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Neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behaviour generally posits that brain mechanisms

will ultimately suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This assumption stems from
the idea that the brain is made up entirely of material particles and fields, and that all causal
elements. Thus, terms having intrinsic mentalistic and/or experiential content (e.g. feeling, knowing
and effort) are not included as primary causal factors. This theoretical restriction is motivated primarily
by ideas about the natural world that have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than
three-quarters of a century. Contemporary basic physical theory differs profoundly from classic physics
on the important matter of how the consciousness of human agents enters into the structure of
empirical phenomena. The new principles contradict the older idea that local mechanical processes
alone can account for the structure of all observed empirical data. Contemporary physical theory brings
directly and irreducibly into the overall causal structure certain psychologically described choices made
by human agents about how they will act. This key development in basic physical theory is applicable to
neuroscience, and it provides neuroscientists and psychologists with an alternative conceptual
framework for describing neural processes. Indeed, owing to certain structural features of ion channels
critical to synaptic function, contemporary physical theory must in principle be used when analysing
human brain dynamics. The new framework, unlike its classic-physics-based predecessor, is erected
directly upon, and is compatible with, the prevailing principles of physics. It is able to represent more
adequately than classic concepts the neuroplastic mechanisms relevant to the growing number of
empirical studies of the capacity of directed attention and mental effort to systematically alter brain

Keywords: mind, consciousness, brain, neuroscience, neuropsychology, quantum mechanics

The only acceptable point of view appears to be the one that recognizes both sides of realitythe
quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychicalas compatible with each other, and can
embrace them simultaneously.

(Pauli 1955, p. 208)

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The introduction into neuroscience and neuropsychology of the extensive use of functional brain
imaging technology has revealed, at the empirical level, an important causal role of directed attention in
cerebral functioning. The identification of brain areas involved in a wide variety of information
processing functions concerning learning, memory and various kinds of symbol manipulation has been
the subject of extensive and intensive investigation (see Toga & Mazziotta 2000). Neuroscientists
consequently now have a reasonably good working knowledge of the role of a variety of brain areas in
the processing of complex information. But, valuable as these empirical studies are, they provide only
the data for, not the answer to, the critical question of the causal relationship between the aspects of
empirical studies that are described in psychological terms and those that are described in
neurophysiological terms. In most of the cases, investigators simply assume that measurable-in-principle
properties of the brain are the only factors needed to explain eventually the processing of the
psychologically described information that occurs in neuropsychological experiments. This privileging of
physically describable brain mechanisms as the core, and indeed final, explanatory vehicle for the
processing of every kind of psychologically described data, is the foundational assumption of almost all
contemporary biologically based cognitive neuroscience.

It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that there is at least one type of information processing and
manipulation that does not readily lend itself to explanations that assume that all final causes are
subsumed within brain, or more generally, central nervous system mechanisms. The cases in question
are those in which the conscious act of wilfully altering the mode by which experiential information is
processed itself changes, in systematic ways, the cerebral mechanisms used. There is a growing
recognition of the theoretical importance of applying experimental paradigms that use directed mental
effort to produce systematic and predictable changes in brain function (e.g. Beauregard et al. 2001;
Ochsner et al. 2002). These wilfully induced brain changes are generally accomplished through training
in, and the applied use of, cognitive reattribution and the attentional re-contextualization of conscious
experience. Furthermore, an accelerating number of studies in the neuroimaging literature significantly
support the thesis that, again, with appropriate training and effort, people can systematically alter
neural circuitry associated with a variety of mental and physical states that are frankly pathological
(Schwartz et al. 1996; Schwartz 1998; Musso et al. 1999; Paquette et al. 2003). A recent review of this
and the related neurological literature has coined the term self-directed neuroplasticity to serve as a
function in a predictable and potentially therapeutic manner (Schwartz & Begley 2002).

From a theoretical perspective, perhaps the most important aspect of this line of research is the
empirical support it provides for a new science-based way of conceptualizing the interface between
mind/consciousness and brain. Until recently, virtually all attempts to understand the functional activity
of the brain have been based, at least implicitly, on some principles of classic physics that have been
known to be fundamentally false for three-quarters of a century. According to the classic conception of
the world, all causal connections between observables are explainable in terms of mechanical
by the currently applied principles of physics, which consequently offer an alternative conceptual
foundation for the scientific description and modelling of the causal structure of self-directed
The advantages for neuroscience and neuropsychology of using the conceptual framework of
contemporary physics, as opposed to that of classic physics, stem from five basic facts. First, terms such
as feeling, knowing and effort, because they are intrinsically mentalistic and experiential, cannot be
described exclusively in terms of material structure. Second, to explain the observable properties of
large physical systems that depend sensitively upon the behaviours of their atomic constituents, the
founders of contemporary physical theory were led to introduce explicitly into the basic causal structure
of physics certain important choices made by human beings about how they will act. Third, within this
altered conceptual framework these choices are described in mentalistic (i.e. psychological) language.
Fourth, terminology of precisely this kind is critically necessary for the design and execution of the
experiments in which the data demonstrating the core phenomena of self-directed neuroplasticity are
acquired and described. Fifth, the injection of psychologically described choices on the part of human
agents into the causal theoretical structure can be achieved for experiments in neuroscience by applying
the same mathematical rules that were developed to account for the structure of phenomena in the
realm of atomic science.

The consequence of these facts is that twentieth century physics, in contrast to classic physics, provides
a rationally coherent pragmatic framework in which the psychologically and neurophysiologically
described aspects of the neuroscience experiments mentioned above are causally related to each other
in mathematically specified ways. Thus, contemporary physics allows the data from the rapidly emerging
coherent, scientific and useful than what is permitted by theories in which all causation is required to be
fundamentally mechanical.

To explicate the physics of the interface between mind/consciousness and the physical brain, we shall in
this article describe in detail how the quantum mechanically based causal mechanisms work, and show
why it is necessary in principle to advance to the quantum level to achieve an adequate theory of the
neurophysiology of volitionally directed activity. The reason, essentially, is that classic physics is an
approximation to the more accurate quantum theory, and that this classic approximation eliminates the
causal efficacy of our conscious efforts that these experiments empirically manifest.

We shall also explain how certain structural features of ion conductance channels critical to synaptic
function entail that the classic approximation fails in principle to cover the dynamics of a human brain.
Quantum dynamics must be used in principle. Furthermore, once the transition to the quantum
description is made, the principles of quantum theory must, in order to maintain rational consistency
and coherency, be used to link the quantum physical description of the subject's brain to their stream of
conscious experiences. The conscious choices by human agents thereby become injected non-trivially
into the causal interpretation of neuroscience and neuropsychology experiments. This caveat
particularly applies to those experimental paradigms in which human subjects are required to perform
decision-making or attention-focusing tasks that require conscious effort.

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Clarity is required about the sorts of neuroscientific reasoning that remain coherent, given the structure
of modern physics and, contrastingly, the types of assertion that can now be viewed as the residue of a
materialistic bias stemming from superseded physics. Entirely acceptable are correlational analyses
about the relationship between mentalistic data and neurophysiological mechanisms. Examining the
qualitative and quantitative aspects of brain function, and doing detailed analyses of how they relate to
the data of experience, obtained through increasingly sophisticated means of psychological investigation
and subject self-report analysis (e.g. the entire SeptemberOctober 2003 issue of Journal of
Consciousness Studies, volume 10, number 910, is dedicated to these questions), are completely in line
with fundamental physics. These activities are the core of neuropsychological science. What is not
justified is the presumption, either tacit or explicit, that all aspects of experience examined and reported
are necessarily causal consequences solely of brain mechanisms. The structure of contemporary physics
entails no such conclusion. This is particularly relevant to data from first-person reports about active,
wilfully directed attentional focus, and especially to data pertaining to which aspects of the stream of
conscious awareness a subject chooses to focus on when making self-directed efforts to modify and/or
modulate the quality and beam of attention. In such cases, the structure of orthodox quantum physics
implies that the investigator is not justified in assuming that the focus of attention is determined wholly
by brain mechanisms that are in principle completely well-defined and mechanically determined.
Conscious effort itself can, justifiably within science, be taken to be a primary variable whose complete
causal origins may be untraceable in principle, but whose causal efficacy in the physical world can be
explained on the basis of the laws of physics.

As already emphasized, the cognitive frame in which neuroscience research, including research on
cerebral aspects of behaviour, is generally conducted contains within it the assumption that brain
mechanisms are in principle fully sufficient to explain all of the observed phenomena. In the fields of
functional neuroimaging, this has led to experimental paradigms that focus primarily on changes in brain
activation as primary variables used to explain whatever behavioural changes are observedincluding
ones understood as involving essentially cognitive and emotional responses. As long as one is
investigating phenomena that are mostly passive in nature this may be fully justified. A person is shown
a picture depicting an emotionally or perhaps a sexually arousing scene. The relevant limbic and/or
diencephalic structures are activated. The investigator generally concludes that the observed brain
activation has some intrinsic causal role in the emotional changes reported (or, perhaps, the hormonal
correlates of those changes).

This method is all well and good, as far as it goes. In addition, from the experimental subject's
perspective, it is all quite passiveall that is really required on his or her part is to remain reasonably
awake and alert or, more precisely, at least somewhat responsive to sensory inputs. But when, as
happens in a growing number of studies, the subject makes an active response aimed at systematically
altering the nature of the emotional reactionfor example, by actively performing a cognitive
reattributionthen the demand that the data be understood solely from the perspective of brain-based
causal mechanism is a severe and counter-intuitive constraint. It is noteworthy that this demand for an
entirely brain-based causal mechanism is nullified, in the quantum model developed here, by a specified
quantum effect, which will be described in detail below.

Surmounting the limitations imposed by restricting one's ideas to the failed concepts of classic physics
can be especially important when one is investigating how to develop improved methods for altering
the emotional and cerebral responses to significantly stressful external or internally generated stimuli.
An incorrect assignment of the causal roles of neurophysiologically and mentalistically described
variables can impact negatively on a therapist's selection of a course of treatment, on a patient's
capacity to recover, and on a neuroscientist's design of clinically relevant research programmes.

