Physics in Neuroscience

*Classical Physics*

Classical 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 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
of not. He found that he could 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
a force inversely proportional the square of the distance between them.

This force was an *instantaneous action at a distance*: it acted
instantaneously, no matter how far apart the particles were located.
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 and force may be conveyed from
one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man,
who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can
ever fall into it." (Newton 1687: 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 space-time itself.
Einstein's contributions made classical 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 neighboring
mathematically described "entities," and no influence propagates faster
than the speed of light.

Classical 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
classical 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
universe.

This result means that, according to classical physics, *you are a
mechanical automaton*: your every physical action was pre-determined
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 reference to your thoughts, ideas, feelings, or
intentions. Your intuitive feeling that your mental intentions make a
difference in what you do is, according to the principles of classical
physics, a false and misleading illusion.

There are two possible ways within classical physics to understand this
total incapacity of your mental side - your stream of consciousness - to
make any difference at all 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 your mental aspects are the *very same things* as
certain of motions of various tiny parts of your brain.

*Problems with classical physics*

William James (1890: 138) argued against the first possibility,
epiphenomenal consciousness, by arguing 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: 136)

If consciousness has no effect upon the physical world then what keeps a
person's mental world aligned with his physical situation: what keeps
his pleasures in general alignment with actions that benefit him, and
pains in general correspondence with things that damage him, if pleasure
and pain have no effect at all upon his actions?

These liabilities of the notion of epiphenomenal consciousness lead most
thinkers to turn to the alternative possibility that a person's stream
of consciousness is *the very same thing* as some activity in his brain:
consciousness is an "emergent property" 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 classical physics framework*, is that within
classical physics the full description of nature is in terms of numbers
assigned to tiny space-time 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, colors, smells,
and moral judgments? Why, given the known failure of classical 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 favor of an identity-emergent theory
of consciousness are illustrated by Roger Sperry's example of a "wheel."
(Sperry, 1991.) 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 classical physics, and with
the idea that "a wheel is, precisely, a structure constructed out of its
tiny atomic parts." So why not suppose "consciousness" to be, like
"wheelness", an emergent property of its classically conceived tiny
physical parts?

The reason that consciousness is not analogous to wheelness, within the
context of classical physics, is that the properties that characterize
wheelness are properties that are *entailed,* within the conceptual
framework of classical physics, by properties specified in classical
physics, whereas the properties that characterize consciousness, namely
the way it feels, are not *entailed,* within the conceptual structure
provided by classical physics, by the properties specified by classical
physics.

This is the huge difference-in-principle that distinguishes
consciousness from things that, according to classical physics, are
constructible out of the particles that are postulated to exist by
classical physics.

Given the state of motion of each of the tiny physical parts of a wheel,
as it is conceived of in classical physics, the properties that
characterize the wheel - e.g., its roundness, radius, center point, rate
of rotation, etc.,\-\--are specified within the conceptual framework
provided by the principles of classical 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 classical 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 classical
physics. Thus it is possible, within that classical 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 classical physics, take away the consciousness
without affecting the locations and motions of the tiny physical parts
of the brain. But one cannot, within the conceptual framework provided
by classical physics, take away the wheelness of the wheel without
affecting the locations and motions of the tiny physical parts of a
wheel.

Because one can, within the conceptual framework provided by classical
physics, strip away the consciousness without affecting the physical
behavior, one cannot rationally claim that the consciousness is the
*cause* of the physical behavior, or is *causally efficacious* in the
physical world. Thus the "identity theory" or "emergent property"
strategy fails in its attempt to make consciousness efficacious, within
the conceptual framework provided by classical physics. Moreover, the
whole endeavor to base brain theory on classical physics is undermined
by the fact that the classical theory fails to work for phenomena that
depend critically upon the properties of the atomic constituents of the
behaving system, and brains are such systems: brain processes depend
critically upon synaptic processes, which depend critically upon ionic
processes that are highly dependent upon their quantum nature. This
essential involvement of quantum effects will be discussed in later
sections.

*The Quantum Approach*

Classical physics is *an approximation* to a more accurate theory -
called quantum mechanics - and quantum mechanics makes mind efficacious.
Quantum mechanics *explains* the causal effects of mental intentions
upon physical systems: it explains how your mental effort can produce
the brain events that cause your bodily actions. Thus quantum theory
converts science's picture of you from that of a mechanical automaton to
that of a mindful human person. Quantum theory also shows, explicitly,
how the approximation that reduces quantum theory to classical physics
completely eliminates all effects of your conscious thoughts upon your
brain and body. Hence, from a physics point of view, trying to
understand the mind-brain connection by going to the classical
approximation is absurd: it amounts to trying to understand something in
an approximation that eliminates the effect you are trying to study.

Quantum mechanics arose during the twentieth century. Scientists
discovered, empirically, that the principles of classical physics were
not correct. Moreover, they were wrong in ways that no minor tinkering
could ever fix. The *basic principles* of classical physics were thus
replaced by *new basic principles* that account uniformly both for all
the successes of the older classical theory and also for all the newer
data that is incompatible with the classical principles.

The most profound alteration of the fundamental principles was to bring
the consciousness of human beings into the basic structure of the
physical theory. In fact, the whole *conception of what science is* was
turned inside out. The core idea of classical 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 *our activities as
knowledge-seeking human agents*, and *the knowledge that we thereby
acquire*. Thus quantum theory involves, basically, what is "in here,"
not just what is "out there."

The basic philosophical shift in quantum theory is the *explicit*
recognition 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 a lot of 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 test, and eventually put the theory to
work. So the structure of a proper physical theory must involve not only
the part describing the behavior 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 each
other. Finally we need some "bridge laws" that specify the connection
between the concepts described in these two different languages.

