Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 10:20:52 +0000 From: Saul-Paul Sirag Subject: [q-mind] Mental Force -- Henry Stapp MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Henry Stapp Subject: Mental Force This abstract for talk to be given on October 14 at the Institute For Noetic Science, Sausalito CA., gives a compact overview of the approach that I have been describing recently on this forum. Mental Force: How Quantum Mind/Brain Can Do What Classical Mind/Brain Cannot. According to the precepts of classical physical theory the physical world is made out of particles and local fields that combine to produce a causal structure that is local/deterministic: the course of events in the physical world is completely fixed by mathematical rules that determine what will happen in each tiny spacetime region in terms of mathematical quantities localized in its immediate neighborhood at slightly earlier times. The causal properties of large-scale structures are completely reducible in this sense to a micro-causal structure. Any causal effect of our conscious experiences upon the physical world would, by the same token, be reducible to this micro-causal physical structure. According to the basic precepts of quantum theory the mathematical formulas of this theory are about increments in knowledge, described in terms that allow us to communicate to our colleagues what we have done and what we have learned. The basic realities thereby become certain describable kinds of conscious experiences, and the mathematical structure identified and used by physicists becomes a representation of certain kinds of causal connections between these experiences. But an examination of the structure of those causal connections reveals a looseness that---without any violation of the basic deterministic or statistical rules of the theory---allows the attentional aspect of our experience, as an aspect of experience per se, to effectively force experience to follow a path that deviates from what would, without this intervention, ensue. The talk will describe how this opening for a non-reductive causal efficacy of conscious experience comes about, and its implications for scientific research on the mind-brain connection and in psychiatry.