The Transparent Becoming of World: A crossing between process philosophy and quantum neurophilosophy (Advances in Consciousness Research)

The Transparent Becoming of World

Advances in Consciousness Research (AiCR) Provides a forum for scholars from different scientific disciplines and fields of knowledge who study consciousness in its multifaceted aspects. Thus the Series includes (but is not limited to) the various areas of cognitive science, including cognitive psychology, brain science, philosophy and linguistics. The orientation of the series is toward developing new interdisciplinary and integrative approaches for the investigation, description and theory of consciousness, as well as the practical consequences of this research for the individual in society. From 1999 the Series consists of two subseries that cover the most important types of contributions to consciousness studies: Series A: Theory and Method. Contributions to the development of theory and method in the study of consciousness; Series B: Research in Progress. Experimental, descriptive and clinical research in consciousness. This book is a contribution to Series A.

Editor Maxim I. Stamenov

Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Editorial Board David J. Chalmers

Australian National University

Gordon G. Globus

University of California Irvine

Christof Koch

California Institute of Technology

Stephen M. Kosslyn Harvard University

Stephen L. Macknik

George Mandler

University of California at San Diego

Susana Martinez-Conde

Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, AZ, USA

John R. Searle

University of California at Berkeley

Petra Stoerig

Universität Düsseldorf

Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, AZ, USA

Volume 77 The Transparent Becoming of World. A crossing between process philosophy and quantum neurophilosophy by Gordon G. Globus

The Transparent Becoming of World A crossing between process philosophy and quantum neurophilosophy

Gordon G. Globus University of California Irvine

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Globus, Gordon G., 1934The transparent becoming of world : a crossing between process philosophy and quantum neurophilosophy / by Gordon G. Globus. p. cm. (Advances in Consciousness Research, issn 1381-589X ; v. 77) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Mind and reality. 2. Process philosophy. 3. Quantum field theory. 4. Neuropsychology-Philosophy. I. Title. BD331.G548   2009 146’.7--dc22 2009035061 isbn 978 90 272 5213 5 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8872 1 (Eb)

© 2009 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

For Be-zu

Table of contents Acknowledgements Quotations chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 World thrownness  1 1.2 Process philosophy  2 1.3 Quantum neurophilosophy  4 1.4 Methods  7 1.5 Strategy of presentation  8 chapter 2 Faith in world: A deconstruction 2.1 Introduction  11 2.2 The quotidian faith of direct realism  12 2.2.1 Direct perception as information pick-up  12 2.2.2 Direct perception as knowing  15 2.2.3 Qualia  17 2.2.4 The dreams of a robot  19 2.2.5 Radical externalism  21 2.2.6 Overview  24 2.3 Indirect perception of reality  25 2.3.1 Introduction  25 2.3.2 Damasio on indirect realism  26 2.3.3 Indirect realism and perceptual “illusions”  27 2.3.4 Metzinger’s indirect scientific realism  28 2.3.5 Virtual realities (VRs)  29 2.3.6 Structural realism  32 2.3.7 Pragmatism  33 2.3.8 Indirect realism as neutral monism  34 2.3.9 A gestalt version of indirect realism  38 2.3.10 Overview  40

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2.4 Absolute idealism  41 2.4.1 Borges’ solipsistic idealism  41 2.4.2 Berkeley’s God-dependent idealism  43 2.5 Overview  47 chapter 3 Process philosophies 3.1 Introduction  49 3.2 Bohm’s holonomic dynamics  50 3.2.1 The law of overall necessity  52 3.2.2 Soma-significance  53 3.2.3 Active information  55 3.2.4 Bohm’s theory of consciousness  57 3.2.5 Discussion of Bohmian theory  58 3.3 Whitehead’s philosophy of process  58 3.3.1 Introduction  58 3.3.2 Creative advance and novel concrescence  60 3.3.3 Actual events  61 3.3.4 Time  62 3.3.5 Eternal objects  62 3.3.6 God for Whitehead  63 3.3.7 Whitehead and world  66 3.4 Heidegger’s process philosophy  67 3.4.1 Preliminaries  67 3.4.2 Sein, Da-sein, the Dasein  69 3.4.3 Zeit  70 3.4.4 In-der-Welt-sein  72 3.4.5. Seyn, Wesen  75 3.4.6 Abgrund and Zeit-Raum  76 3.4.7 Das Ereignis  77 3.4.8 Das Zwischen  78 3.5 Process and world in Whitehead, Heidegger and Bohm  80 chapter 4 Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 4.1 Marching to a different drummer  83 4.2 Stapp’s Copenhagen re-interpretation  85 4.3 Stapp as process theorist  90 4.4 The Penrose-Hameroff hypothesis  92 4.4.1 Objective reduction (OR)  92

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Table of contents 

4.4.2 4.4.3 4.4.4 4.4.5

Qualia  93 Objective reduction is orchestrated (Orch-OR)  94 Consciousness  94 The brain’s orchestration of objective reduction  95 4.5 Penrose-Hameroff v. Stapp  96 4.6 Thermofield brain dynamics  98 4.6.1 Symmetry and the water dipole field  98 4.6.2 Symmetry-breaking and memory  101 4.6.3 Consciousness  103 4.6.4 Symmetry-breaking and macroscopic order  104 4.6.5 The brain’s “connectivity”  105 4.6.6 Dissipative systems  106 4.6.7 Empirical support for dissipative quantum brain dynamics  109 4.6.8 Dissipation and consciousness  109 4.6.9 Consciousness as “intentional”  112 4.7 Review  115 chapter 5 The between-two 5.1 Introduction  119 5.2 The Tao symbol and the between-two  120 5.3 Some previous approaches to the between-two  122 5.4 Thermofield theory of traces and recognition traces  125 5.5 Macroscopic quantum objects  127 5.6 Structural realism and the measurement problem  130 5.7 The explicate order as between-two  131 5.8 Qualities of world  133 5.9 The problem of consciousness  135

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chapter 6 Epilogue: Of monads and tilded spirits

149

Abbreviations

155

References

157

Name index

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Subject index

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Acknowledgements The quantum physics in what follows relies heavily on the work of Mari Jibu, Hiroomi Umezawa, Giuseppe Vitiello and Kunio Yasue, who are of course not responsible for any of my misunderstandings. At times of uncertainty I relied on Kunio’s sage advice to “always trust Umezawa.” Many email exchanges with Donald Mender sharpened the development of the ideas. I thank Maxim Stamenov for specific suggestions.

Quotations In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious. Alfred North Whitehead But what is most essential is first of all to have traversed the whole path once, so as, for one thing, to learn to wonder scientifically about the mystery of things and, for another, to banish all illusions, which settle down and nest with particular stubbornness precisely in philosophy. Martin Heidegger And yes, nobody ever said that a fundamental expansion of knowledge about ourselves necessarily has to be intuitively plausible. Thomas Metzinger In this view, the finite, with its transient nature, can only be understood as held suspended, as it were, beyond time and space, within the infinite. David Bohm “For instance, our rings of power, yours and mine, are hooked right now to the doing in this room. We are making this room. Our rings of power are spinning this room into being at this very moment.” “Wait, wait,” I said. “This room is here by itself. I am not creating it. I have nothing to do with it.” Carlos Castaneda Other Buddhist texts say that the world is annihilated and resurges six billion five hundred million times a day and that every man is an illusion, vertiginously wrought by a series of solitary and momentary men. Jorge Luis Borges

chapter 1

Introduction 1.1 World thrownness We are all pragmatists in our quotidian lives, taking purposive actions in one or another world. Even during our withdrawal into sleep, we still make our way aperiodically through a seemingly transcendent world, bizarre or foggy though that dream world may be. Even in the wierdness of quantum physics there remains the familiar world of measurement apparati, whose pointer readings are recorded innocently by the experimental physicist. This immediacy of the world as unreflectively experienced depends on a “transparent” brain process. The talkative brain is completely silent about its own operations. We have absolutely no awareness that brain processes are involved in perception — that fact is an empirical discovery1 — but “see through” brain processes to the world in which we skillfully operate. The brain’s transparency reminds of Berkeley’s God, ... this pure and clear light which enlightens everyone, is itself invisible. (PHK, p. 90)

Physicalism is blind to the light and disregards the brain’s transparency. Heidegger’s “thrownness” (BP, BT) covers much the same territory as transparency but in a far more dynamical way. World-thrownness is a process in which we always find ourselves already amidst some world or other, a world that “affords” our actions.2 There is no palpable ground of world-thrownness, only an ever-withdrawing and so concealed dynamics that transparently gifts it. Heidegger accused both naturalistic science and common sense of “forgetting Being” (Seinsvergessen), of making use of the world that appears in everyday praxis, science and technology, but never thematizing it. This is a mistake that philosophers in the historical mainstream of process philosophy would not make. The present book remembers Being — the presencing world — within the broad 1.

Recall that Aristotle thought the brain functioned to cool the blood.

2. Gibson’s (1979) “affordances” are akin to Heidegger’s Zuhanden, though their frameworks differ greatly. Gibson was a psychophysicist whose focus was on information at the sensory receptors rather than on situatedness.

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The Transparent Becoming of World

tradition of process thought but brings in a new conception of the transparency involved in the disclosure of Being. This conception is derived from the theory of quantum thermofield brain dynamics, which is an extension of quantum field theory that adds a thermodynamical degree of freedom and so applies to open “dissipative” systems like the living brain (Freeman and Vitiello 2006, 2008; Jibu and Yasue 1995, 2004; Umezawa 1993; Vitiello 1995, 2001, 2004). The present endeavor is to give transparent worldthrownness a quantum neurophilosophical interpretation coherent with process philosophy. 1.2 Process philosophy Rescher (1996, 2000) points out the rich provenance of “process philosophy,” which includes Heraclitus, Leibniz, Hegel, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Peirce, James, and of course Alfred North Whitehead. The process tradition at first conceived change in the form of the Heraclitean fire, but this was long antedated in the east. (Cf. Shiva’s dance.) Despite this history, “process philosophy at present remains no more than a glint in the mind’s eye of certain philosophers” (Rescher 2000 18). Whitehead called his most ambitious work Process and Reality, hence the name “process philosophy.” This was the Gifford lectures (PR) delivered at the University of Edinburgh during the academic year 1927–28. Process philosophy emphasizes change — not the change of a dollar into four quarters to feed the parking meter but dynamics. The idea of “substance” is critiqued by process philosophy, substance that would be divisible ultimately into unchanging Parmenidean units (quarters into nickels into pennies, and no further). Process philosophy offers an emphasis on action over substance, of becoming over Being. Process never simplifies but has a recursive structure of nested processes. (Leibniz already discerned this nesting in his theory of “monads.”) Possibility has ontological primacy in process philosophy. Things are products unfolded in the dynamics. The inherent futurition of process is an exfoliation of the real by successively actualizing possibilities that are subsequently left behind as the process unfolds. (Rescher 2000, p.22)

This makes the physicist David Bohm a process philosopher. Bohm’s term for “exfoliation” is “explication” or “unfolding,” the “possibilities” are for Bohm an “implicate order,” and the unfolded actualities “subsequently left behind” are in Bohm’s theory re-implicated enfoldments. Bohm (1986) was aware of the connection with Whitehead but did not much develop it.



