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of reality, just as mass and electric charge, as well as space and time, are nonreductive primitives in theories of the physical world. Taking consciousness as a primitive rather than as an emergent property of the physical brain, Chalmers’s search for a nonreductive ontology of consciousness led him to what he calls panprotopsychism. The proto reflects the possibility that the intrinsic properties of the basic entities of the physical world may be not quite mental, but that collectively they are able to constitute the mental (it is in this sense of proto that physics is “protochemical”). In this view, mind is much more fundamental to the universe than we ordinarily imagine. Panprotopsychism has the virtue of integrating mental events into the physical world. “We need psychophysical laws connecting physical processes to subjective experience,” Chalmers says. “Certain aspects of quantum mechanics lend themselves very nicely to this.”
    In particular, if consciousness is an ontological fundamental—that is, a primary element of reality—then it may have the power to achieve what is both the best-documented and at the same time the spookiest effect of the mind on the material world: the ability of consciousness to transform the infinite possibilities for, say, the position of a subatomic particle as described by quantum mechanics into the single reality for that position as detected by an observer. If that sounds both mysterious and spooky, it is a spookiness that has been a part of science since almost the beginning ofthe twentieth century. It was physics that first felt the breath of this ghost, with the discoveries of quantum mechanics, and it is in the field of neuroscience and the problem of mind and matter that its ethereal presence is felt most markedly today. “Quantum theory casts the problem of the connection between our conscious thoughts and the activities of our brains in a completely new light,” argues my physicist friend Henry Stapp. “The replacement of the ideas of classical physics by the ideas of quantum physics completely changes the complexion of the mind-brain dichotomy, of the connection between mind and brain.”
    As the millennium turned, a smattering of neuroscientists finally began to accept that consciousness and the mind (as opposed to mere brain) are legitimate areas of scientific inquiry. This is not to say that the puzzle of how mind is interconnected with brain is anywhere close to solution, but at least researchers are letting it into the lab, and that is a signal change from the recent past. “When I first got interested in [the problem of consciousness] seriously and tried to discuss it with brain scientists,” recalled John Searle in 2000, “I found that most of them were not interested in the question…. Consciousness seems too airy-fairy and touchy-feely to be a real scientific subject.” Yet today neuroscientists flock to conferences with consciousness in their names, write books with consciousness in their titles, and contribute to a journal that boldly proclaims itself the Journal of Consciousness Studies . Two Nobel laureates have moved on from the work that won them an invitation to Stockholm, to pursue the puzzle of consciousness: Francis Crick, who with James Watson shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for determining the structure of DNA, mused in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis that the seat of volition might be found in a deep crevasse in the cortex called the anterior cingulate sulcus; Gerald Edelman, who shared the 1972 Nobel for working out the molecular structure of antibodies, argued that consciousness arises from the resonating interplay of assemblies of neurons. More andmore scholars are concluding that our deep inner sense of a mental life not fully encompassed by the electrochemical interactions of neuronal circuits is not delusional. As the German neuroscientist Wolf Singer puts it, these elements of consciousness “transcend the