ABSTRACT.
Despite the impressive achievements of classical neuroscience, it is here argued that there are good general reasons for thinking that quantum theory will play an essential part in any complete account of conscious mind. The evidence that the non-local, acausal nature of the world of quantum superpositions has consequences for our mental states or their correlates is then briefly reviewed, and is found to be stronger than many people suppose.

Keywords. Consciousness. Quantum theory. Neuroscience. Acausal phenomena.


INTRODUCTION

[1]
The progress of neuroscience is hugely impressive. Many of its spokespersons tell us that consciousness is surely a by-product of neural activity of the general sort familiar to neuroscientists since the days of Sherrington, whether in a global workspace (Baars), brain modules that predict outcomes (Ellis), a self-reflective self-model (Mulhauser) or in thalamo-cortical feedback circuits (Newman). Areas of the brain have been pinpointed which are responsible for religious belief and for mirth to give two extraordinary, recently well-publicised examples. Few working psychiatrists doubt that the more serious abnormalities of consciousness can be treated with drugs which affect classical neurotransmission. While it is true that neuroscience cannot yet account for all the phenomena of consciousness, particularly not those involved in Chalmer's 'hard problem', this is surely an argument for sticking with what gives every appearance of being a winning strategy (i.e. tackling the problems piecemeal with neuroscientific methodology), rather than wandering off after will-o'-the-wisps, whether quantum theoretical or religio/philosophical, which have promised much but delivered little by comparison.

[2]
Even those willing to give quantum theoretical approaches a go must admit that their track record has been pretty dismal. The most promising, least generally unacceptable, of them suggest that Bose-Einstein condensation in the brain has something essential (it's often not clear quite what) to do with consciousness. Nevertheless, the more pragmatic physicists generally say that such notions are unlikely to prove realistic. Thermal interactions would surely prevent condensates from occurring on anything like the scale needed. Frohlich's original suggestion, made 30 years ago, that they might be based on phonons originated by vibrating dipoles in nerve cell membranes is unlikely to be valid (Clarke). Del Giudice's attractive notion that the relevant phonons occur in vicinal water attached to microtubules seems to have sunk without trace. The Penrose/Hameroff OR hypothesis has less appeal than used to be the case because few think that Penrose's Godelian arguments for proposing it in the first place have merit, and even fewer go along with his gravitational collapse hypothesis. Jibu and Yasue's quantum field approach is uncomfortably tied to a de Broglie interpretation of quantum theory, while its detail would seem to require that having an MRI scan ought to produce reportable effects on a person's consciousness (such effects have not been reported); moreover, according to Globus, accepting it requires the adoption of an unattractively solipsistic outlook. Other theorists (e.g. Goswami) argue for one form or another of idealism - a philosophy which has always caused discomfort, at least to most Westerners, perhaps because it is seen to be irrefutable despite Dr. Johnston and his stone, contrary to common-sense and without pragmatic benefits.

[3]
The sane response of anyone wanting to understand consciousness, in the face of considerations like those outlined above, should surely be to forget about quantum theory and seek work in a neurophysiology lab. But I want to look at some of the reasons for thinking that sanity so construed may mislead.

[4]
An inadequate reason for turning to quantum theory is its sheer mystery which certainly has allure for some people, though the wonders to be found in it are perhaps no greater than those revealed by classical electrophysiology; they are simply less familiar. Then there are the hopes that it may provide an understanding of the 'hard problem'; it probably does do rather better in this respect than classical neuroscience, but the suggestions made so far (e.g. Stapp, Globus, Nunn) have a markedly post facto, ad hoc quality. I suggest that the strongest grounds for continuing to bother about quantum theory in the context of consciousness centre on two considerations, namely the consequences of an adequate understanding of materialism and the experimental evidence.


MATERIALISM

[5]
Our view of the basis of the physical world is shaped by common-sense, the legacy of Newton and those two great theories - quantum and relativity. The theories, in their sometimes different ways, tell us that the pictures of space, time and matter provided by common-sense and Newton are grossly misleading. Of the two, quantum theory seems to many the more profound and general, but what does it actually say about the nature of matter? Here's where things tend to come unstuck. If you stay with the mathematical formalism it is hard to form any definite view, particularly as the most generally used formalism is based on the invocation of an entirely imaginary (Hilbert) space. If you don't stick to the mathematics, on the other hand, it is easy to get swept off into ever more tenuous realms of vague generality or wishful thinking. Then there's the question, if one does decide to risk getting lost in a quagmire of speculation, of which formalism to use as a starting point for attempts at understanding the nature of reality. As Lockwood has pointed out, Heisenberg's matrices, though mathematically equivalent, give a somewhat different and in his opinion more satisfactory philosophical emphasis from that implied by Schrodinger's waves.