In the analysis and development of clinical practices involving psychological treatments and their
biological effects, the possession and use of a rationally coherent and physically allowable conception of
the causal relationship between mind and brain (or, if one prefers, mentalistic and neurophysiological
variables) is critical. If one simply accepts the standard presumption that all aspects of emotional
response are passively determined by neurobiological mechanisms, then the theoretical development of
genuinely effective self-directed psychological strategies that produce real neurobiological changes can
be impeded by the fact that one is using a theory that excludes from the dynamics what logically can be,
and in our model actually are, key causal elements, namely our wilful choices.

The clinician's attention is thus directed away from what can be in many cases, at the level of actual
practice, a powerful determinant of action, namely the subject's psychologically (i.e. mentalistically)
framed commitment to act or think in specific ways. The therapist tends to becomes locked into the
view that the psychological treatment of ailments caused by neurobiological impairments is not a
realistic goal.

There is already a wealth of data arguing against this view. For instance, work in the 1990s on patients
with obsessive compulsive disorder demonstrated significant changes in caudate nucleus metabolism
and the functional relationships of the orbitofrontal cortexstriatumthalamus circuitry in patients who
responded to a psychological treatment using cognitive reframing and attentional refocusing as key
aspects of the therapeutic intervention (for review, see Schwartz & Begley 2002). More recently, work
by Beauregard and colleagues (Paquette et al. 2003) has demonstrated systematic changes in the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus after cognitive-behavioural therapy for
phobia of spiders, with brain changes significantly related to both objective measurements and
subjective reports of fear and aversion. There are now numerous reports on the effects of self-directed
regulation of emotional response, via cognitive reframing and attentional re-contextualization
mechanisms, on cerebral function (e.g. Schwartz et al. 1996; Beauregard et al. 2001; Ochsner et al. 2002;
Lvesque et al. 2003; Paquette et al. 2003;).

The brain area generally activated in all the studies done so far on the self-directed regulation of
emotional response is the prefrontal cortex, a cortical region also activated in studies of cerebral
correlates of wilful mental activity, particularly those investigating self-initiated action and the act of
attending to one's own actions (Spence & Frith 1999; Schwartz & Begley 2002). There is, however, one
aspect of wilful mental activity that seems particularly critical to emotional self-regulation, and that
seems to be the critical factor in its effective applicationthe factor of focused dispassionate
self-observation that, in a rapidly growing number of clinical psychology studies, has come to be called
mindfulness or mindful awareness (Segal et al. 2002).

The mental act of clear-minded introspection and observation, variously known as mindfulness, mindful
awareness, bare attention, the impartial spectator, etc., is a well-described psychological phenomenon
with a long and distinguished history in the description of human mental states (Nyanaponika 2000). The
most systematic and extensive exposition is in the canonical texts of classic Buddhism preserved in the
Pali language, a dialect of Sanskrit. Because of the critical importance of this type of close attentiveness
in the practice of Buddhist meditation, some of its most refined descriptions in English are in texts
concerned with meditative practice (although it is of critical importance to realize that the mindful
mental state does not require any specific meditative practice to acquire, and is certainly not in any
sense a trance-like state).

One particularly well-established description, using the name bare attention, is as follows:

Bare Attention is the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the
successive moments of perception. It is called Bare because it attends just to the bare facts of a
perception as presented either through the five physical senses or through the mindwithout reacting
to them.

(Nyanaponika 1973, p. 30)

Perhaps the essential characteristic of mindful observation is that you are just watching, observing all
facts, both inner and outer, very calmly, clearly and closely. To sustain this attentional perspective over
time, especially during stressful events, invariably requires the conscious application of effort.

A working hypothesis for ongoing investigation in human neurophysiology, based on a significant body
of preliminary data, is that the mental action of mindful awareness specifically modulates the activity of
the prefrontal cortex. Because of the well-established role of this cortical area in the planning and wilful
selection of self-initiated responses (Spence & Frith 1999; Schwartz & Begley 2002), the capacity of
mindful awareness, and by implication all emotional self-regulating strategies, to specifically modulate
activity in this critical brain region has tremendous implications for the fields of mental health and
related areas.

It might be claimed that the designs and executions of successful clinical practices (and of informative
neuropsychological experiments) that depend on the idea of the causal efficacy of conscious effort, and
which fit so well into the quantum conceptualization that actually explains the causal efficacy of these
efforts, could just as well be carried out within the conceptual framework in which the causal efficacy of
wilful effort is an illusion, or is something very different from what it intuitively seems to be. But such a
claim is not easy to defend. Simple models that are consistent with basic intuition and lead directly to
experimentally demonstrable conclusions are better than philosophically intricate ones that lead to the
same conclusions. Of course, if it could be argued that the simple model could not be true because it
reasonable grounds for question or dispute. But in the present case the reverse is true: it is the simple
model that is built on the basic laws of physics and it is the arcane and philosophically difficult model, in
which our basic human intuition concerning the efficacy of mental effort is denied as not being what it
seems to be, which contradicts the laws of physics.

The major theoretical issue we address in this article is the failure of classic models of neurobiological
action to provide a scientifically adequate account for all of the mechanisms that are operating when
human beings use self-directed strategies for the purpose of modulating emotional responses and their
cerebral correlates. Specifically, the assumption that all aspects of mental activity and emotional life are
ultimately explicable solely in terms of micro-local deterministic brain activity, with no superposed
effects of mental effort, produces a theoretical structure that both fails to meet practical scientific
needs, and also fails to accord with the causal structure of modern physics.

In the alternative approach the role played by the mind, when one is observing and modulating one's
own emotional states, is an intrinsically active and physically efficacious process in which mental action
is affecting brain activity in a way concordant with the laws of physics. A culturally relevant way of
framing this change is to say that contemporary physics imbues the venerable and therapeutically useful
term psychodynamic with rigorous neurophysical efficacy.

This new theory of the mindbrain connection is supportive of clinical practice. Belief in the efficacy of
the efficacy of effort is required to sustain mindfulness during stressful events). Moreover, a conceptual
framework in which psychologically described efforts have effects is needed to explain to patients what
they are supposed to do when directing their inner resources to the challenging task of modifying
emotional and cerebral responses. Clinical success is jeopardized by a belief on the part of either
therapists or patients that their mental effort is an illusion or a misconception.

It takes effort for people to achieve therapeutic results. That is because it requires a redirection of the
brain's resources away from lower level limbic responses and toward higher level prefrontal
functionsand this does not happen passively. Rather, it requires, in actual practice, both wilful training
and directed mental effort. It is semantically inconsistent and clinically counterproductive to insist that
these kinds of brain changes be viewed as being solely an intra-cerebral the physical brain changing
itself type of action. That is because practical aspects of the activity of mind essential to the
identification, activation, application and use of directed mental effort are not describable solely in
terms of material brain mechanisms. The core phenomena necessary for the scientific description of
self-directed neuroplasticity are processes that cannot be elaborated solely in terms of classic models of

Furthermore, as we will see in detail in the following sections of this article, orthodox concepts of
contemporary physics are ideally suited to a rational and practically useful understanding of the action
of mindful self-observation on brain function. Classic models of physics, which view all action in the
physical world as being ultimately the result of the movements of material particles, are now seriously
out of date, and no longer need be seen as providing the unique, or the best, scientifically
well-grounded paradigm for investigating the interface between mind/consciousness and brain.
When people practice self-directed activities for the purpose of systematically altering patterns of
cerebral activation they are attending to their mental and emotional experiences, not merely their
limbic or hypothalamic brain mechanisms. And although no scientifically oriented person denies that
those brain mechanisms play a critical role in generating those experiences, precisely what the person is
training him- or herself to do is to wilfully change how those brain mechanisms operateand to do that
requires attending to mental experience per se. It is, in fact, the basic thesis of self-directed
neuroplasticity research that the way in which a person directs their attention (e.g. mindfully or
unmindfully) will affect both the experiential state of the person and the state of his/her brain. The
existence of this close connection between mental effort and brain activity flows naturally out of the
dynamic principles of contemporary physics, but is, within the framework of classic physics, a difficult
problem that philosophers of the mind have been intensively engaged with, particularly for the past 50
years. The core question is whether the solution to this problem lies wholly in the eventual development
of a more sophisticated philosophy that is closely aligned with the classic
known-to-be-fundamentally-false conception of nature, or whether the profound twentieth century
development in physics, that assigns a subtle but essential causal role to human consciousness, can
usefully inform our understanding of the effects of human consciousness in neuropsychological
experiments that appear to exhibit the causally efficacious presence of such effects.

To appreciate the major conceptual changes made in basic physical theory during the twentieth century,
one must know about certain key features of the older theory.

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Classic physics is a theory of nature that originated with the work of Isaac Newton in the seventeenth
century and was advanced by the contributions of James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. Newton
based his theory on the work of Johannes Kepler, who found that the planets appeared to move in
accordance with a simple mathematical law, and in ways wholly determined by their spatial
relationships to other objects. Those motions were apparently independent of our human observations
of them.

Newton effectively assumed that all physical objects were made of tiny miniaturized versions of the
planets, which, like the planets, moved in accordance with simple mathematical laws, independently of
whether we observed them or not. He found that he could then explain the motions of the planets and
also the motions of large terrestrial objects and systems, such as cannon balls, falling apples and the
tides, by assuming that every tiny planet-like particle in the solar system attracted every other one with
This force was an instantaneous action at a distance: it acted instantaneously, no matter how far the
particles were apart. This feature troubled Newton. He wrote to a friend That one body should act upon
another through the vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action
who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it (Newton 1687, p.
634). Although Newton's philosophical persuasion on this point is clear, he nevertheless formulated his
universal law of gravity without specifying how it was mediated.

