A new article has been published in the Diccionario Interdisciplinar Austral. It is an article by Javier Sánchez Cañizares, from Universidad de Navarra.
In recent years, progress in the field of neuroscience has stimulated interest in better understanding of the relationship between mind and brain. Quantum Mechanics (QM) has been present in this area practically from the beginning, from its well-known “paradox of the measure”. The standard interpretation of the QM assumes the existence in nature of two fundamental and irreducible processes: deterministic evolution of the wave function according to the Schrödinger equation (once you have established the initial and boundary conditions) and undetermined collapse of the wave function after making a measurement. Thus, the QM would be pointing out the limitations of a purely deterministic view of nature and, in particular, of brain activity.
However, the relevance of the QM for the physics of the brain is very controversial. Critics of influence rely on the role of the processes of decoherence to ensure a classic and deterministic behavior of the brain, without paying much attention to the philosophical assumptions that involves the use of quantum decoherence in the mind-brain problem (Sánchez-Cañizares 2014).
In this new entry (available only in Spanish) of the Austral Interdisciplinary Dictionary, after introducing an overview of the relations between neuroscience and QM and explain why the second could be relevant to the first, we will review the most important models involving the QM in the brain, making explicit its position on the causal relationships between brain activity and conscious experience. We will explain the main criticisms to the relevance of the QM for neuroscience, and physical and epistemic implications of the use of decoherence will be discussed before presenting some philosophical considerations that highlight the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the debate. We dedicate the last section to some brief conclusions. So we focus here on the relationship between neuroscience and quantum mechanics in the context of the mind-brain problem and, especially, of consciousness.
Find the whole article in Spanish in this link.
