**8. PSYCHO-PHYSICAL THEORY AND "WILL."**

I have concentrated so far on what is basically new: on the crucial
difference between classical physics and quantum physics that allows our
thoughts to be an essential player in the causal description of brain
process. This new element needs to be placed in the context of what I
take to be otherwise a fairly standard psycho-physical theory, perhaps
the orthodox theory to the extent that any such thing exists.

As already mentioned, I follow William James and take all conscious
experiences to be essentially "feelings" of one kind or another.
Experiencing a major chord "feels different" from experiencing a minor
chord. The exhilarating experiencing of a rapid piano run up the scale
feels different from the tip-toe-y feeling of a lightly fingered
sequence of high notes, or the satisfying feeling of the final chord of
a work of Beethoven or Wagner. Einstein described the feeling of his
theoretical reflections in terms of muscular feelings, and a
mathematician knows his proof is valid because of a deep feeling that
all bases have been well cover: there is no feeling of discord, or
incompleteness, or incursion of doubt.

A person's thoughts are dynamically linked to patterns of brain activity
that are his brain's representations of his physical body and its
relationship to the world around him. Called the body-world schema, this
momentary brain representation is, during wakeful periods being
continually updated by the brain on the basis of its interpretation of
clues provided by the sensory apparatus, and it is closely tied into his
bodily actions and their sensed connections to the outer world. His
actions are controlled by activating patterns in the body-world schema,
and he learns through experience the relationship between his felt
intentions and the subsequent feed-back in terms of sensed experiences.
The body-world schema is the intermediary physical link. The dynamical
interplay between these intentional acts, the body-world schema, and
sensory feedback tunes the connection between mind and brain, and links
the felt quality of the intentional act to a mental image of the
intended consequences.

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 for the central focus.

The physical brain, evolving mechanically in accordance with the local
deterministic Process II does most of the 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 the wave nature of its component parts, the brain
necessarily generates an amorphous mass of overlapping and conflicting
templates for action, formulated in terms of possible structures for the
body-world schema. Process I selects from among these possibilities, on
the basis of high-level coherency and stability criteria that access the
entire structure of the brain *as a whole*, the possible state PSP,
which is the 'Yes' branch of the state S' = PSP + (I-P)(S(I-P) created
by Process I.

Intentionality acts by controlling attention. Intention activates a
Process I event that grasps a state PSP in which attention is focused on
actualizing the intended state. The corresponding physical state is
built around a projected body-world schema. The body-world schema is
created by interaction between intention and feed-back, and a sustained
persistence of a projected body-world schema tends to initiate the
appropriate motor actions, monitoring actions, and follow-up events.

The phenomena of "will" is understood as a condition in which an initial
Process I event leads to the occurrence of a very rapid sequence of
follow-up events defined by very nearly the same P: a "mental effort"
causes a rapid repetition of Process I events with almost identical
projection operators P. Then the quantum equations of motion have the
effect of preventing any transitions of 'Yes' states to 'No' states. The
state is held in a state of the form PXP, with fixed or slowly changing
P, in spite of all sorts of disruptive and distracting mechanical
influences that would otherwise cause a wandering of attention. The
mental effort is thereby causing a large deviation of brain activity
from it would otherwise be. Mental effort is importantly influencing
brain process.

Does this theory of the connection between mind and brain explain
anything?

This theory was already in place when a colleague, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz,
brought to my attention some passages from \`\`Psychology: The Briefer
Course\'\', written by William James. In the final section of the
chapter on Attention James 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. The delay thus gained might not be

more than a second in duration\-\--but that second

may be critical; for in the rising and falling

considerations in the mind, where two associated

systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is

often a matter of but a second more or less of

attention at the outset, whether one system shall

gain force to occupy the field and develop

itself and exclude the other, or be excluded

itself by the other. When developed it may

make us act, and that act may seal our doom.