[6]
There is in fact a lot to be said in favour of the algebraic formulation of quantum theory, which owes more to Heisenberg than to Schrodinger. It is general compared to most others and even offers hopes of reaching an understanding of time, a topic that eludes the standard wave mechanics (see Atmanspacher and Ruhnau). It has many of the advantages of Bohm and Hiley's 'quantum potential' interpretation but does not suffer the disadvantage of introducing any concept so dubious as this potential. That it is not widely used is partly attributable to physicists' habits and partly to greater technical difficulty than wave mechanics in relation to practical applications. As developed by Primas, building on an idea of Scheibe's, it divides the world into two aspects, termed the ontic and the epistemic. The ontic realm is ordered but non-spatial and non-temporal, inhabited by quantum superpositions; our knowledge of it can never be complete. The epistemic includes both the material world in which we dwell and our conscious experience of that world; it must be regarded as a separate sub- system of the ontic realm. Quantum theory describes aspects of the transitions between the two realms. In general, the concept closely resembles Bohm's relatively familiar implicate/explicate distinction but is more precise. This precision allows one to do away with some of the vagueness associated with the realisation, which is entailed by all interpretations of quantum theory, that our everyday world is only part of a much larger, mostly unseen and unseeable, realm.

[7]
One might at this stage simply state that, since the whole world of neuroscientists is to the best of our knowledge no more than a sub-system of a larger realm to which all variants of quantum theory offer similar keys, it would be foolish to ignore the larger realm when trying to reach a complete understanding of a phenomenon so sensitive and complex as mind. It is possible, however, to tighten this argument a little along the lines suggested by Atmanspacher. Complexity is in fact one of the most obvious characteristics of the human brain and is operationally accessible only at the epistemic level. Another characteristic of the brain, namely that it encompasses meaning, is quite different. Meaning is not a characteristic of epistemicity; it does not belong to our everyday world of happenstance but refers basically to the ontic realm.

[8]
Searle's famous 'Chinese room' argument has never been able adequately to meet the objection to it derived from Leibnitz' supposition that the interior of everyone's mind might look very like the internal workings of some enormously complicated piece of machinery. Conscious meaning or understanding, according to this objection, is an overall attribute of the system and lacks any particular place or process to which it can be localised. All the same, Searle's argument has had great intuitive appeal to many people, and maybe they are right to find it attractive. Meaning may indeed be a concept quite separable from information and its processing because it refers to a different level of reality. If this view holds water, one can conclude that consciousness, arising as it does from a complex brain but encompassing meaning in an essential way, is a denizen of both realms. It is like an amphibian poised between epistemic dry land and the ontic ocean, but experimentally accessible only on dry land.

[9]
Two further inferences can be made from these considerations. Firstly quantum theory is bound to crop up sooner or later, in some context or other, in any adequate account of conscious mind. We may not yet know exactly where or how it fits in, but it can be guaranteed to provide essential components of the jigsaw puzzle. There's every reason to examine whether any of the notions presently available to us fit; if they don't, the appropriate response is to look for better ones rather than to give up and say that the current neuroscientific approach is sufficient on its own. Secondly consciousness, belonging as it does partly to the ontic realm, should occasionally demonstrate the non-spatial, non-temporal, acausal nature of that realm. Although all the experiments that can ever be performed manifest epistemically, space, time and causation are not fundamental but are derived from a deeper, mostly unknown, order in the ontic realm which should occasionally be visible in aspects of our conscious experience. Experimental evidence of such features should exist; indeed it does exist and is briefly discussed in the next section.


EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE.

