Title: Is Consciousness Related to Quantum Physics?
Headings: Can Quantum Physics Be Used to Explain the Existence of Consciousness?
Can Quantum Physics Be Used to Explain the Existence of Consciousness?
The answer involves determinism: the theory that humans have free will
Consciousness and Quantum Physics
The Implicate Order
The Human Brain
Quantum Indeterminacy
The Double-Slit Experiment

Content: our editorial process
Andrew Zimmerman Jones
Updated June 11, 2019
Trying to explain where subjective experiences come from would seem to have little to do with physics. Some scientists, however, have speculated that perhaps the deepest levels of theoretical physics contain the insights needed to illuminate this question by suggesting that quantum physics can be used to explain the very existence of consciousness. Consciousness and Quantum Physics
One of the first ways that consciousness and quantum physics come together is through the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. In this theory, the quantum wave function collapses due to a conscious observer making a measurement of a physical system. This is the interpretation of quantum physics that sparked the Schroedinger's cat thought experiment, demonstrating some level of the absurdity of this way of thinking, except that it does completely match the evidence of what scientists observe at the quantum level. One extreme version of the Copenhagen interpretation was proposed by John Archibald Wheeler and is called the participatory anthropic principle, which says that the entire universe collapsed into the state we see specifically because there had to be conscious observers present to cause the collapse. Any possible universes that do not contain conscious observers is automatically ruled out. The Implicate Order
Physicist David Bohm argued that since both quantum physics and relativity were incomplete theories, they must point at a deeper theory. He believed that this theory would be a quantum field theory that represented an undivided wholeness in the universe. He used the term "implicate order" to express what he thought this fundamental level of reality must be like, and believed that what we are seeing are broken reflections of that fundamentally ordered reality.