  In the context of theories of the connection between mind and brain,
physicalism is the demand that all is basically purely physical. But the
concept of "physical" embodied in this demand is characterized essentially by
the properties of the physical that hold in classical physical theories.
Certain of these properties contradict the character of the physical in quantum
mechanics, which provides a better, more comprehensive, and more fundamental
account of phenomena. It is argued that the difficulties that have plaged
physicalists for half a century, and that continue to do so, dissolve when the
classical idea of the physical is replaced by its quantum successor. The
argument is concretized in a way that makes it accessible to non-physicists by
exploiting the recent evidence connecting our conscious experiences to
macroscopic measurable synchronous oscillations occurring in well-separated
parts of the brain. A specific new model of the mind-brain connection that is
fundamentally quantum mechanical but that ties conscious experiences to these
macroscopic synchronous oscillations is used to illustrate the essential
disparities between the classical and quantum notions of the physical, and in
particular to demonstrate the failure in the quantum world of the principle of
the causal closure of the physical, a failure that goes beyond what is entailed
by the randomness in the outcomes of observations, and that accommodates the
efficacy in the brain of conscious intent.