Classical physics met these requirements in a rather trivial kind of
way, with the relevant experiences of the human participants being taken
to be direct apprehensions of various gross behaviors of large-scale
properties of big objects composed of huge numbers of the tiny
atomic-scale parts. And these apprehensions were taken to be *passive*:
they had no effect on the behaviors of the systems being studied. But
the physicists who were examining the behaviors of systems that depend
sensitively upon the behaviors of their tiny atomic-scale components
found themselves forced to go to a less trivial theoretical arrangement,
in which the human agents were no longer passive observers, but were
*active participants* in ways that contradicted, and were impossible to
comprehend within, the general framework of classical physics, *even
when the only features of the physically described world that the human
beings observed were large-scale properties of measuring devices.* The
sensitivity of the behavior of the devices to the behavior of some tiny
atomic-scale particles propagates in such a way that the acts of
observation by the human observers of *large scale properties of the
devices* could no longer be regarded as passive. Thus the core structure
of the basic general physical theory became transformed in a profound
way: the connection between physical behavior and human knowledge was
changed from a one-way bridge to a mathematically specified two-way
bridge. This revision must be expected to have important ramifications
in neuroscience, because the issue of the connection between mind (the
psychologically described aspects of a human being) and brain/body (the
physically described aspects of that person) has recently become a
matter of central concern in neuroscience.

This original formulation of quantum theory was created mainly at an
Institute in Copenhagen directed by Niels Bohr, and is called "The
Copenhagen Interpretation." Due to the profound strangeness of the
conception of nature entailed by the new mathematics, the Copenhagen
strategy was to refrain from making any ontological claims, but to take,
instead, a purely pragmatic stance. Thus the theory was formulated
*basically* as a set of practical rules for how scientists should go
about their tasks of acquiring knowledge, and then using this knowledge
in practical ways. Speculations about "what the world out there is
really like" were regarded as "metaphysics," not real science.

The most profound change in the principles is encapsulated in Niels Bohr
dictum that " in the great drama of existence we ourselves are both
actors and spectators." (Bohr, 1963: 15 & 1958: 81) The emphasis here is
on "actors": in classical physics we were mere spectators.

Copenhagen quantum theory is about the relationships between human
agents (called *participants* by John Wheeler) and the systems that they
act upon. In order to achieve this conceptualization the Copenhagen
formulation separates the physical universe into two parts, which are
described in two different languages. One part is the observing human
agent and his measuring devices. That part is described in mental
terms - in 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 terms - in
terms of mathematical properties assigned to tiny space-time regions.

That approach works very well in practice. However, it seems apparent
that the body and brain of the human agent, and his devices, are parts
of the physical universe, and hence that a complete theory ought to be
able to describe also our bodies and brains in physical terms. On the
other hand, the structure of the theory depends critically also upon
aspects of reality described in mentalistic language as intentional
actions and experiential feedbacks.

The great mathematician and logician John von Neumann reformulated the
theory in a rigorous way that places the bodies and brains of the
agents, along with their measuring devices, in the physical world,
*while retaining those mentalistically described properties of the
agents that are essential to the structure of the theory.* It is this
von Neumann formulation that provides a natural science-based account of
how your mental intentions influence the activities of your brain.

Von Neumann identifies two very different processes that enter into the
quantum theoretical description of the evolution of a physical system.
He calls them Process I and Process II (Von Neumann, 1955: 418). Process
II is the analog in quantum theory of the process in classical physics
that takes the state of a system at one time to its state at a later
time. This Process II, like its classical analog, is *local* and
*deterministic*. However, Process II by itself is not the whole story:
it generates physical worlds that do not agree with human experiences.
For example, if Process II were the *only* process in nature then the
quantum state of the moon would represent a structure smeared out over
large part of the sky, and each human body-brain would likewise be
represented by a structure smeared out continuously over a huge region.

To tie the quantum mathematics to human experience in a rationally
coherent and mathematically specified way quantum theory invokes
*another process*, which Von Neumann calls Process I.

Any physical theory must, in order to be complete, specify how the
elements of the theory are connected to human experience. In classical
physics this connection is part of a *metaphysical* superstructure: it
is not part of the core dynamical description. But in quantum theory
this connection of the mathematically described physical state to human
experiences is part of the essential dynamical structure. And this
connecting process is not passive: it does not represent a mere
*witnessing* of a physical feature of nature by a passive mind. Rather,
the process is active: it injects into the physical state of the system
being acted upon properties that depend upon the intention of the agent.

Quantum theory is built upon the practical concept of intentional
actions by agents. Each such action 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 knowledge-acquiring actions of
agents, and the knowledge that these agents thereby acquire.

Probing actions of this kind are performed not only by scientists. Every
healthy and alert infant is engaged in making willful efforts that
produce experiential feedbacks, and he/she soon begins to form
expectations about what sorts of feedbacks are likely to follow from
some particular kind of effort. Thus both empirical science and normal
human life are based on paired realities of this action-response 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 judgment "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 judgments about what they were
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 a feedback that may conform to a certain criterion associated with
that act. One bit of information is introduced into the world in which
that agent lives, according to whether the feedback conforms or does not
conform to that criterion. Thus knowing whether the counter clicked or
not places the agent on one or the other of two alternative possible
separate branches of the course of world history.

These remarks reveal the enormous difference between classical physics
and quantum physics. In classical 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 actions by agents, the feedbacks arising
from these actions, and the effects of our actions on the physical
states that embody or carry this information.

Consideration of the character of these differences makes it plausible
that quantum theory may be able to provide the foundation of a
scientific theory of the human person that is better able than classical
physics to integrate the physical and psychological aspects of his
nature. For quantum theory describes the effects of a person's
intentional actions upon the physical world, whereas classical physics
systematically leaves these effects out.

An intentional action by a human agent is partly an intention, described
in psychological terms, and partly a physical action, described in
physical terms. The feedback also is partly psychological and partly
physical. In quantum theory these diverse aspects are all represented by
logically connected elements in the mathematical structure that emerged
from the seminal discovery of Heisenberg. That discovery was that in
order to get the quantum generalization of a classical theory one must
formulate the theory in terms of *actions.* 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 actions then generally AB is different from BA:
the order in which actions are performed matters.

