9th Workshop on Biological Mentality

It has recently been remarked that the argument for physicalism from the causal closure of the physical is incomplete. It is only effective against mental causation manifested in the action of putative mental forces that lead to acceleration of particles in the nervous system. Based on consideration of anomalous, physically unaccounted-for correlations of neural events, I argue that irreducible mental causation whose nature is at least prima facie probabilistic is conceivable. The manifestation of such causation should be accompanied by a local violation of the Second Law of thermodynamics. I claim that mental causation can be viewed as the disposition of mental states to alter the state probability distribution within the nervous system, with no violation of the conservation laws. If confirmed by neurophysical research, it would indicate a kind of causal homogeneity of the world. Causation would manifest probabilistically in both quantum mechanical and psychophysical systems, and the dynamics of both would be determined by the temporal evolution of the corresponding system state function. Finally, I contend that a probabilistic account of mental causation can consistently explain the character of selectional states that ensure the uniformity of causal patterns, as well as the fact that different physical realizers of a mental property cause the same physical effects in different contexts.

Testing the Consciousness Causing Collapse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Using Subliminal Primes Derived from Random Fluctuations in Radioactive Decay.

Read the article on Essentia Foundation

Artificial Intelligence is making rapid inroads in many aspects of our lives. Most AI applications involve mathematical models that are trained to recognize or mimic data that have been either generated or verified by human intelligence. I will discuss a different kind of AI, that is based on fundamental logics and does not need prior training. I will show how such AI can be used to search for Dark Matter at the LHC. Also, by embedding such AI directly onto silicon chips, it can execute much faster than computers. I will also discuss a growing school of thought that AI needs to be explainable in order to be reliable.

Over the last years, in this talk series, I have presented a research project which has now come to an initial conclusion. The result of this first stage is the outline of a pragmatic, scientifically tenable idealism, not as a rationalistic necessity, but as an overall best fit to problems in Philosophy as well as Science. (The model is basically 1/3 Plato, 1/3 Leibniz and 1/3 modern Science.) The hypothesis at its heart is the assumption of a world fundamentally build not from particles or fields in space time, but from universal properties including non-physical ones that make up Platonic abstract objects. In this ‘Model A’ or ‘A-world’, human thinking ranges continuously from physical information processing in the brain to the handling of abstract objects in our minds.

The Details of the model are published in an upcoming book (M. Korth, 'Intelligenz, Information und Idealismus', Brill/Mentis 2026), an English manuscript is available on PhilPapers.org.

The Project has now reached a second stage, in which I attempt to work out the proposed experiments in detail. In my talk I will present an example hypothesis derived from the model and how we might be able to investigate it experimentally. The basic idea is that if Platonic abstract objects exist and if humans can process them, then we should be able to find experimental evidence for this at the neuroscience/psychology interface. This work should be interesting also independently of the proposed underlying model.

Brains comprise two related entities: neuronal matter and the electromagnetic (EM) fields generated by neural activity. Most theories of consciousness (ToCs) locate consciousness in neurons and synapses, yet consciousness involves bound or integrated information. Because ‘information is physical’ (Landauer), integrated information must be physically integrated. Matter-based substrates, including neurons and computers, only achieve temporal integration, with information encoded in discrete material units rather than physically unified. Quantum ToCs avoid this issue by appealing to exotic states of matter, but these are implausible in a warm, wet brain. EM field theories of consciousness (EM-ToCs), such as the conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) field theory, propose that consciousness is causally active, physically integrated information encoded in the brain’s global EM field, an entirely physical yet non-material entity. The cemi field theory outperforms matter-based ToCs on standard evaluative criteria and offers explanations for key problems of consciousness, such as the binding problem, the serial nature of the conscious mind compared to the parallel architecture of the non-conscious mind, the nature of free will, and provides a feasible path toward artificial consciousness.

