The Mind and Physics

(This post I have extracted from parts of Chapter 10 of “NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND” by Robert Paster. The book is the synthesis of Mr. Paster's two-year effort researching the historical development and scientists' latest thinking regarding the mind, the brain, cognition and perception, atoms and matter, quantum theory, gravitation, and particle physics.)

The mind has played a role in physics since the earliest days of quantum physics. The Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 featured a debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein about whether the mind and consciousness are (Bohr) or are not (Einstein) part of physics. Einstein's position has dominated mainstream physics for decades, but the battle simmered on for the entire twentieth century.

Roger Penrose, a prominent University of Oxford mathematician who has made major contributions to modern physics, in his book "The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics" speculates that consciousness involves access to the universe’s idealized concepts; these are the Platonic ideals of centuries-old philosophy. In Plato’s formulation, it is not our typically understood physical world that is real; what are truly real are forms and ideas. The physical world is a mere shadow of the real world of forms and ideas.

When the mind perceives one of the mathematical concepts of Plato’s worldview, the mind is making contact with this world. Our experience of grasping a concept is a holistic experience of seeing at once, as a whole, the solution to a problem. Or, as Penrose cites, it’s Mozart discussing how he seizes at a glance an entire musical composition: “It does not come to me successively . . . but in its entirety that my imagination lets me hear it.”

Penrose proposes that before our mind reaches these kernels of understanding, a physiological process within the brain allows the brain to form these ideas. The process involves physical brain activity—rapid trials of combinations of growing and contracting dendritic spines, which stretch out to the synapses that separate a nerve cell from its neighbor. So our brain has a window of opportunity within which to toy with possibilities for dendritic spine construction. How does the brain settle on its ultimate choice?

In part, the construction is influenced by the physiology and chemistry of its environment. So the construction depends in part on our emotional state and on the preexisting state of our brain and its connections. But what provides the core decision-making criterion? How is a final dendrite construction settled on when our mind grasps a concept or glimpses a new symphonic work?

Here, Penrose takes this even further. His answer is quantum gravity, which is also the (still not found) answer to the question of how general relativity is to be reconciled with quantum physics.

Penrose has frequently collaborated with Stuart Hameroff, who has extensively studied microtubules, which give shape to our neurons and through which neuronal chemicals pass. Hameroff, tracing the evolution of life, marks the incorporation of microtubules into the modern cell as taking place about 1.5 billion years ago, as part of a general symbiotic merger of previously independent organelles (cell parts). A billion years later, during the Cambrian period which began 540 million years ago, there was a vast and abrupt emergence of varied lifeforms—the Cambrian explosion—which Hameroff attributes directly to the early precedents of consciousness that microtubules permit.

Penrose and Hameroff propose these microtubules as our brain’s link—through orchestrated reduction—to the collapse (reduction) of the quantum wave function: many neuronal microtubules, acting in concert (orchestrated), create an act of consciousness linked to the quantum physical world…