Quantum consciousness (part 1)
There’s been a lot of attempts in the last few years to explain psychological phenomena using quantum mecanics:
- Consciousness;
- Perception;
- Free-will;
- Whatever is strange or hard to explain.
The quantum consciousness was launched by Penrose in The Emperor’s New Mind.Many neurology and cognitive science experts have criticized Penrose’s views, but they remain relatively popular to this day.
The fans of quantum consciousness say something that goes like this: the laws of classical mecanics can’t explain [insert a phenomenon mentioned earlier] and, after all, if [phenomenon] was only a by-product of our brain, it would really suck… so let’s include something mysterious in the equation, shall we?
Another way of defending quantum consciousness that you will sometimes find consists of saying that there’s sacred and mystical stuff everywhere, so there has to be something in there that could explain [the phenomenon]. Sometimes they’ll also pitch in Shrödinger’s equation, trying to argue that it’s actually consciousness that explans QM.
Of course it wouldn’t be complete without some reference to Gödel’s incompletude and Heisenberg’s uncertainty: we can’t explain everythingabout [phenomenon], since we are ourself based on what it represents globally; therefore we have to base our explanation on something that’s equally unexplainable. And since QM is the current poster boy for the limits of what we can explain with science, so it would be stupid notto use it.
Where will you find such thesis?
- Penrose and his disciples, like Hameroff.
- In Chalmers, although he seems to make it a bit credible. (vidéo here, yeah he does look like a hippie).
- In New Age books (The Secret, The Law of Attraction, some books about TM, etc)
So that’s it for this week, in the next episode we will study “quantum consciousness” a bit closer and meet a few of it’s opponents.
Tags: Chalmers, consciousness, in english, Penrose, quantum mecanics
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