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Dimensions of Mentality Breakthrough

Tuesday, December 25, 2018Tuesday, December 25, 2018 admin

The key idea is more concretely expressed in statements such as:. The freedom of experimentation, presupposed in classic physics, is of course retained and corresponds to the free choice of experimental arrangement for which the mathematical structure of the quantum mechanical formalism offers the appropriate latitude. Copenhagen quantum theory is about how the choices made by conscious human agents affect the knowledge they can and do acquire about the physically described systems upon which these agents act.

In order to achieve this re-conceptualization of physics the Copenhagen formulation separates the physical universe into two parts, which are described in two different languages. One part is the observing human agent plus its measuring devices. The other part of nature is the system that the agent is acting upon.

That part is described in physical terms—in terms of mathematical properties assigned to tiny space—time regions. In particular, it brings a crucial part of doing science, namely our choices about how we will probe nature, directly into the causal structure. It specifies the effects of these probing actions upon the systems being probed. This approach works very well in practice. However, the body and brain of the human agent, and also their devices, are composed of atomic constituents.

Hence a complete theory ought to be able to describe these systems in physical terms. The great mathematician and logician John von Neumann formulated quantum theory in a rigorous way that allows the bodies and brains of the agents, along with their measuring devices, to be shifted into the physically described world. At each step the crucial act of choosing or deciding between possible optional observing actions remains undetermined by the physical observed system.

This act of choosing is always ascribed to the observing agent. It is described in psychological terms, and is, in practice, the stream of consciousness of the agent. At each step the direct effect of the conscious act is upon the part of the physically described world that is closest to the psychologically described world. This means that, in the end, the causal effect of the agent's mental action is on their own brain, or some significant part of their brain.

Process 2 is the analogue in quantum theory of the process in classic physics that takes the state of a system at one time to its state at a later time. This process 2, like its classic analogue, is local and deterministic. However, process 2 by itself is not the whole story: For example, if process 2 were, from the time of the big bang, the only process in nature, then the quantum state centre point of the moon would represent a structure smeared out over a large part of the sky, and each human body—brain would likewise be represented by a structure smeared out continuously over a huge region.

Process 2 generates a cloud of possible worlds , instead of the one world we actually experience. Any physical theory must, in order to be complete, specify how the elements of the theory are connected to human experience. In classic physics this connection is part of a metaphysical superstructure: But in quantum theory a linkage of the mathematically described physical state to human experiences is contained in the mathematically specified dynamic.

This connection is not passive. It is not a mere witnessing of a physical feature of nature. Instead, it injects into the physical state of the system being acted upon specific properties that depend upon choices made by the agent. Quantum theory is built upon the practical concept of intentional actions by agents. Each such action is a preparation that is expected or intended to produce an experiential response or feedback.

Quantum theory is thus an information-based theory built upon the preparative actions of information-seeking agents. Probing actions of this kind are not only performed by scientists. Every healthy and alert infant is continually engaged in making wilful efforts that produce experiential feedbacks and he or she soon begins to form expectations about what sorts of feedbacks are probable to follow from some particular kind of effort. Thus, both empirical science and normal human life are based on paired realities of this action—response kind, and our physical and psychological theories are both basically attempting to understand these linked realities within a rational conceptual framework.

Science would be difficult to pursue if scientists could make no such judgements about what they are experiencing. All known physical theories involve idealizations of one kind or another. In quantum theory the main idealization is not that every object is made up of miniature planet-like objects. It is rather that there are agents that perform intentional acts each of which can result in feedback that may or may not conform to a certain criterion associated with that act.

One piece of information is introduced into the world in which that agent lives, according to whether or not the feedback conforms to that criterion. The answer places the agent on one or the other of two alternative possible branches of the course of world history. These remarks reveal the enormous difference between classic physics and quantum physics. In classic physics the elemental ingredients are tiny invisible bits of matter that are idealized miniaturized versions of the planets that we see in the heavens and that move in ways unaffected by our scrutiny, whereas in quantum physics the elemental ingredients are intentional preparative actions by agents, the feedbacks arising from these actions and the effects of these actions upon the physically described states of the probed systems.

This radical restructuring of the form of physical theory grew out of a seminal discovery by Heisenberg. That discovery was that in order to get a satisfactory quantum generalization of a classic theory one must replace various numbers in the classic theory by actions operators. A key difference between numbers and actions is that if A and B are two actions then AB represents the action obtained by performing the action A upon the action B.

But for numbers the order does not matter: The difference between quantum physics and its classic approximation resides in the fact that in the quantum case certain differences AB—BA are proportional to a number measured by Max Planck in , and called Planck's constant. Setting those differences to zero gives the classic approximation. Thus quantum theory is closely connected to classic physics, but is incompatible with it, because certain non-zero quantities must be replaced by zero to obtain the classic approximation. The intentional actions of agents are represented mathematically in Heisenberg's space of actions.

A description of how it operates follows. Each intentional action depends, of course, on the intention of the agent and upon the state of the system upon which this action acts. Each of these two aspects of nature is represented within Heisenberg's space of actions by an action.

We shall denote the action or operator that represents the state being acted upon by the symbol S. An intentional act is an action that is intended to produce a feedback of a certain conceived or imagined kind. Of course, no intentional act is certain: The effect of this intentional mental act is represented mathematically by an equation that is one of the key components of quantum theory. This equation represents, within quantum mathematics, the effect of process 1 action upon the quantum state S of the system being acted upon.

Thus, an effect of the probing action is injected into the mathematical description of the physical system being acted upon. The operator P is important. That particular retained part is determined by the choice made by the agent. Notice that process 1 produces the sum of the two alternative possible feedbacks, not just one or the other. But that is not correct. This is a key point. It can be made absolutely clear by noticing that S can be written as a sum of four parts, only two of which survive the process 1 action:. This formula is a strict identity.