The intentional actions of agents are represented mathematically in
Heisenberg's space of actions. Here is how it works.

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 classical physics took to be a "being" by a "doing." I
shall denote the action 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 sure-fire: one's intentions may not be fulfilled. Hence the
intentional action puts in 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 equations of quantum theory. This
equation represents, within the quantum mathematics, the effect of the
Process I mental action upon the quantum state S of the system being
acted upon. The equation is:

SàS' = PSP + (I-P)S(I-P).

This formula exhibits the important fact that this Process I 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 the possibility in which the
experiential feedback called "Yes" appears, and the second part,
(I-P)S(I-P), represents the alternative possibility "No", this feedback
does not appear. Thus the intention of the action and the associated
experiential feedback are tied into the mathematics that describes the
dynamics of the physical system being acted upon.

The symbol P is important. It represents the fact that the Process I
depends on *the intention of the agent*. The action represented by the
symbol 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 intentional choice of
the agent. The symbol I is the unit operator, which is essentially
multiplication by 1, and the action of (I-P), 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 I produces the *sum* of the two alternative possible
feedbacks, not just one or the other. Since the feedback must either be
"Yes" or "No = Not-Yes," one might think that Process I, which *keeps*
both the "Yes" and the "No" parts, would do nothing. But that is not
correct! This is a key point. It can be made quite clear by noticing
that S can be written as a sum of four parts, only two of which survive
the Process I action:

S = PSP + (I-P)S(I-P) + PS(I-P) + (I-P)SP.

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 I.*

But this means that Process I has a *nontrivial 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.

That is the *first key point*: quantum theory has a specific dynamical
process, Process I, which specifies the effect upon a physical system of
an *intention-controlled act* of a human agent.

*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 freedom of experimentation, presupposed in classical physics, is
> of course retained and corresponds to the free choice of experimental
> arrangement for which the mathematical structure of the quantum
> mechanical formalism offers the appropriate latitude.\" (Bohr, 1958:
> 73}

This freedom of action 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*, in this very specific sense*, a "free choice."

*Probabilities*

The predictions of quantum theory are generally statistical: only the
*probabilities* that the agent will experience each of the alternative
possible feedbacks are specified. Which of these alternative possible
feedbacks will actually occur in response to a Process I action is not
determined by quantum theory.

The formula for the probability that the agent will experience the
feedback 'Yes' is

Tr PSP/Tr S, where the symbol Tr represents the trace operation. This
trace operation means that the actions act in a cyclic fashion, so that
the rightmost action acts back around upon the leftmost action. Thus,
for example, Tr ABC=Tr CAB =Tr BCA. The product ABC represents the
result of letting A act upon B, and then letting that product AB act
upon C. But what does C act upon? Taking the trace of ABC means
specifying that C acts back around on A.

An important property of a trace is that the trace of any of the
sequences of actions that we consider must always give a positive number
or zero. Thus this trace operation is what ties the actions, as
represented in the mathematics, to measurable numbers.

Von Neumann generates his form of quantum theory by recognizing that
Process I describes an influence of a mentalistically described aspect
of reality upon a physically described aspect, and by expanding the
physically described part to include the brain that is connected to the
mentalistically described stream of consciousness. Thus Process I
represents, in the end, a dynamical influence of the mind of an agent
upon his brain

But if the agent is *free* to choose which action to take, and if the
*intention* of that action, represented by P, affects the state being
acted upon, then the agent's free mental choice of intention influences
the state S being acted upon, which in Von Neumann quantum theory is
his/her brain.

This is the important conclusion: Orthodox (von Neumann) quantum theory
has a Process I action that, on the one hand, is need to tie the theory
to human experience, and that, on the other hand, produces a dynamical
effect upon the state of his brain.

It is worthwhile to reflect for a moment on the ontological aspects of
Von Neumann quantum theory. Von Neumann himself, being a clear thinking
mathematician, said very little about ontology. But he called the
mentalistically described aspect of the agent "his abstract 'ego'." (von
Neumann, 1955: 421). This phrasing tends to conjure up the idea of a
disembodied entity, standing somehow apart from the body/brain. But
another possibility is that consciousness is an *emergent property* of
the body-brain. Notice that some of the problems that occur in trying to
defend this idea of emergence within the framework of classical physical
theory disappear when one accepts the validity of quantum theory. For
one thing, one no longer has to defend against the charge that the
emergent property, consciousness, has no "genuine" causal efficacy
because anything it does is done already by the physically described
process, independently of whether the psychologically described aspect
emerges of not. If quantum theory is accepted then the causal efficacy
of our thoughts is no illusion: it's the real thing!

Another difficulty with "emergence" in a classical physics context is in
understanding how the motion of a set of miniature planet-like objects,
careening through space, can *be* *a painful experience*. But the
essential nature of the "stuff" represented by a quantum event is
experiential, and the mathematically described state that stores the
fact that this experience has occurred is not material, it is
informational. Hence there is no longer any clash with intuition: the
concept of the physical stuff has changed in a way that eliminates the
problem.

In this connection, Heisenberg remarked:

"The conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has
thus evaporated not into the cloud of some obscure new reality concept,
but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no
longer the behavior of the particle but rather our knowledge of this
behavior." (Heisenberg, 1958)

By closing in this way the conceptual gap between mental and physical
properties the acceptance of quantum theory opens the way to a less
problematic version of the emergent-identity theory of mind.

