Remarks on the Mind-Body Question. E. P. Wigner 98:284 (1961) in 🕮The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly-Baked Ideas. I. J. Good. Basic Books, 1962. [ISBN: 978-0465074549]. What the paper says!?
This is the essay by E. Wigner which will eventually inspire the Wigner friends, although here, Wigner deems the superposition (or Wigner bubble) to be impossible.
Quotes of interest:
it seems worth while to summarise the views to which a dispassionate contemplation of the most obvious
facts leads.
Until not many years ago, the ‘existence’ of a mind or soul
would have been passionately denied by most physical scientists.
it was nearly universally accepted among physical scientists that
there is nothing besides matter.
There are several reasons for the return, on the part of most physical scientists, to the spirit of Descartes’s ‘Cogito ergo sum’
which recognises the thought, that is the mind, as primary.
All that quantum mechanics purports to provide are probability
connexions between subsequent impressions of the consciousness
the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality
the question concerning the existence of almost anything (even the
whole external world) is not a very relevant question.
our
knowledge of the external world is the content of our consciousness and that the consciousness, therefore, cannot be denied. On the contrary, logically, the external world could be denied - though it is not very practical to do so.
one may well wonder how materialism, the doctrine8 that ‘life could be explained by sophisticated combinations of physical and chemical laws’ could so long be
accepted by the majority of scientists.
we learned that the principal problem is no longer the fight with the adversities of nature but the difficulty of understanding ourselves if we want
to survive.
Let us first specify the question which is outside the province of physics and chemistry but is an obviously meaningful (because operationally defined) question: Given the most complete description of my body (admitting that the concepts used in this description change as physics develops), what are my sensations ? Or, perhaps, with what probability will I have one of the several possible sensations ? This is clearly a valid and important question which refers to a concept — sensations which does not exist in present-day physics or chemistry. Whether the question will eventually become a problem of physics or psychology, or another science, will depend on the development of these disciplines. [...] The sensations will be simple and un¬ differentiated if the physico-chemical substrate is simple; it will have the miraculous variety and colour which the poets try to describe if the substrate is as complex and well organised as a
human body.
to deny the existence of the consciousness of a friend to this extent is surely an unnatural attitude, approaching solipsism,
and few people, in their hearts, will go along with it.
very little is gained for science as we understand science
how could the two theses be verified experimentally ? i.e. how a body of phenomena could be built around them. It seems that there is no solid guide to help in answering this question and one either has to admit to full ignorance or to
engage in speculations.
consciousnesses never seem to interact with each other directly but only via the physical world. Hence, any knowledge about the consciousness of another being must be mediated
by the physical world.
there are only two avenues through which experimentation can proceed to obtain information about our first thesis: observation of infants where we may be able to sense
the progress of the awakening of consciousness,
The second is:
discovering phenomena postulated by the second thesis, in which the
consciousness modifies the usual laws of physics
or, as stated in a footnote by the editor: «The challenge is to construct the ‘psycho-electric cell’, to coin a term.» The second thesis is that the mind can influence the body (or the material word in general).
The conclusion:
The present writer is well aware of the fact that he is not the first one to discuss the questions which form the subject of this article and that the surmises of his predecessors were either found to be wrong or unprovable, hence, in the long run, uninteresting. He would not be greatly surprised if the present article shared the fate of those of his predecessors. He feels, however, that many of the earlier speculations on the subject, even if they could not be justified, have stimulated and helped our thinking and emotions and have contributed to re-emphasise the ultimate scientific interest in the question which is, perhaps, the most
fundamental question of all.