The classical physical theories that prevailed in science from the time of Isaac Newton until the dawn of the twentieth century were empirically based on human experience and made predictions about our mental experiences, yet excluded from the dynamics all mental properties. But how can one rationally get mental things out if no mental elements are put in? The key step in the creation of quantum mechanics during 1925 by Heisenberg and his colleagues was to recognize and emphasize the essential dynamical role of mental properties in the creation of our mental empirical findings. This basic feature of quantum mechanics was cast into rigorous mathematical form by John von Neumann, and was made a central feature of contemporary relativistic quantum field theory by the work of Tomonaga and Schwinger. That theory is causally strictly forward in time. But it is explained here how it can nevertheless accommodate the seeming backward-in-time causal effects reported by D.J. Bem, and many others, by means of a slight biasing of the famous Born Rule. The purpose of this communication is to explain how those reported retrocausal findings can be explained by a strictly forward-in-time and nearly orthodox causal dynamics that, however, permits the Born Rule to be slightly biased under certain conditions. A feasible experiment is proposed that, if it gives the outcomes predicted by the proposed theory, will provide evidence in favor of this causally forward-in-time and nearly orthodox explanation of the reported retrocausal effects.
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Research Article|
May 31 2017
Retrocausation in quantum mechanics and the effects of minds on the creation of physical reality
Henry P. Stapp
Henry P. Stapp
a)
1Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory,
University of California
, Berkeley CA 94720, USA
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Corresponding author: [email protected]
AIP Conf. Proc. 1841, 040001 (2017)
Citation
Henry P. Stapp; Retrocausation in quantum mechanics and the effects of minds on the creation of physical reality. AIP Conf. Proc. 31 May 2017; 1841 (1): 040001. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4982777
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