Royal College of Psychiatrists: Philosophy SIG Winter Conference 2026 - The mind-body problem revisited: Could physics help? - 7th Dec 2026

Andy

Andy

Senior Member (Voting rights)
Overview

With so many questions remaining unanswered in the field of mental health, we need to return to the basics and fundamentals. Perhaps, the field of mental health is not a fully formed science. For example, before we identify a patient as having a delusion, we may need to ask basic and fundamental questions such as what is reality and how do we know it? Welcome to the field of metaphysics and epistemology.”

- Dr Temi Metseagharun, Chair RCPsych Philosophy SIG


What is reality? Could psychiatric phenomena, phenomenology and nosology be affected and/or reshaped by our understanding of physics? And for the physicist interested in psychiatric phenomena, could phenomena as described in psychopathology provide insights into the mysteries of quantum mechanics?

Could all reality be reduced to the study of physics and physical phenomena?

Is the mind basically the brain?

Has 21st Century AI not resolved the so-called mind-body problem? If so, could predictive processing/coding theories and computational psychiatry inform our understanding of psychosis, decision-making, criminal responsibility, and expert evidence in legal settings?

Just as fundamental particle physics is reflected in the glorious IT of today, why not in our understanding of the brain and its "biological information technology"? If it can, would genuine practical clinical utility come with understanding true psychopathology that is not merely undesirable states of mind, cultural constructs, and human values?

Or:

"...the term mental disorder unfortunately implies a distinction between 'mental' disorders and 'physical' disorders that is a reductionistic anachronism of mind/body dualism." (DSM-IV)

We have neuroscientists like Karl Friston to enlighten us at the conference.

Danko Georgiev may tell us a bit about The Emperor's New Mind, Maya and Tao of physics, or why such talk cannot lead anywhere.

The conference will include a panel discussion and debate to help clarify mental phenomena and the perception of "reality", and then relate them to physics, abnormal emotions and perceptions, and ultimately psychopathology.

Full details here
 
It sin't even philosophy, just bad physics. I have had long. email exchanges with Danko Giorgiev about non-existent quantum mysteries. Avshalom ELitzur is a throwback to the days of Penrose and quantum gravity. None of these people actually understand quantum physics. The blind leading the blind.
 
Andy said:
We have neuroscientists like Karl Friston to enlighten us at the conference.
Click to expand...

This might be a good place to drop a link to 'How to Leave the Free Energy Cult and Still Get Tenure' https://www.researchgate.net/public...ave_the_Free_Energy_Cult_and_Still_Get_Tenure

(the Free Energy Principle being the mathematical underpinning of Karl Friston's theory of predictive processing)

This manual is not a plea. It is a jailbreak from a cult—the Free Energy Principle, a theoretical metastasis that began in computational neuroscience and spread like Fristonial cancer into biology, psychology, AI, and consciousness studies. A document not to debate but to dismantle. For every graduate student who feigned understanding during a Friston talk, for every postdoc who added "active inference" to the abstract to pass review, for every PI who diagrammed a Markov blanket over a nervous system they knew it did not describe—this is your book of emancipation. The Free Energy Principle, like many pseudo-theories before it, survives not by clarifying the world but by colonizing the language with which we speak about it. When a theory can accommodate any data—when neurons that fire more or less both confirm your model—you do not have a theory, you have a religion.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
The sad thing is that there is a lot of interesting science to do in this area. Conscious experiences must be at the quantum level because they are real, rather than rough approximations, which all other physics is. Sound waves and earthquakes are at the quantum level and we don't need to invoke any spookiness for any of these things.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
The sad thing is that there is a lot of interesting science to do in this area. Conscious experiences must be at the quantum level because they are real, rather than rough approximations, which all other physics is.
Click to expand...
But surely other things are real, too? In the end everything is "quantum" in the sense that it involves matter but that does not mean that there is a useful quantum mechanical explanation of these things (e.g., for an earthquake).

Whether consciousness can be usefully explained with higher-level effects is surely an open question but at the moment invoking any quantum here just seems like total speculation?

And the direction that is hinted at in the text above, that psychiatric features can tell us something about quantum effects, is surely bogus.

I am not sure whether I understood your point, sorry if I misrepresented it.
 
fst said:
But surely other things are real, too? In the end everything is "quantum" in the sense that it involves matter but that does not mean that there is a useful quantum mechanical explanation of these things (e.g., for an earthquake).
Click to expand...