When we come to the chapter on the Will

we shall see that the whole drama of the

voluntary life hinges on the attention, slightly

more or slightly less, which rival motor

ideas may receive. \...\'\'

In the chapter on Will, in the section entitled \`\`Volitional effort is
effort of attention\'\' James 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 consideration 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 tendencies for
Process I events to occur.

Much experimental work on attention and effort has occurred since the
time of William James. That work has been hampered by the apparent
nonexistence of any physical theory that rationally explains how our
conscious experiences could influence activities in our brains. The
behaviorist approach, which dominated psychology during the first half
of the twentieth century, and which essentially abolished in this field
the use not only of introspective data but also of the very concept of
consciousness, was surely motivated in part by the fact that
consciousness was excluded from any role in brain dynamics by the
physics of the preceding century

The admitted failure of the behaviorist programs led to the
rehabilitation of \`\`attention\'\' during the early fifties, and many
hundreds of experiments have been performed during the past fifty years
for the purpose of investigating empirically those aspects of human
behavior that we ordinarily link to our consciousness.

Harold Pashler\'s 1998 book \`\`The Psychology of Attention\'\' \[32\]
describes a great deal of this empirical work, and also the intertwined
theoretical efforts to understand the nature of an
information-processing system that could account for the intricate
details of the empirical data. Two key concepts are the notions
\`\`Attention\'\' and of a processing \`\`Capacity\'\'. The former is
associated with an internally directed selection between different
possible allocations of the available processing \`\`Capacity\'\'. A
third concept is \'\'Effort\'\', which is linked to incentives, and to
reports by subjects of \`\`trying harder\'\'.

Pashler organizes his discussion by separating perceptual processing
from post-perceptual processing. The former covers processing that,
first of all, identifies such basic physical properties of stimuli as
location, color, 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 \[p. 33\] that \`\`the
empirical findings of attention studies specifically argue for a
distinction between perceptual limitations and more central limitations
involved in thought and the planning of action.\'\' The existence of
these two different processes, with different characteristics, is a
principal theme of Pashler\'s book \[p. 33, 263, 293, 317, 404\].

In the quantum theory of mind-brain being described here there are two
separate processes. First, there is the unconscious mechanical brain
process governed by the Schroedinger equation. As discussed at length in
my earlier book, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, this brain
processing involves dynamical units that are represented by complex
patterns of neural activity (or, more generally, of brain activity) that
are \`\`facilitated\'\' by use, and 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,
coupled to feed-back loops that strengthen or weaken the activities of
appropriate processing centers, appears to explain the essential
features of the mechanical part of the dynamics.

The function of the brain is to create and direct courses of action
appropriate to the circumstances in which the organism finds itself.
Accordingly, the brain ought to create a template for a possible plan of
action. Detailed examination of the quantum uncertainties associated the
motion in nerve terminals of incoming calcium ions from the ion channels
to the triggering sites for the release of vesicles of neurotransmitter
entail \[MM&QM, p.152\] that a host of different possibilities will
emerge. This mechanical phase of the processing already involves some
selectivity, because of the enhancing and inhibiting feedback loops. But
the essential point is that the evolution of the brain according to the
Schroedinger equation *must* generate not just one single template for
action, but a host of alternative possibilities. Hence the action of the
second process, von Neumann\'s Process **I** must come into play in
order to select what actually happens from the continuum of alternative
possibilities generated by the mechanical aspect of the full quantum
dynamics. But Process **I** involves the element of freedom that feeds
into the Quantum Zeno Effect.

This conception of brain dynamics seems to accommodate all of the
perceptual aspects of the data described by Pashler. But it is the
high-level processing, which is more closely linked to our active
mentally controlled conscious thinking, that is of prime interest here.
The data pertaining to this second process is the focus of part II of
Pashler\'s book.

Mental intervention has, according to the quantum-physics-based theory
described here, several distinctive characteristics. It consists of a
sequence of discrete events each of which consents to an integrated
course of action presented by brain. The rapidity of these events 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
focussed on a task. Between 100 and 300 msec of consent seem to be
needed to fix a plan of action.

