The Scientiic Study of Consciousness from a Strict Quantum Philosophical Point of View 1

Descartes has confronted science with a hard problem: the mind-body or, in modern terms, the consciousness-matter problem. According to the current state of modern theoretical physics { which is, basically, quantum physics { the question arises if we really should expect to solve the problems of mind independently of the problems of matter. Strangely enough, modern philosophy of mind deals extensively with concepts like physicalism, naturalism, or materialism, although the meaning of these concepts is by no means clear! There is a huge conceptual gap between classical mechanism and modern quantum physicalism. Nevertheless, even today physicists are not able to completely solve the question regarding the nature of matter. Strictly speaking, matter does not belong to the fundamental concepts of quantum theory, but information or knowledge does! Thus, we should not say: consciousness must be reduced to physics since brains behave as (quantum) physical systems, but conversely: since quantum physics is primarily dealing with information , the information belonging to self-consciousness is involved in the same manner as the information "invested" into material objects. It is the purpose of this paper to take some steps in this direction of thinking which is mainly innuenced by the philosophy of C. F. von Weizs acker. Plato did not require a mind-matter dichotomy in the sense of Descartes' mechanism { perhaps 21. century science will not either.