumann’s formulation of quantum theory. But the Penrose-Hameroff theory brings in some controversial ideas that are not used in the more direct application of orthodox quantum mechanics described in this book

Eugene Wigner introduced the term ‘orthodox’ to describe von Neumann’s formulation of quantum theory. I use the term more broadly to include, , also the Copenhagen formulation. But at the level I mean the von Neumann—Tomonaga—Schwinger description that includes the entire physical universe in the physically described quantum world, and that accepts the occurrence of the process 1 interventions in the process 2 evolution of the physically described state of the universe.