Paavo Pylkkanen

How are we to understand the causal status of consciousness? In philosophy of mind there has been a long debate about the problem of mental causation. Many philosophers assume that consciousness is in some sense a nonphysical property. But this immediately gives rise to the problem of understanding how something nonphysical could possibly influence something physical. This paper explores whether the ontological interpretation of quantum theory (Bohm and Hiley 1993) might throw new light upon this perennial issue. This interpretation suggests that a new type of active information is playing a key causal role in physical processes at the quantum level. Now, many suggestions about the putative causal powers of consciousness refer to the important role of information (van Gulick 2014; Revonsuo 2006; Tononi and Koch 2015). This suggests a strategy for the present paper. We will first consider how the various suggestions about the causal status of consciousness involve information before asking whether such information in mental and conscious states could be connected to information at the quantum level. In this way we can begin to understand mental causation, and the causal role of conscious experiences in particular, in a new way.

The theme of phenomenology and quantum physics is here tackled by examining some basic interpretational issues in quantum physics. One key issue in quantum theory from the very beginning has been whether it is possible to provide a quantum ontology of particles in motion in the same way as in classical physics, or whether we are restricted to stay within a more limited view of quantum systems, in terms of complementary but mutually exclusive phenomena. In phenomenological terms we could describe the situation by saying that according to the usual interpretation of quantum theory (especially Niels Bohr's), quantum phenomena require a kind of epoché (i.e. a suspension of assumptions about reality at the quantum level). However, there are other interpretations (especially David Bohm's) that seem to re-establish the possibility of a mind-independent ontology at the quantum level. We will show that even such ontological interpretations contain novel, non-classical features, which require them to give a special role to "phenomena" or "appearances", a role not encountered in classical physics. We will conclude that while ontological interpretations of quantum theory are possible, quantum theory implies the need of a certain kind of epoché even for this type of interpretations. While different from the epoché connected to phenomenological description, the "quantum epoché" nevertheless points to a potentially interesting parallel between phenomenology and quantum philosophy.

The paper sketches how the notion of active information has arisen from the quantum theory and then briefly discusses the relevance of this notion to current debates in consciousness studies ("the hard problem" of consciousness) and cognitive science ("the dynamical approach" to cognition).

In order to provide the necessary background for our discussions it is useful to briefly outline some of the relevant features of the Bohm ontological interpretation (for more details see Bohm and Hiley 1993). We begin with the particle theory which, for example, accounts for ...