Another attempt to bridge the explanatory gap without the help of a theatre
appeals to quantum-level processes – that is, processes involving the smallest
possible amount of a given physical entity (like a photon or an electron). For the
British physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose, to solve the hard problem we
need to understand the problem of incompatible explanatory levels. There are
two levels of explanation in physics: the familiar classical level used to describe
large-scale objects, and the quantum level used to describe very small things
and governed by the Schrödinger equation. Both these levels are completely
deterministic and computable. The trouble starts when you move from one to
the other. At the quantum level superposed states are possible – that is, two pos-
sibilities can exist at the same time – but at the classical level either one or other
(seeing the light as red or green) must be the case. When we make an observation
(working at the classical level), the superposed states have to collapse into one or
other possibility, a process known as the collapse of the wave function.
A variety of theories have been developed using quantum physics to try to solve
the hard problem (Tuszynski, 2006). Some physicists, notably Eugene Wigner and
Henry Stapp, have claimed that consciousness causes the collapse of the wave
function. On Stapp’s theory, the quantum brain is understood as a ‘collection
of classically conceived alternative possible states of the brain’ which ‘all exist
together as “parallel” parts of a potentiality for future additions to a stream of
consciousness’ (2011, pp. 51–52). In this context, nondeterministic consciousness
controls deterministic brain activation by an attentional process of choosing
between alternatives (Stapp, 2007). This quantum interactive dualism involves a
widespread effect and is different from Popper and Eccles’ dualist interactionism
(Chapter 6), in which the mind intervenes at certain synapses in what would oth-
erwise be a causally complete physical system.
Far from insisting on physicalist explanations, Stapp believes that ‘contemporary
physical theory demands certain interventions into the physical! The associated
causal gap in a purely physically determined causation provides a natural opening
to an interactive but non-Cartesian dualism’ (2011, p. 116). As a result, he claims
that this kind of quantum approach can solve the binding problem and explain
the unity of consciousness and the power of free will.
Note that these ideas from quantum physics have inspired many popular and spir-
itual theories. These include nuclear physicist Amit Goswami’s theory of creative
evolution in which consciousness is the ground of all being, and spiritual teacher
Deepak Chopra’s notion of consciousness as fundamental, as a field phenomenon
that precedes the quantum field as the origin of the universe (Kafatos et al., 2011).
Among others are theories of quantum consciousness, quantum awakening, and
the quantum soul (Zohar and Marshall, 2002).
But this is not what Penrose means. Penrose argues that all conventional interpre-
tations of the collapse of the wave function are only approximations, and instead
proposes his own theory of ‘Orchestrated Objective Reduction’, or Orch OR. This
new process is gravitational but nonlocal in nature, and hence can link things
in widely separated areas, making large-scale ‘quantum coherence’ possible. This
can only happen when the system is isolated from nonorchestrated perturba-
tions in the rest of the environment, so that objective reduction and the hidden
noncomputational action it makes possible can be made use of by the system in
