Kauffman’s Mind Mediating Possibles to Actuals

Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman posits the following: (i) Quantum measurement converts Res potentia—ontologically real Possibles—into Res extensa - ontologically real Actuals. (ii) Brain/mind/consciousness cannot be purely classical physics because no classical system can be an analog computer whose dynamic behavior can be isomorphic to “possible uses”, and therefore, brain/mind/consciousness must be partly quantum. (iii) Res potentia and Res extensa suggest a role for mind/consciousness in collapsing the wave function converting Possibles to Actuals, because no physical cause can convert a Possible into an Actual. (iv) Our brain/mind/consciousness entangles with the world in a vast superposition and we collapse the wave function to a single state which we experience as qualia, allowing “seeing” or “perceiving” of X to accomplish Y (Kauffman, 2019, 2023; Kauffman & Roli, 2022).^[1]

As Kauffman and parapsychologist Dean Radin put it, “We propose a non-substance dualism theory, following a suggestion by Heisenberg (1958), whereby the world consists of both ontologically real Possibles that do not obey Aristotle's law of the excluded middle, and ontologically real Actuals, that do obey the law of the excluded middle.” Measurement, they say, is what converts Possibles into Actuals” (Kauffman & Radin, 2020).

The “culprit” at the root of the mind-body problem, according to Kauffman and Radin, is the causal closure of classical physics. “We ask mind to act causally on the brain and body, but in classical physics all of the causes are already determined.” Because of this, they conclude, no form of substance dualism can work while quantum mechanics as the foundational mechanism of consciousness should be taken seriously—which, they say, would lead to “the intriguing possibility that some aspects of mind are nonlocal, and that mind plays an active role in the physical world” (Kauffman & Radin, 2020). (See “Materialism.”)

Footnote

[1]. Kauffman says this new way of thinking about the mind-body problem differs from those of Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley, and materialism. Res potentia and Res extensa are not substance dualism because “potentia” are not substances. But Res potentia and Res extensa are not Spinozian monism, a single substance with mental and physical properties. Nor are they Idealism, which has no Res extensa. Nor are they materialism, which has no Res potentia. Kauffman says he bases his way of thinking, in part, on Werner Heisenberg's ontological interpretation of the quantum state as “potentia.”