文档介绍：May 14, 1999 LBNL-42650
Attention, Intention, and Will in Quantum Physics ∗
Henry P. Stapp
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720
Abstract
How is mind related to matter? This ancient question in philoso-
phy is rapidly ing a core problem in science, perhaps the most
important of all because it probes the essential nature of man himself.
The origin of the problem is a conflict between the mechanical concep-
tion of human beings that arises from the precepts of classical physical
theory and the very different idea that arises from our intuition: the
former reduces each of us to an automaton, while the latter allows
our thoughts to guide our actions. The dominant contemporary ap-
proaches to the problem attempt to resolve this conflict by clinging to
the classical concepts, and trying to explain away our misleading in-
tuition. But a detailed argument given here shows why, in a scientific
approach to this problem, it is necessary to use the more basic princi-
ples of quantum physics, which bring the observer into the dynamics,
rather than to accept classical precepts that are profoundly incorrect
precisely at the crucial point of the role of human consciousness in
the dynamics of human brains. Adherence to the quantum principles
yields a dynamical theory of the mind/brain/body system that is in
close accord with our intuitive idea of what we are. In particular, the
∗This work was supported in part by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High
Energy and Nuclear Physics, of the . Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC03-
76SF00098.
need for a self-observing quantum system to pose certain questions cre-
ates a causal opening that allows mind/brain dynamics to have three
distinguishable but interlocked causal processes, one micro-local, one
stochastic, and the third experiential. Passing to the classical limit in
which the critical difference between zero and the