Chapter 1.  Introduction

The present book offers a discussion of brain workings that has not been elaborated in today’s process philosophy. The brain theory to be discussed here might not seem very relevant to the process tradition.3 However, the brain as conceived today is dynamical, the most versatile of nonlinear dynamical dissipative systems, which might attract the curiosity of processualists. There is perhaps a deeper reason than professional predilection for such disregard of dynamical brain functioning by process philosophy. It is orthodoxy among brain scientists that the brain is a kind of wet computer. The silicon “substance” bottoms out with atomic “bits” of information — 0s and 1s — and so brain computation is imbued with a thoroughly substance metaphysics that is incompatible with process philosophy. Even with the revolutionary application of quantum theory to the brain, it is still thought that the brain computes, however with “qubits” that are superpositions (interpenetrations, mutual enfoldings) of bits. If the brain were a wet quantum computer, this still would not serve to pique the interest of process philosophers. It will be argued here that the brain is, at its deepest reaches, not brutely computational. This meshes with process thought. In place of computation on order, a plenum of implicate symmetry is proposed, with symmetry-breaking as trace (memory), and differentiation of the plenum into explicate concretions. It is noteworthy that despite disinterest in quantum brain theory, process philosophy is very sympathetic to quantum physics in general. Rescher (2000) comments,4 It was, in a way, unfortunate for the founding fathers of process philosophy that they did not witness the rise of quantum theory ... . The demise of classical atomism brought on by the dematerialization of physical matter brings much aid and comfort to a process-oriented metaphysics. (p. 12)

Quantum brain theorists have carried forward a computational way of thinking and so process philosophers have not been particularly attracted to the field. However quantum neurophilosophy has a natural interface with process philosophy and much to offer it. There are two thinkers featured in the present work who, although certainly recognized as participating in process thought, have remained somewhat underappreciated: Martin Heidegger and as already mentioned, David Bohm. Process in Heidegger has a more forceful connotation than in Whitehead. The Heideggerian process Seyn5 is a primitive eruption (Ursprung), differing in quality from Whitehead’s 3. See Hameroff (2003) and Stapp (2007) on the specific relationship of quantum brain theory to Whitehead. 4. See also Section 5.5 in Rescher (1996). On Whitehead and physics, see Eastman and Keeton (2004). . 5. Heidegger uses Seyn instead of Sein to indicate that he is not thinking metaphysically but in a more original sense of Being.

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The Transparent Becoming of World

more stately “creative advance.” Further, Heidegger introduces a dynamical duality to ontology that is more obscure in Whitehead, a duality of giving and receiving, a welling-up of their “belonging-together” in “enowning” (das Ereignis). Bohm (1980) offers some radically new and rigorously formulated ideas to process philosophy.6 The process that Whitehead calls “creative advance” is known in Bohm as the “holomovement.” The holomovement has the two simultaneous phases already mentioned: implication (“enfolding” of order) and explication (“unfolding” of order). What for Whitehead is God’s “primordial nature” becomes a “law of overall necessity” in Bohm, mathematically expressed in his quantum physics by the “super-quantum potential.” The deep structure of process philosophy will be seen to be illuminated by Bohm’s theory. 1.3 Quantum neurophilosophy It was not until Patricia Churchland’s publication of Neurophilosophy in 1986 that the area was clearly distinguished as a legitimate field of inquiry. Prior to that event most philosophers thought empirical science quite irrelevant to the deep issues of philosophical concern and the topic was left by and large to interested scientists.7 Churchland (1986) aspired to a “rich interanimation” between brain science and philosophy, “which can be expected to provoke a fruitful co-evolution of theories, models and methods, where each informs, corrects, and inspires the other” (p. 3). Churchland’s neurophilosophy did not question its embedding in the context of classical physics. At that time neurophysics was conceptualized as a subtopic within the field of biophysics, which would acknowledge quantum theory as only relevant to the Microwelt, while giving way to classical approximations for Mitwelt phenomena of concern to biophysics. The present discussion departs from this tradition and shifts the scientific context of neurophilosophy to quantum physics and applies this “quantum neurophilosophy” to the problematic of world. The great quantum revolution in physics was initially extended to the theory of brain functioning in the late sixties of the 20th century. The first systematic proposals in the field of quantum neurophysics were made by Ricciardi and Umezawa (1967) and by Fröhlich (1968). Since that beginning a robust literature has developed (e.g. Jibu & Yasue 1995; Penrose 1994; Stapp 2004; Tuszynski 2006), academ6. There was a conference in the 1980s that brought together Whiteheadians and Bohm (and Prigogine), which resulted in a conference volume, entitled Physics and the ultimate significance of time (Griffin 1986). This initial attempt at alliance has not been vigorously pursued. 7. For example, see the spirited argument between philosophers and scientists in Globus, Maxwell and Savodnik (1976).



Chapter 1.  Introduction

ic meetings are held under the banner of “Quantum Mind,” and an online journal devoted to quantum neurophysics, called NeuroQuantology, has appeared. This development of quantum neurophysics has not had substantial influence, however, on the mainstream of brain science and related disciplines, such as cognitive science and philosophy of mind. This lack of influence is not primarily because quantum neurophysics is highly controversial; it has been instead largely ignored by the mainstream. Brain science is immensely successful, its prospects undiminished, and no sense of “crisis” pervades it that would presage scientific revolution. In my view there is in fact a crisis in brain science at its interface with philosophy of mind but the issues are so chronic and there is so much habituation to lack of advance that the unrelenting crisis is not perceived as such. Quantum neurophysics is an exceptional branch of quantum theory in that cohabitation with philosophy is difficult to avoid. Once the brain is brought in, then consciousness, mind, subjectivity, intentionality, qualia, perception of world and related topics enter too, via their very well substantiated correlation with brain functioning. (Crudely put, an anesthestic gas will wipe them all out by interfering with brain physiology.) To drain the many ambiguities of terms such as “consciousness,” “mind” and “spirit,” they shall often be referred to here collectively as “ψ,” whereas the physical matter kind of terms will be denoted by “ø.” The unwavering “ψ/ø” correlation has been comforting and any sense of crisis thereby warded off. Let the philosophers and the occasional scientist puzzle over it, while bench brain science continues triumphantly on its way. As neuroscience races ahead, however, the philosophical issues remain mired. Some observers, called “Mysterians,” have even been moved to cry, Ignoramus et ignoramibus! (McGinn 1991). We are ignorant and shall remain so! However the advent of quantum neurophysics stimulated a hopeful minority to think that the ψ/ø puzzle might finally be moved forward. Quantum physics, after all, is very strange, deeply at odds with the common sense of everyday life. Indeed, even to this day, despite our long familiarity with quantum effects in both laboratory and technology, and despite a solid theoretical understanding of quantum principles, quantum theory remains extremely counterintuitive. No wonder that the advent of quantum neurophysics was greeted enthusiastically by some, in the hope that its very paradoxicality would finally breach the philosophical impasse. Jibu and Yasue (1995) nicely called the promising quantum neurophysical level of brain functioning the “cryptic brain.” Could it be that classical neurophysics had been all along “barking up the wrong tree?” Might the peculiar quantum powers of a cryptic brain both illuminate the crisis and alleviate it? Despite this rising hope over the last forty years that quantum neurophysics could finally explain the ψ/ø correlation, nothing of the sort has actually happened. Quantum neurophysicists argue as much as did their classical counterparts over

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The Transparent Becoming of World

“consciousness.” An important contributant to this disappointing failure of quantum neurophilosophy to resolve the philosophical issues lies in the general assumption already mentioned, viz., that the cryptic brain has the same task as the classical brain: information processing. The advantage of the quantum version is thought to be that its computations utilize superpositions of information — in the form of qubits rather than bits — and so can conduct certain computations far beyond the practical capabilities of a brain restricted to classical information processing. For neurophysics and quantum neurophysics alike, the brain is a wet computer. The latter theory just adds quantum degrees of freedom to the computation. The idea of brain computation, with or without quantum degrees of freedom, is accepted easily in that the computer is the technology that defines our times, and this idea is reinforced by the current great interest in quantum computing. It will be proposed here instead that the cryptic brain also has striking ontological capabilities which have not previously been appreciated. There is more than information processing with quantum degrees of freedom going on in the quantum brain. The cryptic brain “explicates” Being from a plenum of interpenetrated possibilities, produces presencing, “unfolds” the very appearances that are world from an implicate order. This capability follows from Umezawa’s (1993) formulation of thermofield dynamics in which quantum physical reality has dual quantum modes that are entangled in the least energy quantum vacuum state. The quantum vacuum state is accordingly between two modes. This conception gives new life to dualism, while undermining Cartesianism. The dual modes do not exist outside their relationship, which is an “intrinsic relationship.” The old dualisms such as the Cartesian res cogitans and res extensa, the Spinozan dual aspects of a neutral tertium quid, phenomenon and epiphenomenon (Huxley 1898), supervened and supervenient (Davidson 2001), are succeeded by this innovation which embraces duality but is not ontologically dual. This is dualism as between-two. The ultimate “ground” is an “abground” ... the quantum vacuum state which is “between-two.” The abground is pre-space, pre-time, pre-objectual. The flow of belonging-together lights up the dual mode match as world-thrownness. The “gift” of match — the allusion is to Heidegger — is a world encounter. There is no transcendent world in addition. What will be offered here is not a relativism in which one objective world is taken according to particular situatednesses and so looks different from persona to persona. World-thrownnesses are parallel affairs. Such a “monadology” does not imply idealism because there is a physical reality more fundamental than world. Nor does it agree with Leibniz’s monadology, which presumes a transcendent world in virtue of God’s “fulgurations,” a world in pre-established harmony with monadic states. Instead reality is an abground dynamically erupting in creative advance.



Chapter 1.  Introduction

This conception is a form of process thought. It is close to Bohm. The implicate order is a plenum, a “holoworld” (Globus 1987) from which world-disclosures might be explicated. However Bohm’s conception of consciousness is replaced here by an existential interpretation that is close to Heidegger. Heidegger’s primordial Seyn with its eruptive dynamics of das Ereignis will be seen to correspond to the dynamics of belonging-together in the between-two. 1.4 Methods The present work does not provide a detailed analysis of process philosophy and quantum neurophysics. It looks instead to the deep structure of the theories discussed, to their coherences, thinking them together as much as possible. If discourse is thought of as a sheaf whose interlacing stalks are fractal, then what follows is focused at some crossings. Extensive use is made of quotations; it is necessary to “dwell” in a writer’s words to grasp the underlying ontological principles at work. The guiding strategy is to remember Being in the context of process dynamics while introducing quantum neurophilosophical concepts. Toward this end some use is made of postmodern insights into the history of metaphysics and a certain technique of “deconstruction”8 is borrowed. The ontology of metaphysics is so embedded in the way we think, so coiled within the very language that we must use, so protected, that we cannot get at it by frontal approach. So the following sometimes will probe “marginalia” (Derrida 1974), which are symptoms of unacknowledged tensions in a text. Looking to marginals is a technique postmodernism explicitly takes from psychoanalysis (Derrida 1982).9 Postmodernism applies “the psychopathology of everyday life” (Freud 1904), with its “slips of the tongue,” to texts. This leads to exposing the unspoken (the textual preconscious and unconscious). In the manner that psychoanalysis will “analyze” the marginals of the individual case, there will be a deconstructive focus in the margins of particular texts. A survey of the literature would take too distant a

8. Heidegger (BT) anticipated “deconstruction” in his Destruktion of the history of ontology. 9. A good illustration of the intensive case study approach is Derrida’s (1989) book, Of Spirit, which is organized around Martin Heidegger’s varied use of Geist (Spirit) and related terms at different points in Heidegger’s career.

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The Transparent Becoming of World

view; the symptoms of cover-up would blur and fade into the background, drowned out in the cacophany of never-ending philosophical dispute.10 1.5 Strategy of presentation Chapter 2 begins the deconstructive grappling with world. It offers some case studies of “faith” in the world on the part of scientists and naturalistic philosophers. What is their conception of world and at what point does faith in world come in to rescue the theory? The reader who has already worked at deconstructing world might bypass this chapter, with the exception of 2.3.9 where Lehar’s (2003, 2004) insightful “gestalt bubble” model of conscious experience is discussed. Unsurprising from the standpoint of deconstruction, which recognizes the affinities of opposites, it is shown in Chapter 2 that the very contrary to scientific realism also shares the faith. This is Berkeley’s absolute idealism, which finds “a spirit infinitely wise, good and powerful” (PHK, Section 70), who thinks the reality of world. Here the external world in which we find ourselves is but our own “idea,” a world whose esse is percipi, but Berkeley still retains faith in a world reality, a transcendent reality that God Himself thinks. God’s esse is His concipi. An absolute idealism that truly shakes the faith in world is found in the magical fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. The act of creation has ontological primacy and world reality is secondary and illusory. Borges tantalizes but does not get free of metaphysical subjectivity. Chapter 3 is entitled “Process and Holonomy.” Process philosophy of course does emphasize the law of the whole (“holonomy”). Indeed, Whitehead called his theory the “philosophy of organism.” Its emphasis is on relationships. Complexes of relations are primary, not discrete objects ... . This primacy of a network of relations over discrete objects is a perspective that is easily recognized by modern physicists who have worked with field theories. (Clayton 2004, p.8, italics original)

Three process philosophers are discussed in this chapter: Whitehead, Heidegger and Bohm. The discussion begins with David Bohm, who brings an original conception to holonomy that offers heuristics for understanding Whitehead and Heidegger as process theorists. While emphasizing process over substance, all retain a certain belief in an external world. The understanding of Heidegger’s thought developed in this Chapter is highly unconventional and is not meant to replace standard interpretations but is orthogonal to them. The present work is a crossing 10. Though some may find forced or even irritating the attention to marginalia (e.g. when the phrase “in other words” appears in a text), it is congenial for someone professionally trained as a psychiatrist, as is the present writer.



