Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Most of the atoms in the world are either hydrogen or helium. Hydrogen, of course, is the simplest of atoms. One electron circling one proton.  The Ockham's razor of atoms.  Helium is what you get when a lot of hydrogen atoms are tightly compressed together in a star.  It is the consequence of the process of fusion in that context.  What about all the other elements? Most of them can be explained as themselves also the products of nuclear fusion in the stars, increasingly rare as they get heavier. But there are a few elements that scientists think require a more complicated explanation, and gold is one of these.  These problem elements are neutron heavy and they could only have come into existence in an environment that allows rapid neutron capture, known as "the r process." The usual theory has been, for decades now, that the r-process is created when neutron stars merge with each other, since a dense soup of neutrons, is the most plausible source for gold and ...

  Roger Penrose, a great astrophysicist, did some moonlighting in the worlds of neurology and neuropsychology in the late 1980s, and he developed a theory a quantum theory of consciousness. The idea behind it was (and is, in later more-developed forms) that microtubules, particularly those in neurons, are small enough so that quantum effects become pertinent in understanding their operations. Penrose contended that quantum physics allows for deterministic but non-algorithmic processes, and that these may be harnessed by the operations of the brain, resulting in consciousness. To put the idea crudely, using an old image, the microtubule is the closed box inside which a “cat” is both dead and alive. To refine that a bit: Penrose tells us that there must be a border zone where quantum effects still exist but are becoming of less salience as scales increase toward those of the world of Newtonian physics, the world of what Bertrand Russell once called "medium sized dry goods." The...