David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2 (4):119-124 (1998)
Age-old battle lines over the puzzling nature of mental experience are shaping a modern resurgence in the study of consciousness. On one side are the long-dominant "physicalists" who view consciousness as an emergent property of the brain's neural networks. On the alternative, rebellious side are those who see a necessary added ingredient: proto-conscious experience intrinsic to reality, perhaps understandable through modern physics (panpsychists, pan-experientialists, "funda-mentalists"). It is argued here that the physicalist premise alone is unable to solve completely the difficult issues of consciousness and that to do so will require supplemental panpsychist/pan-experiential philosophy expressed in modern physics. In one scheme proto-conscious experience is a basic property of physical reality accessible to a quantum process associated with brain activity. The proposed process is Roger Penrose's "objective reduction" (OR), a self-organizing "collapse" of the quantum wave function related to instability at the most basic level of space-time geometry. In the Penrose- Hameroff model of "orchestrated objective reduction" (Orch OR), OR quantum computation occurs in cytoskeletal microtubules within the brain's neurons. The basic thesis is that consciousness involves brain activities coupled to a self-organizing ripples in fundamental reality
|Keywords||No keywords specified (fix it)|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library|
References found in this work BETA
No references found.
Citations of this work BETA
David Skrbina (2006). Beyond Descartes: Panpsychism Revisited. [REVIEW] Axiomathes 16 (4):387-423.
Similar books and articles
Wolfgang Baer (2007). The Physical Condition for Consciousness: A Comment on R. Shaw and J. Kinsella-Shaw. Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (8):93-104.
Stuart R. Hameroff & Roger Penrose (1996). Orchestrated Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules: A Model for Consciousness. In Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak & A. C. Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness. MIT Press.
Stuart R. Hameroff, Consciousness, Whitehead and Quantum Computation in the Brain: Panprotopsychism Meets the Physics of Fundamental Spacetime Geometry.
Roger Penrose & Stuart Hameroff (1996). Orchestrated Objective Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules: The "Orch OR" Model for Consciousness. Mathematics and Computers in Simulation 40:453-480.
Stuart R. Hameroff (1998). More Neural Than Thou (Reply to Churchland). In S. Ameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak & A. C. Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness Ii: The 1996 Tucson Discussions and Debates. Mit Press.
Stuart R. Hameroff (2001). Consciousness, the Brain, and Space-Time Geometry. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 929:74-104.
Added to index2009-01-28
Total downloads63 ( #28,055 of 1,413,336 )
Recent downloads (6 months)4 ( #51,540 of 1,413,336 )
How can I increase my downloads?