Physicist Ulrich Mohrhoff paper entitled "Radical Non-Locality": on the relevance of quantum mechanics for psychic phenomena

In a previous post, I criticized some "paranormalists" (i.e. people who research or write about paranormal matters) as pseudo-intellectuals. I argued that some of them reflect serious ignorance about philosophy and science, specially quantum mechanics, and that they tend to abuse QM to justify their idiosyncratic or personal metaphysical opinions about "consciousness", psychic phenomena, spirituality, UFOs or whatever.

In order to avoid misunderstandings of my previous post and just for the record, I want to be stress the following: I'm NOT suggesting that QM is irrelevant to all the above topics (in fact, as I argued in this post, some serious scholars see QM, in its standard interpretation, as relevant even for the topic of God's existence). My criticism is, rather, aimed at those paranormalists who pose just one interpretation of QM as the "only one" or "true one" (when actually there are several interpretations of QM and nobody knows which one is the correct one), and from there they pretend to settle complex philosophical matters like realism vs anti-realism, the origin of consciousness, the principle of causality and so forth.

Recently, physicist Ulrich Mohrhoff alerted me about his most recent paper dealing with QM and non-locality published in the Journal of NonLocality (you can download the paper here). Mohrhoff argues, against the beliefs of some paranormalists and spiritualists, that even though it is true that the discovery of radical nonlocality of the quantum world renders intelligible the possibility of paranormal correlations, it is not justified to infer that quantum mechanics is of any help in explaining how paranormal phenomena come about.

Some writers seem to hope that QM will provide the scientific explanation of consciousness and consciousness-related phenomena (e.g. psychic phenomena), but they have to reply to the challenge posed by thinkers like Mohrhoff. 

Moreover, there are other professional physicists who draws wholly different metaphysical consclusions from the same evidence of QM. For example, in my interview with physicist Marco Biagini, he said "Quantum physics tells us nothing about consciousness, and this fact tells us much about the nature of consciousness: it tells us that consciousness is not a physical process... The laws of quantum physics consist of a system of mathematical equations in abstract matematical spaces and therefore consciousness becomes a preliminary necessary condition for the existence of such laws; the intrinsic conceptual nature of the laws of physics is in my opinion the most direct rational argument supporting the existence of a conscious intelligent God, since a concept cannot exist independently from a conscious intelligent mind conceiving it."

Biagini's is posing a scientific argument for the immateriality of consciousness and the existence of God based on QM and the ontological nature of the laws of QM.

There are also other non-materialistic views of QM, as explained by philosopher Hans Halvorson:

 As you can see, the debate about the ontological implications of QM is far from being settled. Perhaps the paranormalists will turn out to be right, but they need to address competing explanations and views about QM.

Read my interview with Mohrhoff here.