Quantum Biology: Irreducible Mind (Part 4)

Are there quantum processes in the brain? Can quantum mechanics better explain the mind and the soul?

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Sources:

Quantum Effects in Biology: Bird Navigation:

Molecular
Vibration-Sensing Component in Human Olfaction:

Can quantum probability provide a new direction for cognitive modeling:

Is there something quantum-like about the human mental lexicon?

Stuart Hameroff
, “Quantum Cognition and Brain Microtubules”

Dr. Stuart Hameroff - Quantum Cognition and Brain Microtubules:

Aberrant parenting and delayed offspring development in rats exposed to lithium:

Matthew Fisher
“Quantum Cognition - Theory and Experiment”

Are we quantum computers, or merely clever robots?

Information processing in brain microtubules:

Atomic water channel controlling remarkable properties of a single brain microtubule:

John Eccles - How the Self Controls Its Brain

Henry Margenau - The Miracle of Existence

Henry P. Stapp - Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics

Bruce Rosenblum & Fred Kuttner - The Quantum Enigma

Paul Davies & John Gribbin - The Matter Myth

Jeffery Schwartz - The Mind and the Brain

[Ben-lpsv]

I should watch this whole video indeed ! God bless you Mike.

[Jerico]

I was about to lose my faith in Jesus until I found your videos due to finding research that Jesus was the literal sun. But now I know the truth, thank you. Don’t stop making videos, it really helps people! God bless! SUBSCRIBED

[salemsalem]

Mind Blown🤯. Consciousness still intact though

[creatorsofreality]

The only and one of the kind IP.
Watching from Ethiopia 🇪🇹

[akimoetam]

“Man, my day is really busy, I’m going have no free tim-

*me seeing that IP has a new video

...yeah I’ve got time.”

[tdsuddreth]

I love that sneaky subliminal message. "I should watch this video all the way through." 🤣

[Eraktab]

Brest series of scientific philosophy I've ever seen. Love this part and hope there's more

[monarchblue]

Me after watching all of the videos in this series in order before watching this video and after I finished this video: *Oh yeah. Its ALL coming together*



Love the Quantum Biology stuff IP. Liked and saved.

[flapjackpanda]

atheists are always calling me childish and ignorant so i come here to educate myself lol, thanks this is awesome.

[femmedracula]

I really appreciate this installment and the contextualization of current quantum consciousness research. I saw the video from Sci-Show Psych the other day about using quantum theory to predict/understand consciousness without it literally being a quantum process and something was missing from that explanation - the "having your cake and eating it too, " as you said.

Deterministic/classical physics explanations of consciousness have long been unsatisfactory to me, especially to the extreme of simply writing off consciousness and qualia as illusions. I don't claim to have any answers, but exploring possible explanations has been quite informative.

[johnrockwell]

The body is the Organic Mecha for the Spirit.

[kennydawson]

Great Video, as always. This series is truly fascinating.

[oscarklauss]

I'm tired of lame brain physicalist insults like quantum woo. Exhausting all classical accounts to consciousness, one has to look elsewhere for the answer.

[ianb]

Good stuff.

IP, are you familiar with hylomorphic dualism, the view held by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas? I think that quantum physics strongly supports it, even apart from educated guesses regarding the specifics of how our minds and brains may work together through quantum or quantum-like effects.

Contra both materialist reductionism and Cartesian dualism, hylomorphic dualism holds that nature contains substances. A substance is a whole that is greater than the mere aggregate of its parts, and that has powers and properties that are not reducible to the aggregate powers of its parts.

In both materialism and Cartesian dualism all physical things are comprised of elementary particles that behave in a mechanistic manner, and everything that wholes do is determined by the aggregate mechanistic behavior of their parts. In hylomorphic dualism, by contrast, wholes can be just as fundamental as their parts, and their parts can have irreducible powers that they would not have when isolated from the wholes of which they are a part.

Now, many complex wholes are clearly not substances. For instance, the computers that we build are mere material aggregates of their parts. It's precisely because of this that they are useful to us. It is by understanding the mechanistic behaviors of a computer's constituents that engineers are able to combine those behaviors in such a way as to make computers that do what we want them to do. If it were not so, then computers would not behave how we want.