Albert Einstein, building on the ideas of Maxwell, discovered a suitable mediating agent, a distortion of
the structure of spacetime itself. Einstein's contributions made classic physics into what is called a local
theory: there is no action at a distance. All influences are transmitted essentially by contact interactions
between tiny neighbouring mathematically described entities, and no influence propagates faster than
the speed of light.

Classic physics is, moreover, deterministic: the interactions are such that the state of the physical world
at any time is completely determined by the state at any earlier time. Consequently, according to classic
theory, the complete history of the physical world for all time is mechanically fixed by contact
interactions between tiny component parts, together with the initial condition of the primordial

This result means that, according to classic physics, you are a mechanical automaton: your every
physical action was predetermined before you were born solely by mechanical interactions between tiny
mindless entities. Your mental aspects are causally redundant: everything you do is completely
determined by mechanical conditions alone, without any mention of your thoughts, ideas, feelings or
intentions. Your intuitive feeling that your conscious intentions make a difference in what you do is,
according to the principles of classic physics, a false and misleading illusion.

There are two possible ways within classic physics to understand this total incapacity of your mental side
(i.e. your stream of conscious thoughts and feelings) to make any difference in what you do. The first
way is to consider your thoughts, ideas and feelings to be epiphenomenal by-products of the activity of
your brain. Your mental side is then a causally impotent sideshow that is produced, or caused, by your
brain, but that produces no reciprocal action back upon your brain. The second way is to contend that
each of your conscious experienceseach of your thoughts, ideas, or feelingsis the very same thing as
some pattern of motion of various tiny parts of your brain.
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William James (1890, p. 138) argued against the first possibility, epiphenomenal consciousness, by
claiming that The particulars of the distribution of consciousness, so far as we know them, points to its
being efficacious. He noted that consciousness seems to be an organ, superadded to the other organs
which maintain the animal in its struggle for existence; and the presumption of course is that it helps
him in some way in this struggle, just as they do. But it cannot help him without being in some way
efficacious and influencing the course of his bodily history. James said that the study described in his
book will show us that consciousness is at all times primarily a selecting agency. It is present when
choices must be made between different possible courses of action. He further mentioned that It is to
my mind quite inconceivable that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business to which it
so faithfully attends (1890, p. 136).

If mental processes and consciousness have no effect upon the physical world, then what keeps a
person's mental world aligned with their physical situation? What keeps their pleasures in general
alignment with actions that benefit them, and pains in general correspondence with things that damage
them, if felt pleasures and pains have no effect at all upon their actions?

These liabilities of the notion of epiphenomenal mind and consciousness lead many thinkers to turn to
the alternative possibility that a person's mind and stream of consciousness is the very same thing as
some activity in their brain: mind and consciousness are emergent properties of brains.

A huge philosophical literature has developed arguing for and against this idea. The primary argument
against this emergent-identity theory position, within a classic physics framework, is that in classic
physics the full description of nature is in terms of numbers assigned to tiny spacetime regions, and
there appears to be no way to understand or explain how to get from such a restricted conceptual
structure, which involves such a small part of the world of experience, to the whole. How and why
should that extremely limited conceptual structure (which arose basically from idealizing, by
miniaturization, certain features of observed planetary motions) suffice to explain the totality of
experience, with its pains, sorrows, hopes, colours, smells and moral judgements? Why, given the
known failure of classic physics at the fundamental level, should that richly endowed whole be
explainable in terms of such a narrowly restricted part?
The core ideas of the arguments in favour of an identity-emergent theory of mind and consciousness are
illustrated by Roger Sperry's (1992) example of a wheel. A wheel obviously does something: it is
causally efficacious; it carries the cart. It is also an emergent property: there is no mention of
wheelness in the formulation of the laws of physics and wheelness did not exist in the early universe;
wheelness emerges only under certain special conditions. And the macroscopic wheel exercises
top-down control of its tiny parts. All these properties are perfectly in line with classic physics, and with
the idea that a wheel is, precisely, a structure constructed out of its tiny atomic parts. So why not
suppose mind and consciousness to be, like wheelness, emergent properties of their classically
conceived tiny physical parts?

The reason that mind and consciousness are not analogous to wheelness, within the context of classic
physics, is that the properties that characterize wheelness are properties that are entailed, within the
conceptual framework of classic physics, by properties specified in classic physics, whereas the
properties that characterize conscious mental processes, namely the various ways these processes feel,
are not entailed within the conceptual structure provided by classic physics, but by the properties
specified by classic physics.

That is the huge difference-in-principle that distinguishes mind and consciousness from things that,
according to classic physics, are constructible out of the particles that are postulated to exist by classic

Given the state of motion of each of the tiny physical parts of a wheel, as it is conceived of in classic
physics, the properties that characterize the wheel (e.g. its roundness, radius, centre point, rate of
rotation, etc.) are specified within the conceptual framework provided by the principles of classic
physics, which specify only geometric-type properties such as changing locations and shapes of
conglomerations of particles and numbers assigned to points in space. But given the state of motion of
each tiny part of the brain, as it is conceived of in classic physics, the properties that characterize the
stream of consciousness (the painfulness of the pain, the feeling of the anguish, or of the sorrow, or of
the joy) are not specified, within the conceptual framework provided by the principles of classic physics.
Thus it is possible, within that classic physics framework, to strip away those feelings without disturbing
the physical descriptions of the motions of the tiny parts. One can, within the conceptual framework of
classic physics, take away the consciousness while leaving intact the properties that enter into that
theoretical construct, namely the locations and motions of the tiny physical parts of the brain and its
physical environment. But one cannot, within the conceptual framework provided by classic physics,
take away the physical characteristics that define the wheelness of a wheel without affecting the
locations and motions of the tiny physical parts of the wheel.
Because one can, within the conceptual framework provided by classic physics, strip away mind and
consciousness without affecting the physical behaviour, one cannot rationally claim, within that
framework, that mind and consciousness are the causes of the physical behaviour, or are causally
efficacious in the physical world. Thus the identity theory or emergent property strategy fails in its
attempt to make mind and consciousness efficacious, insofar as one remains strictly within the
conceptual framework provided by classic physics. Moreover, the whole endeavour to base brain theory
on classic physics is undermined by the fact that classic theory is unable to account for behavioural
properties (such as electrical and thermal conductivity, and elasticity, etc.) that depend sensitively upon
the behaviour of the atomic, molecular and ionic constituents of a system, and brains are certainly
systems of this kind, as will be discussed in detail later.

Although classic physics is unable to account for observable properties that depend sensitively on the
behaviours of atoms, molecules and ions, the classic theory is an approximation to a more accurate
theory, called quantum theory, which is able to account for these observable macroscopic properties.
But if classic physics is unable to account for the moderately complex behavioural properties of most
other large systems, then how can it be expected to account for the exquisitely complex behavioural
properties of thinking brains?

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Early in the twentieth century scientists discovered empirically that the principles of classic physics could
not be correct. Moreover, those principles were wrong in ways that no minor tinkering could ever fix.
The basic principles of classic physics were thus replaced by new basic principles that account uniformly
for all the successes of the older classic theory and for all the data that are incompatible with the classic

The key philosophical and scientific achievement of the founders of quantum theory was to forge a
rationally coherent and practicable linkage between the two kinds of description that jointly comprise
the foundation of science. Descriptions of the first kind are accounts of psychologically experienced
empirical findings, expressed in a language that allows us to communicate to our colleagues what we
have done and what we have learned. Descriptions of the second kind are specifications of physical
properties, which are expressed by assigning mathematical properties to spacetime points and
formulating laws that determine how these properties evolve over the course of time. Bohr, Heisenberg,
Pauli and the other inventors of quantum theory discovered a useful way to connect these two kinds of
description by causal laws. Their seminal discovery was extended by John von Neumann from the
domain of atomic science to the realm of neuroscience and, in particular, to the problem of
understanding and describing the causal connections between the minds and the brains of human

In order to achieve this result, the whole concept of what science is was turned inside out. The core idea
of classic physics was to describe the world out there, with no reference to our thoughts in here. But
the core idea of quantum mechanics is to describe both our activities as knowledge-seeking and
knowledge-acquiring agents, and the knowledge that we thereby acquire. Thus, quantum theory
involves, essentially, what is in here, not just what is out there.

This philosophical shift arises from the explicit recognition by quantum physicists that science is about
what we can know. It is fine to have a beautiful and elegant mathematical theory about a really existing
physical world out there that meets various intellectually satisfying criteria. But the essential demand of
science is that the theoretical constructs be tied to the experiences of the human scientists who devise
ways of testing the theory and of the human engineers and technicians who both participate in these
tests and eventually put the theory to work. Thus, the structure of a proper physical theory must involve
not only the part describing the behaviour of the not-directly experienced theoretically postulated
entities, expressed in some appropriate symbolic language, but also a part describing the human
experiences that are pertinent to these tests and applications, expressed in the language that we
actually use to describe such experiences to ourselves and to each other. And the theory must specify
the connection between these two differently described and differently conceived parts of scientific

Classic physics meets this final requirement in a trivial way. The relevant experiences of the human
participants are taken to be direct apprehensions of the gross properties of large objects composed of
huge numbers of their tiny atomic-scale parts. These apprehensions (of, for example, the perceived
location and motion of a falling apple or the position of a pointer on a measuring device) were taken to
be passive: they had no effect on the behaviours of the systems being studied. But the physicists who
were examining the behaviours of systems that depend sensitively upon the behaviours of their tiny
atomic-scale components found themselves forced to introduce a less trivial theoretical arrangement. In
the new scheme the human agents are no longer passive observers. They are considered to be active
agents or participants.

The participation of the agent continues to be important even when the only features of the physically
described world being observed are large-scale properties of measuring devices. The sensitivity of the
behaviour of the devices to the behaviour of some tiny atomic-scale particles propagates first to the
devices and then to the observers in such a way that the choice made by an observer about what sort of
knowledge to seek can profoundly affect the knowledge that can ever be received either by that
observer himself or by any other observer with whom he can communicate. Thus the choice made by
the observer about how he or she will act at a macroscopic level has, at the practical level, a profound
effect on the physical system being acted upon.

