Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 40 of 138
Three ways of making mental substance fit the world
It is not easy to make the idea that the mind is a separate substance consistent with the rest of what we know about the world. Here are three ways of trying to do it, each with a different conception of the mind. First, divine intervention. Physical science is incomplete. Our souls are something in addition to the rest of the world. They are created by divine intervention and are not part of the physical world as described by science. Second, quantum mechanics. The traditional mind-body problem arises only because of an obsolete Newtonian conception of the physical. On one interpretation of quantum measurement, consciousness is required to complete the collapse of the wave function and thus create quantum particles and events. So some form of consciousness is not created by the rest of nature, rather it is essential for the creation of nature in the first place. It is a primitive part of nature required to explain brain processes and everything else.4 Third, idealism. The universe is entirely mental. What we think of as the physical world is just one of the forms that the underlying mental reality takes.