Part 5 of Stapp's Lecture on The Physics of Consciousness
Appendix A. Salient Features of the Quantum Theory of the Mind/Brain
Described in Ref. 5.
1. Facilitation.
The excitation of a pattern of neural firings
produces changes in the neurons that have the effect of facilitating
subsequent excitations the pattern.
2. Associative Recall.
The facilitations mentioned above have the
feature that the excitation of a part of the pattern tends to spread
to the whole pattern.
3. Body-World Schema.
The physical body of the person and the
surrounding world are represented by patterns of neural firings in
the brain: these patterns contain the information about the
positioning of the body in its environment. Brain processes are able
to interpret this information.
4. Body-World-Belief Schema.
The body-world schema has an
extension that represents beliefs and other idealike structures. The B-W-B Schema are representations that have the
properties required for records: they endure, are copiable, and are
combinable. These requirements ensure that these representations
are engraved in degrees of freedom that can be characterized as
"classical". Superpositions of such classically describable states
are generally not classical. This characterization of "classical"
(in terms of durability, copiability, and combinability) does not
take one outside quantum theory: it merely distinguishes certain
functionally important kinds of quantum states from others.
6. Evolution via the Schoedinger Equation.
The alert brain evolves
under the quantum dynamical laws from a state in which one B-W-B
schema is excited to a state in which a quantum superposition of
several such states are excited. That is, the brain evolves from a
state in which one B-W-B schema is excited, for a period of time
sufficient to facilitate the pattern, into a quantum state that is a
superposition of several "classical branches", each representing a
different classically describable state of the Body-World-Belief
complex.
7. The Quantum Jump.
The Heisenberg actual event occurs at the
high-level of brain activity where the different classical branches
have separated: this event actualizes one branch and eradicates the
others, in accord with Heisenberg's idea of what happens in a
measuring device. The human brain is, in effect, treated as a
quantum measuring device.
8. Thoughts.
The occurrence of the Heisenberg event at this high
level, rather than at some lower level (e.g., when some individual
neuron fires) is in line with Wigner's suggestion that the reduction
of the wave packet occurs in the brain only at the highest level of
processing, where conscious thoughts enter. The state of the brain
collapses to a classical branch that encapsulates and records the
information contained in a classical description of the body-world-
belief complex. It is postulated that this actualizing event at the
level of the wave function is associated with a conscious event that
is a mental image of the information represented by the actualized
B-W-B schema.
9. Limitations.
The theory describes only those collapses that
occur in the part of the physical world associated with human
brains: Whether. and where other events occur is left open. A
parsimonious version of the theory in which the only collapses are
those associated with human brains would account in principle for
all human experience: there is no empirical evidence available today
that would demand any other actual events. Such a parsimonious
theory would be excessively anthropocentric. Yet any attempt to go
beyond it would be speculative in the absence of relevant data. In
the parsimonious version every actual event corresponds to a human
thought, and every human thought corresponds to an actual event: the
theory is maximally linked to the empirical facts of human
experience.
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