This pragmatic re-conceptualization of the nature of science, and of the
nature of the physical universe and its connection to human thoughts,
should, it would seem, be equally importance in neuroscience. This is
because the basic problem in neuroscience is essentially this very same
problem as the one of atomic physics, namely the problem of linking, in
a practically useful way, the spacetime-imbedded mathematical
description of a physical system being acted upon to the psychologically
described aspects of the human agents. The problem in both cases, and in
science in general, is to link, in practically useful ways, the
psychological language that we human beings use to communicate our
normal experiences from one to another to the mathematical language of
physics and physiology. Matter-based classical physics does not provide
a practically useful linkage between these two languages, but
agent-based, action-based quantum physics does.

According to quantum theory, consciousness is, in effect, a *causally
efficacious reality* that is connected to physical brain processes in a
non-local, non-reducible, non-redundant, non-illusory, and non-trivial
way.

Process I is non-local because each operator P must (due to its
boundedness) act not at a point, but rather over some extended region
(such as a macroscopic part of a brain.) It is non-reducible because it
is a real dynamical process that is neither part of, nor entailed by,
the local-deterministic mechanical Process II. It is non-redundant,
non-illusory, and non-trivial for the same reason. By dealing directly
with *a dynamically formulated* linkage -- Process I -- between the
psychological language that describes the actions and knowledge of the
agents and the mathematical representation of the state of the system
being acted upon, quantum theory provides a pragmatic foundation for a
solution to the mind-brain problem of neuroscience that is both
analogous to, and an extension of, the pragmatic solution devised by
physicists for the problem of creating a scientific theory of atomic
phenomena.

The quantum state of a human brain is, of course, a very complex thing.
But its main features can be understood by considering first a classical
conception of the brain, and then folding in some key features that
arise already in the case of the quantum state of a single particle, or
object, or degree of freedom.

*States of a Simple Harmonic Oscillator*

One of the most important examples of a quantum state is the one
corresponding to a pendulum, or more precisely, to what is called a
"simple harmonic oscillator." Such a system is one in which there is a
restoring force that tends to push the center of the object to a single
"base point" of lowest energy, and in which the strength of this
restoring force is directly proportional to the distance of the center
point of the object from this base point.

According to classical physics any such system has a state of lowest
energy. In this state the center point of the object lies motionless at
the base point. In quantum theory this system again has a state of
lowest energy, but the center point is not localized at the base point:
it is represented by a *cloudlike* spatial structure that is spread out
over a region that extends to infinity. However, the amplitude of this
cloudlike form has the shape of a bell: it is largest at the base point,
and falls off in a prescribed manner as the distance the center point
from the base point increases.

If one were to squeeze this state of lowest energy into a more narrow
space, and then let it loose, the cloudlike form would first explode
outward, but then settle into an oscillating motion. Thus the cloudlike
spatial structure behaves rather like a swarm of bees, such that the
more they are squeezed in space the faster they move, and the faster the
squeezed cloud will explode outward when the squeezing constraint is
released. These visualizable properties extend in a natural way to
many-particle cases.

*The Double-Slit Experiment*

An important difference between the behavior of the quantum cloudlike
form and the somewhat analogous *classical probability distribution* is
exhibited by the famous *double-slit experiment*. If one shoots an
electron, an ion, or any other quantum counterpart of a tiny classical
object, at a narrow slit then if the object passes through the slit the
associated cloudlike form will fan out over a wide angle. But if one
opens two closely neighboring narrow slits, then what passes through the
slits is described by a probability distribution that is not just the
sum of the two separate fanlike structures that would be present if each
slit were opened separately. Instead, at some points the probability
value will be *twice the sum* of the values associated with the two
individual slits, and in other places the probability value drops nearly
to zero, even though both individual fanlike structures give a large
probability value at that place. These *interference* features of the
quantum cloudlike structure make that structure logically different from
a classical-physics probability distribution, for in the classical case
the probabilities arising from the two slits would simply add, due to
the fact that, according to classical principles, the particle must pass
through one slit or the other, and the fact that some other slit is also
open should not matter very much.

Quantum theory deals consistently with this interference effect, and all
the other, non-classical properties of these cloudlike structures.

*Nerve Terminals, Ion Channels, and the Need to Use Quantum Theory*

Some neuroscientists who study the relationship of consciousness to
brain process believe that classical physics will be adequate for that
task. That belief would have been reasonable during the nineteenth
century, but now, in the twenty-first, it is rationally untenable:
quantum theory must in principle be used because the behavior of the
brain depends sensitively upon ionic and atomic processes, and these
processes involve 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.
The reason is that *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 I acts to be the brain of the agent. Thus
Process I then describes an interaction between a person's stream of
consciousness, described in mentalistic terms, and the activity in his
brain, described in physical terms. That interaction drops completely
out when one passes to the classical approximation. Hence ignoring
quantum effects in the study of the mind-brain connection means,
according to the basic principles of physics, ignoring the dynamical
connection one is trying to study. One must *in principle* use quantum
theory. But there is then the quantitative issue of how important the
quantum effects are.

To explore that question we now consider the quantum dynamics of nerve
terminals.

*Nerve Terminals*

Nerve terminal are essential connecting links between nerve cells. The
way they work is quite well understood. When an action potential
traveling along a nerve fiber 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 site on vesicles containing neurotransmitter molecules. The
triggering effect of the calcium ions causes these contents to be dumped
into the synaptic cleft that separates this terminal from a neighboring
neuron, and these neurotransmitter molecules influence the tendencies of
that neighboring neuron to "fire."

The channels through which the calcium ions enter the nerve terminal are
called "ion channels." At their narrowest points they are less than a
nanometer in diameter.(Cataldi, 2002). This extreme smallness of the
opening in the ion channels has profound quantum mechanical importance.
The consequence is essentially the same as the consequence of the
squeezing of the state of the simple harmonic operator, or of the
narrowness of the slits in the double-slit experiments. 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 cloud 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, on some small triggering site.

This spreading of the ion wave packet means that the ion may or may not
be absorbed on the small triggering site. Accordingly, the vesicle may
or may not release its contents. Consequently, the quantum state of the
vesicle 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.