That conclusion is not surprising. How one acts on a system would, in general, be expected to affect it.
Nor is it shocking that the effect of the agent's actions upon the system being probed is specified by the
quantum mechanical rules. But the essential point not to be overlooked is that the logical structure of
the basic physical theory has become fundamentally transformed. The agent's choice about how to act
has been introduced into the scientific description at a basic level and in a way that specifies,
mathematically, how his or her choice about how to act affects the physical system being acted upon.

The structure of quantum mechanics is such that, although the effect upon the observed system of the
agent's choice about how to act is mathematically specified, the manner in which this choice itself is
determined is not specified. This means that, in the treatment of experimental data, the choices made
by human agents must be treated as freely chosen input variables, rather than as mechanical
consequences of any known laws of nature. Quantum theory thereby converts science's concept of us
from that of a mechanical automaton, whose conscious choices are mere cogs in a gigantic mechanical
machine, to that of agents whose conscious free choices affect the physically described world in a way
specified by the theory. The approximation that reduces quantum theory to classic physics completely
eliminates the important element of conscious free choice. Hence, from a physics point of view, trying
to understand the connection between mind/consciousness and brain by going to the classic
approximation is absurd: it amounts to trying to understand something in an approximation that
eliminates the effect we are trying to study.

This original formulation of quantum theory was created primarily at an institute in Copenhagen
directed by Niels Bohr and is called the Copenhagen interpretation. Owing to the strangeness of the
properties of nature entailed by the new mathematics, the Copenhagen strategy was to refrain from
making any ordinary sort of ontological claims, but instead to take an essentially pragmatic stance. Thus,
the theory was formulated basically as a set of practical rules for how scientists should go about the
tasks of acquiring, manipulating and using knowledge. Claims about what the world out there is really
like were considered to lie beyond science.

This change in perspective is captured by Heisenberg's famous statement:


(Heisenberg 1958, p. 100).

A closely connected change is encapsulated in Niels Bohrs dictum that in the great drama of existence
we ourselves are both actors and spectators (Bohr 1963, p. 15; 1958, p. 81). The emphasis here is on
actors: in classic physics we were mere spectators. The key idea is more concretely expressed in
statements such as:

The freedom of experimentation, presupposed in classic physics, is of course retained and corresponds
mechanical formalism offers the appropriate latitude.

(Bohr 1958, p. 73)

Copenhagen quantum theory is about how the choices made by conscious human agents affect the
knowledge they can and do acquire about the physically described systems upon which these agents
act. In order to achieve this re-conceptualization of physics the Copenhagen formulation separates the
physical universe into two parts, which are described in two different languages. One part is the
observing human agent plus its measuring devices. This extended agent, which includes the devices, is
described in mental termsin terms of our instructions to colleagues about how to set up the devices
and our reports of what we then see, or otherwise consciously experience. The other part of nature is
the system that the agent is acting upon. That part is described in physical termsin terms of
mathematical properties assigned to tiny spacetime regions. Thus, Copenhagen quantum theory brings
doing science into science. In particular, it brings a crucial part of doing science, namely our choices
about how we will probe nature, directly into the causal structure. It specifies the effects of these
probing actions upon the systems being probed.

This approach works very well in practice. However, the body and brain of the human agent, and also
their devices, are composed of atomic constituents. Hence a complete theory ought to be able to
describe these systems in physical terms.
The great mathematician and logician John von Neumann formulated quantum theory in a rigorous way
that allows the bodies and brains of the agents, along with their measuring devices, to be shifted into
the physically described world. This shift is carried out in a series of steps, each of which moves more of
what the Copenhagen approach took to be the psychologically described observing system into the
physically described observed system. At each step the crucial act of choosing or deciding between
possible optional observing actions remains undetermined by the physical observed system. This act of
choosing is always ascribed to the observing agent. In the end all that is left of this agent is what von
Neumann calls his abstract ego. It is described in psychological terms, and is, in practice, the stream of
consciousness of the agent.

At each step the direct effect of the conscious act is upon the part of the physically described world that
is closest to the psychologically described world. This means that, in the end, the causal effect of the
agent's mental action is on their own brain, or some significant part of their brain.

von Neumann makes the logical structure of quantum theory very clear by identifying two very different
processes, which he calls process 1 and process 2 (von Neumann 1955, p. 418). Process 2 is the analogue
in quantum theory of the process in classic physics that takes the state of a system at one time to its
state at a later time. This process 2, like its classic analogue, is local and deterministic. However, process
2 by itself is not the whole story: it generates a host of physical worlds, most of which do not agree
with our human experience. For example, if process 2 were, from the time of the big bang, the only
process in nature, then the quantum state (centre point) of the moon would represent a structure
smeared out over a large part of the sky, and each human bodybrain would likewise be represented by
a structure smeared out continuously over a huge region. Process 2 generates a cloud of possible
worlds, instead of the one world we actually experience.

This huge disparity between properties generated by the mechanical process 2 and the properties we
actually observe is resolved by invoking process 1.

Any physical theory must, in order to be complete, specify how the elements of the theory are
connected to human experience. In classic physics this connection is part of a metaphysical
superstructure: it is not part of the dynamic process. But in quantum theory a linkage of the
mathematically described physical state to human experiences is contained in the mathematically
specified dynamic. This connection is not passive. It is not a mere witnessing of a physical feature of
nature. Instead, it injects into the physical state of the system being acted upon specific properties that
depend upon choices made by the agent.
Quantum theory is built upon the practical concept of intentional actions by agents. Each such action is
a preparation that is expected or intended to produce an experiential response or feedback. For
example, a scientist might act to place a Geiger counter near a radioactive source and expect to see the
counter either fire during a certain time-interval or not fire during that interval. The experienced
response, Yes or No, to the question, Does the counter fire during the specified interval?, specifies
one bit of information. Quantum theory is thus an information-based theory built upon the preparative
actions of information-seeking agents.

Probing actions of this kind are not only performed by scientists. Every healthy and alert infant is
continually engaged in making wilful efforts that produce experiential feedbacks and he or she soon
begins to form expectations about what sorts of feedbacks are probable to follow from some particular
kind of effort. Thus, both empirical science and normal human life are based on paired realities of this
actionresponse kind, and our physical and psychological theories are both basically attempting to
understand these linked realities within a rational conceptual framework.

The basic building blocks of quantum theory are, then, a set of intentional actions by agents and for
each such action an associated collection of possible Yes feedbacks, which are the possible responses
that the agent can judge to be in conformity to the criteria associated with that intentional act. For
example, the agent is assumed to be able to make the judgement Yes the Geiger counter clicked, or
No the Geiger counter did not click. Science would be difficult to pursue if scientists could make no
such judgements about what they are experiencing.

All known physical theories involve idealizations of one kind or another. In quantum theory the main
idealization is not that every object is made up of miniature planet-like objects. It is rather that there are
agents that perform intentional acts each of which can result in feedback that may or may not conform
to a certain criterion associated with that act. One piece of information is introduced into the world in
which that agent lives, according to whether or not the feedback conforms to that criterion. The answer
places the agent on one or the other of two alternative possible branches of the course of world history.

These remarks reveal the enormous difference between classic physics and quantum physics. In classic
physics the elemental ingredients are tiny invisible bits of matter that are idealized miniaturized versions
of the planets that we see in the heavens and that move in ways unaffected by our scrutiny, whereas in
quantum physics the elemental ingredients are intentional preparative actions by agents, the feedbacks
arising from these actions and the effects of these actions upon the physically described states of the
probed systems.
This radical restructuring of the form of physical theory grew out of a seminal discovery by Heisenberg.
That discovery was that in order to get a satisfactory quantum generalization of a classic theory one
must replace various numbers in the classic theory by actions (operators). A key difference between
numbers and actions is that if A and B are two actions then AB represents the action obtained by
performing the action A upon the action B. If A and B are two different actions then generally AB is
different from BA: the order in which actions are performed matters. But for numbers the order does
not matter: AB=BA.

The difference between quantum physics and its classic approximation resides in the fact that in the
quantum case certain differences ABBA are proportional to a number measured by Max Planck in 1900,
and called Planck's constant. Setting those differences to zero gives the classic approximation. Thus
quantum theory is closely connected to classic physics, but is incompatible with it, because certain
non-zero quantities must be replaced by zero to obtain the classic approximation.

The intentional actions of agents are represented mathematically in Heisenberg's space of actions. A
description of how it operates follows.

Each intentional action depends, of course, on the intention of the agent and upon the state of the
system upon which this action acts. Each of these two aspects of nature is represented within
Heisenberg's space of actions by an action. The idea that a state should be represented by an action
may sound odd, but Heisenberg's key idea was to replace what classic physics took to be a being with a
doing. We shall denote the action (or operator) that represents the state being acted upon by the
symbol S.

An intentional act is an action that is intended to produce a feedback of a certain conceived or imagined
kind. Of course, no intentional act is certain: one's intentions may not be fulfilled. Hence the intentional
action merely puts into play a process that will lead either to a confirmatory feedback Yes, the
intention is realized, or to the result No, the Yes response did not occur.

The effect of this intentional mental act is represented mathematically by an equation that is one of the
key components of quantum theory. This equation represents, within quantum mathematics, the effect
of process 1 action upon the quantum state S of the system being acted upon. The equation is:

This formula exhibits the important fact that this process 1 action changes the state S of the system
being acted upon into a new state S, which is a sum of two parts.

The first part, PSP, represents in physical terms, the possibility in which the experiential feedback called
Yes appears and the second part, (IP)S(IP), represents the alternative possibility No, this Yes
feedback does not appear. Thus, an effect of the probing action is injected into the mathematical
description of the physical system being acted upon.

The operator P is important. The action represented by P, acting both on the right and on the left of S, is
the action of eliminating from the state S all parts of S except the Yes part. That particular retained part
is determined by the choice made by the agent. The symbol I is the unit operator, which is essentially
multiplication by the number 1, and the action of (IP), acting both on the right and on the left of S is,
analogously, to eliminate from S all parts of S except the No parts.