The dedicated reader can quickly verify it by collecting the contributions of the four occurring terms PSP , PS , SP and S , and verifying that all terms but S cancel out. This identity shows that the state S is a sum of four parts, two of which are eliminated by process 1.

But this means that process 1 has a non-trivial effect upon the state being acted upon: This result is the first key point: Nature's subsequent choice we shall call process 3. The second key point is this: Orthodox quantum theory is formulated in a realistic and practical way. It is structured around the activities of human agents, who are considered able to freely elect to probe nature in any one of many possible ways. Bohr emphasized the freedom of the experimenters in passages such as the one already quoted earlier, or the similar:.

The foundation of the description of the experimental conditions as well as our freedom to choose them is fully retained. This freedom of choice stems from the fact that in the original Copenhagen formulation of quantum theory the human experimenter is considered to stand outside the system to which the quantum laws are applied. Those quantum laws are the only precise laws of nature recognized by that theory. The von Neumann generalization leaves this freedom intact.

Neuroscientists studying the connection of mind and consciousness to physical processes in the brain often assume that a conception of nature based on classic physics will eventually turn out to be adequate. That assumption would have been reasonable during the nineteenth century. But now, in the twenty-first century, it is rationally untenable. Quantum theory must be used in principle because the behaviour of the brain depends sensitively upon atomic, molecular and ionic processes, and these processes in the brain often involve large quantum effects.

To study quantum effects in brains within an orthodox i. Copenhagen or von Neumann quantum theory one must use the von Neumann formulation. This is because Copenhagen quantum theory is formulated in a way that leaves out the quantum dynamics of the human observer's body and brain. But von Neumann quantum theory takes the physical system S upon which the crucial process 1 acts to be precisely the brain of the agent, or some part of it. Thus process 1 describes here an interaction between a person's stream of consciousness, described in mentalistic terms, and an activity in their brain, described in physical terms.

A key question is the quantitative magnitude of quantum effects in the brain. They must be large in order for deviations from classic physics to play any significant role. To examine this quantitative question we consider the quantum dynamics of nerve terminals. Nerve terminals are essential connecting links between nerve cells. The general way they work is reasonably well understood. When an action potential travelling along a nerve fibre reaches a nerve terminal, a host of ion channels open.

Calcium ions enter through these channels into the interior of the terminal. These ions migrate from the channel exits to release sites on vesicles containing neurotransmitter molecules. At their narrowest points, calcium ion channels are less than a nanometre in diameter Cataldi et al. This extreme smallness of the opening in the calcium ion channels has profound quantum mechanical implications.

The narrowness of the channel restricts the lateral spatial dimension. Consequently, the lateral velocity is forced by the quantum uncertainty principle to become large. This causes the quantum cloud of possibilities associated with the calcium ion to fan out over an increasing area as it moves away from the tiny channel to the target region where the ion will be absorbed as a whole, or not absorbed at all, on some small triggering site.

This spreading of this ion wave packet means that the ion may or may not be absorbed on the small triggering site. Accordingly, the contents of the vesicle may or may not be released. Consequently, the quantum state of the brain has a part in which the neurotransmitter is released and a part in which the neurotransmitter is not released. This quantum splitting occurs at every one of the trillions of nerve terminals. This means that the quantum state of the brain splits into a vast host of classically conceived possibilities, one for each possible combination of the release-or-no-release options at each of the nerve terminals.

In fact, because of uncertainties on timings and locations, what is generated by the physical processes in the brain will be not a single discrete set of non-overlapping physical possibilities but rather a huge smear of classically conceived possibilities. This focus on the motions of calcium ions in nerve terminals is not meant to suggest that this particular effect is the only place where quantum effects enter into the brain process, or that the quantum process 1 acts locally at these sites. What is needed here is only the existence of some large quantum of effect.

The focus upon these calcium ions stems from the facts that i in this case the various sizes dimensions needed to estimate the magnitude of the quantum effects are empirically known, and ii that the release of neurotransmitter into synaptic clefts is known to play a significant role in brain dynamics. The brain matter is warm and wet and is continually interacting intensely with its environment. It might be thought that the strong quantum decoherence effects associated with these conditions would wash out all quantum effects, beyond localized chemical processes that can be conceived to be imbedded in an essentially classic world.

Strong decoherence effects are certainly present, but they are automatically taken into account in the von Neumann formulation employed here. The existence of strong decoherence effects makes the main consequences of quantum theory being discussed here more easily accessible to neuroscientists by effectively reducing the complex quantum state of the brain to a collection of almost classically describable possibilities. Because of the uncertainties introduced at the ionic, atomic, molecular and electronic levels, the brain state will develop not into one single classically describable macroscopic state, as it does in classic physics, but into a continuous distribution of parallel virtual states of this kind.

Process 1 must then be invoked to allow definite empirical predictions to be extracted from this continuous smear of parallel overlapping almost-classic possibilities generated by process 2. A principal function of the brain is to receive clues from the environment, to form an appropriate plan of action and to direct and monitor the activities of the brain and body specified by the selected plan of action. The exact details of the plan will, for a classic model, obviously depend upon the exact values of many noisy and uncontrolled variables.

The contemporary physical model accounts for these uncertainties in brain dynamics. As long as the brain dynamic is controlled wholly by process 2—which is the quantum generalization of the Newtonian laws of motion of classic physics—all of the various alternative possible plans of action will exist in parallel, with no one plan of action singled out as the one that will actually be experienced.

Some process beyond the local deterministic process 2 is required to pick out one experienced course of physical events from the smeared-out mass of possibilities generated by all of the alternative possible combinations of vesicle releases at all of the trillions of nerve terminals. As already emphasized, this other process is process 1. This process brings in a choice that is not determined by any currently known law of nature, yet has a definite effect upon the brain of the chooser.

The process 1 choice picks an operator P and also a time t at which P acts. The effect of this action at time t is to change the state S t of the brain, or of some large part of the brain, to. The action P cannot act at a point in the brain, because action at a point would dump a huge in principle infinite amount of energy into the brain, which would then explode.

