Where does the weirdness go?

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Paavo T.I. Pylkkänen

"Quantum theory predicts experimental results brilliantly but simultaneously raises difficult conceptual issues. Paradoxes such as Schrodinger's cat, the EPR paradox, or the nonlocality demanded by Bell's inequalities have hampered philosophers in their attempts to include quantum-theory when discussing the relation between mind and matter. Pylkkanen proposes that Bohm's alternative interpretation of quantum theory resolves these paradoxes and thus enables one to base new philosophical theories upon quantum physics. He uses Bohm's concepts of "implicate order", active information" and "soma-significance" as tools to tackle several well-known problems in the philosophy of mind. These include mental causation, the hard problem of consciousness, time consciousness, and virtual reality. Pylkkanen's eclectic approach combines new physics-based insights with those of analytical philosophy, phenomenology, cognitive science and neuroscience and he proposes a view in which the mechanistic framework of classical physics and neuroscience is complemented by a more holistic underlying framework in which conscious experience finds its place more naturally."--BOOK JACKET.

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[by] Wolfgang Yourgrau [and] Stanley Mandelstam

A historical and theoretical survey of variational principles and their relationship to dynamics and quantum theory. Topics include Hamilton's principle, Hamilton-Jacobi equation, relationship to quantum theory and wave mechanics, and principles of Feynman and Schwinger. For professional physicists, mathematicians and advanced students.

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Rudolf Těsnohlídek

This story tells how the vixen is captured but escapes, marries, and raises a litter. She is shot by a poacher, but her spirit survives in her cubs.

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Roger Penrose

A New York Times bestseller when it appeared in 1989, Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind was universally hailed as a marvelous survey of modern physics as well as a brilliant reflection on the human mind, offering a new perspective on the scientific landscape and a visionary glimpse of the possible future of science. Now, in Shadows of the Mind, Penrose offers another exhilarating look at modern science as he mounts an even more powerful attack on artificial intelligence. But perhaps more important, in this volume he points the way to a new science, one that may eventually explain the physical basis of the human mind. Penrose contends that some aspects of the human mind lie beyond computation. This is not a religious argument (that the mind is something other than physical) nor is it based on the brain's vast complexity (the weather is immensely complex, says Penrose, but it is still a computable thing, at least in theory). Instead, he provides powerful arguments to support his conclusion that there is something in the conscious activity of the brain that transcends computation - and will find no explanation in terms of present-day science. To illuminate what he believes this "something" might be, and to suggest where a new physics must proceed so that we may understand it, Penrose cuts a wide swathe through modern science, providing penetrating looks at everything from Turing computability and Godel's incompleteness, via Schrodinger's Cat and the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb-testing problem, to detailed microbiology. Of particular interest is Penrose's extensive examination of quantum mechanics, which introduces some new ideas that differ markedly from those advanced in The Emperor's New Mind, especially concerning the mysterious interface where classical and quantum physics meet. But perhaps the most interesting wrinkle in Shadows of the Mind is Penrose's excursion into microbiology, where he examines cytoskeletons and microtubules, minute substructures lying deep within the brain's neurons. (He argues that microtubules - not neurons - may indeed be the basic units of the brain, which, if nothing else, would dramatically increase the brain's computational power.) Furthermore, he contends that in consciousness some kind of global quantum state must take place across large areas of the brain, and that it is within microtubules that these collective quantum effects are most likely to reside.