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Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness: Some Views from a Novice

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Quanta and Mind

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 414))

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Abstract

In this purely conjectural paper we attempt to define how consciousness may be related to a measure of information. We use the quantum-like approach to formulate a possible relationship.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    AlphaGo is an AI programme which beats human players at ‘Go’.

  2. 2.

    Appleby (2014) mentions another scale, the Glasgow Coma Scale which (p. 13) “is widely used to quantify the level of consciousness in cases of brain damage.” (see also Teasdale and Jennett (1974, 1976) as quoted in Appleby).

  3. 3.

    See Bohm (1990, p. 281), where that example is mentioned.

  4. 4.

    It can be debated whether the claim we make is true. The assailant himself, as the source of the shadow, may contain more information than the shadow coming from the assailant’s presence and the light falling over his physical presence.

  5. 5.

    At the level of submodalities, there is debate on where to locate the experience of a submodality, like when one sees a color. See Skokowski (2004).

  6. 6.

    The very subtle field refers to some analogy of a quantum field.

  7. 7.

    The Dirac Delta function, although called ‘function’ it is not a function in a mathematical sense.

  8. 8.

    A Brownian motion can be seen as a stochastic differential equation composed of a drift and a diffusion. It describes a time dependent stochastic process.

  9. 9.

    This difference is divided by 2.

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Haven, E. (2019). Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness: Some Views from a Novice. In: de Barros, J.A., Montemayor, C. (eds) Quanta and Mind. Synthese Library, vol 414. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21908-6_12

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