This paper explores the flaws underlying Engel's biopsychosocial paradigm of psychiatric illness and offers a quantum-neurodynamical alternative that addresses these defects. It is argued that the current conceptual foundations of biopsychosocial psychiatry, insofar as they rest upon analogies between neural network theory and classical statistical mechanics, are plagued by tensions and inconsistencies among notions of causation, physical scale, and objectivity. The recent rise of a potentially more adequate post-classical paradigm, grounding cognitive neuroscience in quantum principles, is described. The possibility is advanced that this developing quantum perspective on mind and brain can transform psychiatry's understanding of mental disorders through an explanatory adequacy and a theoretical coherence superior to Engel's classically limited ideas.
Pothos & Busemeyer (P&B) argue convincingly that quantum probability offers an improvement over classical Bayesian probability in modeling the empirical data of cognitive science. However, a weakness related to restrictions on the dimensionality of incompatible physical observables flows from the authors' "agnosticism" regarding quantum processes in neural substrates underlying cognition. Addressing this problem will require either future research findings validating quantum neurophysics or theoretical expansion of the uncertainty principle as a new, neurocognitively contextualized, "local" symmetry.
Energy harvesting by photosynthesis in "brainless" plants and green algae is identified as the root non-trivially quantum process powering neural correlates of consciousness in humans and other "brainy" animals. Thermofield attributes of solar energy flow through the biosphere's food chain are suggested as a "bottom up" mediator between quantum-coherent aspects of photosynthesis and emergent dynamical architectonics of transmembrane electrical potentials in neurons. This quantum-ecological approach to energetics of brain function as part of an open dissipative world system offers a segue, experimentally grounded by empirical evidence for photosynthetic coherence, into qualitatively gauged links between quantum tunneling and the Hard Problem of consciousness. (Globus, 2003;Hagan et al., 2002;Hameroff and Penrose, 1996; Jibu and Yasue, 1995;Penrose, 1989;Penrose, 1994;Umezawa, 1993;Vitiello, 2001) that experiments will someday prove the existence of functionally nontrivial in vivo Bose Einstein coherent processes firmly linked to the sentient brain (Palermo Declaration, 2013;Tarlaci and Pregnolato, 2015). However, so far no unequivocal demonstration has been forthcoming Corresponding author: Donald Mender Address: Lecturer in Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, USA. e-mail onald.mender@yale.edu Relevant conflicts of interest/financial disclosures: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Received: September 27, 2015; Accepted: November 1, 2015 (Mender, 2013a;. In this regard quantum olfaction, quantum avian compasses, quantum genetic coding, quantum enzyme folding, sustainably orchestrated quantum tubulin superpositions, and ordered water to date all remain merely theoretically tantalizing proposals with at best debatable and in many cases no experimental support. At present one must consider the real possibility that experiments may never (Mender, 2013a;Tegmark, 2000) generate the kind of ironclad examples of overt quantum neurodynamical coherence imagined as a future vindication of existing quantum brain theories.However, there is currently available one functionally significant example of nontrivial quantum coherence that is experimentally on fairly firm ground in what seems at first glance to be a systematically non-neural domain of biology, i.e. photon energy harvesting by the photosynthetic Z-process (Engel et al., 2007) in
Orch OR is reviewed with critical attention to the theory's epistemological claims. A modification of the Penrose-Hameroff hypothesis entailing state vector reduction by an eccentrically subjective agency is proposed. Empirically falsifiable implications of the revised model are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.