Chapter 1.  Introduction

between process thought and quantum neurophilosophy, and in the surprise of their echoing resonance new ways of thinking crystallize for both. Chapter 4 is devoted to quantum brain theory, in preparation for the proposal regarding world disclosure in Chapter 5. Stapp’s formulation (2004, 2007), founded in von Neumann’s theory of measurement which brings in a metaphysical consciousness, is initially discussed. Then the panprotopsychist theory of Hameroff (1994, 2006), Penrose (1994) and Hameroff & Penrose (1996) is taken up. Finally the thermo-field approach of Umezawa (1993) and its application to brain functioning by Jibu and Yasue (1995, 2004), Vitiello (1995, 2001, 2004) and Freeman and Vitiello (2006, 2008) is elaborated. Although there are differences in the physics of these quantum brain theorists, the greatest contrast lies in their philosophical interpretations. Nonetheless they all are in agreement that there is an external world. In Chapter 5 the fruit of thermofield brain dynamics is taken to be the unique state of the least energy quantum vacuum state, the “between-two” in which dual quantum modes are entangled. In the match between the dual quantum modes — in their belonging-together — Being is unfolded; that is, world is a concretion transparently dis-closed out of the enfolded orders in case of dual mode match. The brain’s supreme achievement is to bring this match in the between-two under exquisite control. The transparent process of becoming in which world appears both waking and dreaming is the belonging-together of dual ontological modes described in terms of quantum thermofield brain dynamics. The “between-two” of Chapter 5 enriches ontology to the benefit of process philosophy. The philosophical disputes between resolute Humean skeptics, pragmatic realists like Rescher (1996, 2000), transcendental realists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Pietersma 2000), and Berkeleyan idealists are resolved in a new way through belonging-together in the between-two. World is not a persisting substance under efficient causality but instead world-thrownness is continually gifted in the transparent dynamical operations of the brain’s between-two. The thermofield “ground” of this process is an “abground,” akin to Heidegger’s (CP) der Abgrund. Chapter 6 is an epilogue on the transparent becoming of world. The present work aspires to what Whitehead calls “the true method of philosophical construction,” which is “to frame a scheme of ideas, the best that one can, and unflinchingly to explore the interpretation of experience in terms of that scheme” (PR, p. ix). The present scheme has no external world-in-common or even “things” an sich but instead world-thrownnesses transparently sustained in parallel by “Dasein’s quantum brain.” We are bubbles of perception hoisted continuously in waking and aperiodically during sleep through quantum thermofield brain dynamics. The rest is abground. Such an outcome will put Whitehead’s unflinching resolve to the test.

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chapter 2

Faith in world A deconstruction

2.1 Introduction World-thrownness is inescapable in quotidian life. We are transparently engaged with world, waking and dreaming, finding ourselves amidst its affordances. A world is seemingly there and we plainly perceive it. As Whitehead says, Sometimes we see an elephant and sometimes we do not ... . an elephant, when present, is noticed. (PR, p. 4)

Reality is equated with world. In conscious experience a reality is present ... . for all beings enjoying conscious experience necessarily a world appears. (Metzinger 2003, p.5, italics original)

Respite from world does come in states of non-dreaming sleep, with concussion, and under anesthesia. When we become “lost” in thought, what we lose is world, which is immediately there again when we reach for the pad to jot it all down. In meditation we temporarily get free of our attachment to world, escape from our eager complicity in world’s hegemony, only to resume faith in world immediately on re-engagement with it, yet once again ensnared by Māyā. Our pragmatic faith in the reality of world is vindicated moment-to-moment by our flourishing survival. The aim of the present chapter is to deconstruct this adamant conviction about world, focusing on illustrations of it, case studies of belief as it were. The moments of faith will be highlighted. In the next chapter it will become clear that process philosophy is not entirely free of such faith, while shifting from world as persisting substance to world as ongoing product of a process. Chapter 5 will open up an alternative account of world, making use of quantum thermofield brain dynamics. As with any challenge to a deep faith, a frontal assault would be stoutly defended, so the present strategy undertakes significant displacement to the margins of discourse. Some advocates of direct perception of the world will first be considered and then indirect perception. These turn out to be different versions of the same faith. Since deconstruction discerns the underlying commonality with other within opposition (Derrida 1974), it is not surprising that the philosophical pole

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to direct and indirect realism — Bishop Berkeley’s absolute idealism — shares the faith in world. The difference is only with regard to location: whether the material world is external to our minds or internal to God’s mind. 2.2 The quotidian faith of direct realism 2.2.1 Direct perception as information pick-up The steadfast conviction that we directly perceive world is commonly operative among brain and cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers today, though probably not as influential as the idea of indirect perception of world, to be discussed in 2.3. The brain just “picks up” information of the quotidian world (Gibson 1979) — “detects” what is actually there — and so has the world’s information. Having the world’s information is thought tantamount to directly perceiving the world for what it really is — with one caveat. Perception is of course not a simple passive registration of sensory input but there is always a selection going on. For Gibson we pick up the information we are tuned to pick up, we are attuned for information that the environment affords. Selection penetrates even the sensory systems. “Pre-afferent” signals generated intrinsically by the brain prepare the sensory systems to register certain information. Freeman (2000, 2007) calls this pervasive process of selection through which we engage the world “intentionality.” He traces its lineage to Aquinas for whom we come to know the world through the adjustments made in conforming to it (adequatio). Freeman locates the integration of intentionality to the old brain cortex known as the “limbic system.” Although “intentionality” is commonly phrased as a “consciousness-of,” Brentano (1973) and Husserl (1960) understand it as a “directedness-upon,” a “prescription” (Smith and McIntyre 1982), what is called here the “selectiveness” of intentionality. To illustrate, you are reading this book, which is right in front of you. The theory of direct perception holds that your brain at this moment takes in the information on the page, in accordance with the laws of ecological optics (Gibson 1979). Your highly sensitive retina picks up this information of an object, which is actually there in the world. Your brain detects the ordered symbols characteristic of the English language — picks up the information of the symbol strings — and you read what is right there on the page. Your sensory systems are already tuned to pick up Latin symbols rather than Chinese idiographs or finger smudges on the page which go unnoticed.



Chapter 2.  Faith in world

Unfortunately for this straightforward scheme, direct perception of world runs into a difficulty with “ecological psychophysics.”1 The information that we actually pick up is abstract information, whereas the ambient world is concretely perceived. The Latin ab-stract literally means to lift out of, out of the manifest; abstraction implies a general concept rather than a concretely presencing particular. The world as perceived is concrete but the brain’s information is abstract relative to world. That is a puzzle where the philosophical theory that reality is directly perceived begins to lose its way. Such common sense may get us to the dinner Table and successfully operate at the laboratory bench but more is expected of philosophy. Abstract cues for depth perception have long been known (Boring 1942). For example, the retinal disparity between the eyes in binocular vision is a cue for depth. When the lying Pinocchio looks at the tip of his nose, the retinal disparity is less than when he tells the truth. Degree of retinal disparity is a cue for depth. Another abstract cue is relative motion: the train hurtles by rapidly as we wait at the Kansas crossing, but later crawls ever so slowly over the distant horizon. Yet another cue for depth is the “graininess” of the information at the retina. Close by the stalks of grass are sharply individuated whereas further away the individual stalks begin to blur and finally become indistinguishable. The texture gradient is a cue for depth — and gradients are abstract. This does not mesh with an unvarnished direct realism. There are more and equally severe difficulties for the simplistic idea that we directly perceive reality in virtue of selective information pick-up. The metrical space of classical physics, which governs the stimulus array at the retina, does not coincide with the phenomenal space of color and form within which we live (Albertazzi 2007).2 The stimulus to the receptors, which contains classical order, is not what is represented. Appearances cannot be reduced to physical dimensions but have their own dynamical structures, such as figure and ground, which are highly sensitive to context. The discrepancy between stimulus and appearance is well illustrated by the illusory contour of Kanisza’s triangle (Figure 1). The contour of this vivid triangle is not given in the stimulus but is an expression of the dynamical organization. Albertazzi (2007) provides many examples of color perception in which color appearance does not reflect the physical properties of the object. The organization of phenomenal experiences surpasses sensory input, which is problematic for the idea of direct realism. 1. By “ecological psychophysics” I mean the classical psychophysics of Helmholtz, whose history is carefully described by Boring (1942), plus the fitting to the environment described by Gibson (1979). 2. For some vivid illustrations of how color affects shape and how shape and color affect level of brightness, which are inconsistent with the idea that phenomenal space reflects metrical space, see Werner, Pinna and Spillmann (2007).

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The Transparent Becoming of World Kanisza Triangle

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Figure 1.  Kanisza’s illusory triangle.

So the common sense theory that we directly perceive reality does not straightforwardly work out because the brain has the wrong kind of information for it. Direct realists are forced to change the rules of the game somehow to keep the faith. The first rescue operation came from behaviorism, which simply ruled out of consideration, for example, the look of depth. The appearance of a world stretching before us was inadmissible, so the problem could not even arise. Then functionalism took over, and remains influential to this day, expunging anything that smacks of the mental. The look of depth becomes relational; an appearance of extendedness is replaced by the relationships between sensory input, functional states, and behaviors. The move in the margins of direct realism, for both behavioral and cognitive versions, is in some way to shift the meaning of “perception.” Perception is no longer about appearances, no longer about the presence of world, not about Being. Perception is instead about knowing. This dislocation, which keeps the faith in reality, is from ontology to epistemology.



