QUANTUM BRAIN DYNAMICS AND CONSCIOUSNESS (John Benjamins, 1995)
(Copyright © 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini d'uso )
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The Heisenberg and Von Neumann tradition has always viewed the brain as a "quantum measuring device". But the Japanese physicist Kunio Yasue, the American physicist Gordon Globus and others, claims that brain substrates uphold second-order quantum fields, which cannot be treated as mere measuring devices.
Yasue, building on the quantum field theory developed in the 1960s by the Japanese physicist Hiroomi Umezawa, has developed a "quantum neurophysics" that explains how the classical world can originate from quantum processes in the brain.
Yasue is not a connectionist. The fact that neurons are organized inside the brain is of negligible importance in his theory.
Yasue thinks that several layers of the brain can host quantum processes, whose quantum properties explain consciousness and cognition. Yasue presents the brain as a macroscopic quantum system.
He focuses on water megamolecules in the space between neurons, which can combine to form extended quantum systems, interacting with the neural networks.
He focuses on the sensory system, whose quantum field causes some special molecules in the membrane of the neuron to undergo Froehlich condensation and cause, in turn, macroscopic coherence.
He focuses on structures such as microtubules which lie inside the neuron,
and which contain quasi-crystalline water molecules that again lend themselves to quantum effects.
The function of this quantum field could be cognitive: some particular quantum states could record memory.
He focuses on a bioplasma of charged particles which interact with the electromagnetic field, an ideal vehicle for a merge of the sensory quantum field with the memory quantum field, an ideal vehicle for the creation of classical reality.
Thus, classical order can continually unfold in the perimembranous bioplasma.
According to traditional interpretations of Quantum Theory, classical order
unfolds because of a measurement and the consequent collapse of the wave
function. According to Globus, classical order unfolds from the interaction
between quantum cognition (the memory quantum field, or "holoworld") and quantum reality (the sensory quantum field).
Heisenberg's discontinuous sequence of collapsed realities is replaced by a continuous unfolding of worlds from a holoworld.
Consciousness could arise from the interaction between the electromagnetic field and molecular fields of water and protein.
Furthermore, Yasue maintains that the evolution of the neural wave function is not random, as would result from the traditional quantum theories, but optimized under a principle of "least neural action". Random effects of consciousness are replaced by a "cybernetic" consciousness which is more in the tradition of the self as a free-willing agent.
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