The operator P must, therefore, act non-locally, over a potentially large part of the brain. In examining the question of the nature of the effect in the brain of process 2 we focused on the separate motions of the individual particles. But the physical structures in terms of which the action of process 1 is naturally expressed are not the separate motions of individual particles.

They are, rather, the quasi-stable macroscopic degrees of freedom. The brain structures selected by the action of P must enjoy the stability, endurance and causal linkages needed to bring the intended experiential feedbacks into being. These functional structures are probably more like the lowest-energy state of the simple harmonic oscillator, which is completely stable, or like the states obtained from such lowest-energy states by spatial displacements and shifts in velocity.

These shifted states tend to endure as oscillating states. In other words, in order to create the needed causal structure the projection operator P corresponding to an intentional action ought to pick out functionally pertinent quasi-stable oscillating states of macroscopic subsystems of the brain. The state associated with a process 1 preparatory intervention should be a functionally important brain analogue of a collection of oscillating modes of a drumhead, in which large assemblies of particles are moving in a coordinated way.

Such an enduring structure in the brain can serve as a trigger and coordinator of further coordinated activities. It is the brain's template for the intended action. It is a pattern of neuroelectrical activity that, if held in place long enough, will tend to generate a physical action in the brain that will tend to produce the intended experiential feedback. On the other hand, a person's intentions are surely related in some way to their historical past. This means that the laws of contemporary orthodox quantum theory, although restrictive and important, do not provide a complete picture.

In spite of this, orthodox quantum theory, while making no claim to ontological completeness, is able to achieve a certain kind of pragmatic completeness. But the need for this strategic move goes deeper than the mere fact that contemporary quantum theory fails to specify how these choices are made. Passive process 1 events are attentional events that occur with little or no feeling of conscious effort.

Active process 1 events are intentional and involve effort. Consciousness probably contributes very little to brain dynamics compared with the contribution of the brain itself. This allows effort to have only a very limited kind of influence on brain activities, which are largely controlled by physical properties of the brain itself. The notion that only the attention density is controlled by conscious effort arose from an investigation into what sort of conscious control over process 1 action was sufficient to accommodate the most blatant empirical facts.

Imposing this strong restriction on the allowed effects of consciousness produces a theory with correspondingly strong predictive power. If one considers only passive events, then it is very difficult to identify any empirical effect of process 1, apart from the occurrence of awareness. Moreover, the passivity of the mental process means that we have no empirically controllable variable. However, the study of effortfully controlled intentional action brings in two empirically accessible variables, the intention and the amount of effort.

It also brings in the important physical QZE. According to our model, this rapidity is controlled by the amount of effort being applied. Thus, the model allows intentional mental efforts to tend to bring intended experiences into being. Systems that have the capacity to exploit this feature of natural law, as it is represented in quantum theory, would apparently enjoy a tremendous survival advantage over systems that do not or cannot exploit it. A person's experiential life is a stream of conscious experiences. In James's words , p. This part of the stream of consciousness provides an overall background cause for the central focus of attention.

The physical brain, evolving mechanically in accordance with the local deterministic process 2, can do most of the necessary work of the brain.

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It can do the job of creating, on the basis of its interpretation of the clues provided by the senses, a suitable response, which will be controlled by a certain pattern of neural or brain activity that acts as a template for action. However, owing to its quantum character, the brain necessarily generates an amorphous mass of overlapping and conflicting templates for action.

Process 1 acts to extract from this jumbled mass of possibilities some particular template for action. Conscious effort can, by activation of the QZE, override strong mechanical forces arising from process 2 and cause the template for action to be held in place longer than it would be if the rapid sequence of process 1 events were not occurring. This sustained existence of the template for action can increase the probability that the intended action will occur. Consider some passages from Psychology: In the final section of the chapter on attention, James , p.

I have spoken as if our attention were wholly determined by neural conditions. I believe that the array of things we can attend to is so determined. No object can catch our attention except by the neural machinery. But the amount of the attention which an object receives after it has caught our attention is another question. It often takes effort to keep the mind upon it. We feel that we can make more or less of the effort as we choose. If this feeling be not deceptive, if our effort be a spiritual force, and an indeterminate one, then of course it contributes coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result.

Though it introduce no new idea, it will deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade more quickly away. Thus we find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask by what process is it that the thought of any given action comes to prevail stably in the mind. Consent to the idea's undivided presence, this is effort's sole achievement…Everywhere, then, the function of effort is the same: This description of the effect of will on the course of mental—cerebral processes is remarkably in line with what had been proposed independently from purely theoretical considerations of the quantum physics of this process.

The connections specified by James are explained on the basis of the same dynamic principles that had been introduced by physicists to explain atomic phenomena. Thus the whole range of science, from atomic physics to mind—brain dynamics, has the possibility of being brought together into a single rationally coherent theory of an evolving cosmos that is constituted not of matter but of actions by agents.

In this conceptualization of nature, agents could naturally evolve in accordance with the principles of natural selection, owing to the fact that their efforts have physical consequences. The outline of a possible rationally coherent understanding of the connection between mind and matter begins to emerge. First, there is the purely mechanical process called process 2. The activation of various of these complex patterns by cross referencing—that is, by activation of several of its parts—coupled to feedback loops that strengthen or weaken the activities of appropriate processing centres, appears to account for the essential features of the mechanical part of the dynamics in a way that is not significantly different from what a classic model can support, except for the existence of a host of parallel possibilities that according to the classic concepts, cannot exist simultaneously.

The second process, von Neumann's process 1, is needed in order to pick out from a chaotic continuum of overlapping parallel possibilities some particular discrete possibility and its complement. Process 1 has itself two modes. The first is passive, and can produce temporally isolated events. The second is active and involves mental effort. Active process 1 intervention has, according to the quantum model described here, a distinctive form. It consists of a sequence of intentional purposeful actions, the rapidity of which can be increased with effort.