Chapter 2.  Faith in world

2.2.2 Direct perception as knowing The strategy to rescue direct realism from the facts of ecological psychophysics is well illustrated by O’Regan and Noë (2001).3 They open their discussion with the indirectly realistic view they will critique. It is generally thought that somewhere in the brain an internal representation of the outside world must be set up which, when it is activated, gives us the experience that we all share of the rich three-dimensional, colorful world. (p. 939)

It is commonly believed, in a tradition that goes back to Descartes (1596–1650) and Locke (1632–1704), that the representation re-presents the outside world inside the brain. Here perception is “indirect,” not immediate perception of a world outside our brains but perception that is a re-presentation of a world outside our brains. The world is present and inside the brain the world is presented again, or better, inside the brain the world as taken is presented, whereas outside the brain the world is as it is, affording many possibilities for being taken. O’Regan and Noë deny that there are re-presentations of world which are as close as we can get to the world as it is in itself. We directly have world presence, they think. O’Regan and Noë focus on “visual experience” and approach it not as a state but as a kind of action, the action of “exploratory activity.” Visual experience is a mode of exploratory activity. The action mode of visual experience is modulated by a certain kind of knowledge, knowledge of “sensorimotor contingencies” (p. 940). The idea of sensorimotor contingencies is a refinement of the ecological emphasis. Our motor actions change in systematic ways the information that we are getting. The information that we have depends crucially on what we do, as we move about our ecological niche. It is not that we just passively receive the stimulus information goading our sensory receptors, which “transduce” this sensory order to neurally embodied information. The mind does not simply mirror nature (Rorty 1979). We actively devour information; we are “informavores.” If we walk around a cubical object the succession of information that we get is very different than when we walk around a spherical object. The “sensorimotor contingencies” differ — both the systematic changes and the invariances in sensory order as we move — and these differences specify cubic or spherical as the case may be. The visual quality of looking cubical is constituted (at least in part) by your knowledge of how your visual stimulation will change as you move around it. (p. 1011)

3. This rich article is available at: http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/OREGAN-NOE-BBS/ ORegan;Noe.BBS.pdf

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In general, the visual quality of shape is precisely the set of all potential distortions that the shape undergoes [in its projection onto the retina of the eye] when it is moved relative to us, or when we move relative to it. Although this is an infinite set, the brain can abstract from this set a series of laws [invariances], and it is this set of laws that encodes shape. (p. 942, brackets added)

The segue here from “visual quality” to a “precise” mathematical set lacks any justification, indeed, makes a gross category mistake.. Sensori-motor contingencies differ categorically across modes of experience, such as visual and tactual perceptual experience. Inter-modal differences pertain  ... to the differences in what you do when you encounter objects through different sensory modalities. Moving your eyes to the left or right will produce a change in sensory stimulation related to an object if that object is being visually perceived but not if it is being tactually perceived, or if it is being listened to ... . sensory modalities differ from one another in that they are governed by different laws of sensorimotor dependency. (1011)

Through our actions we learn what happens sensorily within and across the various senses. Consider this rich description of the humble experience of holding a bottle, provided by O’Regan and Noë. You hold a bottle in your hand. You feel the whole bottle. But you only make contact with isolated parts of its surface with isolated parts of the surface of your hands. But don’t you feel the whole bottle as present? That is, phenomenologically speaking, the feeling of presence of the bottle is not a conjecture or an inference. The feeling you have is the knowledge that movements of the hand open up and reveal new aspects of the bottle surface. It feels to you as if there’s stuff there to be touched by movement of the hands. That’s what the feeling of the presence of the bottle consists in. But the basis of the feeling, then, is not something occurring now. The basis rather is one’s knowledge now as to what one can do. (p. 963)

The perceptual experience is “not something occurring now,” not a presencing, not Being, but a knowledge, knowledge of what one can do and what the results will be. Visual experience on this account is an action constrained by knowledge. With O’Regan and Noë’s way of thinking, the issue of perception is deflected from ontology to enactive epistemology.



Chapter 2.  Faith in world 

2.2.3 Qualia Perception as sensori-motor knowledge-guided action leaves out visual, tactual and other sensory experiences altogether, experiences which philosophers call “qualia,” such as the unique experiences of red, sweet, loud, smooth, and the smell of mint. There is no more important quest in the whole of science probably than the attempt to understand those very particular events in evolution by which brains worked out that special trick that enabled them to add to the cosmic scheme of things: colour, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the other facets of mental experience. (Sperry 1964, p.2)

The hang-up for this quest has been an elucidation of the “special trick.” However, there are no such qualia experiences (singular, quale) generated with the brain, though this claim seems quite counterintuitive.4 Tye (1995) puts it trenchantly. [P]henomenology ain’t in the head. Just as you cannot read semantics out of syntax, so you cannot read phenomenology out of physiology. This is why you cannot find any technicolor qualia, any raw feels, by peering around inside the brain (with or without a flashlight). They simply are not in there. To discover what it’s like, you need to look outside the head to what the brain states represent. Phenomenology is, in this way, externally based. (p. 151)

O’Regan and Noë (2001) are also emphatic on this point: “Qualia are an illusion” (960). Qualia are not properties of experiential states for them because there are no experiential states. Instead of experiential states we should think of “ways of acting ... things we do” (960). Perceiving is a form of acting. Forget qualia. To illustrate, suppose you are standing before a red wall. What is it like for you to see this red wall, to undergo this experience? What is the putative red “quale” like? There is an implicit knowledge involved in seeing the redness: The knowledge that if you were to move your eyes, there would be changes in the incoming information that are typical of sampling with the eye; typical of the nonhomogeneous way the retina samples color; knowledge that if you were to move your eyes around, there might be changes in the incoming information typical of what happens when illumination is uneven, and so on. (O’Regan and Noë 2001, p. 949)

4. Arguments against qualia are well-developed (Heidegger BT; Sartre (1956); Sellars (1963)) but nonetheless likely the majority continues to believe in them. I think this is because the familiar versions of indirect realism rely on sensations, and qualia are a conceptually upgraded form of sensations. The sensations/qualia idea so pervades metaphysical thought and permeates language that deconstruction is needed to solicit the idea’s hold. Qualia will be discussed again in 5.8.

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The “raw feels” that are qualia are replaced by knowledge of sensori-motor contingencies, expectations about the sensory consequences of actions based in past learning. Importantly there is not one thing in which the focussing of your attention on the hue (say) consists. Eye movements, shifts of attention, the application of understanding — seeing the red hue of the wall consists in all of this. There is no simple, unanalyzable core of the experience. There are just the different things we do when we see the redness of the wall. (961)

Any “qualia” in addition to what we do is a theoretical fiction according to O’Regan and Noë; so-called qualia are merely philosophical confusions. There are many different things we do in “seeing red.” It is a variegated activity. [E]xperience is a temporally extended activity of exploration mediated by the perceiver’s knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies. The differences in the qualitative character of perceptual experiences correspond to differences in the character of the relevant sensorimotor contingencies. (p. 961)

There is a difference between the so-called qualia of seeing and smelling because what we do in seeing and what we get in seeing is different from what we do in smelling and what we get in smelling, that is, the sensorimotor contingencies differ in character — and that’s the difference between seeing and smelling. Not that they feel different in an ineffable way but that our expectations and actions are different in seeing and smelling. But even though there is no red quale involved in seeing the red wall, as O’Regan and Noë argue, the wall obviously looks red, indeed, we insist is red. There are no immanent intrinsic qualia, it is true, but there still seems to be transcendent world qualities of redness and sweetness and loudness and such. Tye (1995) makes this point well. When, for example, a ripe tomato looks red to me, I experience redness all over the facing surface of the tomato. Each perceptible part of the surface looks red to me. None of these parts, in looking red, look to me to have a perceiver-relative property. I do not experience any part of the surface as producing a certain sort of response in me or anyone else. On the contrary, I surely experience redness as intrinsic to the surface, just as I experience the shape of the surface as intrinsic to it. (p. 145)

The world has a look and a sound to it, a taste if you bite into it, a fragrance when the lilacs bloom. Though there is no inner “feel” that are qualia, yet the external world has phenomenal qualities — the redness of the wall — which O’Regan and Noë just take for granted. There are no internal qualia, indeed, but how can we comprehend external qualities, phenomenal Being? The wall looks red, is red, presences as a red thing, is experienced as red. O’Regan and Noë simply assume the wall is red — see it right there? They settle the troublesome issue of inner qualia by



Chapter 2.  Faith in world 

denying them, but then are left with no account of the world’s qualities, such as the redness of the wall that is comfortably assumed to be there. This is an expression of Seinsvergessen, the forgetting of the problematic of Being, a forgetting very characteristic of science. Even though Being enters their theory as an assumption, O’Regan and Noë have absolutely no doubts about the existence of this real world and its qualities; no skepticism troubles them. Indeed, there is no “re”-presentation of the world inside the brain: the only pictorial or 3D version required is the real outside version. What is required, however, are methods for probing the outside world — and visual perception constitutes one mode via which it can be probed. The experience of seeing occurs when the outside world is being probed according to the visual mode ... the outside world acts as an external memory that can be probed at will by the sensory apparatus. (946)

The world is real, a repository that can be probed, transcendently there to be explored at will, by the informed actions of the perceiver. The qualitative world — phenomenal Being — is never problematized by O’Regan and Noë, who are above all pragmatic. Ensconsed in a beckoning world that affords this or that action, they are uninfected by doubt. So O’Regan and Noë solve the problem of mental qualia by denying them while tacitly leaving unresolved another issue: phenomenal qualities, such as the way the world looks, the world’s appearance. The Being of the world goes without saying in the theory of direct perception of reality, with common sense allied on its side. The problem of qualia is resolved by making perception an expectant action, while pushing the problematic of Being out into the world where common sense faith in reality prevails 2.2.4 The dreams of a robot One technique of deconstruction looks to “marginalia” for indications of underlying tensions in texts, detecting “symptoms” of hidden problematics. Metaphysical assumptions so pervade our thought that we can only catch them “out of the corners of our eyes,” so to speak. Such a marginal can be found in the journal Science, which is the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a premier publication that covers all areas of science. The 17 November 2006 issue carries a Report by researchers at Cornell University, entitled “Resilient machines through continuous self-modeling” (Bongard, Zykov & Lipson 2006). The article describes a remarkably adaptive robot that is able to compensate on its own for damage to one of its four legs.

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In addition to carrying Reports, Science also publishes “Perspectives” which are commentaries on articles in the same issue of especial interest. A Perspective permits the writer much more latitude than a Report, which must meet the highest of scientific standards. Marginalia are more likely to show up in a Perspective than in a Report, whose rigid scientific structure confines texts between the margins. Science permitted a rather catchy Title to the Perspective on the Report about the resiliently adaptive robot: “What do robots dream of?” (Adami 2006). However, the Report on which the Perspective is taken never mentions dreaming. The opening line of the Perspective goes, “Perhaps robots aren’t so different from us after all.” Robots work better “if they have an accurate sense of self.” It is already clear where this is heading ... robots are like us and we’re like them. But to truly appreciate this marginal, we need to understand the Report, which is an impressive work, whose latent biases only show through in the relaxation of the Commentary. The “resilient machines” of the Report are a species of four-legged robot having eight motorized joints, eight joint angle sensors and two tilt sensors. This new type of robot can do more than build a model of the environment — which is no great feat for the old four-legged robot armed with sensors and having a computer brain. Of course, should the old robot unfortunately break a leg and be left with three, its model doesn’t work well any more, since the model still has the robot with four legs. A three-legged robot of the old type would quickly have to be junked. However the new robot models not only its environment but is also able to build up a model of its own body based on the contingencies between its own actions and inputs at it sensors, that is, a model based on sensorimotor contingencies. Using as data the recording of sensorimotor contingencies as the new robot lives its robotic life, a model of its own body, its self, is built up. The robot uses this self-model to generate locomotion. A robot is able to indirectly infer its own morphology through self-directed exploration and then use the resulting self-models to synthesize new behaviors (p. 1119).

Now break a leg of this new type of robot and it just modifies its model of self based on the new sensori-motor contingencies. After adjusting its self-image, the three-legged robot lumbers merrily on its way. The authors of the Report are sober enough in assessing the significance of their robotic achievement. “This concept may help develop more robust machines and shed light on self-modeling in animals” (118). Nothing about dreams or consciousness or being like us shows up in the scientific Report. All that is left to the margins of discourse, to the Commentary. So how does the Commentator get to dreams? By bringing in a completely extraneous metaphor about day and night, which is irrelevant to a computer’s



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operations (for whom “day’ and “night” are, of course, arbitrary, solely a matter of its Programmer’s convenience). A robot would spend the day exploring part of the landscape, and perhaps be stymied by an obstacle. At night, the robot would replay its actions and infer a model of the environment. (p. 1094)

“Day” and “night,” operationally speaking, mean “in play” and “playback” respectively. At night the robot “dreams” the sensorimotor contingencies again and infers a model of the self. That’s supposed to be the robot’s dream — replaying the sensorimotor contingencies in the service of developing models of world and self. Then the robot is able to “approach the morning with fresh ideas” (1094), as fresh as a mechanical daisy. The Commentator conceives of “far more complex simulations” than this which “could play an interesting role in our quest to understand the nature of consciousness” (1094). An enhanced robot would have more than dreams. For example, we ought to be able to record the changes in the robot’s artificial brain as it establishes its beliefs and models about the world and itself, and from those infer not only its cognitive algorithms, but also witness the emergence of a personality. Thus, perhaps the discipline of experimental robot psychology is not too far off in the future (1094).