Notice that process 1 produces the sum of the two alternative possible feedbacks, not just one or the
other. Since the feedback must either be Yes or No=NotYes, one might think that process 1, which
keeps both the Yes and the No possibilities, would do nothing. But that is not correct. This is a key
point. It can be made absolutely clear by noticing that S can be written as a sum of four parts, only two
of which survive the process 1 action:


This formula is a strict identity. The dedicated reader can quickly verify it by collecting the contributions
of the four occurring terms PSP, PS, SP and S, and verifying that all terms but S cancel out. This identity
shows that the state S is a sum of four parts, two of which are eliminated by process 1.

But this means that process 1 has a non-trivial effect upon the state being acted upon: it eliminates the
two terms that correspond neither to the appearance of a Yes feedback nor to the failure of the Yes
feedback to appear.

This result is the first key point: quantum theory has a specific causal process, process 1, which produces
a non-trivial effect of an agent's choice upon the physical description of the system being examined.
(Nature will eventually choose between Yes and No, but we focus here on the prior process 1, the
agent's choice. Nature's subsequent choice we shall call process 3.)

(a) Free choices

The second key point is this: the agent's choices are free choices, in the specific sense specified below.

Orthodox quantum theory is formulated in a realistic and practical way. It is structured around the
activities of human agents, who are considered able to freely elect to probe nature in any one of many
possible ways. Bohr emphasized the freedom of the experimenters in passages such as the one already
quoted earlier, or the similar:

The foundation of the description of the experimental conditions as well as our freedom to choose them
is fully retained.

(Bohr 1958, p. 90)

This freedom of choice stems from the fact that in the original Copenhagen formulation of quantum
theory the human experimenter is considered to stand outside the system to which the quantum laws
are applied. Those quantum laws are the only precise laws of nature recognized by that theory. Thus,
according to the Copenhagen philosophy, there are no presently known laws that govern the choices
made by the agent/experimenter/observer about how the observed system is to be probed. This choice
is thus, in this very specific sense, a free choice. The von Neumann generalization leaves this freedom
intact. The choices attributed to von Neumann's abstract ego are no more limited by the known rules
of quantum theory than are the choices made by Bohr's experimenter.

(b) Nerve terminals, ion channels and the need to use quantum theory in the study of the mindbrain

Neuroscientists studying the connection of mind and consciousness to physical processes in the brain
often assume that a conception of nature based on classic physics will eventually turn out to be
adequate. That assumption would have been reasonable during the nineteenth century. But now, in the
twenty-first century, it is rationally untenable. Quantum theory must be used in principle because the
behaviour of the brain depends sensitively upon atomic, molecular and ionic processes, and these
processes in the brain often involve large quantum effects.

To study quantum effects in brains within an orthodox (i.e. Copenhagen or von Neumann) quantum
theory one must use the von Neumann formulation. This is because Copenhagen quantum theory is
formulated in a way that leaves out the quantum dynamics of the human observer's body and brain. But
von Neumann quantum theory takes the physical system S upon which the crucial process 1 acts to be
precisely the brain of the agent, or some part of it. Thus process 1 describes here an interaction
between a person's stream of consciousness, described in mentalistic terms, and an activity in their
brain, described in physical terms.

A key question is the quantitative magnitude of quantum effects in the brain. They must be large in
order for deviations from classic physics to play any significant role. To examine this quantitative
question we consider the quantum dynamics of nerve terminals.

Nerve terminals are essential connecting links between nerve cells. The general way they work is
reasonably well understood. When an action potential travelling along a nerve fibre reaches a nerve
terminal, a host of ion channels open. Calcium ions enter through these channels into the interior of the
terminal. These ions migrate from the channel exits to release sites on vesicles containing
neurotransmitter molecules. A triggering effect of the calcium ions causes these contents to be dumped
into the synaptic cleft that separates this terminal from a neighbouring neuron, and these
neurotransmitter molecules influence the tendencies of that neighbouring neuron to fire.

At their narrowest points, calcium ion channels are less than a nanometre in diameter (Cataldi et al.
2002). This extreme smallness of the opening in the calcium ion channels has profound quantum
mechanical implications. The narrowness of the channel restricts the lateral spatial dimension.
Consequently, the lateral velocity is forced by the quantum uncertainty principle to become large. This
causes the quantum cloud of possibilities associated with the calcium ion to fan out over an increasing
area as it moves away from the tiny channel to the target region where the ion will be absorbed as a
whole, or not absorbed at all, on some small triggering site.

This spreading of this ion wave packet means that the ion may or may not be absorbed on the small
triggering site. Accordingly, the contents of the vesicle may or may not be released. Consequently, the
quantum state of the brain has a part in which the neurotransmitter is released and a part in which the
neurotransmitter is not released. This quantum splitting occurs at every one of the trillions of nerve
terminals. This means that the quantum state of the brain splits into a vast host of classically conceived
possibilities, one for each possible combination of the release-or-no-release options at each of the nerve
terminals. In fact, because of uncertainties on timings and locations, what is generated by the physical
processes in the brain will be not a single discrete set of non-overlapping physical possibilities but rather
a huge smear of classically conceived possibilities. Once the physical state of the brain has evolved into
this huge smear of possibilities one must appeal to the quantum rules, and in particular to the effects of
process 1, in order to connect the physically described world to the streams of consciousness of the

This focus on the motions of calcium ions in nerve terminals is not meant to suggest that this particular
effect is the only place where quantum effects enter into the brain process, or that the quantum process
1 acts locally at these sites. What is needed here is only the existence of some large quantum of effect.
The focus upon these calcium ions stems from the facts that (i) in this case the various sizes
(dimensions) needed to estimate the magnitude of the quantum effects are empirically known, and (ii)
that the release of neurotransmitter into synaptic clefts is known to play a significant role in brain

an essentially classic world.

von Neumann formulation employed here. These effects merely convert the state S of the brain into
what is called a statistical mixture of nearly classically describable states, each of which develops in
time (in the absence of process 1 events), in an almost classically describable way.

The existence of strong decoherence effects makes the main consequences of quantum theory being
discussed here more easily accessible to neuroscientists by effectively reducing the complex quantum
state of the brain to a collection of almost classically describable possibilities. Because of the
uncertainties introduced at the ionic, atomic, molecular and electronic levels, the brain state will
develop not into one single classically describable macroscopic state, as it does in classic physics, but
into a continuous distribution of parallel virtual states of this kind. Process 1 must then be invoked to
allow definite empirical predictions to be extracted from this continuous smear of parallel overlapping
almost-classic possibilities generated by process 2.
(c) Quantum brain dynamics

A principal function of the brain is to receive clues from the environment, to form an appropriate plan of
action and to direct and monitor the activities of the brain and body specified by the selected plan of
action. The exact details of the plan will, for a classic model, obviously depend upon the exact values of
many noisy and uncontrolled variables. In cases close to a bifurcation point, the dynamic effects of noise
might even tip the balance between two very different responses to the given clues, for example, tip the
balance between the fight or flight response to some shadowy form. It is important to realize that the
exact values accounting for what in classic physics models are called dynamic effects of noise are
unknowable in principle. The contemporary physical model accounts for these uncertainties in brain

The effect of the independent release or do not release options at each of the trigger sites, coupled
with the uncertainty in the timing of the vesicle release at each of the trillions of nerve terminals, will be
to cause the quantum mechanical state of the brain to become a smeared-out cloud of different
macroscopic possibilities, some representing different alternative possible plans of action. As long as the
brain dynamic is controlled wholly by process 2which is the quantum generalization of the Newtonian
laws of motion of classic physicsall of the various alternative possible plans of action will exist in
parallel, with no one plan of action singled out as the one that will actually be experienced.

Some process beyond the local deterministic process 2 is required to pick out one experienced course of
physical events from the smeared-out mass of possibilities generated by all of the alternative possible
combinations of vesicle releases at all of the trillions of nerve terminals. As already emphasized, this
other process is process 1. This process brings in a choice that is not determined by any currently known
law of nature, yet has a definite effect upon the brain of the chooser. The process 1 choice picks an
operator P and also a time t at which P acts. The effect of this action at time t is to change the state S(t)
of the brain, or of some large part of the brain, to


The action P cannot act at a point in the brain, because action at a point would dump a huge (in principle
infinite) amount of energy into the brain, which would then explode. The operator P must, therefore, act
non-locally, over a potentially large part of the brain.
In examining the question of the nature of the effect in the brain of process 2 we focused on the
separate motions of the individual particles. But the physical structures in terms of which the action of
process 1 is naturally expressed are not the separate motions of individual particles. They are, rather,
the quasi-stable macroscopic degrees of freedom. The brain structures selected by the action of P must
enjoy the stability, endurance and causal linkages needed to bring the intended experiential feedbacks
into being.

These functional structures are probably more like the lowest-energy state of the simple harmonic
oscillator, which is completely stable, or like the states obtained from such lowest-energy states by
spatial displacements and shifts in velocity. These shifted states tend to endure as oscillating states. In
other words, in order to create the needed causal structure the projection operator P corresponding to
an intentional action ought to pick out functionally pertinent quasi-stable oscillating states of
macroscopic subsystems of the brain. The state associated with a process 1 preparatory intervention
should be a functionally important brain analogue of a collection of oscillating modes of a drumhead, in
which large assemblies of particles are moving in a coordinated way. Such an enduring structure in the
brain can serve as a trigger and coordinator of further coordinated activities.

(d) Templates for action

The brain process that is actualized by the transition S(t)PS(t)P is the neural correlate of the
psychologically intended action. It is the brain's template for the intended action. It is a pattern of
neuroelectrical activity that, if held in place long enough, will tend to generate a physical action in the
brain that will tend to produce the intended experiential feedback.

