Is There Room for the Soul?
New challenges to our most cherished beliefs about self and the human spirit
Not only quantum mechanics but a number of new fields such as the science of complexity put into question the whole enterprise of explaining reality in terms of bottom-up causality alone. As Galin points out, that kind of thinking only reversed the old, prescientific hierarchical conception of top-down causality, an explanation that attributed ultimate causality to a divine being or prime mover. In thinking about a phenomenon like consciousness, many today argue that it might be useful to move beyond the hierarchical model of causality and consider whether causality moves in both directions, up and down, between different levels of complex systems or organizations. It might be useful also to think of the mind as what philosopher Philip Clayton, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, calls an emergent property, a complex system that is more than the sum of its parts and that has effects on the systems that support it. One of the things that distinguish the "moreness" of mind, according to Clayton (and Stapp would agree), is its unique ability to represent, know, and interpret the objects of its own awareness, an ability that makes it possible for a human being to make decisions and initiate actions and not just to be acted upon, or determined, by a lengthy chain of survival-related factors. This is not to say that the mind is not strongly concerned with, or shaped by, the exigencies of survival. But for Clayton, the mind is more than the sum of the parts that support it because it is a semantic machine and not just the elaborately embodied computer, or syntactical machine, that Dennett says it is. It is not, in other words, a machine that merely responds to external stimuli or underlying physical factors that subserve it. Mind-at least higher-order consciousness-is, by this reasoning, very much involved in creating meaning, largely if not entirely through its ability to assert the existence of things through language.
If the fundamental levels of reality are more informational than material, as quantum physics suggests, then consciousness may be the interface between the fundamental quantum world of information and the "classical" physical world that is more accessible to our senses. That, at least, is a theory developed by Oxford physicist Roger Penrose and Hameroff. Penrose came first to this idea while wrestling with the problem of how we understand mathematics if understanding is not just following a rule (in the way a computer does) but requires understanding the meaning of mathematical concepts. To answer this, Penrose proposed that consciousness was a quantum computation within the brain, an infinitesimal collapse of quantum information into classical information that takes place at the level of the neurons. Impressed by Penrose's argument, Hameroff approached him with the suggestion that the site of this collapse might be at the more microscopic level of the microtubule, a computerlike protein structure inside the dendrites of every neuron and, indeed, every cell.
Hard-line. Although the theory is very far from being proved-and many neuroscientists, including Koch, scoff at it as being completely untestable-Hameroff has published a list of 20 testable predictions, and he claims that some have been confirmed. More broadly, though, the line of inquiry that Penrose and Hameroff have opened, and which has been differently explored by other physicists like Stapp, suggests that consciousness is far more than a sophisticated survival machine or even a highly agile embodied computer. Instead, the mind's resistance to simple reductive explanations lends support to the notion that it is a profoundly complex emergent system whose capacity for intentional acts and creative discoveries connects it with the underlying order of reality, an order analogous, Hameroff suggests, to the world of forms or ideas that Plato believed stood behind our shadowy and ephemeral world of appearances.
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