The Chest of Time

Since the beginning of Quantum Mechanics, it was believed that it is somehow profoundly related to Consciousness, but the details are not clear at all. The problem of the relation between mind and body is one of most difficult knots in the history of philosophy. Many monistic and dualistic theories have been suggested, especially after the weird quantum behavior of microscopic particles have been puzzling scientists for almost a century, but it is still not clear what consequences this may have for our understanding of the mind. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics tried to solve the problem of measurement and the effect of the observer based on consciousness by affecting the quantum potentialities and determining their definite actualities. At any rate, the measurement problem seems to be impossible to solve within the current laws of physics. This is partially due to the residual indeterminism of quantum mechanics in making predictions of physical processes, and also because of the non-locality that is exemplified in the EPR Paradox and Bell’s inequalities.

There are some analogies between mental processes and the structure of matter entailed by quantum mechanics. For example, quantum objects evolve through the succession of states, just like mental entities which evolve though specious presents between intermittent changes. The state of a quantum object is determined by the probability of all possible virtual processes and interactions that produce a certain outcome when the system is observed. Likewise, the mind is continually collecting information and comparing with past events before making any specific decision.

Some hypotheses propose that quantum mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement and superposition, may play an important part in the brain’s function and could contribute to form the basis of an explanation of consciousness, but these hypotheses remain unproven and no conclusive experiments have been possible to perform in this field. While some scientists proposed that the wave function collapses due to its interaction with consciousness, other argued that quantum consciousness is a myth without scientific basis. Some have even suggested that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in elementary particles, but most physicists and philosophers considered such arguments unconvincing. Bohm viewed Quantum Theory and Relativity as contradictory, which implied a more fundamental level in the universe, which he formulated as a Quantum Field Theory. This more fundamental level was proposed to represent an undivided wholeness and an implicate order, from which arises the explicate order of the universe as we experience it. On the other hand, Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff collaborated to produce the theory known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction, which stemmed from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Penrose argued that while a formal system cannot prove its own consistency, Gödel’s unprovable results are provable by human mathematicians. He took this disparity to mean that human mathematicians are not formal proof systems and are not running a computable algorithm: “One might speculate, however, that somewhere deep in the brain, cells are to be found of single quantum sensitivity. If this proves to be the case, then quantum mechanics will be significantly involved in brain activity” (Penrose et al., 1989, p. 400). He determined that wave function collapse was the only possible physical basis for a non-computable process, proposing a new form of collapse that occurred in isolation and he called it objective reduction. He suggested each quantum superposition has its own piece of space-time curvature and that when these become separated by more than one Planck length they become unstable and collapse.