Effort can, by increasing the number of events per second, increase the
mental input into brain activity. Each conscious event picks out from
the multitude of quasi-classical possibilities that comprise the quantum
brain the sub-ensemble that is compatible with the conscious experience.

The correspondence between the mental event and the associated physical
event is this: the physical event reduces the prior physical ensemble of
alternative possibilities to the sub-ensemble compatible with the mental
event. This connection constitutes the core postulate of Copenhagen
quantum theory: the physical event reduces the prior state of the system
to the part of it that is compatible with the experience of the
observer.

Examination of Pashler\'s book shows that this quantum-physics-based
theory accommodates naturally all of the complex structural features of
the empirical data that he describes. He emphasizes \[p. 33\] a specific
finding: strong empirical evidence for what he calls a central
processing bottleneck associated with the attentive selection of a motor
action. This kind of bottleneck is what the quantum-physics-based theory
predicts: the bottleneck is precisely the single linear sequence of
mind-brain quantum events that von Neumann quantum theory is built upon.

Pashler \[p. 279\] describes four empirical signatures for this kind of
bottleneck, and describes the experimental confirmation of each of them.
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.

This bottleneck is not automatic within classical physics. A classical
model could easily produce simultaneously two responses in different
modalities, say vocal and manual, to two different stimuli arriving via
two different modalities, say auditory and tactile. The two processes
could proceed via dynamically independent routes. Pashler \[p. 308\]
notes that the bottleneck is undiminished in split-brain patients
performing two tasks that, at the level of input and output, seem to be
confined to different hemispheres.

The queuing effect for the mind-controlled motor responses does not
exclude interference between brain processes that are similar to each
other, and hence that use common brain mechanisms. Pashler \[p. 297\]
notes this distinction, and says \`\`the principles governing queuing
seem indifferent to neural overlap of any sort studied so far.\'\'

The important point here is that there is in principle, in the quantum
model, an essential dynamical difference between, on the one hand, the
unconscious processing carried out by the Schroedinger evolution, which
generates via a local process an expanding collection of classically
implementable possible courses of action, and, on the other hand, the
process associated with the sequence of conscious events that
constitutes a stream of consciousness. The former are not limited by the
queuing effect, because all of the possibilities develop in parallel,
whereas the latter do form elements of a single queue. The experiments
cited by Pashler all appear to support this clear prediction of the
quantum approach.

An interesting experiment mentioned by Pashler involves the simultaneous
tasks of doing an IQ test and giving a foot response to rapidly
presented sequences of tones of either 2000 or 250 Hz. 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 both to \`intelligent\' behavior, which
requires conscious processing, and to selection of motor response.

Another interesting experiment showed that, when performing at maximum
speed, with fixed accuracy, subjects produced responses at the same rate
whether performing one task or two simultaneously: the limited capacity
to produce responses can be divided between two simultaneously performed
tasks. \[p. 301\]

Pashler also notes \[p. 348\] that \`\`Recent results strengthen the
case for central interference even further, concluding that memory
retrieval is subject to the same discrete processing bottleneck that
prevents simultaneous response selection in two speeded choice
tasks.\'\'

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\'\'. 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, via
quantum selection and reduction, bits of control information that
reflect mental evaluation.

Studies of sleep-deprived subjects suggest that in these cases
\`\`effort works to counteract low arousal\'\'. If arousal is
essentially the rate of occurrence of conscious events then this result
is what the quantum model would predict.

Pashler notes that \`\`Performing two tasks at the same time, for
example, almost invariably\... produces poorer performance in a task and
increases ratings in effortfulness.\'\' And \`\`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.\'\' All
of these empirical connections are in line with the general principle
that effort increases the rate of conscious events, each of which inputs
a mental evaluation and a selection or focussing on a course of action,
and that this resource can be divided between tasks.