Such an increase in attention density, defined as an increase in the number of observations per unit time, can bring into play the QZE, which tends to hold in place both those aspects of the state of the brain that are fixed by the sequence of intentional actions and also the felt intentional focus of these actions. Attention density is not controlled by any physical rule of orthodox contemporary quantum theory, but is taken both in orthodox theory and in our model, to be subject to subjective volitional control.

This application in this way of the basic principles of physics to neuroscience constitutes our model of the mind—brain connection. A huge amount of empirical work on attention has been done since the nineteenth century writings of William James. Much of it is summarized and analysed in Harold Pashler's book The psychology of attention.

Pashler organizes his discussion by separating perceptual processing from post-perceptual processing. The former type covers processing that, first of all, identifies such basic physical properties of stimuli as location, colour, loudness and pitch and, secondly, identifies stimuli in terms of categories of meaning. The post-perceptual process covers the tasks of producing motor actions and cognitive action beyond mere categorical identification.

The existence of these two different processes with different characteristics is a principal theme of Pashler's book e. A striking difference that emerges from the analysis of the many sophisticated experiments is that the perceptual processes proceed essentially in parallel, whereas the post-perceptual processes of planning and executing actions form a single queue.

This idea of a limited capacity for serial processing of effort-based inputs is the main conclusion of Pashler's book. It is in accord with the quantum-based model, supplemented by the condition that there is a limit to how many effortful process 1 events per second a person can produce during a particular stage of their development. Examination of Pashler's book shows that this quantum model accommodates naturally all of the complex structural features of the empirical data that he describes.

Of key importance is his chapter 6, in which he emphasizes a specific finding: This kind of bottleneck is what the quantum-physics-based theory predicts: Pashler describes four empirical signatures for this kind of bottleneck and describes the experimental confirmation of each of them p. Much of part II of Pashler's book is a massing of evidence that supports the existence of a central process of this general kind.

The queuing effect is illustrated in a nineteenth century result described by Pashler: However, it is an automatic consequence of the physics-based theory: This opposing tendency is produced by the QZE and is roughly proportional to the number of bits per second of central processing capacity that is devoted to the task.

So, if part of this processing capacity is directed to another task, then the applied force will diminish. The former are not limited by the queuing effect, because process 2 simply develops all of the possibilities in parallel. Nor is the stream of essentially isolated passive process 1 events thus limited.

It is the closely packed active process 1 events that can, in the von Neumann formulation, be limited by the queuing effect. The very numerous experiments cited by Pashler all seem to be in line with the quantum approach. It is important to note that this bottleneck is not automatic within classic physics.

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A classic model could easily produce, simultaneously, two responses in different modalities, say vocal and manual, to two different stimuli arriving via two different modalities, say auditory and tactile: Pashler notes that the bottleneck is undiminished in split-brain patients performing two tasks that, at the level of input and output, seem to be confined to different hemispheres p.

This could be accounted for by the necessarily non-local character of the projection operator P. The subject's mental age, as measured by the IQ test, was reduced from adult to 8 years p. This is what would be expected if incentives lead to effort that produces increased rapidity of the events, each of which injects into the physical process, through quantum selection and reduction, bits of control information that reflect mental evaluation.

All of these empirical connections are in line with the general principle that effort increases attention density, with an attendant increase in the rate of directed conscious events, each of which inputs a mental evaluation and a selection or focusing of a course of action. Additional supporting evidence comes from the studies of the stabilization or storage of information in short-term memory STM. According to the physics-based theory, the passive aspect of conscious process merely actualizes an event that occurs in accordance with some brain-controlled rule and this rule-selected process then develops automatically, with perhaps some occasional monitoring.

Thus, the theory would predict that the process of stabilization or storage in STM of a certain sequence of stimuli should be able to persist undiminished while the central processor is engaged in another task. This is what the data indicate. In the theory outlined here, STM is stored in patterns of brain activity, whereas consciously directed actions are associated with the active selection of a sub-ensemble of quasi-classic states.

This distinction seems to account for the large amount of detailed data that bear on this question of the relationship of the stabilization or storage of information in STM to the types of task that require wilfully directed actions pp. In marked contrast to STM function, storage or retrieval of information from long-term memory LTM is a task that requires actions of just this sort pp. Deliberate storage in, or retrieval from, LTM requires wilfully directed action and hence conscious effort. These processes should, according to the theory, use part of the limited processing capacity and hence be detrimentally affected by a competing task that makes sufficient concurrent demands on the central resources.

These expectations are what the evidence appears to confirm: Pashler speculates on the possibility of a neurophysiological explanation of the facts he describes, but notes that the parallel versus serial distinction between the two mechanisms leads, in the classic neurophysiological approach, to the questions of what makes these two mechanisms so different, and what the connection between them is pp. Thus, the fact that this bottleneck and its basic properties seem to follow automatically from the same laws that explain the complex empirical evidence in the fields of classic and quantum physics means that the theory being presented here has significant explanatory power for the experimental data of cognitive psychology.

Further, it coherently explains aspects of the data that have heretofore not been adequately addressed by currently applicable theoretical perspectives. These features of the phenomena may be claimed by some to be potentially explainable within a classical-physics-based model. But the possibility of such an explanation is profoundly undermined by the absence from classic physics of the notion of conscious choice and effort.

These consciousness-connected features, so critical to a coherent explanation of the psychology of human attention, however, already exist and are specified features of the causal structure of fundamental contemporary physical theory. The quantum model is better suited to the analysis of neuropsychological data than models based on the classic approximation. For, just as in the treatment of atomic systems, the quantum approach brings the phenomenologically described data directly into the dynamics in place of microscopic variables that are, in principle, unknowable.

