Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Rediscovering the Mind 39pretations moved science toward the idealist as contrasted withthe realist conception of philosophy.The views of a large number of contemporary physicalscientists are summed up in the essay “Remarks on the Mind-BodyQuestion” written by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner. Wigner beginsby pointing out that most physical scientists have returned tothe recognition that thought – meaning the mind – is primary. Hegoes on to state: “It was not possible to formulate the laws ofquantum physics in a fully consistent way without reference tothe consciousness.” And he concludes by noting how remarkable itis that the scientific study of the world led to the content ofconsciousness as an ultimate reality.A further development in yet another field of physicsreinforces Wigner’s viewpoint. The introduction of informationtheory and its applications to thermodynamics has led to theconclusion that entropy, a basic concept of that science, is ameasure of the observer’s ignorance of the atomic details of thesystem. When we measure the pressure, volume, and temperature ofan object, we have a residual lack of knowledge of the exactposition and velocity of the component atoms and molecules. Thenumerical value of the amount of information we are missing isproportional to the entropy. In earlier thermodynamics, entropyhad represented, in an engineering sense, the energy of thesystem unavailable to perform external work. In the modern view,the human mind enters once again, and entropy relates not justto the state of the system but to our knowledge of that state.The founders of modern atomic theory did not start out toimpose a “mentalist” picture on the world. Rather, they beganwith the opposite point of view and were forced to the presentdayposition in order to explain experimental results.We are now in a position to integrate the perspectives ofthree large fields: psychology, biology and physics. Bycombining the positions of Sagan, Crick, and Wigner as spokesmenfor the various outlooks, we get a picture of the whole that isquite unexpected.First, the human mind, including consciousness andreflective thought, can be explained by activities of thecentral nervous system, which, in turn, can be reduced to thebiological structure and function of that physiological system.Second, biological phenomena at all levels, can be totallyunderstood in terms of atomic physics, that is, through theaction and interaction of the component atoms of carbon,nitrogen, oxygen, and so forth. Third, and last, atomic physics,which is now understood most fully by means of quantummechanics, must be formulated with the mind as a primitivecomponent of the system.We have thus, in separate