Dreams, cognitions, personality ... the robot of the future will be behaviorally indistinguishable from us. But will the wall look red to this robot? Of course philosophical arguments have long raged on this issue and there is no sign of concession on any side. The present book claims some advance, however. Whereas Heidegger sharply demarcated ontological investigation from science, and whereas science erases that distinction in virtue of not problematizing Being, there is a melding here of ontology and science. It will be shown in Chapter 5 that Being is a state of the between-two described by quantum thermofield dynamics. 2.2.5 Radical externalism A form of direct realism called “radical externalism” has in recent years received much attention. A double issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (v. 13, No. 7–8, 2006) was devoted to it. Radical externalism is the brain-child of Ted Honderich (2004), formerly Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University of London. His one time colleague, the well-known philosopher Colin McGinn, certainly takes a dim view of it!

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This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad. It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.5

Though one might be in agreement with McGinn’s assessment of radical externalism, it could still be useful to consider in the service of the task of deconstruction, indeed attracts attention because of the emotional charge and the critic’s later lack of repentance. To repeat, I found Honderich’s book to be quite the worst thing I’ve ever read — an insult to the reader, no less — so I was duty-bound to pan it.6

A deconstructionist might wonder about McGinn and Honderich’s quiet agreements. Chapter Seven of Honderich’s (2004) On consciousness is entitled “Consciousness as the Existence of a world,” and that idea recurs repeatedly in the chapter. The difference between me now and a chair in this room, it can be said, is that for me a world exists, and for the chair a world does not exist. Or rather, as I prefer to say, my consciousness now consists in the existence of a world. (p. 130) [M]y perceptual consciousness now — my consciousness in so far as it consists in my seeing, hearing, and so on. So what we have is that my perceptual consciousness now — my consciousness consists in the existence of a world. (p. 131)

Some objects (us) consist in world existence and others (the chair) do not. The glissade in Honderich’s position occurs at “Or rather, as I prefer to say ...”. That world presences, there is no doubt. But then Honderich brutally equates world presencing with a perceptual consciousness, a preference without justification indeed. Honderich is at pains to distinguish this theory from idealism. He is a scientific realist. [I]t is no part of what has been suggested that only the worlds of perceptual consciousness exist. There is the unperceived part of the physical world, and the objective world, and the world indicated by science. It has certainly not been doubted that these conceptions are true of what there is, or anyway, of some of what there is. Something of their sort is undeniable. (p. 139)

He fully believes in an unperceived reality, “the world-in-itself [which] is a necessary condition for my neural events, the correlates of my conscious events” (141). Honderich’s proposal never gets off the ground, however. The facticity of world existence does not imply any perceptual “consciousness.” The world exists. Full 5. http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/McGinnReview.html The controversy between McGinn and Honderich has been described by Ross (2008). 6. http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/McGinnRejoinder.html



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stop. To call that “consciousness” imports an enormous philosophical structure, in essence the traditional metaphysics which process philosophy seeks to overturn. Snowdon (2006) makes essentially the same point with regard to seeing a page. [I]n undergoing the perceptual experience of seeing the page there is no such item as the subject’s consciousness (or the subject’s experience) which seems (or appears) some way to the subject. (p. 193)

It is not consciousness that we “have,” contra Honderich, but the existence of world, its Being, is what we “have.” Honderich means to be ontologically decisive. [W]ith respect to consciousness, there is no difference between appearance and reality. With consciousness, what there seems to be is what there is. What there seems to be is all there is. (Honderich 2006, p. 5)

(He also accepts as legitimate scientific inferences from what there is.) While looking at a page, What did your consciousness seem to consist in? An answer can grow on you fast. It was for the page to be there. What your consciousness seemed to consist in was nothing other or more than that. (2006, p.5)

The decisive point here is that the notion of consciousness is completely superfluous. For the page to be there is for the page to be there, and the process through which the page comes to be there is utterly silent. What we have transparently is world but Honderich thinks we have consciousness. Consciousness, after all, is what we have. And what we don’t have in this sense isn’t consciousness. Also, we don’t have it in two ways. Certainly we can’t get behind or under or beyond consciousness itself by introspection or recollection and bring back a part of it. There isn’t any other experiential access to it than the single one we’ve all got. (2006, p. 133)

Honderich obscures our encounter with world by bringing in consciousness and stirring up all the murky controversies surrounding it.7 It requires great effort to overcome traditional conceptual commitments to consciousness and subjectivity embedded in quotidian language practices. This page is indeed there. “Nothing other or more than that” is required. 7. Honderich’s view can be fruitfully juxtaposed to Heidegger’s “world-thrownness,” that we always find ourselves already amidst some world or other. What Honderich means by our inability to “get behind or under or beyond” consciousness is covered (and more) by “thrownness.” But there is a fundamental difference too. Honderich is thinking metaphysically of a subjective conscious action that “gets,” whereas Heidegger thinks a primitive dynamical process. (See the discussion of Heidegger in 3.4.)

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Honderich considers radical externalism to be closer to direct realism than to indirect realism, though not identical with the former. Direct realism still retains something of an inside and an outside, though the inside is not considered representational. Naïve realism has always been advanced and characterized as subtracting or denying the internal object, not subtracting both such an object and also any relation in consciousness to the remaining external object (2006, p. 203)

Thus the inside “picks-up” information of the outside in Gibsonian direct realism. Honderich squeezes together this difference between internal and external. Someone’s being perceptually conscious is identical with things being in space and time external to the person ... (2006, p. 200)

Consciousness is not in relation to an external world but is the external world’s space-time existence: this is the heart of Honderich’s thesis. Yet the continuation of the preceding quotation immediately reverts back to the inside/outside distinction. ... with such further properties of colour, and being dependent on a scientific or noumenal world underneath and also on the person neurally. (2006, p. 200)

Radical externalism is properly considered to be a variant of direct realism in which the term “consciousness” is stapled to the presenting world. It is clear in any case that Honderich never doubts an external world (nor does his critic McGinn, for that matter). Snowdon (2006) is absolutely certain as well. The indisputable claim is that if a subject S is genuinely perceptually aware of a G then there is a G. For example, if I actually see an ape in front of me then there is an ape in front of me. In this respect seeing an object is like sitting on an object. I cannot do it unless the object is there. (p. 191–2)

Honderich’s move is just to coalesce the ape and perceptual experience. In all the vituperation over radical externalism, faith in world is amicably shared. 2.2.6 Overview The practical belief that we directly perceive world is but commonsense. Brain science tells us that this idea is not so simple as seems, because the information that the brain picks up is abstract relative to the world perceived. Further, metrical space does not coincide with phenomenal space and gestalt organizing principles come into play. This forces the direct realist to tinker with the meaning of perception, typically by assimilating it to cognition in virtue of a behavioral/functional framework. Perceiving becomes a form of cognitive activity, something that we do, a robotic probing of the world that is there, a probing constrained by the knowledge of



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sensori-motor contingencies that we have. Being — that a quotidian external world is present, actually is — goes unquestioned. To say that consciousness consists in the existence of world adds nothing (but confusion) to saying that a world is present. 2.3 Indirect perception of reality 2.3.1 Introduction The problematic of reality comes forcibly to attention when we awaken from a vivid dream. Sometimes one isn’t sure whether or not the authentic experience was a dream or “actually happened.” Conversely Descartes, meditating by the fire, could find “no certain indications by which we may distinguish wakefulness from sleep,” and observed, “my astonishment is such that it is almost able of persuading me that I now dream” (1912 145). Though for some the dream may be mainly thought-like or hazy, anyone who has been chased by the nightmare’s beast will testify to that world’s terrifying authenticity. (Of course, one can reason out on waking that “it was only a dream.”) This is another place where the direct realism discussed in 2.2 falters. If the experience of world is understood as selective information pick-up, then in explaining dreams direct realism must retreat to selective information pick-up from memory traces that are worked-over by the dream-sleepy cognition during REM sleep. But this will not do. The dream world is not a smoothed composition of literal memory traces of past wake worlds. (See Globus (1987, 1991) for detailed dream illustrations of this point.) The memory traces which feed the dream are from different times and places, from different perspectives and illuminations, at different ages of the dreamer ... yet the dream experience is of a seamless world. The most bizarre of dream worlds remains worldly. So Freud’s (1900) idea that the dream is a “composition” of memory traces must be amended. Dream creation is “formative” (Globus 1987), a creation de novo, not transformative of memory traces. The sometimes vivid and authentic dream world is a product, like Athena from Jove’s brow. Direct realism does not provide a unified explanation of the wake world and the dream world, even though those worlds are at times indistinguishable. Although this failure is not by itself fatal, it adds weight to the serious deficiencies brought out above. In contrast to the case of direct realism, dream experiences make indirect realism seem eminently plausible. The brain builds a re-presentation of the world in both waking and dreaming. In waking the re-presentation constructed is constrained by both bottom-up sensory input from reality and by top-down cognitive expectations of what is most probably out there (Smythies 2009). Whereas in the

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case of dreams, the peculiar cognitive process during dreaming goes unopposed. (Freud (1900) distinguished dream cognition as a “primary process,” subject to some “secondary process” revision on awakening.) Cognition during REM sleep picks and chooses from the day’s memory traces (Freud’s “day residues”). By associative connections of those day residues picked out, memory traces of the distant past could also enter the dream construction of an authentic world. Despite its success with regard to dreaming, indirect realism runs into a different kind of difficulty, to be detailed below. 2.3.2 Damasio on indirect realism The idea of indirect realism is well illustrated by the neurologist, Antonio Damasio (1999). Here Damasio is considering the brain’s re-presentation of objects in reality. Neuroscience has dedicated considerable effort to understanding the neural basis of object representation. Extensive studies of perception, learning and memory, and language have given us a workable idea of how the brain processes an object, in sensory and motor terms, and an idea of how knowledge about an object can be stored in memory, categorized in conceptual or linguistic terms, and retrieved in recall or recognition modes. (p. 134)

The result of this complicated process is that in the case of the visual aspects of an object, the appropriate neural patterns are constructed in a variety of regions of the visual cortices, not just one or two but many, working in concerted fashion to map the varied aspects of the object in visual terms. (p. 134)

Damasio does not mean to imply that the representation (“map”) has literal fidelity to the world object represented. The representation is the brain’s construction. Moreover, whatever the fidelity may be, neural patterns and the corresponding mental images are as much creations of the brain as they are products of the external reality that prompts their creation. (p. 320) Thus the images you and I see in our minds are not facsimiles of the particular object, but rather images of the interactions between each of us and an object which engaged our organisms, constructed in neural pattern form according to the organism’s design. (p. 321)

The following statement by Damasio is the epitome of contemporary indirect realism. The object is real, the interactions are real, and the images are as real as anything can be. (p. 321)



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There are real objects but what we have are brain creations which re-present reality, with enough fidelity that we are able to survive and reproduce. The illusion in all of this, according to indirect realism, is the feeling that we have reality directly, immediately, when in fact what we have is our own construction that represents reality. The experienced presentation of world is an illusion; the seeming “presentation” of world — world disclosure — is in fact a re-presentation. 2.3.3 Indirect realism and perceptual “illusions” Perceptual illusions can also be naturally interpreted to support indirect realism. The text under study here is “Perceptual illusions and brain models” by a well-known expert in the area, Richard Gregory. Gregory published this paper in the august Proceedings of the Royal Academy and makes it conveniently available on his extensive website.8 For Gregory perceptual illusions are faulty re-presentations of reality. Perceptual illusions have been well-studied conventionally by psychologists and neuroscientists. There are very many illusions, some of which were already known to the ancient Greeks. Here is the famous Műller-Lyer Illusion (1889).

