Neuroscience, Atomic Physics, and the Human Person

This article is an integration of the contents of three talks and one text that I have prepared and delivered during the past year. They were aimed at four different audiences. The first talk was at a small conference in Philadelphia of scientists who are leading proponents of various diverse efforts to further develop and understand quantum theory. The second talk was at a public event in Switzerland where a number of scientists, and several artists, described to a general audience recent developments aimed at a better understanding of the nature of the human person. The third talk was at a conference in Tucson entitled “Quantum Approaches to the Understanding of Consciousness” and attended mainly by physicists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. The “text” was a section of a chapter of a book aimed at neuroscientists. Although the details of these four presentations were different, the essential content was the same: an explanation of the enormous difference in the scientific conception of the connection between mind and brain brought about by the replacement of the essentially seventeenthcentury classical physical theory of Newton, Galileo, and Descartes by the twentieth-century quantum physics of Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, and von Neumann.