(e) Origin of the choices of the process 1 actions

It has been repeatedly emphasized here that the choices by which process 1 actions actually occur are
free choices in the sense that they are not specified by the currently known laws of physics. On the
other hand, a person's intentions are surely related in some way to their historical past. This means that
the laws of contemporary orthodox quantum theory, although restrictive and important, do not provide
a complete picture. In spite of this, orthodox quantum theory, while making no claim to ontological
completeness, is able to achieve a certain kind of pragmatic completeness. It does so by treating the
process 1 free choices as the input variables of experimental protocols, rather than mechanically
determined consequences of brain action.
In quantum physics the free choices made by human subjects are regarded as subjectively controllable
input variables. Bohr emphasized that the mathematical structure of the quantum mechanical
formalism offers the appropriate latitude for these free choices. But the need for this strategic move
goes deeper than the mere fact that contemporary quantum theory fails to specify how these choices
are made. For if in the von Neumann formulation one does seek to determine the cause of the free
choice within the representation of the physical brain of the chooser, one finds that one is
with merely a practical unknowability of the causal origin of the free choices, but with an
quantum mechanics. There is thus a deep root in quantum theory for the idea that the origin of the free
choices does not lie in the physical description alone and also for the consequent policy of treating
these free choices as empirical inputs that are selected by agents and enter into the causal structure
via process 1.

(f) Effort

It is useful to classify process 1 events as either active or passive. Passive process 1 events are
attentional events that occur with little or no feeling of conscious effort. Active process 1 events are
intentional and involve effort. This distinction is given a functional significance by allowing effort to
enter into the selection of process 1 events in a way that will now be specified.

Consciousness probably contributes very little to brain dynamics compared with the contribution of the
brain itself. To minimize the input of consciousness, and in order to achieve testability, we propose to
allow mental effort to do nothing but control attention density, which is the rapidity of the process 1
events. This allows effort to have only a very limited kind of influence on brain activities, which are
largely controlled by physical properties of the brain itself.

The notion that only the attention density is controlled by conscious effort arose from an investigation
into what sort of conscious control over process 1 action was sufficient to accommodate the most
blatant empirical facts. Imposing this strong restriction on the allowed effects of consciousness produces
a theory with correspondingly strong predictive power. In this model all significant effects of
consciousness upon brain activity arise exclusively from a well-known and well-verified strictly quantum
effect known as the quantum Zeno effect (QZE).
(g) The quantum Zeno effect

If one considers only passive events, then it is very difficult to identify any empirical effect of process 1,
apart from the occurrence of awareness. In the first place, the empirical averaging over the Yes and
No possibilities in strict accordance with the quantum laws tends to wash out all effects that depart
from what would arise from a classic statistical analysis that incorporates the uncertainty principle as
simply lack of knowledge. Moreover, the passivity of the mental process means that we have no
empirically controllable variable.

However, the study of effortfully controlled intentional action brings in two empirically accessible
variables, the intention and the amount of effort. It also brings in the important physical QZE. This effect
is named for the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea, and was brought into prominence in 1977 by the
physicists Misra & Sudarshan (1977). It gives a name to the fact that repeated and closely spaced
observational acts can effectively hold the Yes feedback in place for an extended time-interval that
depends upon the rapidity at which the process 1 actions are happening. According to our model, this
rapidity is controlled by the amount of effort being applied. In our notation, the effect is to keep the
Yes condition associated with states of the form PSP in place longer than would be the case if no effort
were being made. This holding effect can override very strong mechanical forces arising from process

The Yes states PSP are assumed to be conditioned by training and learning to contain the template for
action which if held in place for an extended period will tend to produce the intended experiential
feedback. Thus, the model allows intentional mental efforts to tend to bring intended experiences into
being. Systems that have the capacity to exploit this feature of natural law, as it is represented in
quantum theory, would apparently enjoy a tremendous survival advantage over systems that do not or
cannot exploit it.

Go to:


A person's experiential life is a stream of conscious experiences. The person's experienced self is part
of this stream of consciousness: it is not an extra thing that lies outside what the person is conscious of.
In James's words (1890, p. 401) thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond. The
experiential self is a slowly changing fringe part of the stream of consciousness. This part of the
stream of consciousness provides an overall background cause for the central focus of attention.

The physical brain, evolving mechanically in accordance with the local deterministic process 2, can do
most of the necessary work of the brain. It can do the job of creating, on the basis of its interpretation of
the clues provided by the senses, a suitable response, which will be controlled by a certain pattern of
neural or brain activity that acts as a template for action. However, owing to its quantum character, the
brain necessarily generates an amorphous mass of overlapping and conflicting templates for action.
Process 1 acts to extract from this jumbled mass of possibilities some particular template for action. This
template is a feature of the Yes states PSP that specifies the form of the process 1 event. But the
quantum rules do not assert that this Yes part of the prior state S necessarily comes into being. They
assert, instead, that if this process 1 action is triggered (for example, by some sort of consent) then this
Yes component PSP will come into being with probability Tr PSP/Tr S, and that the No state will occur
if the Yes state does not occur, where the symbol Tr represents a quantum mechanical summation
over all possibilities.

If the rate at which these consents occur is assumed to be increasable by conscious mental effort, then
the causal efficacy of will can be understood. Conscious effort can, by activation of the QZE, override
strong mechanical forces arising from process 2 and cause the template for action to be held in place
longer than it would be if the rapid sequence of process 1 events were not occurring. This sustained
existence of the template for action can increase the probability that the intended action will occur.

Does this quantum-physics-based concept of the origin of the causal efficacy of will accord with the
findings of psychology?

Consider some passages from Psychology: the briefer course, written by William James. In the final
section of the chapter on attention, James (1892, p. 227) writes:

things we can attend to is so determined. No object can catch our attention except by the neural
machinery. But the amount of the attention which an object receives after it has caught our attention is
another question. It often takes effort to keep the mind upon it. We feel that we can make more or less
ideas which else would fade more quickly away.
In the chapter on will, in the section entitled Volitional effort is effort of attention, James (1892, p. 417)

Thus we find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask by what process is it that

And, later:

The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most voluntary, is to attend to a difficult
object and hold it fast before the mind.Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.

Still later, James says:

Consent to the idea's undivided presence, this is effort's sole achievementEverywhere, then, the
slip away.

This description of the effect of will on the course of mentalcerebral processes is remarkably in line
with what had been proposed independently from purely theoretical considerations of the quantum
physics of this process. The connections specified by James are explained on the basis of the same
dynamic principles that had been introduced by physicists to explain atomic phenomena. Thus the
whole range of science, from atomic physics to mindbrain dynamics, has the possibility of being
brought together into a single rationally coherent theory of an evolving cosmos that is constituted not of
matter but of actions by agents. In this conceptualization of nature, agents could naturally evolve in
accordance with the principles of natural selection, owing to the fact that their efforts have physical
consequences. The outline of a possible rationally coherent understanding of the connection between
mind and matter begins to emerge.

In the quantum theory of mind/consciousnessbrain being described here, there are altogether three
processes. First, there is the purely mechanical process called process 2. As discussed at length in the
book, Mind, matter, and quantum mechanics (Stapp 1993/2003, p. 150), this process, as it applies to the
brain, involves important dynamic units that are represented by complex patterns of brain activity that
are facilitated (i.e. strengthened) by use and are such that each unit tends to be activated as a whole
by the activation of several of its parts. The activation of various of these complex patterns by cross
referencingthat is, by activation of several of its partscoupled to feedback loops that strengthen or
weaken the activities of appropriate processing centres, appears to account for the essential features of
the mechanical part of the dynamics in a way that is not significantly different from what a classic model
can support, except for the existence of a host of parallel possibilities that according to the classic
concepts, cannot exist simultaneously.

The second process, von Neumann's process 1, is needed in order to pick out from a chaotic continuum
of overlapping parallel possibilities some particular discrete possibility and its complement. (The
complement can be further divided, but the essential action is present in the choice of one particular
Yes state PS(t)P from the morass of possibilities in which it is imbedded.) The third process is nature's
choice between Yes and No. Nature's choice conforms to a statistical rule, but the agent's choice is,
within contemporary quantum theory, a free choice that can be and is consistently treated as an input
variable of the empirical protocol.

Process 1 has itself two modes. The first is passive, and can produce temporally isolated events. The
second is active and involves mental effort.

Active process 1 intervention has, according to the quantum model described here, a distinctive form. It
consists of a sequence of intentional purposeful actions, the rapidity of which can be increased with
effort. Such an increase in attention density, defined as an increase in the number of observations per
unit time, can bring into play the QZE, which tends to hold in place both those aspects of the state of the
brain that are fixed by the sequence of intentional actions and also the felt intentional focus of these
actions. Attention density is not controlled by any physical rule of orthodox contemporary quantum
theory, but is taken both in orthodox theory and in our model, to be subject to subjective volitional
control. This application in this way of the basic principles of physics to neuroscience constitutes our
model of the mindbrain connection.

(a) Support from psychology of attention

A huge amount of empirical work on attention has been done since the nineteenth century writings of
William James. Much of it is summarized and analysed in Harold Pashler's (1998) book The psychology of
attention. Pashler organizes his discussion by separating perceptual processing from post-perceptual
processing. The former type covers processing that, first of all, identifies such basic physical properties
of stimuli as location, colour, loudness and pitch and, secondly, identifies stimuli in terms of categories
of meaning. The post-perceptual process covers the tasks of producing motor actions and cognitive
action beyond mere categorical identification. Pashler emphasizes that the empirical findings of
attention studiesargue for a distinction between perceptual attentional limitations and more central
limitations involved in thought and the planning of action (p. 33). The existence of these two different
processes with different characteristics is a principal theme of Pashler's book (e.g. pp. 33, 263, 293, 317,

A striking difference that emerges from the analysis of the many sophisticated experiments is that the
perceptual processes proceed essentially in parallel, whereas the post-perceptual processes of planning
and executing actions form a single queue. This is in line with the distinction between passive and
active processes. The former are essentially a passive stream of essentially isolated process 1 events,
whereas the active processes involve effort-induced rapid sequences of process 1 events that can
saturate a given capacity. This idea of a limited capacity for serial processing of effort-based inputs is the
main conclusion of Pashler's book. It is in accord with the quantum-based model, supplemented by the
condition that there is a limit to how many effortful process 1 events per second a person can produce
during a particular stage of their development.