Quantum theory injects directly into the causal structure the phenomenal descriptions that we human beings use in order to communicate to our colleagues the empirical facts. Quantum physics works better in neuropsychology than its classic approximation precisely because it inserts knowable choices made by human agents into the dynamics in place of unknowable-in-principle microscopic variables. To illustrate this point we apply the quantum approach to the experiment of Ochsner et al. Reduced to its essence, this experiment consists first of a training phase in which the subject is taught how to distinguish, and respond differently to, two instructions given while viewing emotionally disturbing visual images: Second, the subjects perform these mental actions during brain data acquisition.

The visual stimuli, when passively attended to, activate limbic brain areas, and when actively reappraised, activate prefrontal cerebral regions. How do the vibrations in the air that carry the instructions get converted into feelings of understanding? And how do these feelings of understanding get converted to conscious effort, the presence or absence of which determine whether the limbic or frontal regions of the brain will be activated? Within the framework of classic physics these connections between feelings and brain activities remain huge mysteries.

But the question is whether these connections should reasonably be expected to be understood in terms of a physical theory that is known to be false, and to be false in ways that are absolutely and fundamentally germane to the issue. The classic concept demands that the choices made by human agents about how they will act be determined by microscopic variables that according to quantum theory are indeterminate in principle. The reductionist demand that the course of human experience be determined by local mechanical processes is the very thing that is most conclusively ruled out by the structure of natural phenomena specified by contemporary physical theory.

To expect the mind—brain connection to be understood within a framework of ideas so contrary to the principles of physics is scientifically unsupportable and unreasonable. There are important similarities and also important differences between the classic and quantum explanations of the experiments of Ochsner et al. In both approaches the atomic constituents of the brain can be conceived to be collected into nerves and other biological structures and into fluxes of ions and electrons, which can all be described reasonably well in essentially classic terms.

In the classic approach the dynamics must in principle be describable in terms of the local deterministic classic laws that, according to those principles, are supposed to govern the motions of the atomic-sized entities. The quantum approach is fundamentally different.

In the first place the idea that all causation is fundamentally mechanical is dropped as being prejudicial and unsupported either by direct evidence or by contemporary physical theory. The quantum model of the human person is essentially dualistic, with one of the two components being described in psychological language and the other being described in physical terms. The apparent causal connection manifested in the experiments between these two components of the agent is then explained by the causal connections between these components that are specified by the quantum laws.

The quantum laws, insofar as they pertain to empirical data, are organized around events that increase the amount of information lodged in the psychologically described component of the theoretical structure. But important departures from the classic statistical predictions can be caused by conscious effort.

This effort can cause to be held in place for an extended period, a pattern of neural activity that constitutes a template for action. This delay can tend to cause the specified action to occur. These causal effects are, by the QZE, mathematical consequences of the quantum rules.

The form of the quantum laws accommodates a natural dynamic breakpoint between the cause of wilful action, which is not specified by the theory, and its effects , which are specified by the theory. Quantum theory was designed to deal with cases in which the conscious action of an agent—to perform some particular probing action—enters into the dynamics in an essential way. Within the context of the experiment by Ochsner et al. The resulting intention-induced modulation of limbic mechanisms that putatively generate the frightening aversive feelings associated with passively attending to the target stimuli is the key factor necessary for the achievement of the emotional self-regulation seen in the active cognitive reappraisal condition.

Thus, within the quantum framework, the causal relationship between the mental work of mindfully reappraising and the observed brain changes presumed to be necessary for emotional self-regulation is dynamically accounted for. Furthermore, and crucially, it is accounted for in ways that fully allow for communicating to others the means used by living human experimental subjects to attain the desired outcome.

The classic materialist approach to these data, as detailed earlier in this article, by no means allows for such effective communication. Analogous quantum mechanical reasoning can of course be used mutatis mutandis to explain the data of Beauregard et al. Materialist ontology draws no support from contemporary physics and is in fact contradicted by it. The notion that all physical behaviour is explainable in principle solely in terms of a local mechanical process is a holdover from physical theories of an earlier era.

It was rejected by the founders of quantum mechanics, who introduced, crucially into the basic dynamical equations, choices that are not determined by local mechanical processes, but are rather attributed to human agents. These orthodox quantum equations, applied to human brains in the way suggested by John von Neumann, provide for a causal account of recent neuropsychological data. In this account brain behaviour that appears to be caused by mental effort is actually caused by mental effort: Our wilful choices enter neither as redundant nor epiphenomenal effects, but rather as fundamental dynamical elements that have the causal efficacy that the objective data appear to assign to them.

A shift to this pragmatic approach that incorporates agent-based choices as primary empirical input variables may be as important to progress in neuroscience and psychology as it was to progress in atomic physics. The work of the second-named author H. The work of the third-named author M. We thank Joseph O'Neill for his insightful comments about preliminary versions of our manuscript.

This work is based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory, and von Neumann's extension of it. The Copenhagen Interpretation is what is, in essence, both taught in standard quantum physics courses and used in actual practice. The distinction between categories like emotion and cognition , for example, is relative and can vary with cultural context e. Even the most basic categories in psychology appear to be observer dependent. Take, for example, behaviors which are intentional, bounded events and actions which are descriptions of physical movements.

We easily and effortlessly see behaviors in people and in nonhuman animals. We typically believe that behaviors exist and are there to be detected, but not created, by the human brain. But this is not quite true. Behaviors are actions with a meaning that is inferred by an observer. Social psychology has accumulated a large and nuanced body of research on how people come to see the physical actions of others as meaningful behaviors by inferring the causes for those actions usually by imputing an intention to the actor; for a review, see Gilbert, People and animals are constantly moving and doing things—that is, they are constantly engaging in a flow of actions.

In emotion research, a rat that kicks up bedding at a threatening creature is said to be defensive treading or in a state of fear. Similarly, standing still in a small spare box in response to a tone that all of the sudden predicts an electric shock can be described as freezing or it can be called fear. It can also be called a state of vigilance — an alert, behavioral stance that allows an organism to martial all its attentional and sensory resources to quickly learn more about a stimulus when its predictive value is uncertain cf. Barrett, Lindquist, et al.