The left and right line segments when measured are actually of the same length, though the right segment looks much longer. That is, the left and right line segments in the Műller-Lyer illusion are actually equal but because of how our brains conduct the computation, the image produced does not correspond to the independently confirmed reality. Another type of illusion is the phenomenon of “synesthesia” in which, for example, a sound may be simultaneously experienced visually or even tasted, in addition to being heard. To illustrate, while dozing off one day I heard the grating sound of a child’s toy thrown on the floor and simultaneously saw a jagged flash of lightning. Even a movie is a perceptual illusion; the information projected on the screen is a two-dimensional array but we perceive a vivid three-dimensional world that the hero romps through. Gregory subscribes whole-heartedly to the representational view of indirect realism. He thinks the brain develops an “internal model” of reality. When the 8. http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/brainmodels/illusions-and-brain-models_p1.htm

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model is a good one, “we see aspects of reality without illusion,” but when the model is wrong or the right model but wrongly scaled, then we get perceptual illusions. There is a notable leitmotif to Gregory’s paper, which addresses distinctions that have been made between “analog” and “digital” computing. He does not question the very widely and staunchly held idea that computation is going on in the brain; he questions only the type of computation. His interest is in how computation can breed illusion. But now illusion is no longer exclusively a brain issue. We should find the same kinds of illusion cropping up in well-designed machines, Gregory thinks. The tacit power of Gregory’s discussion is that it in effect trivializes illusion. The brain as wet machine takes the information of world it is ready for and selects from, and then outputs a re-presentation. This re-presentation can be wrong — an illusion — when the wrong model or the right model with the wrong scale is used during the image-construction that represents world. Within the frame of indirect realism Gregory successfully reduces Illusion to a mere mistake, trivializing the power of the goddess Māyā. All the while, he maintains that there is in fact a world, which we may wrongly model or scale. 2.3.4 Metzinger’s indirect scientific realism Thomas Metzinger (2003) elaborates indirect realism in his great treatise on subjectivity, Being no one. Metzinger exceeds traditional philosophical discussion by engaging brain science, clinical neurology, cognitive science and experimental psychology. He calls his book “an experiment in interdisciplinary philosophy” (2); in present terms it is “neurophilosophical.” As many have argued, consciousness is the most fascinating research target conceivable, the greatest remaining challenge to the scientific worldview as well as the centerpiece of any philosophical theory of mind. (p. 5)

“In conscious experience,” Metzinger’s emphasis, “a reality is present ... a world appears” (5). Mental representation is a process by which some biosystems generate an internal depiction of parts of reality. The states generated in the course of this process are internal representations ... . (p. 15)

The resulting internal representations are called “phenomenal experience.” These mental representations that comprise phenomenal experience are determined by certain facts, which are external facts, lying outside the [brain] system in a very simple and straightforward sense. If your current mental book representation really has the



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content “book” in a strong sense depends on whether there really is a book in your hands right now. (15–16)

Metzinger never questions the external reality of the book. He is a self-described “naturalist,” taking the furnishings of world as we commonsensically find them, like the book in your hands right now. As a naturalistic reader, you may question what is in the book but you do not question the reality of the book. What is so enveiling here is that the assumption of an external world plainly works. The proof of the reality pudding seems to be in the practical eating. Many of the representation processes underlying conscious experience seem to be isomorphy-preserving9 processes; they systematically covary with properties of the world and they actively conserve this covariance. The covariance generated in this way is embedded into a causal-teleological context, because it possesses a long biological history and is used by individual systems in achieving certain goals. (p. 18)

Metzinger refuses to question the source of covariance: external world reality. The obvious fact that biological nervous systems are able to generate representations of the world and its causal matrix is something that I will not discuss further in this book. (p. 18)

So he has faith in an external reality which we do not access directly but only indirectly via “representations of the world and its causal matrix.” Perception — phenomenal experience — is not of world as it is in itself but only as we re-present it. The Illusion is that we think we have reality, however we only have a re-presentation of reality ... but no matter, since the re-presentation is as good as reality, at least with respect to our own concerns. Metzinger considers the world in which we find ourselves to be actually “virtual,” a simulation of external reality, real in effect but not in fact. Revonsuo (2006) has unpacked the meaning of virtual reality in his book, Inner presence. Revonsuo’s view is highly consistent with that of Metzinger, so it is easy to shift over to Revonsuo’s discussion of virtual reality. 2.3.5 Virtual realities (VRs) Virtual realities are simulations of the external world which can be generated by computers and experienced by users. There is no world generated inside of the 9. In “isomorphy preservation” the abstract structure of something—the relationships between the parts—is preserved in its isomorph. For example, look at your reflection in a fun house mirror. Your image is distorted but it still is recognizeably you due to isomorphy preservation. What is preserved is “abstract invariance.”

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computer to be somehow shared with us. Instead the computer feeds the user sensory information and responds to the user’s actions with sensory information appropriate to having taken those actions. (That is, valid sensorimotor contingencies are available to the user of a virtual reality device.) The user accordingly feels as if she is thrown amidst an authentic world. When the user turns her head, for example, the computer tracks this action and delivers information appropriate to the shifted view. In computer-generated flying within an enclosed training module, the student gets all the sensory information that would be had in actual flying, and actions (say, pulling up sharply on the nose of the plane) bring sensory information appropriate to those actions (being thrown back in one’s chair). The student-pilot flies a virtual world and can be trained up on different emergency situations. Immersion in the virtual world gives a “you-are-there experience” (111). Revonsuo gives this description of a proficient VR system called the “Cybersphere”: a large, hollow, translucent sphere, several meters in diameter, provided with a means of entry for an observer, and supported by a ring of bearings. The walking motion of the observer causes the sphere to rotate. Computer-generated images, updated in response to the subject’s movement, are projected onto the outer surface of the sphere. (p. 111)

Of course this description of the Cybersphere assumes the extrinsic perspective and corresponding images of the world from the standpoint of someone standing outside of the Cybersphere, whereas inside the sphere the projected images are experienced by the user as world. The observer is able to walk, run, jump, or crawl in any direction, while at the same time being able to observe an all-encompassing virtual environment. The Cybersphere allows completely free and limitless movement within the virtual world. (111–112)

Ideally the virtual reality (VR) of the Cybersphere is a simulated world; that ideal is limited only by the power of the Cybersphere’s computer. Revonsuo points out that the dream world is a virtual world also. The dreamer experiences being present in a reality where she, as a matter of fact, is not — it may well be a purely imaginary place where no one could be truly present. ... it certainly does not seem to me as if I was trapped inside a living brain when I am dreaming, but still, I know for a fact that that must be where all the stuff that dreams are made of is actually coming from. (p. 115)

It is quite the same for a VR system when someone is fully immersed in it. It does not seem that one is living within the Cybersphere but within an external world



Chapter 2.  Faith in world

beyond mind and body. It must be that what is going on inside of the brain, in dreaming and VR experience both, involves the inescapable illusion that the events we are directly conscious of are not taking place inside a brain at all, but in a complete, centered, perceptual world definitely external to the body and the brain. (p. 115)

The brain creates Illusion! And the same thing is going on in ordinary perception, Revonsuo believes. In dreaming as in VR technology as in ordinary waking life: the good old world amidst which we always already find ourselves is merely virtual. And what of reality? Revonsuo, like Metzinger, is a naturalist. He thinks that there is a reality in the waking case that we have a virtual version of, in contradistinction to the conditions of dreaming and VR technology. The philosophical theory of perception that underlies the world-simulation metaphor is called representative realism [indirect realism]. This view holds that the external world is real and exists independently of our experiences and representations of it; that accurately perceiving an external object is to be in causal interaction with it; and that the perception is realized not by an immediate or direct contact with the external world, but indirectly via a surrogate of the external object in consciousness, directly experienced. (p. 121, bracket added)

But all anyone could ever have on this theory is a virtual world. No one ever is directly acquainted with an external world according to Revonsuo, and Metzinger too. We must take on naturalistic faith that there is an external world which our virtual worlds well-model. An actual external world must be assumed by indirect realism, which only has re-presentations of it ex hypothesi. At this point skeptics would gag. So there remains a skeptical gap in his theory, a break which Revonsuo is well aware of. Regardless of one’s theory of perception, no one can provide an absolute logical proof of the existence of an external world ... . (p. 122)

It is logically possible that there is no external world at all. But not to worry. We just have to live with those logical possibilities. This is certainly not to say that we should have the slightest reason to think that any of those bizarre views have any truth to them. (p. 122)

The deconstructive eye, attuned to the margins, widens at the epithet “bizarre” and the scientific lapsus of appealing to what is “most reasonable.” The most reasonable scientific hypothesis for explaining the complex organization we find in our experience is that there is an external world out there, causally modulating the structure of experience through sensory systems. (p.122, italics added)

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“Most reasonable” is not good science, which has the capability of surprising us deeply. After all, experimentally well-confirmed quantum theory is definitely not “most reasonable.” Revonsuo throws down the gauntlet, which distracts from the failure of the theory of indirect realism. Can anyone come up with a rival scientific hypothesis that is different from the far-fetched solipsistic evil demon type of logical possibility, but still would have a ghost of a chance of being true? I fear not. (p. 123)

He again falls back pragmatically on what is “most reasonable” to counter the skepticism. So, again, the most reasonable scientific hypothesis for explaining the complex regularities and coherent organization at the phenomenal level during perceptual states is to suppose that there is an organized external physical world out there. (p. 123)

Failing to suppose there really is an external reality would start slippage — horribile dictu! — to absolute idealism. Revonsuo’s unembarrassed appeal to reasonableness can be found much earlier in G. E. Moore’s (1925/1980) classical lecture, “In defense of Common Sense.” Waggling his finger, Moore insists, This, after all, you know, really is a finger; there is no doubt about it; I know it, and you all know it. And I think we may safely challenge any philosopher to bring forward any argument in favor either of the proposition that we do not know it, or of the proposition that it is not true, which does not at some point, rest upon some premise which is, beyond comparison, less certain than is the proposition which it is designed to attack. The questions whether we do ever know such things as these, and whether there are any material things, seem to me, therefore, to be questions which there is no need to take seriously: they are questions which it is quite easy to answer, with certainty, in the affirmative. (Moore 1925/1980)

The quantum revolution underway at the time of Moore’s lecture puts an end to such arguments. Common sense assumptions that Husserl called the “natural attitude” can no longer be counted on. 2.3.6 Structural realism Direct realism runs into problems because the brain’s information is abstract relative to the phenomenal world of our acquaintance. The brain must then be interpreted cognitively, which leaves world outside its scheme as cognition’s object, and then world’s relevance has to be depreciated by behaviorist and functionalist strategems. The difficulty faced by indirect realism is quite different.



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If world is virtual — a model of an external one — then we have no direct acquaintance with an external world ex hypothesi and what world we do perceive is subject to transcendental conditions. The world for indirect realism must be propped up more than Revonsuo’s scorn. This issue is highlighted in the form of indirect realism known as “structural realism.” Structural realism (Born 1955, Feigl 1967, Maxwell 1968, Russell 1948, Schlick 1974, 1979) is a refinement of Kant’s ontology. The phenomenal world is known “by direct acquaintance” but reality is known only “by description” (Russell 1948), most rigorously in the models of science. We might have descriptions of reality only in terms of its abstract structural properties — its parameter levels and invariants and transition rules — not by direct acquaintance. We cannot be directly acquainted with real objects, with things of the world ... with one possible exception to consider. The possible exception of course is that real object which is our own brain. The ding an sich in the case where the ding is a human brain is the case of our direct acquaintance. Acquaintance through a brain’s transparent operations is the facticity of world-thrownness. So “real objects” are for us only abstract, with the one exception being real brains, whose functioning is perfectly transparent. But since world is not presented in the exception but rather “re-presented,” we are no closer to an external world. Indirect realism must believe in world on pragmatic grounds; it can never get there on its own. 2.3.7 Pragmatism The pragmatic realism of Rescher’s (2000) process philosophy is very clear in its faith. The existence of an objective world is considered to be a precondition for empirical inquiry. The assumption is to be “validated in the manner appropriate for postulates and prejudgments of any sort” (p. 96), viz., its practical value. Thus Rescher straightforwardly asks, “What can this postulation of a mind-independent reality actually do for us?” He finds important reasons why we must postulate “an objective order of mind-independent reality” (Rescher 2000, p. 100). Rescher appears to lean toward indirect realism. He wants “to preserve the distinction between appearance and reality, between our picture of reality and reality itself ” (p. 100). But his formulation is also consistent with a direct realism in which we selectively detect information of a reality that is simply there, a reality that we have in virtue of having its information. Rescher argues that the assumption of reality underlies the very possibility of communication between different people. We just talk about reality as if it is actually there, as if there are things an sich (“in themselves”), even though on reflection