Examination of Pashler's book shows that this quantum model accommodates naturally all of the
complex structural features of the empirical data that he describes. Of key importance is his chapter 6,
in which he emphasizes a specific finding: strong empirical evidence for what he calls a central
is what the quantum-physics-based theory predicts: the bottleneck is precisely the single linear
sequence of mindbrain quantum events that von Neumann quantum theory describes.

Pashler describes four empirical signatures for this kind of bottleneck and describes the experimental
confirmation of each of them (p. 279). Much of part II of Pashler's book is a massing of evidence that
supports the existence of a central process of this general kind.

The queuing effect is illustrated in a nineteenth century result described by Pashler: mental exertion
reduces the amount of physical force that a person can apply. He notes that This puzzling phenomenon
remains unexplained (p. 387). However, it is an automatic consequence of the physics-based theory:
generated by the Schrdinger equation (process 2). This opposing tendency is produced by the QZE and
to the task. So, if part of this processing capacity is directed to another task, then the applied force will

difference between the unconscious processing done by the Schrdinger evolution, which generates by
a local process an expanding collection of classically conceivable experiential possibilities and the
process associated with the sequence of conscious events that constitute the wilful selection of action.
The former are not limited by the queuing effect, because process 2 simply develops all of the
possibilities in parallel. Nor is the stream of essentially isolated passive process 1 events thus limited. It
is the closely packed active process 1 events that can, in the von Neumann formulation, be limited by
the queuing effect.

The very numerous experiments cited by Pashler all seem to be in line with the quantum approach. It is
important to note that this bottleneck is not automatic within classic physics. A classic model could
easily produce, simultaneously, two responses in different modalities, say vocal and manual, to two
proceed via dynamically independent routes. Pashler notes that the bottleneck is undiminished in
different hemispheres (p. 308). This could be accounted for by the necessarily non-local character of the
projection operator P.

giving a foot response to a rapidly presented sequence of tones of either 2000 or 250Hz. The subject's
mental age, as measured by the IQ test, was reduced from adult to 8 years (p. 299). This result supports
the prediction of quantum theory that the bottleneck pertains to both intelligent behaviour, which
requires complex effortful processing, and the simple wilful selection of a motor response.

Pashler also notes that Recent results strengthen the case for central interference even further,
simultaneous response selection in two speeded choice tasks (p. 348).

In the section on mental effort, Pashler reports that incentives to perform especially well lead subjects
to improve both speed and accuracy, and that the motivation had greater effects on the more
cognitively complex activity (p. 383). This is what would be expected if incentives lead to effort that
produces increased rapidity of the events, each of which injects into the physical process, through
quantum selection and reduction, bits of control information that reflect mental evaluation. Pashler
notes Increasing the rate at which events occur in experimenter-paced tasks often increases effort
ratings without affecting performance. Increasing incentives often raises workload ratings and
performance at the same time (p. 385). All of these empirical connections are in line with the general
principle that effort increases attention density, with an attendant increase in the rate of directed
conscious events, each of which inputs a mental evaluation and a selection or focusing of a course of

Additional supporting evidence comes from the studies of the stabilization or storage of information in
short-term memory (STM). According to the physics-based theory, the passive aspect of conscious
process merely actualizes an event that occurs in accordance with some brain-controlled rule and this
rule-selected process then develops automatically, with perhaps some occasional monitoring. Thus, the
theory would predict that the process of stabilization or storage in STM of a certain sequence of stimuli
should be able to persist undiminished while the central processor is engaged in another task. This is
what the data indicate. Pashler remarks that These conclusions contradict the remarkably widespread
resources (p. 341). In the theory outlined here, STM is stored in patterns of brain activity, whereas
consciously directed actions are associated with the active selection of a sub-ensemble of quasi-classic
states. This distinction seems to account for the large amount of detailed data that bear on this question
of the relationship of the stabilization or storage of information in STM to the types of task that require
wilfully directed actions (pp. 337341). In marked contrast to STM function, storage or retrieval of
information from long-term memory (LTM) is a task that requires actions of just this sort (pp. 347350).

Deliberate storage in, or retrieval from, LTM requires wilfully directed action and hence conscious effort.
These processes should, according to the theory, use part of the limited processing capacity and hence
resources. On the other hand, perceptual processing that involves conceptual categorization and
identification without wilful conscious selection should not be interfered with by tasks that do consume
central processing capacity. These expectations are what the evidence appears to confirm: the entirety
offront-end processing are modality specific and operate independent of the sort of single-channel
analysis but also storage in STM and whatever processing may feed back to change the allocation of
perceptual attention itself (p. 353).

notes that the parallel versus serial distinction between the two mechanisms leads, in the classic
what the connection between them is (pp. 354356, 386387).
After considering various possible mechanisms that could cause the central bottleneck, Pashler
concludes that the question of why this should be the case is quite puzzling (pp. 307308). Thus, the
fact that this bottleneck and its basic properties seem to follow automatically from the same laws that
explain the complex empirical evidence in the fields of classic and quantum physics means that the
theory being presented here has significant explanatory power for the experimental data of cognitive
psychology. Further, it coherently explains aspects of the data that have heretofore not been adequately
addressed by currently applicable theoretical perspectives.

These features of the phenomena may be claimed by some to be potentially explainable within a
classical-physics-based model. But the possibility of such an explanation is profoundly undermined by
the absence from classic physics of the notion of conscious choice and effort. These
consciousness-connected features, so critical to a coherent explanation of the psychology of human
attention, however, already exist and are specified features of the causal structure of fundamental
contemporary physical theory.

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The quantum model is better suited to the analysis of neuropsychological data than models based on
the classic approximation. For, just as in the treatment of atomic systems, the quantum approach brings
the phenomenologically described data directly into the dynamics in place of microscopic variables that
are, in principle, unknowable. Quantum theory injects directly into the causal structure the phenomenal
descriptions that we human beings use in order to communicate to our colleagues the empirical facts. It
thereby specifies a useful and testable causal structure, while evading the restrictive classic demand that
the causal process be bottom up, i.e. expressible in terms of local mechanical interactions between tiny
mindless entities. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle renders that ideal unachievable in principle and
the banishment of that microlocal bottom up determinism opens the door to the quantum alternative
of injecting the phenomenologically described realities directly into the causal structure in the way that
is both allowed and described by contemporary physical theory.

Quantum physics works better in neuropsychology than its classic approximation precisely because it
inserts knowable choices made by human agents into the dynamics in place of unknowable-in-principle
microscopic variables. To illustrate this point we apply the quantum approach to the experiment of
Ochsner et al. (2002).
Reduced to its essence, this experiment consists first of a training phase in which the subject is taught
how to distinguish, and respond differently to, two instructions given while viewing emotionally
disturbing visual images: attend (meaning passively be aware of, but not try to alter, any feelings
elicited by) or reappraise (meaning actively reinterpret the content so that it no longer elicits a
negative response). Second, the subjects perform these mental actions during brain data acquisition.
The visual stimuli, when passively attended to, activate limbic brain areas, and when actively
reappraised, activate prefrontal cerebral regions.

From the classic materialist point of view this is essentially a conditioning experiment where, however,
the conditioning is achieved through linguistic access to cognitive faculties. But how do the cognitive
realities involving knowing, understanding and feeling arise out of motions of the miniature
planet-like objects of classic physics, which have no trace of any experiential quality? How do the
vibrations in the air that carry the instructions get converted into feelings of understanding? And how
do these feelings of understanding get converted to conscious effort, the presence or absence of which
determine whether the limbic or frontal regions of the brain will be activated?

Within the framework of classic physics these connections between feelings and brain activities remain
huge mysteries. The materialist claim (Karl Popper called this historicist prophecy promissory
materialism) is that someday these connections will be understood. But the question is whether these
connections should reasonably be expected to be understood in terms of a physical theory that is known
to be false, and to be false in ways that are absolutely and fundamentally germane to the issue. The
classic concept demands that the choices made by human agents about how they will act be determined
by microscopic variables that according to quantum theory are indeterminate in principle. The
reductionist demand that the course of human experience be determined by local mechanical processes
is the very thing that is most conclusively ruled out by the structure of natural phenomena specified by
contemporary physical theory. To expect the mindbrain connection to be understood within a
framework of ideas so contrary to the principles of physics is scientifically unsupportable and

There are important similarities and also important differences between the classic and quantum
explanations of the experiments of Ochsner et al. (2002). In both approaches the atomic constituents of
the brain can be conceived to be collected into nerves and other biological structures and into fluxes of
ions and electrons, which can all be described reasonably well in essentially classic terms. In the classic
approach the dynamics must in principle be describable in terms of the local deterministic classic laws
that, according to those principles, are supposed to govern the motions of the atomic-sized entities.
The quantum approach is fundamentally different. In the first place the idea that all causation is
fundamentally mechanical is dropped as being prejudicial and unsupported either by direct evidence or
by contemporary physical theory. The quantum model of the human person is essentially dualistic, with
one of the two components being described in psychological language and the other being described in
physical terms. The empirical/phenomenal evidence coming from subjective reports is treated as data
pertaining to the psychologically described component of the person, whereas the data from objective
observations, or from measurements made upon that person, are treated as conditions on the physically
described component of the person. The apparent causal connection manifested in the experiments
between these two components of the agent is then explained by the causal connections between these
components that are specified by the quantum laws.

