I am in the middle of reading a fascinating book called "The Spiritual Brain; A Scientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul" by Mario Beauregard, Ph.D. and Denyse O'Leary.
In the first part of the book, Beauregard and O'Leary apply the principles of quantum physics to neuroscience, and the conclusions are startling. Determinism's relation to human action was always a sort of enigma for me, perhaps because proponents of the theory commonly mistake all the laws of the universe to obey classical, Newtonian physics. However, from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in modern physics, we know that electrons do not definitely exist in space and time; they are a cloud of probabilities and their existence at any one point is only potential. When electrons pass from one state to another, they don't "pass through" the space in between... rather there is nothing in between. Fully aware of this, I did not consider the consequences of modern physics in the natural sciences such as the study of the human brain. We know that the synapses or the spaces between neurons in our brains conduct signals with ions, which function according to the rules of quantum physics and not classical physics.
The authors of "The Spiritual Brain" assert: "determinism is dispelled right away as the basic level of the universe is a cloud of probabilities, not of laws...in the human brain we are not driven to process a given decision...we experience a "smear" of possibilities."
There's so much more here but I have to go do real work now...
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)

0 comments:
Post a Comment