Additional supporting evidence comes from the studies of the effect of
the conscious process upon the storage of information in short-term
memory. According to the physics-based theory, the conscious process
merely actualizes a course of action, which then develops automatically,
with perhaps some occasional monitoring. Thus if one sets in place the
activity of retaining in memory a certain sequence of stimuli, then this
activity can 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 assumption that short-term memory capacity can be equated
with, or used as a measure of, central resources.\'\'\[p.341\] In the
theory outlined here short-term memory is stored in patterns of brain
activity, whereas consciousness is associated with the selection of a
sub-ensemble of quasi-classical states. This distinction seems to
account for the large amount of detailed data that bears on this
question of the connection of short-term-memory to consciousness.
\[p.337-341\]

Deliberate storage in, or retrieval from, long-term memory requires
focussed attention, and hence conscious effort. These processes should,
according to the theory, use part of the limited processing capacity,
and hence be detrimentally affected by a competing task that makes
sufficient concurrent demands on the central resources. On the other
hand, \`\`perceptual\'\' processing that involves conceptual
categorization and identification without conscious awareness should not
interfere with tasks that do consume central processing capacity. These
expectations are what the evidence appears to confirm: \`\`the entirety
of\...front-end processing are modality specific and operate independent
of the sort of single-channel central processing that limits retrieval
and the control of action. This includes not only perceptual analysis
but also storage in STM (short term memory) and whatever may feed back
to change the allocation of perceptual attention itself.\'\' \[p. 353\]

Pashler describes a result dating from the nineteenth century: mental
exertion reduces the amount of physical force that a person can apply.
He notes that \`\`This puzzling phenomena remains unexplained.\'\' \[p.
387\]. However, it is an automatic consequence of the physics-based
theory: creating physical force by muscle contraction requires an effort
that opposes the physical tendencies generated by the Schroedinger
equation. This opposing tendency is produced by the quantum Zeno effect,
and is roughly proportional to the number of bits per second of central
processing capacity that is devoted to the task. So if part of this
processing capacity is directed to another task, then the applied force
will diminish.

Pashler speculates on the possibility of a neurophysiological
explanation of the facts he describes, but notes that the parallel
versus serial distinction between the two mechanisms leads, in the
classical neurophysiological approach, to the questions of what makes
these two mechanisms so different, and what the connection between them
is. \[p.354-6, 386-7\]

After analyzing various possible mechanisms that could cause the central
bottleneck, Pashler \[p.307-8\] says \`\`the question of why this should
be the case is quite puzzling.\'\' Thus the fact that this bottleneck,
and its basic properties, follow automatically from the same laws that
explain the complex empirical evidence in the fields of classical and
quantum physics means that the theory has significant explanatory power.

Of course, the fact that this theory seems to work so well does not mean
that it is the only theory that can work. But in the past science has
been well served by the endeavor of trying to understand various complex
high-level processes in ways that all fit together coherently with basic
physical theory. The brain is a physio-chemical structure that rests in
principle on quantum processes, and the quantum principles lead in a
completely natural way to a specified kind of dynamical linkage between
the aspects of the mind-brain that are described in psychological and
physical terms. All classically described features are accounted for in
the quantum description, which however provides also a natural dynamical
place for mind whereas classical physics does not.

Quantum theory automatically accounts for all the successes of classical
physical theory. So the fact that classical ideas work well in
neuroanatomy and for other large scale phenomena is not evidence that
classical physics will work in domains where quantum effects ought to
come in, such as the migration of calcium ions inside of nerve
terminals. The quantum description becomes necessary only when treating
subtle dynamical effects, which, however, can have important large scale
effects. The effect of mental effort to hold ideas in place longer than
classical computations would predict seems to be the most crucial
dynamical difference between the classical and quantum models. This
effect could eventually become important in neuroscience, but it
immediately entails a major revision in the scientific conception of
human beings.