Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

by Brian Greene

You can see the appeal. Quantum mechanics is mysterious. Consciousness is mysterious. How fun to imagine that their mysteries are related, or are the same mystery, or that each mystery resolves that of the other. But in my decades of immersion in quantum physics, I have not encountered a mathematical argument or experimental data that have shifted my long-held assessment of the purported link: extraordinarily unlikely. Our experiments and observations support the view that when a quantum system is prodded—whether the prodder is a conscious being or a mindless probe—the system snaps out of the probabilistic quantum haze and assumes a definite reality. Interactions—not consciousness—coax the emergence of a definite reality. Of course, to verify this, or anything else for that matter, I need to bring my consciousness to bear; I can’t be aware of a result without my conscious mind participating in the process. So there is no foolproof argument that consciousness does not play a special quantum role. Still, even in the most refined approaches, which have gone well beyond a superficial identification of two apparently distinct mysteries, the proposed quantum-consciousness connections are tenuous.