The question centres around real dynamic entities. Newton's physics assumed that everything was arbitrarily divisible and chunkable. That is no good for events of conscious experience because their chunking cannot be arbitrary, because it determines their nature from within. As Leibniz deduced, it is even pretty meaningless to suggest they are chunked. They are individual events that do not merge with similar events insomeone sitting next to you on the sofa. Even Giulio Tononi, the inventor of the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness gets this right in his axioms.

Quantum theory provides us with a basis for dynamic individuals, very much as Leibniz foresaw. There is a myth that these are always small but Feynmann points out how wrong that is in his first few chapters on QM. Dynamic individuals in quantum theory consist of action patterns that can be photons or seismic waves.

Seismic waves belong to an interesting form of dynamic unit that often has a pretty good classical descriptor as well as a quantum level descriptor. For seismic waves the difference in predictions is so small that it is of not interest. However, the difference between the classical and quantum level descriptions of phononic (notionally acoustic) modes in ice is crucial in explaining why snow crystals are so beautifully symmetrical, despite each one being unique in its hexagonal array.

Even that does not actually matter for understanding how conscious events might be quantised modes of action because the need for a quantum description is simply the need for an account of a dynamic individual. If the computational impact of that event in a brain can be covered with classical theory there is no contradiction or loss of the need for quantisation for individualisation. Interestingly, Andrew Huxley, who worked out the math of the events that i think are likely to be conscious, used Maxwellian theory, which already starts to address the issue of dyanmic individuals. And Huxley regarded the relevant events as mathematically indivisible - which is ultimately what makes them legitimate quantum level events.

fst said:
Whether consciousness can be usefully explained with higher-level effects is surely an open question but at the moment invoking any quantum here just seems like total speculation?
Click to expand...

I disagree. If higher level means a system with multiple events relating in sequence, which is the popular model, as tononni admits, it cannot work, because sequences of events cannot be individual events and therefore cannot be conscious experiences. You have an infinite sequential regress, as the philosopher James Blackmon neatly pointed out. If it just means a larger scale indivisible and therefore quantisable action pattern then we are back to quantum. It is not an open question. Leibniz explained precisely why it isn't 300 years ago.

And equally, looking for quantisable indivisible events is not speculative. It is the only thing that makes any sense. You cannot include two events in one event, especially if they relate by one being before the other (and nobody has proposed any other relation that could work). And if indivisible action patterns occur at all sizes, as we have known they do since Bohr and much more so since Yang, Mills, and Goldstone, why be shy about invoking them? Why are quantum events 'spooky' or otherwise suspect? The spookiness is simply an artefact of physicists' failure to appreciate the implications of indirect perception (again as Leibniz understood).
 
Utsikt said:
What’s indirect perception?
Click to expand...

The fact that what we see and hear is all inferred indirectly from differences in sensory inputs and passed from one lot of cells in the brain to other cells in a language of phenomena that are entirely brain generated. The idea that something that does not behave like 'matter' is spooky is a misunderstanding since 'the way matter behaves' is entirely a story in brainese designed for communication in brains. Something understood deeply by Montaigne in the sixteenth century, Galileo, probably Newton, Leibniz and popularised by Kant.

In simple terms the idea that it is odd for a particle to go through two slits is an artefact of not realising that 'particle' is an incoherent concept that our brains find useful much of the time but was understood not to make sense by at least some of the Athenian school.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
In simple terms the idea that it is odd for a particle to go through two slits is an artefact of not realising that 'particle' is an incoherent concept that our brains find useful much of the time but was understood not to make sense by at least some of the Athenian school.
Click to expand...
Thank you. So we kind of make simplified models of reality and feel like things shouldn’t be that way when reality doesn’t match the models we have almost forgotten were simplifications?
 
Utsikt said:
Thank you. So we kind of make simplified models of reality and feel like things shouldn’t be that way when reality doesn’t match the models we have almost forgotten were simplifications?
Click to expand...

It is not so much that they are simplifications, although that is in a sense true. Our brains paint objects in a language that cannot bear any direct relation to real events. We experience movement at a point in time and movement is defined as a change across time. So brains paint pictures using signs for concepts that cannot be part of pictures in the intuitive sense. William James discussed this at length. Quantum field theory tells us that nothing ever goes through a slit. There is just a different set of field values for each point in space and time. Everything collapses into something much simpler than billiard balls with no size.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
It is not so much that they are simplifications
Click to expand...
I was thinking of our models of physics, but that’s not tied to indirect perception so I got things mixed up. I really hope I get the opportunity to dig into this without the brainfog at some point, it’s so fascinating even though I feel like I barely understand any of it.

If it ever happens: What are some recommended things to read that wouldn’t send me on a wild goose chase of misconceptions?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom