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4.5
"The exceptional man," Schopenhauer one remarked, "is like an archer who can strike a target others cannot, the genius is the one who can strike a target others cannot even see." It is a thought worth bearing in mind while reading 'The Quantum Brain,' the remarkable, often enthralling, new book by Jeffrey Satinover. Satinover's aim in this book is to map out a highly detailed account of how mysterious quantum properties - such as quantum indeterminacy - may be harnessed or amplified by the nervous system to allow for the exercise of free will. The course traversed by Satinover to reach this destination is not always an easy one, and it includes challenging passages on: physics, biochemistry, computer science, and chaos theory. It helps a great deal that Satinover's style is sharp, succinct, and sprinkled with elucidating metaphors. However, Satinover has the tendency to jump immediately into difficult terrain on such a wide variety of topics that a broad scientific literacy is a virtual prerequisite. That said, Satinover handles such topics as well - if not better - than a host of competing books -- like Roger Penrose's 'Shadows of the Mind.' Penrose, of course, generated considerable notoriety with his thesis that intra-cellular "mechanisms" called microtubules were a "bridge" linking the quantum realm and our everyday macroscopic world. The appeal of Penrose's view, at least in part, had much to do with his intuition that the quantum realm was somehow closely identical to a Platonic realm of mathematical Forms, thus appealing to the mystically and religiously inclined. The schema Penrose proposed - that of the macro-scale quantum field-states being generated in the brain - as well the one his collaborator Stuart Hameroff put forward - have not held up to scientific scrutiny, and Satinover convincingly shows why. But contra the arch-materialists Satinover demonstrates that the iterative architecture of the brain at different scales is conducive to amplifying quantum level uncertainty so that behavior at the classical level is non-deterministic. What I've mentioned here, of course, is a necessarily condensed summary of a much more elegant presentation. I'll add but two important details however - namely, that Satinover makes the case that quantum level "effects," such as quantum tunneling, are both ubiquitous and necessary to understand classical level phenomena, and that lowest scale quantum level "effects" influence the initial state of the next scale, while adaptive pressures of the next higher levels shape the boundary conditions of the lowest scale. This amounts to a mutually adaptive feedback loop - an idea closely allied to what the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, in his masterful 'Godel, Escher, Bach,' called a "tangled hierarchy." We shall return to this idea shortly. But first I'd like to set my sights on some of Satinover's philosophical conclusions. It's hardly a quantum leap (or is it?) to suggest that quantum level "events" - events which have no cause - bear at least a superficial relationship to the ancient Greek and Scholastic notion of God as the "uncaused cause" of matters material. Or likewise, as Satinover suggests in passing, that quantum level events "function" as the source of a continual "creation" that sustains the universe at every instant. (This too, is a Scholastic notion expressed by the idea of the "exnihilating preservative" action of God -- exnihilating means continual creation). But Satinover's theological speculations do not extend much further than this. This is an ironic disappointment, particularly since Satinover laments the possibility that mankind risks severing its cultural roots in the race towards the future. And there is indeed, a wealth of concepts and ideas to found in mankind's spiritual, artistic, and philosophical traditions, which might situate and illuminate the implications of Satinover's findings. That is to say, philosophy may be blind without the aid of science, but science may not know what too look for without the help of philosophy. Here is something of what I mean in this regard. Satinover has gone to considerable lengths to produce an argument within the empirical tradition in support of the notion of free will. It is a laudable and welcome achievement. But consider this: Science has hitherto assumed a methodological and metaphysical determinism. In a deterministic framework it is difficult - if not impossible - then, to have conceived of an experiment taking place on the wholly classical level that would disconfirm determinism (the double slit experiment, of course, is the exception). And given that the essence of a scientific theory is that it should be susceptible to disproof we are left to conclude that metaphysical determinism wasn't scientific at all - it was an article of faith (of a rather peculiar sort). More to the point, metaphysical determinism was similar to Newton's notion of an absolute frame of reference - part of the intellectual scaffolding that supported and constrained what questions made sense in a given paradigm, yet lay unexamined as the un-provable assumptions within that system. That such esteemed scientists - the Churchland's, Dennett, and Dawkins, to name a few - could manage to bully and harangue so much of the scientific community into accepting what are ultimately dogmatic assertions is a symptom of a gross philosophical illiteracy among the highest strata of empiricists (many scientists will, no doubt, take this as a compliment). Reading Satinover's concluding chapter, "Quantum Ripples," I can't but help feel that some of these hidden assumptions are still at work, hampering, perhaps, a deeper appreciation of the implications of his preceding discussion. Some quantum theorists have suggested that the collapse of a superposition to an actual state isn't just a case of matter going from a state of potentiality to actuality - to use Aristotle's terminology - but that the potential for "experience" is inherent quantum level, but it is only through collapse of the wave function from potentiality to actuality that "experience" of a sort occurs - that is, quantum measurement is experience. Though presumably the amplification of the quantum capacity for experience through a human (or artificial) nervous system would be necessary for the richly textured sense of experience we as humans experience. In this case, the fundamental energy behind the universe - the quantum realm - would be conscious only adventitiously - through us. And our consciousness - our "I" - would be but an attribute of the noumenal - the un-conceptualizable ground of existence. William James expressed an idea not far from this - about the reciprocal relationship between man and God -- where humankind contributed to the evolution of God. Which brings us back to the notion of tangled hierarchies. A tangled hierarchy is a set of nested hierarchical levels that contain a "strange loop." The idea is captured most intuitively by thinking about the famous wood carvings of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher - most notably his 'Drawing Hands' in which each hand seems to give rise to or draws the other - or his 'Print Gallery' in which a young man in an art gallery stares intently at painting that curves and twists around so that it contains both the man and the gallery. It is a theme of ancient origin, arising in the 'Ramayana,' composed in the 3rd century B.C. by the Indian poet and sage Valmiki, in which the principal characters, after heroic and arduous adventures, retire to a hermitage to study the very book in which they make their appearance as fictional characters (The device also makes it appearance in one of Woody Allen's most creative films, 'Deconstructing Harry'). The iterative is implied in these examples. And so to the notion of self-similar scales within scales, as well as the mutually adaptive feedback loop and self-reference. Douglas Hofstader called the tangled hierarchy a "strange loop" because following the loop tended to lead to unexpected results - i.e., following an apparently outward course one is brought back to one's starting point. The idea is important in this context, I think, because, as Hofstader notes, the paradoxical nature of the tangled hierarchy requires an inviolate, discontinuous, or transcendent level without which the other levels could not exist. It is ideas such as this, dovetailing with Satinover's biological/quantum model, which could form the basis of a richer ontological framework - one in which transcendence not only fits, but is necessary. T.S. Eliot once wrote that art often anticipates revolutionary ideas later discovered by pioneering scientists and thinkers. Perhaps this is a further indication that Satinover's aim has been on target. Satinover has drawn on a vast array of disciplines to make his point. But the inherent tension of stringing together so many diverse interests has helped propel his argument. If we cannot yet tell whether he has scored a bulls-eye, a near miss, or whether others shall score the cleaner shot it is only because the target is still beyond the horizon.