On the other hand, other things clearly are substances, such as conscious living creatures. If living things were mere aggregates of parts behaving in mechanistic fashion, then subjective conscious experience would be entirely superfluous to their behavior, which would mean that we could have no reason to suppose that they were conscious. But clearly some living things (namely us) do have conscious subjective experience, and clearly it affects our behavior (such as when we discuss it as I am doing now), so clearly conscious living things have causal powers that are not reducible aggregate mechanistic behavior of their parts in the way that computers are.

Anyhow, I think that even the most elementary facts about quantum physics demonstrate that the concept of irreducible substances holds true not just for conscious living things, but is rather ubiquitous all across nature. For instance, in the double-slit experiment, elementary particles produce an interference pattern *even if they are fired one at a time*. In other words, when fired through double slits, an individual photon wave produces two waves that interfere with each other and affect the probability of where the photon will land when it hits the photographic paper.

The fact that a photon is interfering with itself in a double-wave pattern before being measured implies that it isn't just a matter of us not *knowing* where the photon is before measuring it. Rather, the photon *doesn't actually have* what we think of as basic properties of a particle, such as location, while it is "on its own." Only when the photon is incorporated into the substantial form of a "macro" whole by hitting the photographic paper does it gain the properties of a particle.

While on its own, a photon has only a *potential* range of positions rather than an actual position. This also ties together nicely with the Aristotelian/Thomistic idea of potentiality versus actuality, and its idea that "prime matter" (which is to say matter as abstracted apart from any substantial form) is pure potentiality with no actuality. Of course, prime matter is only an abstraction that can't actually exist (since matter always has some form or other), but it's interesting that as we study the behavior of ever smaller and more "fundamental" particles isolated from larger wholes, the more we find that they have only potential or "probabilistic" properties rather than definite and actual ones.

This also ties into the logical and empirical difficulty of trying to tie human consciousness and human rationality (the ability to grasp immaterial abstract universals) to any single part of the brain. No part of the brain mechanistically *produces* consciousness and rationality. Instead, it's the whole brain, or rather the *whole human being*, that *is* conscious and rational by virtue of its substantial form. It's an irreducible power of the human being, not something that is "generated" or "produced" by lower-level mechanistic processes.

I think some of your educated speculations in your Near Death Experiences video about how memory and personality may persist after death through quantum entanglements or something analogous also tie in nicely with this. It's long been argued by Thomists that the rational human intellect is provably immaterial and therefore survives the death of the material body in an incomplete form, despite human beings being essentially embodied creatures. And that in turn fits like a glove with the Christian teaching that the final resurrection is a bodily resurrection, not an eternal existence as disembodied Platonic souls.

The idea that the brain is built to facilitate the building of memories and personality that survive the brain's death through quantum effects fits very well with this. It would mean that our memories and personalities, along with our rational intellects, are essentially "tied to" our brains and bodies, and yet can persist without them. Which again fits like a glove with the Christian teaching that the final resurrection is the eternal resurrection of our physical bodies, but in a glorified and imperishable form that will be as immortal as the souls that inform them.

[JH-dpzk]

*sees new IP video*
my hand: the fastest draw in the west

[DanielApologetics]

Awesome video! Now, sit back and wait for an objection that you've answered already earlier in this series..!

[owencampbell]

We're getting closer, the more hints are given the more it activates sleeping parts of the brain. Nothing emerges out of nothing, there is and was something there. It depends on your brain and your senses to observe and fine tune the tools required for such discoveries.

[paulforester]

This would explain my weird dreams. Lol

[mcawesomeytyo]

Amen brother. Wave Function collapse does not create consciousness. It only creates the brain. You just solved the hard problem of consciousness by inverting it (How does consciousness create the brain) and explaining it through quantum biology.

[danharte]

That was an amazingly detailed and technical presentation and I'll need to listen to this a few more times just to fully understand it all.
Great work IP