Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

see from CAT scans that when someone has a certain kind
of thought, a certain area of the brain is active. There is,
thus, a correlation between a state of the brain and a human
experience, but the dualist will say that this correlation is a
relation between two different things.
The materialist, someone who contends that there is only one
sort of metaphysical entity and that reality is strictly material,
must hold that brain states and mind states are the same thing,
that they are different descriptions of the same occurrence.
One physicist who made the case that consciousness is nonmaterial
was Eugene Wigner. He was concerned with the measurement
problem in quantum mechanics.
As we’ve said, when a quantum system is not observed, it
occupies a state of superposition; it is in a combination of every
possible state it could occupy. But the instant we observe the
system, it collapses into one state. The Schrödinger equation
but the best we get is a probability.
We have a physical law in the Schrödinger equation that
always holds, except when we look. Wigner sought to
determine what it is about us looking that causes the violation
of the physical law.
Quantum systems become entangled. If two electrons bounce off
each other, we may be able to label them as A and B coming in, but
we cannot say which one is A or B coming out. The two electrons
cease to be independent things but, rather, are just disturbances in
the reality of the things themselves is lost; we can describe only the
system as a whole.
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