Depending on the category used, intention is inferred to different degrees as part of the categorization of the action into a behavior. The same point can be made about situations. Physical surroundings exist separately from observers, but situations do not. A similar point can even be made about what are typically assumed to be the observer-independent phenomena measured during functional magnetic resonance functional imaging.

Areas of the brain that show increased activity during memory, perception, or emotion or whatever the researcher is interested in measuring are assumed to reflect changes in blood flow caused by neuronal firing at those locations. But just as behavioral scientists separate the variance in a measured behavior into effect i. This separation is guided by the neuropsychological assumption that psychological functions are localized to modules in particular brain areas, like islands on a topographical map, because lesions in particular areas appear to disrupt specific psychological functions.

In recent years, however, it has become clear using multivariate voxel pattern analysis procedures that noise carries meaningful psychological information e. Let me be clear about what I am saying here—it is a brute fact that the brain contains neurons that fire to create mental states or cause behavior and this occurs independent of human experience and measurement. We use categories to separate ongoing mental activity into discrete mental states such as, in this culture, anger, an attitude, a memory, or self-esteem , to classify a stream of physical movements into behaviors such as lying, stealing, or joking , or to classify parts of the physical surroundings as situations.

These categories come from and constitute human experience. The category instances are real, but they derive their reality from the human mind in the context of other human minds. Mental activity is classified this way for reasons having to do with collective intentionality, communication, and even self-regulation, but not because this is the best way to understand how the brain mechanistically creates the mind and behavior.

Emotion and cognition make up the Western psychological and social reality, and they must be explained by the brute fact of how the human brain works, but emotion and cognition are not mechanisms that are necessarily respected by the human brain or categories that are required by the human brain. Brain states are observer-independent facts. The existence of mental states is also an observer-independent fact. Cognitions, emotions, memories, self-esteem, beliefs, and so on are not observer-dependent events, however.

They are categories that have been formed and named by the human mind to represent and explain the human mind. Words are powerful in science. When dealing with observer-independent categories, words set the ground rules for what to look for in the world. To the extent that scientists understand and use the word in a similar way, they agree on what to search for. They assume, for the moment, that genetic material really is segregated into genes and junk, and they then go about searching for the deep properties that ground these categories in the material world, with the hope either that they are right or that their observations will lead them to formulate better, more accurate categories.

When dealing with observer-dependent categories that populate psychology, words are ontologically powerful. They set the ground rules for what exists. Words can also be dangerous.

PART 2: ADOPTING A BREAKTHROUGH MINDSET: A New Way of Thinking Is No Longer an Option

They present scientists with a Faustian bargain. We need words to do the work of science, but the words lead us to mistake observer-dependent categories or nominal kinds for observer-independent categories or natural kinds. By naming both defensive treading and freezing as fear , for example, scientists are lulled into thinking these behaviors share a deep property, and they will spend years searching for it, even when it may not exist.

Then we end up arguing about whether the amygdala is the brain locus of fear, whether dopamine is the hormone for reward, or whether the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR is the cause of depression. Thus far, I have suggested that psychology is populated by a set of observer-dependent categories that do not directly correspond in a one-to-one fashion to the observer-independent facts of neurons firing in the brain. That being said, if emotion, cognition, memory, the self, and so on, exist— they are real by virtue of the fact that everyone within a culture experiences them, talks about them, uses them as reasons for actions then they cannot be discarded or ontologically reduced to or merely redefined as nothing but neurons firing.

Psychology must explain the existence of cognition and emotion because they are part of the world that we in the Western hemisphere live in even if it is a part that we, ourselves, created. I think the answer is yes. And as with most things psychological, the answer begins with William James. This is pretty much the same thing as saying that psychologists confuse observer-dependent or ontologically subjective distinctions with observer-independent or ontologically objective ones. They are grounded in the assumption that experienced psychological states are not the elemental units of the mind or the brain, just as fire, water, air, and earth are not the basic elements of the universe.

Instead, they are products that emerge from the interplay of more basic, all-purpose components. The importance of distinguishing between the function of a mechanism or process and the products that it creates what the functions are in the service of or what they allow to emerge is inherent to a psychological constructionist approach. The contents of a psychological state reveal nothing about the processes that realize it in much the same way that a loaf of bread does not reveal the ingredients that constitute it. The modern constructionist approach that I envision for psychology in the 21st century is grounded in a simple observation.

Every moment of waking life our brain realizes mental states and actions by combining three sources of stimulation: These three sources—sensations from the world, sensations from the body, and prior experience—are continually available, and they form the three fundamental aspects of all mental life. Different recipes combinations and weights of these three ingredients produce the myriad of mental events that constitute the mind.

Depending on the focus of attention and proclivities of the scientist, this stream of brain activity is parsed into discrete psychological moments that we call by different names: When the focus is trying to understand what externally driven sensations refer to in the world, mental activity is called perception. When the focus is trying to understand how prior experiences are reinstated in the brain, mental activity is called cognition. When a person experiences the act of remembering, this mental activity is called memory. When they do not, it is called thinking. When the mental activity refers to the future, it is called imagining.

And this mental activity provides a sense of self that continues through time. When the focus is trying to understand what internal sensations from the body stand for, the mental activity is called emotion. This last piece is essentially a restatement of the model of emotion that I proposed in Barrett b. This very general description of mental life can be developed into a psychological constructionist approach that consists of five principles: Unlike the culturally relative complex psychological categories that they realize, psychological primitives are universal to all human beings.

This is not the same as proposing that there are broad, general laws for psychology or for domains of psychology like emotion or memory. It might be possible to describe the operations that the brain is performing to create psychological primitives, but these operations would be identified in terms of the psychological primitives that they constitute. Depictions of three brain states comprised of different combinations of the same three psychological primitives represented in yellow, pink, and blue.

Although identifying specific psychological primitives is beyond the scope of this article, elsewhere, my lab and I nominated three phenomena as psychological primitives. Another may be categorization determining what something is, why it is, and what to do about it. Complex psychological categories refer to the contents of the mind representations that can be redescribed as the psychological primitives that are themselves the products of neuronal firing.