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we recognize that we must always be limited to our “take” on them. In the social consensus involved in communicating we are each committed to an objective reality. That our conceptual scheme, which is committed to a mind-independent reality an sich, actually works out reflects back in support of that conceptual scheme. The ontological thesis that there is a mind-independent physical reality to which our inquiries address themselves more or less adequately ... has the epistemic status of a pre-suppositional postulate that is initially validated by its pragmatic utility and ultimately retrovalidated by the satisfactory results of its implication (in both practical and theoretical respects). (Rescher 2000, p.104, italics added)

Without a reality there would be on this view no truth, since truths state what actually is the case. Contingent truth needs to be nailed down to the way the world is in fact. It will become clear through the discussion of Jorge Luis Borges’ solipsistic idealism (2.41 ) that pragmatism is not inevitable. Suppose each of our lives was dreamed by some dreamer, whose life in turn was dreamed by some dreamer, ad infinitum. Pragmatic utility and retrovalidation by satisfactory results would be no different if each of our live’s were but someone’s dream. After all, Descartes, seated by the fire, could have “no certain indication” that he was awake rather than dreaming it. Pragmatism is “an ontological thesis,” as Rescher says, consistent with common sense praxis, but is it truly consistent with theory? Pragmatism is certainly consistent with classical science but quantum science gives it no support. The world of the pragmatic view is not explained in quantum theory, indeed, is tangled up with the notorious measurement problem. Quantum theory simply “lets Planck’s constant go to zero,” and lo, there is the world described by classical physics. Jettison Planck’s constant, which is absolutely fundamental to quantum theory, and only then does pragmatism become grounded. So the claim that pragmatism is “retrovalidated” by theory is unwarranted, since it does not well mesh with quantum theory. This means that pragmatism is retro­ validated only by pragmatic utility and so pragmatism is left self-validating. 2.3.8 Indirect realism as neutral monism Stubenberg (1995) usefully distinguishes between a neutral monism in which the neutral stuff is accessed in two incompatible ways (“double knowledge”) and one in which the neutral stuff has two incompatible modes of organization (“double modes”). Feigl (1967) illustrates the former by the planet Venus, which from one perspective is the morning star and from another the evening star. The highly developed proposal by Velmans (2000, 2003, 2007, 2008) is also a double knowledge theory.



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[R]epresentations in the mind/brain have two (mental and physical) aspects, whose apparent form is dependent on the perspective from which they are viewed. (Velmans 2008, p.43)

Velmans calls his theory a “reflexive monism.” In a reflexive universe, humans are differentiated parts of an embedding wholeness (the universe itself) that, reflexively, have a conscious view of both that embedding surround and the differentiated parts they think of as themselves. (2008, p. 47)

Reflexivity is built into ontology. It is assumed that a differentiated part of the whole has a perspective on both itself and the whole. The present focus is Velmans’ description of perceptual consciousness, which is consistent with, but cuts much more deeply than, Honderich’s (2.2.5). Velmans (2008) focuses on a (Kantian) phenomenal world that we consciously experience and brings into focus its “seeming out-thereness” (5). Velmans is attracted to the puzzle of “how the ‘phenomenal world’ relates to the ‘physical world’, the ‘world itself ’, and processing in the brain” (5). The phenomenal world is the world as perceived which “consists of what we see, what we hear, what we touch, what we taste and what we smell” (2000 140). The world itself — physical reality — is described by science. The neuroscientific story is what brain processing has to do with the phenomenal world as perceived. What we ordinarily think of as the physical world before us, through which we scurry on our life errands, has a certain “appearance.” If one looks at the ‘physical world’ it has the appearance of a phenomenal world composed of objects surrounding one’s body located and extended in a three-dimensional space through which one can move and with which one can interact. (2008, p. 8)

All these four expressions mean the same thing for Velmans: the “physical world,” the “phenomenal world,” the “world as experienced,” my “experience of world.” The world before us is not distinguished from conscious experience (which is just Honderich’s point (see 2.2.5)). [I]nsofar as experiences are anywhere, they are roughly where they seem to be ... . a pain in the foot is in the experienced foot, and this perceived print on this visible page really is out here on this visible page. Nor is a pain in the foot accompanied by some other, additional experience of pain in the brain, nor is this perceived print accompanied by some additional experience of print in the brain. (Velmans 2008, p.140)

To anticipate the discussion of Heidegger (3.4), we always find ourselves amidst a phenomenal world — we are already amidst it when we take notice of it — though Velman’s rendition of experience lacks the “thrown” quality of Heideggerian Existenz.

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Velmans quotes William James, Michael Tye and John Searle in support of his account. The reader of this page has a sense of life which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist. (James 1904 (Velmans, p. 16)) None of the qualities of which you are directly aware in seeing the various surfaces look to you to be qualities of your experience ... . if redness is one of the qualities and roundness another, you do not experience your experience as red or round. (Tye 2007, p. 30) [C]onsciousness consists in the appearances themselves. Where appearance is concerned we cannot make the appearance-reality distinction because the appearance is the reality. (Searle 1992, p. 121)

Conscious experience is actually an inference from the phenomenal world. If we try to focus on our experiences, we see right through them to the world outside. By being aware of the qualities apparently possessed by surfaces, volumes, etc., we become aware that we are undergoing visual experiences. But we are not aware of the experiences themselves. (Tye 2007, p. 30)

The phenomenal world with its various qualities (redness, roundness, etc.) is the only world we have but Velmans, as a scientific realist in the Kantian mode, is comfortable making inferences to “the world itself.” ... experiences themselves have qualities. These qualities usually represent aspects of the world in useful ways developed over the course of biological evolution, but are not necessarily qualities of the world itself ... . our everyday experiences must only be rough and ready representations of what is really going on ... . (Velmans 2008 p. 23)

But still, “what is really going on” is world-like. ... the appearances of the world only indirectly represent (and sometimes misrepresent) the nature of the world itself. (p. 23)

Here the phenomenal world and the “world itself ” are distinguished. One might ask, “If the phenomenal world is only a re-presentation of the world itself, then why does it seem a world-out-there? If conscious experience is a brain kind of thing, then how does it take on the qualities of an external world?” Velmans answers with a theory of “perceptual projection” (27). He insists that perceptual projection is an empirically observable effect ... an effect that requires explanation; perceptual projection is not itself an explanation. (p. 27)



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However Velmans quickly concedes “but we don’t know how this is done” (17), and adds, “but poorly understood perceptual effect does not place it beyond science” (29), instead inspiring scientific investigation.10 What Velmans does not question is a world itself that is re-presented. (The “no one doubts” in the following quotation flags the deconstructive attention.) No one doubts that physical bodies can have real extension and location in space. ... What we normally think of as the ‘physical foot’ for example is actually the phenomenal foot (the foot as seen, felt and so on). That does not stop us from pointing to it, measuring its location and extension and so on. (p. 35)

The phenomenal world is “projected onto objects and events themselves” (37) which exist at a given location, whether or not they are actually observed. How Velmans is basically conceiving of “objects and events themselves” is buried in a footnote whose point is that Velmans confines himself to classical macroscopic physics and “will ignore” quantum mechanics. “I refer here only to macroscopic things such as tables, chairs and cats” (ftnt. 13, p. 38). So Velmans retains faith in a real world of things-in-themselves — faith in Kant11 — that the phenomenal world re-presents faithfully enough that we manage to survive and reproduce. He provides a phenomenologically sensitive version of indirect realism which is a neutral monism. ... the one basic stuff of which the universe is composed has the potential to manifest both physically and as conscious experience. Given this potential, it seems reasonable to think of its ultimate nature as ‘psychophysical’, rather than either psychological or physical. (p. 41)

Here Velmans appears to shift to a double modes theory rather than a double knowledge theory. Velmans completely rejects any suggestion of idealism. Nor does it make sense to suppose that there is nothing there other than the experiences or thoughts we have about it (unless one is willing to accept all the consequences of Berkelian idealism). The critical realism I adopt assumes instead that there really is something there to experience or to think about, whether we perceive it, have thoughts about it, or not. (2000, p. 164) 10. Velmans turns to holography for an analogy, along the lines of Pribram (1971). 11. Velmans (2000 164–5) takes Kant to task for holding that the thing-in-itself is “unknowable” and finds Kant “extreme” and “self-defeating.” Velmans misunderstands Kant in failing to distinguish between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description” (Russell 1948). We cannot know things-in-themselves by direct acquaintance, cannot know their intrinsic nature, but can know them in their structural properties by abstract description. (See 2.3.6.) For a discerning discussion of Kant’s ding-an-sich see Langton (2004).

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Although it is logically possible that the world we experience is entirely illusory (along with the concepts and theories we have about it), the circumstantial evidence against this is immense. (p. 165)

He reverts to the usual pragmatic justification. We necessarily base our interactions with the world on the experiences, concepts and theories we have of it, and these representations enable us to interact with it quite well. (p. 165) If you bring an egg to the boil, then leave the kitchen for 3½ minutes, you get a soft-boiled egg whether you are watching it or not. (p. 28)

Nonetheless Velmans concedes the evidence against pesky idealism is “circumstantial,” however idealism does not “make sense,” indeed the whole notion is “absurd” (28). As in the case of Revonsuo (see 2.3.5) epithet catches the deconstructive attention. And what could be more prima facie absurd that quantum theory? 2.3.9 A gestalt version of indirect realism Steven Lehar (2003, 2004, 2008) is as staunch an indirect realist as any but brings fresh insights from a traditional gestalt psychology perspective. He reminds us of the too obvious to notice fact that the world consists not just in objects but transparent space too. Visual experience is certainly not solely a recognition of abstract world features but the world is “vividly experienced as solid three-dimensional objects, bounded by colored surfaces, embedded in a spatial void” (2004 2). The void of empty space has the same geometrical fidelity as objects in that space. Each point in space can appear either transparent or filled-in with color, and the brightness of each point is independent of whether it is transparent or colored. Lehar emphasizes spatial transparency by pointing to the clinical neurological phenomenon of “hemi-neglect” (Kolb and Wishaw 1996) in which not only are patients blind to one side (including denying the half of their body on the neglected side) but there is no space experienced on that side either. Since according to indirect realism the world that appears is in fact the brain’s representation of external reality and in that this appearance is a three-dimensional spatial structure, we should anticipate finding not just abstract information in the brain but volumetrically ordered information. This view resolves the “inverse optics” problem of hoisting a three-dimensional world when the order available from the retina is two-dimensional. The primary function of visual perception appears to be to solve the inverse optics problem, that is, to reverse the optical projection of the eye, in which information from a three-dimensional world is projected onto the two-dimensional retina. But



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the inverse optics problem is underconstrained, because there are an infinite number of three-dimensional configurations that can give rise to the same twodimensional projection. (Lehar 2008, p. 16).

The gestalt “law of prägnanz” operating within the visual system reduces this plethora by tending toward the simplest possible interpretation of the stimulus, which is what Lehar (2008 34) calls an “effigy”12 of the world, with missing information being filled in (“reification”). He observes further that the inverse optics computation is easier if the best interpretation is picked out of a pre-existing plenum of all possibilities by parallel processing rather than created by serial computation. Lehar (2004) concludes that the brain constructs a complex and elaborate bubble structure ... composed of patterns of electrochemical energy that take the form of a replica of the external world, complete with a replica of our own body at the center of that representational space. (p. 23)

This is a very typical indirect realism but phenomenologically astute and supplemented by gestalt principles. The central message of Gestalt theory therefore is that the primary function of perceptual processing is the generation of a miniature, virtual-reality replica of the external world inside our head, and that the world we see around us is not the real external world, but is exactly that miniature internal replica. (p. 47)

Lehar (2008) also works out a holographic mechanism (with a family resemblance to Pribram (1971, 1991)) to explain the brain’s productivity. Lehar supposes a volumetric structure — a bubble — constructed by interference between two coherent beams of light. A boson condensate is formed, as in pumping a laser. This bubble is in effect a plenum of possibilities (or “holoworld” (Globus 1987)) that functions like a phase conjugate mirror. When an incident beam is brought to a phase conjugate mirror, it does not reflect at an angle equal to the angle of incidence, as an ordinary mirror does, but instead reflects on the same line as the incident beam. The incident and reflected beams interfere and form a standing wave in the bubble. In Lehar’s brain version of optical holography the standing wave is formed inside the mirror. It is a function of both input and gestalt principles of organization (and appetition or intentionality, it might be added). The world we immediately perceive is actually inside our heads, a virtual world just as in Metzinger (2003) and Revonsuo (2006) (discussed in 2.3.4 and 2.3.5).

