Re: Quantum thought?

[Keith Wilson <kw503@york.ac.uk>]

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It's an interesting thought...

As I understand it, the reason why quantum mechanics exhibits these 
characteristics (or at least one interpretation of it) is that it is 
impossible to isolate a particular aspect of the universe (e.g. an 
electron) from the rest of its environment, so the measuring equipment you 
use to perform the experiment becomes part of the overall system being 
tested and there is no longer any distinction between the observer and the 
phenomena being observed. This implies that the universe cannot be analysed 
into multiple independent parts, like a machine, but instead behaves as a 
single unified whole, with each part affecting all of the others to a 
greater or lesser extent. If this is true, it has some fairly fundamental 
implications for metaphysics, not to mention the rest of philosophy, as it 
challenges the very idea of an independent 'object' both at the macro- and 
microscopic levels. (David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order is a 
good and very readable introduction to these topics.)

I'm not sure how much evidence there is that the brain (or at least the 
parts that are involved in conscious thought) behave in a similarly 
holistic way, but it wouldn't surprise me, and this would certainly explain 
why limited progress has been made in identifying the various structures 
and processes that are responsible. A good book I read on the subject 
recently is Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination by G Edelman and 
G Tononi, and also How Brains Think by William Calvin, which has some 
interesting stuff about the role of Darwinian processes in thinking and 
consciousness (not sure if this is directly relevant, but it's interesting 
stuff anyway...)

Your post hits on another important point, which is that in studying the 
mind in general, and consciousness in particular, philosophers have a 
tendency to focus on logical or rational thought and language, often using 
themselves as a model for study. To some extent this is inevitable when you 
use rational thought and language as a tool for analysis, but it seems to 
me that most of the action in the brain takes place at a sub- or 
semi-conscious level, and so any philosophical account must also take these 
into account (I'm thinking here of the ability to recognise complex 
patterns, i.e. perception, and to associate thoughts and events with past 
experience, i.e. memory and imagination). In a sense, conscious thought and 
rationality may just be the 'froth on top of the waves' that cannot be 
accounted for independently of the rest of the mind, and is again a part of 
a single integrated whole. There seems to be an implicit assumption in some 
philosophy, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence, that you 
can somehow 'disconnect' rationality from the rest of mental life and model 
it independently, but perhaps this view is just mistaken. In this case, we 
don't need a theory of consciousness but a theory of mind in the broadest 
sense that can explain conscious thought as just one of a range of mental 
phenomena. What we are doing when we are thinking may indeed be very 
different from what we are doing when we aren't, and so trying to give an 
account of consciousness in isolation from other mental phenomena may be 
the wrong place to start.

OK, that's enough waffly speculation for one e-mail... Good topic for 
discussion though. What do other people think about this?

Cheers,
Keith.


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