Paul Davies

“As a physicist, I am used to thinking of matter as passive, inert and clodlike, responding only when coerced by external forces -- as when the dead bird plunges to the ground under the tug of gravity. But living creatures literally have a life of their own. It is as if they contain some inner spark that gives them autonomy, so that they can (within limits) do as they please. Even bacteria do their own thing in a restricted way. Does this inner freedom, this spontaneity, imply that life defies the laws of physics, or do organisms merely harness those laws for their own ends? If so, how? And where do such "ends" come from in a world apparently ruled by blind and purposeless forces?”
― Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle

“More radically, how can we be sure that the source of consciousness lies within our bodies at all? You might think that because a blow to the head renders one unconscious, the ‘seat of consciousness’ must lie within the skull. But there is no logical reason to conclude that. An enraged blow to my TV set during an unsettling news programme may render the screen blank, but that doesn’t mean the news reader is situated inside the television. A television is just a receiver: the real action is miles away in a studio. Could the brain be merely a receiver of ‘consciousness signals’ created somewhere else? In Antarctica, perhaps? (This isn’t a serious suggestion – I’m just trying to make a point.) In fact, the notion that somebody or something ‘out there’ may ‘put thoughts in our heads’ is a pervasive one; Descartes himself raised this possibility by envisaging a mischievous demon messing with our minds. Today, many people believe in telepathy. So the basic idea that minds are delocalized is actually not so far-fetched. In fact, some distinguished scientists have flirted with the idea that not all that pops up in our minds originates in our heads. A popular, if rather mystical, idea is that flashes of mathematical inspiration can occur by the mathematician’s mind somehow ‘breaking through’ into a Platonic realm of mathematical forms and relationships that not only lies beyond the brain but beyond space and time altogether. The cosmologist Fred Hoyle once entertained an even bolder hypothesis: that quantum effects in the brain leave open the possibility of external input into our thought processes and thus guide us towards useful scientific concepts. He proposed that this ‘external guide’ might be a superintelligence in the far cosmic future using a subtle but well-known backwards-in-time property of quantum mechanics in order to steer scientific progress.”
― Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life