Why Physics Should Care about the Mind, and How to Think about it Without Worrying about the Mind-Body Problem

Abstract

Abstract: Physics has a somewhat uneasy relationship to the mind. On the one hand, minds are part of the natural universe and although much of physics is concerned with the non-minded parts of reality, recently a set of problems has emerged in physics that has placed a special focus on observers. In quantum mechanics, the contrast between what the deterministic dynamics yields and what the observer sees is at the forefront of the theory’s difficulties. In the controversies surrounding time, questions about whether the relativistic image of time can account for the subjective experience of passage and flow have been central. In general, reconciling the manifest image of the world with the image presented by science requires at least some tacit understanding of how minds work. And because the evidence for our theories ultimately comes from experience, eventually we have to be able to bring the mind itself firmly under the scope of our physical theories. On the other hand, there is a set of philosophical controversies about the relationship between the mental and the physical that many people believe physics would do well to steer clear of. This chapter argues for a division between the aspects of the mind that physics must cope with and those that it can ignore. I argue the most difficult unresolved questions about the mind can be ignored without affecting progress in physics.