Ken Glasziou

   The purpose of this article is to provide a brief discussion about why "classical" concepts of the mind are considered to have failed, and how new work invoking quantum theory may eventually provide a viable alternative. These new ideas are compared with what the Urantia Papers state about mind and personality.

   Scientific research has provided new insights into the mind and its functioning that cannot be reconciled with older interpretations. In the past, a view accepted by most researchers considered the material world to be the reality which the mind interprets via its sensory inputs after processing the inputs through some kind of computational procedure.

   However the actual input from our sensory organs is very far from what we imagine to be our reality. For example, if we walk into a hotel dining room we may see a rectangular table. If we walk around the table to get to where the breakfast items are laid out, any occasional glances at the rectangular table are unlikely to consciously register changes to its shape.

   If we had the equipment to photograph the retinal images at the back of our eyeballs, we would get an entirely different picture. At no time would the image of the table be rectangular, it would be trapezoid. That trapezoid figure would also keep changing shape depending on the angle of perception.

   Remarkably, if our entrance to the dining room had been down a set of stairs we may have viewed a number of different tables, some rectangular, some square, some  round, and some of markedly different size. All of this, we could take in at a glance, and all of our impressions would be approximately correct if we later checked them through measurement. Again the photographic record of what we really "saw" in our retinal images would quite amaze us.

   The scene gets much more complicated if we compared our retinal images with what we think we see when viewing a landscape having different sized objects at varying distances, perhaps with some moving relative to the others.

   Our cursory glance provides us with the impression of a three dimensional scene in which our mental impression of the different size objects at different distances has their shape and size appropriately adjusted and even their relative speeds of movement appropriate to the distances at which we deem them to be. However the images on our retina are only two dimensional and have their shapes distorted by being projected onto the curved surface at the back of our eyeballs. So, regardless of the detail of how our minds sort the scene, the fact is that the information we gather through our senses is abstract, and our view of what is reality appears to have been derived only after some kind of computation.

   If abstract computation is going on in the brain, the concrete and reliable look of the world has no obvious explanation. We might also ask ourselves who or what does the computing and who could have written the exceedingly complex mathematical program that would be needed to transform the input data? In the absence of sensible answers being forthcoming from materialist philosophy and classical physics, many have sought for possible mechanisms in the strange world of quantum physics.
   From its inception, quantum physics has proposed, then proved, the unbelievable. And even after fifty or more years since the unbelievable has been demonstrated as true, people continue to devise more experiments just to make sure it really is so. Some of these curiosities are the superpositioning of states when a particle has the potential to be in more than a single state--particle or wave for example. The particle appears to remain "undecided" about what it is and so remains in a "suspended" state until an observer decides to look. Then the particle obliges by being a particle if the observer looks for a particle, or being a wave if he/she looks for a wave. Perhaps that would not seem so extraordinary if it were not for the fact that the object in superposition appears to be able to make the correct decision before it actually "knows" what the observer wants from it. How does the mind of the observer get into this scene?

   Then there is "non-locality" such as is seen when twin photons are travelling in opposite directions and we place a polarizer in the path of each such that there is only a fifty percent chance of getting through. We then find that if one gets through its polarizer, its twin does the same. Worse is to come. This holds good even if the photons are separated by a distance at which no signal travelling at the speed of light could pass between them. Called non-locality, it will hold even if the photons are at opposite ends of the universe. Initially demonstrated in the laboratory, this phenomenon is now the subject of competition for "the greatest distance of separation" and is already extended to many kilometers.

    It is the strangeness of quantum phenomena that has induced researchers to wonder whether equally strange brain phenomena are the result of having root in the world of the quantum. Work is still mostly theoretical--taking a lead from quantum physics in which proposals and their demonstration sometimes were separated by much more than fifty years. For example, Bose-Einstein condensates (comprising a large number of molecules forming what is virtually a super atom in superposition) have only recently been demonstrated, though they were first proposed more than seventy years ago.