What is the effect of this *necessary* incursion of the cloud-like
quantum character of the ions into the evolving state of the brain?

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 classical
model, obviously depend upon the exact values of many noisy and
uncontrolled variables. In cases close to a bifurcation point the
dynamical effects of noise might even tip the balance between two very
different responses to the given clues, e.g., tip the balance between
the 'fight' or 'flight' response to some shadowy form.

The effect of the independent superpositions of the "release" or "don't
release" options, 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
superposition of different macro-states representing different
alternative possible plans of action. As long as the brain dynamics is
controlled wholly by Process II - which is the quantum generalization of
the Newtonian laws of motion of classical physics - all 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 occur. Some
other process, beyond the local deterministic Process II, is required to
pick out one particular real 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. That other process is Process I, which brings in the action
of the mind of the agent upon his brain.

This explanation of why quantum theory is pertinent to brain dynamics
has focused on individual calcium ions in nerve terminals. That argument
pertains to the *Process II* *component* of brain dynamics.

The equally important *Process I component* of the brain dynamics, which
brings the mind of the agent into the dynamics, must be analyzed in
terms of a completely different set of variable, namely certain
*quasi-stable* *macroscopic degrees of freedom*. These specify the brain
structures that enjoy the stability or persistence, and the causal
connections, needed to represent intentional actions and expected
feedbacks.

The states of the brain that will be singled out by the actions P that
specify the form of a Process I action will be more like the
lowest-energy state of the simple harmonic oscillator discussed above,
which tends to endure for a long time, or like the states obtained from
such lowest-energy states by spatial displacements and shifts in
velocity. Such states tend to endure as oscillating states, rather than
immediately exploding. In other words, in order to get the needed
stability properties the projection operators P corresponding to
intentional actions should be constructed out of *oscillating states of
macroscopic subsystems of the brain*, rather than out of sharply defined
spatial states of the individual particles. The pertinent states will be
functionally important brain analogs of a collection of oscillating
modes of a drumhead, in which large collections of particles of the
brain are moving in a coordinated way that will lead on to further
coordinated activity.

In summary, the *need to use quantum theory* in brain dynamics arises
from the dispersive quality of *Process II* action at the level of the
ionic, and electronic, and atomic components of the brain. Hence *that*
analysis is carried out at the individual-particle level. However, the
opposing integrative and selective action, Process I, which brings in
the mental (i.e., psychologically described) aspect involves a
completely different set of variables. Process I is specified by an
operator P that singles out a quasi-stable large-scale pattern of brain
activity that is the brain correlate of a particular mental intention.

It should be mentioned here that the actions P are *non-local*: they
must act over extended regions, which can, and are expected to, cover
large regions of the brain. Each conscious act is associated with a
Process I action that coordinates and integrates activities in diverse
parts of the brain. A conscious thought, as represented by the Von
Neumann Process I, effectively grasps as a whole an entire quasi-stable
macroscopic brain activity.

*Choices of the Process I Actions*

It has been emphasized that the choices of which Process I actions
actually occur are "free choices," in the sense that they are not
specified by the currently known orthodox laws of physics. On the other
hand, a person's intentions surely depend upon his brain. This means
that we need to understand the process that determines the choice of P,
which, within the framework of contemporary physical theory, is a free
choice. In other words, the laws of contemporary quantum theory,
although highly restrictive, are not the whole story: there is still
work to be done. Hypotheses must be formulated and tested.

According to the theory, each experience is associated with the
occurrence of a Process I event. As a simple first guess, let us assume,
following a suggestion of Benjamin Libet and other psychologists, that
the occurrence of a Process I action is triggered by a "consent" on the
part of the agent, and that the rapidity with which consent is given can
be increased by "mental effort."

To get a definite model, let {P} be the set of actions P that correspond
to possible mental intentions. Then let P(t) be the "most probable P in
{P}, where the probability is defined by brain state S(t). In equations
this most probable P in {P} would be the P in {P} that maximizes Tr
PS(t)P/Tr S(t). The first hypothesis will be that the Process I event
specified by P(t) will occur if and only if a "consent" is given at time
t.

To make mind efficacious it is assumed that "consent" depends on the
*mental realities* associated with P(t), and that "consent" can be given
with a rapidity that is increased if the mental evaluation includes a
feeling of effort. This simplest model makes the choice of the Process I
action dependent both upon the physical state of the agent's brain, and
also upon the mental realities associated with that action.

It is assumed, here, that the consent associated with "hearing a nearby
clap of thunder" is essentially passive: it will occur unless attention
is strongly focused elsewhere. The important input of the mental aspect
arises from the *effortful* focusing of mental attention on some
intention.

Quantum theory *explains* how such a mental effort can strongly
influence the course of brain events. Within the Von Neumann framework
this potentially very strong effect of mind upon brain is an automatic
consequence of a well-known and well studied feature of quantum theory
called The Quantum Zeno Effect.

*The Quantum Zeno Effect*

If one considers only passive consents, then it is very difficult to
identify any clean empirical effect of this intervention, apart from the
production of low-level awareness. In the first place, the empirical
averaging over the "Yes" and "No" possibilities tends to wash out all
measurable effects. Moreover, the passivity of the mental process means
that we have no independent self-controlled mental variable.

But the study of effortful and intentionally controlled attention brings
in two empirically accessible variables, the intention and the amount of
effort. It also brings in the important physical Quantum Zeno Effect.
This effect is named for the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea, and was
brought into prominence in 1977 by the physicists Sudarshan and Misra
(1977). It gives a name to the fact that repeated and closely-spaced
intentional acts can effectively hold the "Yes" feedback in place for an
extended time interval that depends upon the *rapidity at which the
Process I actions are happening*. According to our quantum model, this
rapidity is controlled by the amount of effort being applied.

This Quantum Zeno Effect is, from a theoretical point of view, a very
clean consequence of the Von Neumann theory. It was first identified
*theoretically*, and the theoretical predictions were later confirmed in
many experimental contexts. The first confirmations were in the realm of
atomic and molecular physics.