Conscious macrostates are usually assumed to be emergent from the underlying physical microstates comprising the brain and nervous system of biological organisms. However, a major problem with this assumption is that consciousness is essentially non-measurable unlike all other proven emergent properties of physical systems. In an earlier paper, using a no-go theorem, it was shown that conscious states cannot be comprised of processes that are physical in nature (Reason, 2019). Combining this result with another unrelated work on causal emergence in physical systems (Hoel, Albantakis and Tononi, 2013), we show in our paper that conscious macrostates are not emergent from physical systems and they also do not supervene on physical microstates. An important implication of our work is that there must be some form of violation of energy conservation in biological systems that are conscious.

We propose a new substance dualist framework to explain consciousness, drawing on near-death experience (NDE) and neurological evidence. Evidence from veridical NDE perceptions suggests that consciousness can separate from the physical body as an individuated, self-aware entity or mind. We propose that the mind is a separate entity from the physical body, belonging to a distinct ontological category. Accordingly, the human being is conceptualized as the union of the mind entity (or soul) and the physical body. As the locus of consciousness, the mind entity possesses all the attributes of consciousness: perception, thinking, emotion, memory, volition, and self-awareness.

We provide NDE evidence that the mind entity interacts in general with physical processes and specifically with neural activity in the brain. The mechanism for mind-brain interaction involves initially triggering and then detecting neural action potentials. The induced neural activity in specific regions brings the mind’s mental content to awareness. The mind-brain interface occurs in cortical dendritic spines, where the mind triggers calcium ion release from the spine apparatus via spine F-actin filaments. Inhaled anesthetics dissolve these filaments, blocking this process, leading to loss of consciousness. The mind entity’s actions to induce cortical activity can explain numerous cognitive neurological processes including perception and language comprehension.

The full paper this talk is based on is at Self Conscious Mind.

The perceived tension between mental causation and the conservation laws assumes that mental causation involves events such as, paradigmatically, that I will to raise my arm and then, presumably as a result, my arm goes up. Given such a paradigm for mental causation, it is natural to reply that conservation laws are conditional upon symmetries (in particular time and space translations), apply locally where and when such symmetries hold, and hence fail to apply where such symmetries do not hold---perhaps including brains, one infers. Indeed it is difficult to see how mental causation could bring about an event that would not have happened anyway while conserving energy and momentum---at least without bringing in quantum mechanics.

William Seagar, while largely granting the reasoning above, has proposed a panpsychist account that aims to reconcile dualism with conservation laws. On his view, minds might be partly responsible for Newtonian gravity, for example, and hence (1) clearly do something (2) that apparently would not have happened anyway, (3) respect the time- and space-translation symmetries and hence (4) preserve the conservation laws. If minds exist everywhere and always as panpsychism holds, then spatio-temporally uniform effects might reasonably result. In reply I note how Seager's example differs from the usual paradigm of arm-raising. Seagar's claim that the world 'gives every indication of being causally closed' is briefly evaluated in light of evidence and Hume's problem of induction.

Although enzyme function is often characterized as a decreased activation energy, the mechanism of action involves altering the quantum interactions of substrate molecules. The need to understand this fine graining (molecular structures acting at quantum level interactions) process led me to consider the key role of dimensionality in information dynamics in living systems. That is, the string of amino acids encoded by genetic information becomes functional only when it folds into a 3-dimensional structure. Protein folding, when governed only by thermodynamics, is a random process with many possible (lower free energy) outcomes. However, living systems, by controlling the kinetics of protein folding, ensure a single final, optimally functional configuration out of the many possible structures - effectively increasing Shannon information.

Perhaps this "dimensionality" mechanism to increase information also works at the cellular level as interactions among proliferating cells ensure cellular proliferation results in a highly non-random, functioning multicellular structure out of all possible 3-dimensional configurations. Again, this highly controlled change in dimensionality permits the increased information necessary for multicellularity.

Humans, unlike all other living systems, explicitly recognize, measure, and predict time. My hypothesis is that this increased dimensionality, in turn, allows access to information not available to other living systems and characterized (by us) as "consciousness". An extension of this hypothesis is that consciousness resides in the dimension of time and, therefore, interacts with but is exterior to the spatial dimensions.