What psychology needs in the 21st century is a toolbox filled with categories for representing both the products and the processes at the various levels. That is, there must be an explicit accounting of how categories at each level relate to one another. At the top of the ontology, complex psychological categories, such as anger, correspond to a collection of brain states that can be summarized as a broadly distributed neural reference space.

A neural reference space, according to neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, refers to the neuronal workspace that implements the brain states that correspond to a class of mental events. A specific instance of a category e. The individual brain states transcend anatomical boundaries and are coded as a flexible, distributed assembly of neurons.

For example, the brain states corresponding to two different instances of anger may not be stable across people or even within a person over time. Each mental state can be redescribed as a combination of psychological primitives. In this ontology, psychological primitives are functional abstractions for brain networks that contribute to the formation of neuronal assemblies that make up each brain state. They are psychologically based, network-level descriptions. They are not necessarily segregated meaning that they can partially overlap.

Each network exists within a context of connections to other networks, all of which run in parallel, each shaping the activity in the others. All psychological states including behaviors emerge from the interplay of networks that work together, influencing and constraining one another in a sort of tug-of-war as they create the mind. From instance to instance, networks may be differentially constituted, configured, and recruited. This means that instances of a complex psychological category e.

It also means that phenomena that bear no subjective resemblance are constituted from many of the same brain areas. This scientific ontology has a family resemblance to other discussions of how psychology might map to brain function e. Like these other scientific ontologies, it takes its inspiration from a number of notable neuroscience findings that together appear to constitute something of a paradigm shift in the field of cognitive neuroscience away from attempting to localize psychological functions to one spot or in a segregated network and toward more distributed approaches to understanding how the brain constitutes mental content.

Specifically, the proposed ontology is consistent with: By combining these novel approaches, it becomes clear that psychological states are emergent phenomena that result from a complex system of dynamically interacting neurons within the human brain at multiple levels of description. Neither the complex psychological categories nor the psychological primitives that realize them correspond to particular locations in the brain per se, and thus do not reconcile well with the kind of localization approach to brain function that was inspired by neuropsychology, remained popular in neuroscience throughout much of the 20th century, and continues to prevail today.

The scientific ontology proposed here is also distinct from other scientific ontologies in three important ways. First, and perhaps most important, it deals with the existence of two domains of reality one that is subjective and one that is objective and their relation to one another. Second, it helps solve a puzzle of why different sorts of behavioral tasks are associated with similar patterns of neural activity.

Many functions have been proposed for this circuitry, but one approach is to ask what all these tasks have in common: They draw on stored, prior experience in the form of episodic projection or mental simulation that shapes sensory information from the body and the world. They allow the brain to predict what the current sensory information means based on that last time something like it was encountered and to formulate an appropriate response.

A similar view is discussed in Bar , who suggested that this circuitry functions to connect sensory input with memory to create predictions about what the sensory input means. Finally, this psychological constructionist ontology also unifies a number of smaller scientific paradoxes with one solution. For example, it helps us to understand how perceptual memory can influence declarative memory tasks even though implicit and explicit memory are supposed to be mechanistically different; e.

In the psychological constructionist ontology proposed here, the metaphor for the mind in the 21st century is not a machine, but a recipe book. Psychological primitives are not separate, interacting bits and pieces of the mind that have no causal relation to one another like the cogs and wheels of a machine. Instead, they are more like the basic ingredients in a well-stocked pantry that can be used to make any number of different recipes which make the mental states that people experience and give names to. The recipes are not universal. The recipe for anger will differ from instance to instance with a context within a person, and even if there is a modal recipe, it might differ across persons within a particular cultural context, as well as across cultural contexts.

At the psychological level, however, the ingredients that make up the recipes might be universal although how they function in conjunction with one another may not be. And as with all recipes, the amount of each ingredient is only one factor that is important to making the end product what it is.

The process of combining ingredients is also important e. As a result, it is not enough to just identify what the factors are, but also how they coordinate and shape one another during the process of construction. The recipe analogy also helps us to see the scientific utility of distinguishing between complex psychological categories, psychological primitives, and neuronal firing. Scientists must understand that the category anger differs at each level in much the same way that the category bread differs for a food critic, a chef, or a chemist. If a chef wants to know which bread will taste best with a particular meal, it helps to know the recipe, or at least some of the key ingredients.

That being said, it is much more efficient and less costly in both the economic and caloric sense to change the taste of bread by modifying the recipe than by slathering a slice in butter and jam.

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And although it is not necessary, all chefs know that it helps to have some knowledge of chemistry, otherwise experimenting with changing the recipe can feel like shots in the dark. If mental events are constructed like recipes, then goals or anger or memories or attitudes do not cause behavior in the typical mechanistic way that psychologists now think about causation, where Psychological Process A localized in Brain Area 1 causes the separate and distinct Psychological Process B localized in Brain Area 2, and so on see Fig.

Either way, to say that a person pounds a table because he is angry is to give a reason for the behavior, and reasons are not causes for behavior and therefore do not constitute an explanation of it for a discussion, see Searle, Two models of mental causation. Either option points to the implication that psychologists must abandon the linear logic of an experiment as a metaphor for how the mind works. In the classic experiment, we present a participant be it a human or some nonhuman animal with some sensory stimulation a stimulus , and then we measure some response.

Neurons are presumed to generally lie quiet until stimulated by a source from the external world. Scientists talk about independent variables because we assume that they exist separate from the participant. In real life, however, there are no independent variables. Our brains not an experimenter help to determine what is a stimulus and what is not, in part by predicting what will be important in the future Bar, Said another way, the current state of the human brain makes some sensory stimulation into information and relegates the rest to the psychologically impotent category of physical surroundings.