Consider an atom that has absorbed a photon of energy. That energy has
kicked one of the atom's electrons into what's called a higher orbital,
kind of like a super-massive asteroid kicking Mercury into Venus's
orbit, and the atom is said to be "excited." But the electron wants to
go back where it came from, to its original orbital, which it can do if
the atom releases a photon. When the atom does so is one of those chance
phenomena, like when a radioactive atom will decay: the atom has some
chance of releasing a photon (and allowing the electron to return home)
within a given period of time. Physicists can measure whether the atom
is still in its initial state or not. If they carry out such
measurements repeatedly and rapidly, physicists have found, we can keep
the atom in its initial state. This is the Quantum Zeno Effect: such a
rapid series of observations locks a system into that initial state. The
more frequent the observations of a quantum system, the greater the
suppression of transitions out of the initial quantum state. Taken to
the extreme, observing continuously whether an atom is in a certain
quantum state keeps it in that state forever. For this reason, the
Quantum Zeno Effect is also known as the watched pot effect. The mere
act of rapidly asking questions of a quantum system freezes it in a
particular state, preventing it from evolving as it would if we weren\'t
peeking. Simply observing a quantum system suppresses certain of its
transitions to other states.

How does it work? Consider this experiment. An ammonia molecule consists
of a single atom of nitrogen and three atoms of hydrogen. The
arrangement of the four atoms shifts over time because all the atoms are
in motion. Let\'s say that at first the nitrogen atom sits atop the
three hydrogens, like an egg nestled on a tripod (The nitrogen atom has
only two options, to be above or below the trio. It cannot be in
between.). The wave function that describes the position of the nitrogen
is almost all concentrated in this configuration; that is, the
probability of finding the nitrogen at the apex is nearly 100 percent.
Left to its own devices, the wave function would shift as time went by,
reflecting the increasing probability that the nitrogen atom would be
found below the hydrogens. But before the wave function shifts, we make
an observation. The act of observation causes the wave function (which,
again, describes the probability of the atom being in this place or that
one) to collapse from several probabilities into a single actuality.
This is all standard quantum theory, the well-established collapse of
the wave function following an observation.

But something interesting has happened. \"The wave function has ceased
oozing toward the bottom,\" as Sudarshan and his colleague Rothman
explained (Rothman; 1998) \"it has been \'reset\' to the zero position.
And so, by repeated observations at short intervals, . . . one can
prevent the nitrogen atom from ever leaving the top position.\" If you
rapidly and repeatedly ask a system, *are you in this state or are you
not?,* by making observations designed to ascertain whether or not the
nitrogen atom is where it began, the system will not evolve in the
normal way. It will become, in a sense, frozen. An answer of "Yes" to
the posed question \[in this case: Is the nitrogen atom on top?\] will
become fixed and unchanging. The state will be forced to stay longer
within the realm that provides a "Yes" answer.

Quantum Zeno has been verified experimentally many times. One of the
neatest confirmations came in a 1990 study at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology. There, researchers measured the probability
that beryllium ions would decay from a high-energy to a low-energy
state. As the number of measurements per unit time increased, the
probability of that energy transition fell off; the beryllium atoms
stayed in their initial, high-energy state because scientists kept
asking them, "So, have you decayed yet?" The watched pot never boiled.
As Sudarshan and Rothman concluded, \"One really can stop an atomic
transition by repeatedly looking at it.\"

This effect is a very special case of the general fact that if a
sequence of similar Process I events occur rapidly \[on the time scale
of the macroscopic oscillations associated with the associated actions
P\] then the "Yes" outcome can be held in place in the face of strong
Process II mechanical forces that would tend to quickly produce the "No"
feedback. This means that agents whose efforts can influence the
rapidity of Process I actions would enjoy a survival advantage over
competitors that lack this feature, for they could sustain beneficial
activities longer than their Process I deprived competitors. This gives
the leverage needed to link mind to natural selection, and also the
leverage needed to allow us to link our minds to our physical actions.
For these efforts will then have intention-controlled physical effects,
and this linkage can be discovered, and integrated into behavior, by
trial and error processes.

*Support from Psychology*

The empirical evidence cited above for the actual existence of the
theoretically mandated Quantum Zeno Effect comes from physics
experiments. But, according to the theory, the effect should manifest
itself also in the realm of psychology.

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 is outside or apart from the stream. In
James's words "*thought is itself the thinker*, and psychology need not
look beyond." The "self" is a slowly changing "fringe" part of the
stream of consciousness. It provides a background cause for the central
focus of attention.

The physical brain, evolving mechanically in accordance with the local
deterministic Process II does most of the necessary work, without the
intervention of Process I. It does its job of creating, on the basis of
its interpretation of the clues provided by the senses, a suitable
response. But, due to its quantum nature, the brain necessarily
generates an amorphous mass of overlapping and conflicting templates for
action. Process I acts to extract from this jumbled mass of
possibilities a dynamically stable configuration in which all of the
quasi-independent modular components of the brain act together in a
maximal mutually supportive configuration of non-discordant harmony that
tends to prolongs itself into the future and produce a characteristic
subsequent feedback. This is the preferred "Yes" state PSP that
specifies the form of the Process I event. But the quantum rules do not
assert that this preferred part of the prior state S necessarily comes
into being: they assert, instead, that if this process is
activated\-\--say by some sort of "consent"\-\--then this "Yes"
component PSP will come into being with probability

Tr PSP/Tr S.

And the rate at which consents are given is assumed to be increasable by
mental effort.

The phenomena of "will" is understood in terms of this effortful control
of Process I, which can, by means of the Quantum Zeno Effect, override
strong mechanical forces arising from Process II, and cause a large
deviation of brain activity from what it would be if no mental effort
were made.

