There’s every reason to think that physics
provides the underlying fundamental laws that
describe how mind works.
That’s the working hypothesis that Francis
Crick calls the astonishing hypothesis that
I think basically every serious neurophysiologist
assumes that by understanding at a molecular
level how nerve cells worked and understanding
at an architectural level how they’re wired
together and understanding the logic of the
processing as you might try to understand
how a computer works that that will give a
rich and in a sense complete understanding
of how the brain works, that there’s nothing
missing.
That program is very, very far from being
accomplished and so it’s logically possible
that something will go wrong.
But so far that seems to be on track and there
don’t seem to be any show stoppers as far
as I can tell.
The previous history is that at one time people
thought that there would be some kind of special
animism or vital principle that was necessary
to understand how metabolism works or to understand
how heredity works or to understand how other
basic biological processes work.
But in those cases I think it’s fair to
say that we’ve actually achieved a molecular
understanding.
It’s not absolutely complete but it’s
– I think the conceptual outlines are quite
clear of how metabolism works and how heredity
works and it is firmly based on the principles
of physics.
Now that being said there’s a very important
concept that as I’ve – the deeper I’ve
studied the more I’ve come to appreciate
that Niels Bohr introduced called complementarity.
This in quantum mechanics is a theorem but
I think it has much more general applicability.
It’s the concept that there can be an underlying
reality that you address questions to in different
ways that are meaningful and give informative
answers but require processing the underlying
reality in different ways.
So that the ways that you have to do the processing
might be mutually incompatible.
In quantum mechanics that’s just something
that’s a theorem, a mathematical theorem
that if you want to know where a particle
is you have to process its most basic reality,
it’s wave function in one way.
If you want to know how fast it’s moving,
its velocity or momentum, you have to process
the wave function in a different way.
And you can do either one of those and get
good answers for where it’s going to be
or how it’s going to move.
But you can’t do both at once because the
kind of processing that’s involved is incompatible.
I think that’s a much more general phenomenon
that when you try to address the nature of
things you may find that asking different
questions requires different ways of processing
the underlying information structures, the
underlying reality so that, for instance,
in understanding the human mind which is what
we were talking about, to understand it physically
requires one kind of processing and there’s
every reason to think that we already have
the fundamental physical laws that are adequate
to that kind of treatment.
But to understand how a person works, how
thought processes, moods and so forth add
up to a personality in a human actor will
require quite different ways of understanding
and quite different ways of processing the
underlying information structure that are
probably incompatible.
So the age old conflict between determinism
and free will, for instance, I think is superficial.
They’re different ways of processing that
could easily be and apparently are incompatible.
If we’re dealing with our own experience
or if we’re dealing with issues of law we
really need the concept of free will.
But if we’re dealing with the brain as a
physical object I think we can rely on the
physical laws.
