The ‘hard problem’ and the quantum physicists. Part 1: The first generation

All four of the most important figures in the early twentieth-century development of quantum physics—Niels Bohr, Erwin Schroedinger, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli—had strong interests in the traditional mind–brain, or ‘hard,’ problem. This paper reviews their approach to this problem, showing the influence of Bohr’s complementarity thesis, the significance of Schroedinger’s small book, ‘What is life?,’ the updated Platonism of Heisenberg and, perhaps most interesting of all, the interaction of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli in the latter’s search for a unification of mind and matter.