Anyone who believes in a spiritual soul necessarily assumes that his soul is somehow involved in governing certain movements of his body. When I speak or write, I implicitly assume that I am controlling the movements of my lips, hands and eyes through the spiritual powers of my soul, i.e. my free will and intellect. In this sense, one would expect neural science to be open to the possibility of a spiritual soul governing the operations of the brain. The 10th International Interdisciplinary Seminar aims to investigate this issue. The method of the Seminar consists in using scientific evidence as the basis for any philosophical discussion, and accordingly the presentations will rely on scientific experiments and mathematical theorems.

In trying to explain how the soul operates, the Seminar combines traditional philosophical arguments with quantum physics. The notion that visible effects cannot be exclusively explained by visible causes was current in philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. This view was lost with the arrival of the classical mechanistic view of the world, because classical physics using deterministic mathematical laws succeeded in describing and predicting nature much better than Aristotelian physics. Now quantum physics seems to provide a framework in which both of these approaches can advantageously be taken into account. A quantum philosophical approach may contribute to explain the way the human soul operates.

The soul would be the principle responsible for the choices guiding certain movements of the body, but this happens in agreement with the principles of physics, without violating conservation laws regarding energy, momentum etc. When someone types on a keyboard, the energy of the movements originates from deterministic material processes. However every choice of typing a particular key (‘r’, ‘a’, ‘d’, ‘o’, etc.) originates from a free spiritual agency. This also holds for the choices taking place whenever we move spontaneously: hand , leg, and lip movements, head flexion and rotation, eye and breathing movements, even if they are often unconscious and even non-intentional, are will-guided movements, and can always be consciously directed when chosen. In contrast to these movements of the lips, tongue, eyes, fingers, etc., it is not possible to use “heart beats” to communicate messages: Movements like “heart beats” (autonomous movements) or reflexes in a human body are not necessarily linked to a spiritual soul.

This quantum philosophical view overcomes the dualistic view of the soul “as something mental, divorced from the tangible grey matter”. Identifying possible quantum events at the origin of differential behaviour (moving this way, instead of another way) may help for discerning where in neural science there is room for freedom. This will be a central issue of the Seminar. At what level in the brain does the choice determining whether someone moves his right or left hand take place? We know that this depends on the building up of different transient neuronal assemblies, but which processes are responsible for the difference? The neural assemblies (like the counts in different detectors in quantum experiments) are measurable. But the cause choosing between two rival neural assemblies, as the cause choosing between two rival detectors, may be unobservable. Quantum causes may very well operate as causes deciding between two different neural assemblies.

For the time being, an insurmountable difficulty in answering these questions by experimental means originates from the high inaccuracy of current measuring techniques: imaging techniques for instance are still too slow to capture the recruitment of ten million cells in less than a quarter of a second. Nonetheless it is worth discussing current evidence about the brain centres triggering spontaneous motility, and trying to explore possible roads leading to experiments that may demonstrate the quantum behaviour of the brain. Notice that anyone who accepts freedom must necessarily reject any explanation of the brain that uses only deterministic causality, be it in terms of genes, chemicals or environmental influences. Anyone believing that as a person he can escape genetic programming and “chose how to live his life” should – to be consistent – exclude any explanation of the brain that includes only observable causal chains. Even if for the time being quantum mechanics is not being used in neuroscience, one may be confident that quantum effects will appear when the measuring techniques progress.

The impossibility of uninterrupted consciousness seems to be a fundamental limitation defining the human condition: The human mind cannot be continuously conscious (i.e. aware of his own existence), the human will cannot act on purpose all the time. Our brain is a device combining both meaningless spontaneous behavior and purposefully ordered one. According to the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield (University of Oxford): (1) “Emotion is the most basic form of consciousness”, and (2) “Minds develop as brains do”, “a sufficient condition for consciousness is a large net size of transient assembly of neurons.” In that case, how is this “net size” defined? When does the brain’s development reach the stage at which conscious knowledge and action is possible?

In mathematics the theorems of Gödel and Turing, and the axiom of choice stress that the way the human mind functions cannot be explained in algorithmic deterministic terms. Creativity is an essential ingredient of human knowledge. Which neural and cognitive processes correlate with mathematical understanding? How is it possible that mortal brains produce immortal achievements such as masterpieces of literature, science, music?

As in the previous Seminar, the ethical implementation of the quantum philosophical analysis will be continued: What does it imply for the moral status of patients in irreversible vegetative state, anencephalic children, and brain-dead organisms? Certain genomic insufficiencies may prevent embryos reaching the stage of foetal motility. Do such insufficiencies exclude their moral status?