The implication, then, is that mental events are not independent of one another. They occur in a context of what came before and what is predicted in the future. This kind of model building is easy for a human brain to accomplish, but difficult for a human mind to discover, because we have a tendency to think about ingredients in separate and sequential rather than emergent terms e. As complex categories such as emotions , memories , goals , and the self are collections of mental states that are created from a more basic set of psychological ingredients, it might be tempting to assume that psychology can dispense with the complex categories altogether.

After all, a complex psychological category like anger will not easily support the accumulation of knowledge about how anger is caused if varieties of anger are constituted by many different recipes. When it came to emotion, James was both a constructionist and a material reductionist espousing a token—token identity model of emotion, in which every instance of emotion that feels different, even when part of the same category, can be ontologically reduced to a distinctive physical state as opposed to a type type identity model in which every kind of emotion can be reduced to one and only one type of physical state.

Mental states will be reduced to brain states, and psychology will disappear. But even William James can be wrong. In the constructionist account proposed here, a process should not be confused with the mental content it produces, but neither can it replace the need for describing that content. Said another way, the kind of material reductionism that James advocated should be avoided if for no other than the very pragmatic reason that complex psychological categories are the targets of explanation in psychology. You have to know what you are explaining in order to have something to explain.

You have to be able to identify it and describe it well. But the more important reason to avoid material reduction is that the various phenomena we are discussing complex psychological categories, psychological primitives, and neuronal firing each exist at different levels of scientific inquiry and do not exist at others. Complex psychological categories like cognition memories , beliefs , imaginings , thoughts , emotions anger , fear , happiness , and other varieties of psychological categories the self , attitudes , and so on are phenomena that fall squarely in the social science camp.

They dwell at the boundary between sociology and anthropology on the one hand, and psychology on the other. Being observer-dependent categories that exist by virtue of collective intention a group of human minds agree that anger exists and so it does , they are phenomenological distinctions. To understand them is to understand the nature, causes, and functions of these phenomenological distinctions or the distinctions between whatever categories exist in your cultural context. They may not correspond to the brute facts of neuronal firing, but they are real in a relational way.

If I categorize my mental state as a thought instead of a feeling and communicate this to you, you will understand something about the degree to which I feel responsible for that state and the degree to which I feel compelled to act on it, as long as you belong to a culture where the emotion cognition distinction exists because in some cultures it does not. Furthermore, from a descriptive standpoint, we have to understand what these categories are for, both for the collective which could be a dyad or a group of people and for the individual.

They can be epistemologically objective i. And these categories may even have a biologically constructive quality of their own see Fig. As many neuroscientists have pointed out, humans are not born with the genetic material to provide a sufficient blueprint for the synaptic complexity that characterizes our brains. Instead, our genetic make up requires plasticity.

Evolution has endowed us with the capacity to shape the microstructure of our own brains, in part via the complex categories that we transmit to one another within the social and cultural context. Causal relations among levels. Networks of neurons realize psychological primitives that in turn are the basic ingredients of the mind. These basic ingredients construct instances of complex psychological categories like the self , attitudes , controlled processing , emotion , and so on.

At the other end of the continuum, there are brain states that are made up of collections of neurons firing with some frequency. Brain states are phenomena that fall squarely in the natural science camp. Brain states are observer-independent—they do not require the mind they create to recognize them. In realizing the mind, they change from moment to moment within a person, and they certainly vary across people. But understanding how a neuron fires is not the same as understanding why it fires, and the latter question cannot be answered without appealing to something psychological.

In between are psychological primitives—the basic ingredients of the mind that are informed by both the categories above and below them. They are not completely observer-independent, but neither are they free from the objective fact of the workings of the brain. Psychological primitives are caused by physical and chemical processes in the brain, but understanding these causes alone will never provide a sufficient scientific understanding of what psychological primitives are.

They, too, have content that must be described for a complete understanding of what they are. That being said, when discussing psychological primitives, the structure of the brain cannot be ignored either. Psychological primitives will not necessarily replace complex psychological categories in the science of psychology, although sometimes they should. Whether complex psychological categories can be ontologically reduced to psychological primitives depends on the question that a scientist is trying to answer. As a result of all this, it is possible to causally reduce complex psychological events to brain states and psychological primitives to distributed neuronal activity what Searle, , calls causal reduction without redefining the mental in terms of the physical what Searle calls ontological reduction.

Now, it may be possible that the scientific need for psychological primitives is merely the result of the rudimentary state of cognitive neuroscience methods, and that even these psychological categories can be dispensed with once we have methods that can better measure cortical columns, which are by conventional accounts the smallest unit of functional specialization in the cortex whose size is measured in microns.

But I suspect this will not happen, for four reasons. First of all, there is some debate over whether columns are, in fact, the most basic functional units of cortical organization. Dendrites and axons of the neurons within a column extend beyond those columns DeFilpe et al. Third, recent evidence suggests that specific neurons do not necessarily code for single features of a stimulus. A recent study in ferrets suggests that individual neurons when participating in neuronal assemblies appear to respond to more than one type of sensory cue, even in primary sensory areas where receptive fields for neurons are supposed to be well defined as in primary visual cortex or V1; Basole et al.

Finally, and perhaps most controversially, it may be a bit of an overstatement to assume that all humans have exactly the same nervous system. This means that although all humans may have the same brain at a gross anatomical level, the connections between neurons are exceptionally plastic and responsive to experience and environmental influence, producing considerable variability in brains at the micro level. The implication is that the neuronal networks that constitute psychological primitives will be molded by experience or epigenetic influences and that they may not be isometric across people.

If these kinds of findings forecast the future of neuroscience, then they suggest even more strongly that psychological primitives may be the best categories for consistently describing what the brain is doing when it realizes the mind. If one accepts this reasoning, then psychology will never disappear in the face of neuroscience.

As a science of the mind, psychology is equipped with the ability to analyze how being human affects the process of doing science. We are in a better position than most to see how scientists make unintentionally biased observations of the world and have the capacity to correct for this all too common mistake.

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