A call to clarify the debate on the links between quantum physics and consciousness

• What are the different possible, mutually incompatible, versions of such views;
• Which arguments are there to support some specific versions as opposed to other versions;
• How much support does each version have, among those physicists (or other scientists or philosophers) generally sympathetic to the overall idea that there is a fundamental link between quantum physics and consciousness.

The lack of such a clarification appears to have 2 effects:

• Among supporters, the confusion between the general philosophy and a particular version of it, results in restricting some people's thoughts and arguments into passive acceptance of a fixed version (or closed-minded automatic tries to defend it by the force of authority arguments), which passes as if it was a scientifically established fact with all its details. They adopt such attitudes just because they intuitively feel that minds are obviously not machines, so that any specific claim which the default rumor associates with this general idea must of course be true as well, since there is not supposed to be any alternative... when superficially referring to the seemingly authoritative voices on the topic.
  
• Among opponents, it perpetuates the apparent lack of scientific credibility of the overall philosophy, by its way of making it vulnerable to straw man arguments : as if pointing out a possible weakness in the technical details of a particular version of the idea, could suffice to dismiss it all.
  

As an example of the first effect, in this article, D. Hoffman wrote that "the accepted view is that aspects of neural dynamics—from quantum-gravity induced collapses of wavefunctions at microtubules (Hameroff, 1998) to informational properties of re-entrant thalamo-cortical loops (Tononi, 2004)—cause, or give rise to, or are identical to, consciousness". But even before putting forward that these "aspects of neural dynamics" are indeed generally accepted to be identical to consciousness, I think a first question should be whether or not the quantum-gravity induced collapses of wavefunctions at microtubules are already scientifically established to occur among "aspects of neural dynamics" in the first place; a question which D. Hoffman seems to have ignored. Meanwhile, the wikipedia article about "microtubule" does not even contain the word "quantum". I believe that a clarification on this point is needed.

As for the second effect, a usual argument pointed out by materialists, is that brain processes would be subject to fast quantum decoherence, so that any idea that fundamentally requires the brain to maintain a form of quantum coherence, looks dubious. But I do not feel concerned by such an argument because I consider the expression of free will in the brain (in a sense of a non-algorithmic behavior not deducible by current physics) to be naturally conceivable as taking place in simpler ways, with no need of quantum coherence.
I propose to distinguish between 3 main views according to their kinds of technical details, and which I also see as naturally matched with different ontologies (as part of a larger list of views including naturalistic ones - see also a more official classification of "idealist" views from the philosophical tradition):

I support the first option, and also found for example Casey Blood (also in this article) and Amit Goswami to be presenting essentially the same view. I only slightly mentioned the Penrose view (as I currently don't figure out how it is supposed to work) in remarks about spontaneous collapse.

Here are my arguments for idealism (or mind/mathematics dualism)

Philosophical argument

The famous "unreasonable efficiency of mathematics in physics" supports mathematical Platonism, but then also the mathematical existence, not just of our universe, but also of all alternative mathematically possible states of a universe as well. But if all mathematical possibilities coexist, then none of them can be meaningfully said more probable than another, thus destroying the sense of probability laws we find in physics. Thus we need a different kind of existence aside the mathematical one (a sense to qualify specific universe(s) as "real" unlike other mathematically existing ones).
This leads to reformulate the dualism/idealism debate in the following terms: can this other (non-mathematical) kind of existence, be a "material" kind separate from consciousness, or does it have to be reducible to conscious existence ? and then argue for the latter as follows:

• No sense can be found for qualifying some mathematically existing universes as more materially real than others if no consciousness is present;
• Consciousness does not need anything more than the mathematical form of a universe to perceive it (a material kind of existence would not help).

Arguments from physics

I find the ontological picture described above as wonderfully confirmed by the mathematical form of quantum physics.

I sketched some arguments for my option against Stapp's mind/matter dualism in the main page where I express my view (section "Perception and decoherence") and another page focusing on Stapp's view. I might keep working to develop the arguments, but first of all I wish to know whether any participant or any reference of a work, can be found in specific support to a different option as opposed to the rest of options, instead of satisfying oneself with general arguments against materialistic views which are usually held as the main focus of concern in books and public spaces.

Feedback from parapsychology

On the experimental side, this article by George Williams tried to match the candidate theories on mind-matter interaction with experimental data, which includes some observed deviations of quantum random generators away from Born's rule. There, he faced difficulty at finding a theory that seemed coherent with these data, by lack of having found any clear statement of the above first option as a candidate theory in usual references. What seemed to him, was that the Penrose model does not fit well, but that Bohm's theory of "implicate order", itself confused with his hidden variables interpretation, would be a better match.

Bad arguments I reject

Ideas as initiated by David Bohm, involving such concepts as "Holonomic brain theory", inspired some authors of Christian apologetic videos, to put forward the holographic principle of quantum gravity as an argument in favor of idealism. The idea of such a link between idealism and the holographic principle was strongly criticized in this blog article, but trying to explain to the authors of these videos, who did a lot of work searching for scientific references, that their argument by the holographic principle really has no weight, was not obvious. See my long reply to this article, which I wrote in a try to fix some very general misunderstandings around issues of scientific credibility in this debate.

In arguments against dualism, I do not consider the "interaction problem" as a real problem, but rather a mere lack of imagination on the possible relations between 2 things of a different nature. I support mind/mathematics dualism, which I do not consider as subject to any such problem (the "interaction" between mind and math is very assymmetrical)

Penrose's Panpsychism : a terrible position "in the middle"

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