Abstract

His words effectively assert, within a scientific context, that the mental realities that comprise a person’s stream of conscious experiences can influence the state of that person’s physically described body. That claim neither follows naturally from, nor meshes rationally with, the basic physical theory that, in 1799, had prevailed in science for more than a century---since the 1687 publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia---and that would continue to prevail for an additional century, until its replacement during the twentieth century by quantum theory. It is this later theory that, according to the precepts of contemporary physics, must in principle be used to describe the dynamics of the ions and other microelements that underlies the brain processes associated with the mental realties. Unlike its predecessor, quantum mechanics was specifically designed to deal with the complex relationship between the empirical aspects of science represented in our sensory experiences and the physically described properties represented in our physical theories. This incorporation of the mental allows quantum theory to provide a rationally coherent understanding of influence mind upon body identified in the epigraph. The aim of this presentation is to describe this quantummechanical understanding to an audience of neurologists