According to some leading scientific theories of consciousness, we are on the verge of creating genuinely conscious AI systems. According to other leading scientific theories of consciousness, AI could never be conscious in anything like its current form. Both liberal and conservative scientific theories of AI consciousness have substantial plausibility. We cannot dismiss either. We will thus likely soon be surrounded by AI systems who are debatably conscious. If they are conscious, their consciousness is unlikely to be simple and froglike, but instead sophisticated and personlike. There is no good ethical answer to the question of what we should do with AI systems who are debatably persons, deserving equal moral rights with us. If we deny them full rights, then we risk perpetrating slavery and murder, perhaps on an enormous scale. If we grant them full rights, we risk sacrificing real human lives for entities without interests worth the sacrifice. The solution is not to create such debatable AI persons.

NCCs are powerful tools for understanding how neural process are associated with the human experience of consciousness, but they do not provide an answer to all of the questions that relate to that experience. For example, why do we choose a specific action (free will), and why is there an integrated conscious experience from many different cognitive and sensory processes (the binding problem)?

Quantum biology is the study of biological processes that cannot be explained classically, and which can only be explained with quantum mechanics. It has been applied to the mitochondrial electron transport chain and to photosynthesis, among other things, and has provided useful and falsifiable hypotheses about those biological processes. However, in the realm of consciousness, quantum mechanics has failed to provide such hypotheses. A common objection from neuroscientists to the various quantum consciousness ideas that have been proposed is that quantum mechanics is not needed to explain anything related to how the brain functions, and that classical processes can fully explain its function.

This presentation will first discuss the quantum biology of ferritin, an iron storage protein that has been extensively studied and found to support electron tunneling and to have other bioelectric and biomagnetic properties that can only be explained using quantum mechanics. The consistent expression of those properties throughout plant and animal species has also manifested itself in the basal ganglia, a biological system that has been conserved in animals for over 500 million years. The presentation will then discuss evidence that supports the presence of a neural signaling mechanism in dopamine and norepinephrine neurons that uses electron tunneling associated with ferritin, and which can also explain why specific actions are selected and how diverse neural and sensory signals are integrated into a singular experience. Unlike well-known quantum consciousness ideas that have been rejected by numerous neuroscientists, this hypothesized signaling mechanism has predicted subsequent discoveries in neuroscience and provides explanations for biological functions.

Background reading:

• Rourk, Christopher. "The Bioelectric and Biomagnetic Properties of Ferritin." Bioelectricity (2025).
• Perez, Ismael Diez, et al. "Electron tunneling in ferritin and associated biosystems." IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications 9.2 (2023): 263-272.
• Rourk, Christopher John. "Ferritin and neuromelanin “quantum dot” array structures in dopamine neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta and norepinephrine neurons of the locus coeruleus." Biosystems 171 (2018): 48-58.

I make a sharp distinction between being conscious and the contents of consciousness, i.e., what you are conscious of. I use the phrase infrastructure of consciousness to mean that which provides the contents of consciousness. I propose that while being conscious requires certain brain activities that are disabled by anesthesia, the contents of consciousness involves subconscious activity coming from not only from the central nervous system but also from the peripheral nervous system. I will also present some incipient thoughts on the possible value of QBism and its extension (what I call Merminism) to the problem of understanding consciousness.

Cognition, essential to every living organism, links memory to the sensing of and acting on an organism’s environment. Two “preposterous” findings lead to a model of cognition.

1. All logical explanations of evidence are expressible by the same networks of elementary operations found in digital computers.
2. An obscure proof in quantum theory makes a place in science for unpredictable, imaginative acts beyond logic; human cognition depends on acts of imagination

These two findings lead to models of cognitive processes as logic networks subject to unpredictable changes that occur during their operation. The findings are “preposterous” only because of obsolete habits of thought outlined in Frank et al. The Blind Spot.

At Amazon, you can read the opening parts of The Blind Spot for free: Link to Amazon.