[10]
The notion of telepathy can of course be defined as the concept of the occurrence of acausal, non-spatial and perhaps non-temporal correlations between the mental states of two or more people. The more popular idea of 'thought transfer' is unnecessary and probably misleading. It is thus a prime example, if it exists, of the manifestation of onticity in our epistemic world. People still often assert, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that claims for the occurrence of such correlations are always due to chance, fraud or failure to eliminate subtle causal relationships. The first claim (about chance) has plausibility since it is clear that the correlations involved in telepathy are probabilistic and the only question is whether the probabilities are skewed in a manner which can't be accounted for in terms of any known form of causation. Careful work over recent years has more or less eliminated the possibility that fraud or poor experimental design can always account for positive findings. Moreover it is now clear that the correlations are skewed to a very improbable extent. The statistical evidence that telepathy occurs, albeit in a weak and wavering sort of way, is a lot stronger than the conceptually similar statistical evidence that antidepressant drugs are effective. Yet such drugs are prescribed by the bucketful while organised bands of sceptics, such as those belonging to CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims Of the Paranormal), still routinely cast doubt on the veracity and/or sanity of anyone involved in any field of study defined by them as 'paranormal'. They often justify themselves by stating that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary standards of proof, forgetting that many of the findings are in fact extraordinary only in relation to the inadequacy of their own beliefs about the nature of reality.

[11]
Evidence for the occurrence of other 'ontic realm' relationships has been provided by the long-running Princeton experiments on the ability of people to consciously influence the output of random number generators. Although the effect is extremely weak, it has been established far beyond reasonable doubt. The clincher is that, although the effect is seen with a variety of physically different types of truly random number generators, it disappears in otherwise identical tests in which pseudo-random generators are used - i.e. generators whose output is causally fixed (see Jahn et al.). The experimenters themselves have provided a quantum theoretical framework for understanding their findings (Jahn and Dunne) which envisages that the wavefunction of the subject is subsumed in that of the whole experimental set-up.

[12]
Other relevant enquiries have involved electro-encephalographic (EEG) activity, which has been known since the 1930s to be related to mental happenings. For instance both Travis and Orme-Johnson and Grinberg-Zylberbaum and Ramos have observed that the pattern of one person's EEG can acausally converge with that of another person when, respectively, one is meditating or the two feel that they may be in touch with one another. A rather different approach was used in a study in which I was involved (Nunn et al.). It was designed to test the earlier, 1989, version of Penrose's gravitational collapse hypothesis, the idea being that people should respond faster in conscious choice situations when an EEG was being recorded from a relevant brain area, due to quantum entanglement between the person's brain state and the EEG apparatus. We found that speed of response did not vary, but accuracy did vary according to the brain area from which the EEG was being taken; there were no obvious sources of causation for this effect. It looked as though entanglement might have been responsible, but Penrose's suggestion concerning the 'read-out' mechanism (i.e. gravitational collapse) was not specifically confirmed.

[13]
There are of course a vast range of other 'paranormal' phenomena, from various forms of clairvoyance to the alleged evidence for reincarnation, which may be partly or wholly attributable to concomitants of quantum theory. The task of teasing out which are illusory or delusory, which can be accounted for in terms of developments of quantum theory and whether any fall outside both its scope and that of classical neuroscience, will start in earnest only when investigators are not constantly having to fend off slurs or outright attacks on their integrity and judgement. The evidence from the phenomena discussed above is, however, sufficiently strong to make it hugely more probable than not that the world of quantum superpositions does sometimes have consequences for our mental states that can never be fully explained in classical terms.

CONCLUSIONS
[14]
The argument from materialism concerning the importance of quantum theory for an understanding of consciousness is quite strong but not, by itself, compelling. Outside of mathematics, hardly any such general reasoning is ever entirely conclusive. When one adds in, however, the fact that the occurrence of some non-classical mental phenomena is now as firmly established as any of the more mainstream findings of psychology or psychiatry, the case for taking quantum theory seriously in the context of consciousness studies becomes far stronger. Indeed it would be fair, though not yet very realistic, to say that the onus for proving their case should now be transferred to those who wish to exclude quantum theory from our field of interest.


REFERENCES.

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[The author is a recently retired British psychiatrist who worked in Zambia and the
West Indies for few years before joining the psychiatric department associated with Southampton University Medical School. His main interests were in psycho-somatic relationships and manic-depressive illness. At present he is interested in broader issues such as Quantum Consciousness and collective mental phenomena such as archetypes, mass hysterias, etc.
E-mail:< chrisnunn@compuserve.com>]