The quantum laws, insofar as they pertain to empirical data, are organized around events that increase
the amount of information lodged in the psychologically described component of the theoretical
structure. The effects of these psychologically identified events upon the physical state of the associated
brain are specified by process 1 (followed by Nature's statistical choice of which the discrete options
specified by process 1 will be experienced). When no effort is applied, the temporal development of the
body/brain will be approximately in accord with the principles of classic statistical mechanics, for
reasons described earlier in connection with the strong decoherence effects. But important departures
from the classic statistical predictions can be caused by conscious effort. This effort can cause to be held
in place for an extended period, a pattern of neural activity that constitutes a template for action. This
delay can tend to cause the specified action to occur. In the experiments of Ochsner the effort of the
subject to reappraise causes the reappraise template to be held in place and the holding in place of
this template causes the suppression of the limbic response. These causal effects are, by the QZE,
mathematical consequences of the quantum rules. Thus the subjective and objective aspects of the
data are tied together by quantum rules that directly specify the causal effects upon the subject's brain
of the choices made by the subject, without needing to specify how these choices came about. The form
of the quantum laws accommodates a natural dynamic breakpoint between the cause of wilful action,
which is not specified by the theory, and its effects, which are specified by the theory.

Quantum theory was designed to deal with cases in which the conscious action of an agentto perform
some particular probing actionenters into the dynamics in an essential way. Within the context of the
experiment by Ochsner et al. (2002), quantum theory provides, via the process 1 mechanism, an explicit
means whereby the successful effort to rethink feelings actually causesby catching and actively
holding in placethe prefrontal activations critical to the experimentally observed deactivation of the
amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. The resulting intention-induced modulation of limbic mechanisms
that putatively generate the frightening aversive feelings associated with passively attending to the
target stimuli is the key factor necessary for the achievement of the emotional self-regulation seen in
the active cognitive reappraisal condition. Thus, within the quantum framework, the causal relationship
between the mental work of mindfully reappraising and the observed brain changes presumed to be
necessary for emotional self-regulation is dynamically accounted for. Furthermore, and crucially, it is
accounted for in ways that fully allow for communicating to others the means used by living human
experimental subjects to attain the desired outcome. The classic materialist approach to these data, as
detailed earlier in this article, by no means allows for such effective communication. Analogous
quantum mechanical reasoning can of course be used mutatis mutandis to explain the data of
Beauregard et al. (2001) and related studies of self-directed neuroplasticity (see Schwartz & Begley

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Materialist ontology draws no support from contemporary physics and is in fact contradicted by it. The
notion that all physical behaviour is explainable in principle solely in terms of a local mechanical process
is a holdover from physical theories of an earlier era. It was rejected by the founders of quantum
mechanics, who introduced, crucially into the basic dynamical equations, choices that are not
determined by local mechanical processes, but are rather attributed to human agents. These orthodox
quantum equations, applied to human brains in the way suggested by John von Neumann, provide for a
causal account of recent neuropsychological data. In this account brain behaviour that appears to be
illusion. Our wilful choices enter neither as redundant nor epiphenomenal effects, but rather as
fundamental dynamical elements that have the causal efficacy that the objective data appear to assign
to them.

atomic physics.

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The work of the second-named author (H.P.S.) was supported in part by the Director, Office of Science,
Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics, Division of High Energy Physics, of the US Department of
Energy under Contract DE-AC03-76SF00098. The work of the third-named author (M.B.) was supported
in part by a scholarship from the Fonds de la Recherche en Sant du Qubec (FRSQ). We thank Joseph
O'Neill for his insightful comments about preliminary versions of our manuscript.
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This work is based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory, and von Neumann's extension
of it. The Copenhagen Interpretation is what is, in essence, both taught in standard quantum physics
courses and used in actual practice. This interpretation brings the human agent into the dynamics at a
crucial point, namely to resolve the basis problem, i.e. to pose some particular physical question. This
entry of the agent's free choice is the basis of the present work.

Many of the physicists who are most acutely interested in the logical and physical foundations of
quantum theory reject the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is basically epistemological and have
sought to invent alternative formulations that can be regarded as descriptions of what is really going on
in nature. The three most-discussed alternatives are the ones associated with the names of Roger
Penrose, Hugh Everett and David Bohm. In order to provide a broader conceptual foundation for
understanding and assessing the Copenhagenvon Neumann approach used here we shall compare it
with those other three.

All three of the alternative approaches accept von Neumann's move of treating the entire physical world
quantum mechanically. In particular, the bodies and brains of the agents are treated as conglomerations
of such things as quantum mechanically described electrons, ions and photons.

Penrose (1994) accepts the need for conscious-related process 1 events, and wants to explain when
they occur. He proposes an explanation that is tied to another quantum mystery, that of quantum

Suppose the quantum state of a brain develops two components corresponding to the Yes and No
answers to some query. Penrose proposes a rule, based on the gravitational interaction between these
two parts, that specifies approximately how long before a collapse will occur to one branch or to the
other. In this way the question of when the answer Yes or No occurs is given a physical explanation.
Penrose and his collaborator Hameroff (1996) calculate estimates of this typical time-interval on the
basis of some detailed assumptions about the brain. The result is a time of the order of one-tenth of a
second. They argue that the rough agreement of this number with time-intervals normally associated
with consciousness lends strong support to their theory.

The PenroseHameroff model requires that the quantum state of the brain has a property called
macroscopic quantum coherence, which needs to be maintained for around a tenth of a second. But,
according to calculations made by Max Tegmark (2000), this property ought not to hold for more than
about 1013s. Hameroff and co-workers (Hagen et al. 2002) have advanced reasons why this number
should actually be of the order of a tenth of a second. But 12 orders of magnitude is a very big
difference to explain away and serious doubts remain about whether the PenroseHameroff theory is
technically viable.

If all aspects of the collapse process were similarly determined in an essentially mechanical way, then
there would be in quantum mechanics, as in classic physics, nothing for consciousness to do. But
Penrose (1994) argues that the effects of consciousness cannot be purely algorithmic: it cannot be
governed by a finite set of rules and operations. His argument is based on the famous incompleteness
theorem of Gdel. However, the logical validity of his argument has been vigorously challenged by many
experts, including Hillary Putnam (1994), and Penrose's conclusion cannot be deemed absolutely secure.
Also, it is peculiar that the question of when the event occurs should be essentially algorithmic, while
the process itself is non-algorithmic.

However, Penrose's overall aims are similar to those of the approach made in this paper, namely to
recognize that the process-1-related features of quantum mechanics are dynamically very different from
the local mechanistic dynamics of classic mechanics, or of its quantum analogue, process 2. This
differing character of process 1, which is closely connected to conscious awareness, seems, on its face,
to be signalling the entry of an essentially non-mechanical consciousness-related element into brain

Everett (1957) proposed another way to deal with the problem of how the quantum formulae are tied
to our conscious experiences. It is called the many-worlds or many-minds approach. The basic idea is
that nature makes no choices between the Yes and No possibilities: both options actually do occur.
But, owing to certain features of quantum mechanics, the two streams of consciousness in which these
two alternative answers appear are dynamically independent: neither one has any effect on the other.
Hence the two incompatible streams exist in parallel epistemological worlds, although in the one single
ontological or physical quantum world.

This many-minds approach is plausible within the framework provided by quantum mathematics. It
evades the need for any real choices between the Yes and No answers to the question posed by the
process 1 action. However, von Neumann never even mentions any real choice between Yes and No
and the founders of quantum theory likewise focus attention on the crucial choice of which question
shall be posed. It is this choice, which is in the hands of the agent, that the present paper has focused
upon. The subsequent choice between Yes and No, is normally deemed to be made by nature. But it is
enough that the latter choice merely seems to be made in accordance with the quantum probably rules.
The real problem with the many-minds approach is that its proponents have not yet adequately
explained how one can evade the process 1 choices. This difficulty is discussed in detail in Stapp (2002).

David Bohm's pilot-wave model (Bohm 1952) seems at first to be another way of evading the problem of
how to tie the formulae of quantum mechanics to human experiences. Yet in David Bohm's book with
Basil Hiley (Bohm & Hiley 1993) the last two chapters go far beyond the reasonably well-defined
pilot-wave model and attempt to deal with the problem dealt with in the works of Stapp (1990) and of
Gell-Mann & Hartle (1989). This leads Bohm into a discussion of his concept of the implicate order,
which is far less mathematically well-defined than his pilot-wave model.

Bohm saw a need to deal with consciousness and wrote a detailed paper on it (Bohm 1986, 1990). His
proposals go far beyond the simple well-defined pilot-wave model. It involves an infinite tower of pilot
waves, each controlling the level below. The engaging simplicity of the original pilot-wave model is lost
in this infinite tower.

The sum of all this is that the structure of quantum theory indicates the need for a non-mechanistic
consciousness-related process, but that the approaches to quantum theory that go beyond the
pragmatic Copenhagenvon Neumann approach have serious problems that have yet to be resolved.
We, in this paper, have chosen to stay on the safer ground of orthodox pragmatic quantum theory and
to explore what can be said within that framework.

However, in this addendum we will now stray very briefly from our strict adherence to the pragmatic
stance, in order to get a glimpse into what seems to us to be the pathway beyond contemporary
pragmatic science that is pointed to by the structure of contemporary physics.

The core message of quantum theory appears to be that the basic realities are knowables not
be-ables: they are things that can be known, not realities that exist yet cannot be known. This
conclusion can be strongly defended by a detailed analysis of quantum theory, but this is not place to do
so. However, given this premise, the programme of passing from the anthropocentric set of pragmatic
rules to a conception of the greater reality in which our streams of human consciousness are imbedded
takes on a different complexion. If nature is constructed of knowables, then the acts of knowing with
become, then, the primitives of nature, along with the substrate upon which they act. Conscious acts of
probing must also be encompassed.

This way of understanding the meaning of quantum theory opens the door, in principle, to the
formulation of rules that allow the choices of which probing actions are taken to depend not exclusively
on the current condition of the physically/mathematically described substratethat is, the current state
of the brainbut also on prior acts of knowing. Thus it could well be, as James's remarks suggest, that a
mechanical rule determines which thought is initially caught, but that felt properties of the consequent
act of knowing can influence the rapidity of follow-up repetitions of the probing action.

It is not our intention to propose in this appendix some testable proposal along these lines. We merely
note that quantum theory seems naturally to point to this route for an understanding of the reality that
lies behind our human-knowledge-based science.