David Chalmers, a philospher from Washington University, jokingly calls it the law for the minimisation of mysteries. 'Consciousness is a mystery, quantum mechanics is a mystery. When you have two mysteries, well maybe there is really only one. Perhaps they are the same thing.'
That the answer to consciousness might be found in the strange world of the quantum is a suggestion that dates back at least as far as the musings of physicist, David Bohm, in his 1951 book, Quantum Theory. In the past few years, however, such speculation has taken on a new urgency. What else, ask a host of thinkers, including Roger Penrose, the Oxford mathematician famed for his work on the geometry of tiling patterns and black holes, could explain aspects of the mind such as free will, intuition, creativity and the subjective unity of experience?
In the odd world of the quantum, things appear to ...
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