Can Quantum Physics Explain Consciousness? One Scientist Thinks It Might
discovermagazine.comI think I enjoy these sorts of stories like one might enjoy horoscopes: fun to think about.
> Traditional quantum mechanics says that a physical system doesn’t have definite properties until it’s observed — an act known as collapsing a wave function. For example, in Erwin Schrödinger’s classic thought experiment, a cat in a box is both dead and alive — known as superposition — until observed as one or the other. So an observation, or consciousness itself, causes the wave to collapse. OR proposes the opposite: The collapse gives rise to consciousness. (Credit: Alison Mackey/Discover)
Does he have a method (or proposed one) to verify his claim? If not, he is not speaking as a scientist and could be abusing his status as a scientist to promote unscientific ideas.
One example:
> Two decades ago, neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland and physicist Max Tegmark were among those who launched outright broadsides. Hameroff and Penrose responded, and Hameroff published a list of 20 testable predictions yielded by Orch-OR.
Anyway, it seems that his research has also inspired better equipped scientists to delve deeper.