Does this quantum-physics-based conception of the connection between
mind and brain explain anything in the realm 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: 227) writes:

> \`\`I have spoken as if our attention were wholly determined by neural
> conditions. I believe that the array of 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 mind upon it. We feel that we can make more or less of
> the effort as we choose. If this feeling be not deceptive, if our
> effort be a spiritual force, and an indeterminate one, then of course
> it  contributes coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result.
> Though it introduce no new idea, it will deepen and prolong the stay
> in consciousness of innumerable 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: 417) writes:

> \`\`Thus we find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition
> when we ask by  what process is it that the thought of any  given
> action comes to prevail stably in the mind.\'\'  

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
> achievement.\'\'\... \`\`Everywhere, then, the function of effort is
> the same: to keep affirming and adopting the  thought which, if left
> to itself, would slip away.\'\'

This description of the effect of mind on the course of mind-brain
process 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 dynamical principles that had been introduced by
physicists to explain atomic phenomena. Thus the whole range of science,
from atomic physics to mind-brain dynamics, is brought together in a
single rationally coherent theory of an evolving cosmos that consists of
a physical reality that is constituted not of matter but of an
action-based reality that determines propensities or tendencies for
Process I events to occur.

In the quantum theory of mind-brain being described here there are two
separate processes. First, there is the unconscious mechanical brain
process called Process II. As discussed at length in the book, *Mind,
Matter, and Quantum Mechanics* (Stapp, 1993: 150), this brain processing
involves dynamical units that are represented by complex patterns of
neural activity (or, more generally, 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
referencing\-\--i.e., by activation of several of its parts\-\--coupled
to feed-back loops that strengthen or weaken the activities of
appropriate processing centers, appears to account for the essential
features of the mechanical part of the dynamics in a way that in many
cases is not greatly different from that of a classical model, except
for the creation of a superposition of a host of parallel possibilities
that according to the classical concepts could not exist simultaneously.

The second process, Von Neumann\'s Process I**,** is needed in order to
select what actually happens from the continuum of alternative
possibilities generated by Process II.

Process I, which is connected to conscious awareness and to what
actually happens, has itself two modes. The first involves mere passive
consent, and temporally isolated events; the second involves mental
effort, and a sequence of temporally closely spaced events that bring
importantly into play the Quantum Zeno Effect. The first mode involves
passive processing, and exploits the massively parallel processing
capacities of process II, whereas the second mode involves an
effortfully sustained sequence of Process I events.

Active Process I intervention has, according to the
quantum-physics-based theory described here, a distinctive form. It
consists of a sequence of intentional actions the rapidity of which can
be increased with effort. Effort-induced speed-up of the rate of
occurrence of these events can, by means of the quantum Zeno effect,
keep attention focused on an intention.

Effort can, by increasing the number of intentional events per second,
increase the input of mental processing into brain activity.

An extended discussion of non-trivial agreement of these features with a
large body of data from the field of the psychology of attention is
described in Stapp (2001)

*Mental Action in Neuroscience*

Scientists in different fields are to some extent free to choose what
sort of models or theories they use to organize, explain, understand,
and predict the observed features of the data in their field, and to
guide their further inquiries. On the other hand, the ideal of *the
unity of science* gives precedence to models that mesh with the basic
principles of physics, or at least do not contradict them.

On the basis of this ideal it would seem that, for experiments that deal
directly with the effects of self-directed mental intentions upon brain
activity, the preferred theoretical framework would be one based upon
contemporary physical theory, rather than one based upon an
approximation that, according to contemporary physical theory,
systematically eliminates from the more exact theory some important
effects of mental intention upon the brain that seem to be exactly of
the kind needed to account for the neuroscience data.

The conceptual structure of the more accurate quantum model seems
eminently better suited to the analysis of this data than models based
on the classical approximation. The quantum treatment not only *retains*
a mechanism that coherently accounts for the data, it is also much
simpler. For, just as in the treatment of atomic systems, it brings
directly into the *dynamical* description of the phenomena a
representation of the *phenomenological* description of those phenomena.
It ties the mentalistic language that we human beings use to communicate
to each other the facts about the phenomena into the physical
description of the phenomena.

The foregoing account of the quantum approach is general, but somewhat
abstract. To make it more tangible and concrete let us consider the
experiments of Ochsner et al. (2002) - described also in Chapter Seven
of this volume - with particular attention to the following four key
questions:

1\. How does the quantum mechanism work in this case, in comparison to
what the classical account would say?

2\. How do we account for the rapid changes occurring in large neural
circuits involving millions of neurons during conscious and voluntary
regulation of brain activity?

3\. How does consciousness "know" where and how to interact in the brain
in order to produce a specific psychological effect?

4\. Is consciousness localized, and, if so, how and in what sense; or
does it lie, instead, "outside of space"?

Reduced to its essence the 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"). The subjects then 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 classical materialist point of view this is essentially a
conditioning experiment, where, however, the "conditioning" is achieved
via 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 classical physics,
which have no trace of any experiential quality? And 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 effortful actions, the presence or absence of which
determine whether the limbic or frontal regions of the brain will be
activated.

Within the framework of classical physics these connections between
feelings and brain activities are huge mysteries. The classical
materialist claim is that *someday* these connections will be
understood. But the basic question is whether these connections will
ever be understood in terms of a physical theory that is known to be
false, and that, moreover, is false in ways that, according to
contemporary physical theory, systematically exclude the causes of the
correlations between the psychological and physiological aspects of the
mind-brain system that these neuropsychology experiments reveal. Or, on
the other hand, will the eventual understanding of this linkage accord
with causal linkage between mental realities and brain activities that
orthodox (Von Neumann) contemporary physical theory entails.

There are important similarities and also important differences between
the classical and quantum explanations of the experiments of Ochsner et
al. In both approaches the particles in 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 classical terms. However, in the classical description the
dynamics is well described in terms of the local deterministic classical
laws that govern these classical quantities, insofar as they are
precisely defined.

