The Quantum Mind: From NDEs to Post-Materialist Science

The Quantum Mind: From NDEs to Post-Materialist Science

Thomas R. Verny M.D. 

• The study of near-death experiences challenges the idea that the mind fades to black when the body expires.
  
• Those who believe in telepathic communication claim that the thoughts and feelings of one person can affect another.
  
• Post-materialism science is not synonymous with materialism and is not committed to any particular belief, dogma, or ideology.
  

Riding this momentum, Stuart Hameroff, from the departments of anaesthesiology and psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, supported by Sir Roger Penrose together with a group of scientists from a variety of fields such as neuroscience, biology, medicine, psychiatry, and psychology initiated a new science they call post-materialist science. These scientists emphasize that science is first and foremost a non-dogmatic, open-minded method of acquiring knowledge about nature through the observation, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. Its methodology is not synonymous with materialism and is not committed to any particular belief, dogma, or ideology.

I fully support this stand. We should follow the evidence and rely on the data.

4 Theories That Could Explain Near-Death Experiences

Thomas R. Verny M.D.

• Our current understanding of matter alone is unlikely to explain the nature of the mind.
  
• The commonly accepted deterministic view of the mind as an epiphenomenon of the brain is no longer tenable.
  
• The Embodied Mind provides a bridge between neuroscience and more spiritual approaches to consciousness, free will and selfhood.
  
• Consciousness can interface with the material because matter and energy are interchangeable.
  

Stuart Alan Kauffman, emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, with Samuli Niiranen and Gabor Vattay, was issued a founding patent on the Poised Realm, an apparently new "state of matter" hovering reversibly between quantum and classical realms, between quantum coherence and classicality.

Kauffman thinks that the system seen in the chlorophyll molecule (which he studied at length) raises the possibility that webs of quantum coherence or partial coherence can extend across a large part of a neuron, and can remain poised between coherence and decoherence.

The Kauffman hypothesis proposes that the mind, consciousness, and free will are associated with the Poised Realm. Our brains with our sense organs connect us to the universe.

The difference in theories between Hameroff and Kauffman is that the former locates consciousness in the microtubules and the latter in the Poised Realm. They both lean heavily on quantum physics for their hypotheses. This is the theory that makes the most sense to me.