Quantum theory asserts, however, that the condition that these classical
quantities be *precisely defined* is unrealistic: Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle asserts that this assumption is not justified: one
must accept at least some small amount of cloudlike uncertainty. But
small uncertainties rapidly grow into larger uncertainties. The
discussion of the ionic motions in nerve terminals exemplifies this
growth of uncertainty: the state of the brain rapidly fans out into a
state that encompasses many possible experiential states.

This incursion into the dynamics of growing uncertainties renders the
classical approach basically incomplete: it can never lead to well
defined experiential states, except by actually violating the quantum
laws.

\[There is a well-known and powerful process in quantum theory that
strongly influences this expansion of the state of the brain into a
state that encompasses many alternative experiential possibilities. It
is called "environmental decoherence." The interactions of the brain
with its environment makes the state S of the brain into what is called
a "mixture." This means that the interference effects between
significantly different classically describable possibilities becomes
markedly attenuated. That effect is, however, already completely
accounted for in the Von Neumann state S of the brain: environmental
decoherence in no way upsets or modifies the Von Neumann theory
described here. Indeed it makes that theory basically accessible to
neuroscientists by converting the complex mathematical concept of a
quantum state into a structure that can be visualized as simply a
collection of virtual classically conceived states: the quantum state of
the brain is effectively transformed by environmental decoherence
effects into an ensemble of classically describable potentialities that
become converted to experiential realities by a Process I action. Thus
the quantum brain dynamics becomes much easier both to conceive and to
describe because of environmental decoherence effect allows classical
language and imagery to be validly used in an important way. But it has
never been shown to obviate the need for Process I.\]

One could, despite violating the quantum laws, try to pursue a
quasi-classical calculation. This would be a classical-type computation
with the quantum-mandated uncertainties folded in as probability
distributions, and with certain classically describable brain states
identified as the "neural correlates" of the various possible
experiential states. One could then produce, in principle, the same
general kinds of statistical predictions that quantum theory would give.

This sort of quasi-classical approach would, in fact, probably give
results very similar to quantum theory for situations arising from
"passive attention." For in these cases mind is acting essentially as a
passive witness, in a way that is basically in line with the ideas of
classical physics.

But quantum theory was designed to deal with the other case, in which
the conscious action of an agent -- to perform some particular probing
action - enters into the dynamics in an essential way. Within the
context of the experiment by Ochsner et al., quantum theory provides,
via the Process I mechanism, an explicit means whereby the successful
effort to "rethink feelings" actually causes - by catching and actively
holding in place - the 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 utilized by living human
experimental subjects to attain the desired outcome. The classical
materialist approach to these data, as detailed earlier in this chapter,
by no means allows for such effective communication. Analogous quantum
mechanical reasoning can of course be utilized *mutatis mutandis* to
explain the data of Beauregard (2001) and related studies of
self-directed neuroplasticity (see Schwartz & Begley, 2002).

Quantum theory resolves, within a scientific context, the problem of the
connection between the psychologically and physically described features
of the mind-brain system by, first, taking the linguistic/semantic modes
of expression that scientists use to communicate experimental conditions
and facts to one another, and to others, to be descriptions of
psychological realities that, in essence, are what they seem to be, and
do what they seem to do, and, second, specifying the dynamical equation
that determines how these psychologically described realities act upon
physical brain states.

The second question is: How do we account for the rapid changes induced
by mental effort in large brain circuits?

The answer is that the non-local operator P that represents the
intention singles out a large quasi-stable and functionally important
brain state that is likely to produce the expected feedbacks. Large
intention-controlled functionally effective brain activities are singled
out and linked to mental effort through *learning*, which depends upon
the fact that the mental efforts, per se, have physical consequences. A
"Yes" outcome actualizes such a functional state. Thus quantum theory
provides the mathematical machinery for linking mentalistically
described functional properties to the physically described macroscopic
properties of the brain that implements them. No comparable linkage is
provided by classical physics, which would appear to be constitutionally
ill-equipped to accommodate causally efficacious mental actions.

The third question is: How does consciousness "know" where and how to
interact in the brain in order to produce a specific psychological
effect?

The answer is that felt intentions, per se, have physical consequences,
and thence experiential consequences. Hence an agent can learn, by trail
and error, how to select an intentional action that is likely to produce
a feedback that fulfills an intention.

The fourth question is: Is consciousness localized, and, if so, how and
in what sense; or does it lie, instead, "outside of space"?

Each conscious event is associated with a Process I action that involves
an action P that is necessarily non-local, for mathematical reasons.
Moreover, the "Yes" part must have the functional properties needed to
set in motion the brain-body activity that is likely to produce the
intended feed-back experience. Thus each conscious action would, in
order to meet these requirements, act over some functionally
characterized extended portion of the brain. \[In fact, for reasons that
go well beyond the scope of this chapter, this event also induces
effects in faraway places: these effects are the causes, within the Von
Neumann ontology, of the long-range non-local effects associated with
the famous theorem of John Bell (1964).\]

# Conclusions and summary

The key point of this entire chapter is simply this: neuropsychology is
greatly simplified by accepting the fact that brains must in principle
be treated quantum mechanically. Accepting that obvious fact means that
the huge deferred-to-the-future question of how mind is connected to a
classically described brain must, in principle, be replaced by the
already resolved question of how mind is connected to a quantum
mechanically described brain. That shift resolves the problem of
accounting for the dynamic linkage between linguistic/semantic modes
communication used in setting up experiments involving cognitive control
of emotions and the physical description of the brains of subjects, by
adopting the same pragmatic solution that atomic physicists adopted when
faced with this *same* problem of accounting coherently for the effects
of *mentalistically described human intentional actions* *upon the*
*physically described systems that those actions act upon.* This
solution is encapsulated in Process I. The benefits of adopting the
pragmatic quantum approach may be as important to progress in
neuroscience as they were in atomic physics.

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