12. The etymology of “effigy” has to do with forming, as in constructing a voodoo doll. Lehar’s term is carefully chosen.

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Velmans (2008) is absolutely incredulous regarding Lehar’s proposal. How can the world and the vast dome of the sky be within the skull? Lehar makes this agreeable response. I am viscerally sympathetic with this objection, so much so that for years I too refused to accept the conclusion towards which all of the evidence points. It is indeed incredible to think that your physical head is larger than the dome of the sky. But science has discovered many things which were initially considered to be at least equally incredible; like the vastness of the universe, and its cataclysmic genesis from a singularity in space and time, and the bizarre nature of black holes, and of quantum phenomena. All of these theories were initially held to be incredible, but have since been accepted as established fact. And the reason why they were accepted is not because they have become any less incredible. Scientific fact is accepted on the basis of the evidence, regardless of the incredible truth to which that evidence points. In fact that is exactly what gives science the power to discover unexpected or incredible truth. When the obvious explanation is blocked by chronic paradoxes, it is time to give the seemingly incredible alternative a serious look. (Lehar 200413)

But Lehar’s effigy need not seem incredible. There is no need to look to future science. Velmans and Lehar are equally indulging in metaphysics, taking a privileged subjective vantagepoint and judging head to be small and sky vast. The look of the distant dome of the sky is just that: a way the world looks, a quality. And the book appearing close-by is a quality of world too, no more and no less peculiar than red or loud or sweet. Look at the sky through a pinhole and it comes close, while psychedelics may make it look ever so far away. The qualities of world as experienced do not necessarily imply a qualitative reality. That there actually is a vast sky over the bench on which we sit with humble heads and small prayer book in hand is something assumed by indirect realists, and direct realists as well, which the present discussion will not concede. The deconstructive task envisioned here is instead to understand both experienced world-thrownness — whether that world is vast or small — and a reality that is not a ground but “is” an “abground.” 2.3.10 Overview There is some skeptical tension endemic to indirect realism. In that the brain is said to “re-present” reality, the implication is that reality is in fact “present,” though not present as such to us. Typical indirect realists, like Damasio (1999), Metzinger (2003) and Revonsuo (2006), have faith in an external world. After all, that a world

13. http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/bubw3/response.html#Velmans



Chapter 2.  Faith in world 

is virtual — “in effect but not in fact” — already assumes a world facticity. The quotation from Damasio already given says it all. The object is real, the interactions are real, and the images are as real as anything can be. (p. 321)

Even though it would be conceded that strictly speaking, scientific realism can only describe the abstract properties of reality at various levels of analysis, belief that a world is there is overpowering. Such commonsense faith in the presence of a reality is buttressed not only by quotidian pragmatic success but by the extreme counter-intuitiveness of the remaining alternative: absolute idealism. However quantum neurophilosophy ought to expect common sense to fail, an expectation inherited from the extremely uncommonsensical theories of quantum physics. Quantum neurophilosophy should be prepared to embrace the deeply counterintuitive, but as next discussed, absolute idealism does not offer a viable solution. 2.4 Absolute idealism Absolute idealism has no faith in the reality supposed in direct and indirect perception. Nor does absolute idealism suffer their dualisms, whether the distinction between actually available information and information actually picked up or the distinction between information available and its constructed representation. The theory of indirect perception pretends to be a monism but is saddled with what Schopenhauer called the “World Knot,” that is, how to factor in consciousness. Direct perception gets away with monism only by denying consciousness and replacing it by embodied cognition and action. Absolute idealism intends to be truly monistic in holding that the only reality is mind. But as will be shown, absolute idealism easily slips back into faith. Two forms of idealism are discussed here, beginning with the solipsistic idealism so magically expressed by the great Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges (1899– 1986). Then George Berkeley (1685–1753) is considered. He wants to be a true idealist but in the end does not break free from realism. 2.4.1 Borges’ solipsistic idealism Borges (1998) is best known for fiction that is a dramatized form of philosophical inquiry. Borges twists the world of pragmatic common-sense and brings us to see alternative worlds and how they come about. His short story “The Circular Ruins” (Borges 1998, 96–100) is a fine example, whose solipsistic form of idealism sets a framework for the discussion that follows.

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A solitary man arrives by boat and drags himself from the river shore to the circular ruins of an ancient temple, which has been burned in some distant holocaust. There the man sleeps. In the opening paragraphs of this concise story Borges already sets the themes of dynamics (the river), memory traces (the ruins), and the sovereignty of the man’s isolation. The circular ruins of the temple in which the man sleeps are where ultimate truth will be revealed to him ... and to us. In the story Borges describes the man’s central labor, which is dreaming. He wanted to dream a man. He wanted to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality. (p.97)

The man spends a year dreaming the body. The countless hairs of the body were perhaps the most difficult task. The man had dreamed a fully fleshed man — a stripling — but this youth did not stand up or speak, nor could it open its eyes. Night after night, he dreamed the youth asleep. (p.98)

He comes to think of this dreamed youth as his son. The man goes on to dream a world for his son to live in, bit by painful bit. He populates the world and prepares it for his son, now awakened, to go forth into it. He even dreams the education of his son. Before the man sends his dreamed son into the man’s dreamed world, he appeals to the God of the ruined temple. The manifold god revealed to the man that its early name was Fire, and in that circular temple (and others like it) men had made sacrifices and worshiped it ... every creature, save Fire itself and the man who dreamed him, would take him [his son] for a man of flesh and blood. (p. 99)

So Fire does not touch the man’s dream son, and this is the only indication of the son’s true nature as phantasm. The man dreams all this, at the circular ruins of some great fire that had swept through the temple in the past. The man dreams a world indistinguishable from ours, a world in which lives the son he has created in dreams. Then one day there is the smell of smoke and Fire appears in the distance, coming slowly toward the man, finally enveloping him within the circular ruins — and then passing on, leaving the man untouched! The man then understands that he, too, has been dreamt by another. The power of Borges’ magical story-telling and our willing suspension of disbelief brings us to the point where the man with whom we have been identified recognizes in anguish that he, too, is dreamt, which forces the possibility that we, too, are dreamt. Subjectivity has primacy, world is its product ... an absolute idealism. So creation and annihilation are endlessly repeated in the dynamical circle, a cascading eternal returning that is somebody’s dream. Reality is the product of mind and has no independent transcendent existence.



Chapter 2.  Faith in world 

There remains a significant lacuna in the story, which should not bother a dramatizing writer but is of concern to philosophers, who insist on more rigor. In Borges’ narrative there is always a subjectivity assumed; the dreamer whose subjective self-discovery is buoyed up by some other dreamer, whose existence is in turn sustained by some other dreamer, ad infinitum. Borges’ idealism is thus dualistic, a metaphysics that assumes an autonomous subjectivity distinguished from world. Of course Borges’ purpose is to snare our imagination by his story-telling, and to break our expectation so we might suddenly glimpse ourselves and our worlds as products of a transparent dynamical process. Then the story is over and we are jerked back into quotidian Illusion, where we believe ourselves to be amidst a transcendent world in common. 2.4.2 Berkeley’s God-dependent idealism Borges’ solipsistic idealism lacks parsimony. Our waking lives are but dreams, humiliated lives in being dreamt by some other subjectivity who feels in control, only to be in turn dreamt by some superior other. Berkeley stops Borges’ unrelenting iteration of dreamers by fiat: God backstops it all. Berkeley’s idealism is as implausible as the solipsism he wants to avoid. (Hume famously said of Berkeley’s philosophy, it does not admit the slightest refutation nor does it cause the slightest conviction.) Further, there are clearly wafflings and inconsistencies in Berkeley (Foster 1982, 1985; Foster and Robinson 1985). The development followed here is where I take Berkeley’s heart to be. What we ordinarily consider to be an autonomous world out there — the world in which we always find ourselves already thrown — is a grand illusion for Berkeley. Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, to wit, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world have not any subsistence without a mind — that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit ... . (PHK, Part I, Section 6, italics added)

Berkeley is no nihilist, as the italicized “or else” reveals: there is “the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth,” which depend on God for their existence. Berkeley maintains that for the objects of the external world, Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them. (Section 3)

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The very Being of world is mental. Consequently for that choir of heaven and those furniture of earth, ... so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they ... have no existence at all ... . (PHK, Part I, Section 6).

In this quotation no “existence”means no autonomous transcendent reality for the heavenly choir and mundane world both. To be is to be perceived by some spirit. If Berkeley were truly an absolute idealist, stopping with Esse est percipi, this would not do justice to God’s glory (which being a minister, he deeply wants to uphold) and God’s creative spirit. Berkeley wants somehow to retain some kind of reality for world, which means ex hypothesi that it must be perceived. It would be difficult to explain a number of things if world had no reality: the persistent consistency of the world as we each experience it, intersubjective consensus across our experiences, indeed difficult to explain the prowess of science, if there were no external world to anchor the nomological net. Berkeley, however, hopes to avoid both skepticism and pragmatism. In the Second Dialogue Berkeley contrasts his theory with Malebranche’s “occasionalism.”14 I shall therefore not be surprised, if some men imagine that I run into the enthusiasm of Malebranche, though in truth I am very remote from it ... . He asserts an absolute world, which I deny. (TD, p. 154–5)

For occasionalism God, at each moment, creates both our experience of world and a world reality that fits it. There are according to Malebranche no effective causal relations between world objects, or between world and our experience, or between our volition and world. All seeming causality is due to God’s will on every occasion. God brings it about that the external reality that he creates corresponds perfectly to the laws of nature and dovetails with the internal reality of our minds. We are never the wiser. When the basketball player shoots the ball at the hoop, God wills the shot and makes it go in or out, and when the player is flagrantly fouled by his opponent, it is not the hit of contact that causes his pain but God causes the hit and simultaneously causes the pain. God’s will is enacted in a way consistent with the laws of nature and lawful mind-matter interactions. God regulates his own activity such that these laws of nature mercifully hold. Berkeley objects to the externalization of reality in Malebranche; there is no world outside of us, at least in the way that it seems to be. While denying external existence to sensible things, Berkeley nonetheless emphatically affirms their existence. 14. See Nadler (2000) on Malebranche.



Faith in world 

Ideas imprinted on the senses are real things, or do really exist; this we do not deny, but we deny they can subsist without the minds which perceive them, or that they are resemblances of any archetypes existing without the mind: since the very being of a sensation or idea consists in being perceived, and an idea can be like nothing but an idea. Again, the things perceived by sense may be termed external, with regard to their origin, in that they are not generated from within, by the mind itself, but imprinted by a spirit distinct from that which perceives them. Sensible objects may likewise be said to be without the mind, in another sense, namely when they exist in some other mind. Thus when I shut my eyes, the things I saw may still exist, but it must be in another mind. (PHK, Part I, Section 90 in entirety)

There is a world external to our minds but not to all minds. ... there is an omnipresent eternal Mind, which knows and comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our view in such a manner, and according to such rules as he himself hath ordained, and are by us termed the Laws of Nature. (TD, Third Dialogue, p. 173)

The esse of these sensible things is not our percipi but God’s concipi. God is pure agency who conceives an external world such that there is something that our perceivings correspond to. ... every unthinking being is necessarily, and from the very nature of its existence, perceived by some mind: if not by any finite created mind, yet certainly by the infinite mind of God, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. (TD, Third Dialogue, p. 179)

Our perceptions of an external world are not caused by an external world that God creates on every occasion, as Malebranche would have it. Nor would God, in His love, leave us with so cruel an illusion that world is a complete hoax. There is a world, a world which God conceives, not as mere thought but like an incarnate Athena born of Jove’s brow. There is an external world after all, according to Berkeley — but we don’t perceive it, its existence is God’s alone. The existent world rests on Her shoulders; all we have is ideas of world. So we perceive what God conceives, but Berkeley also speaks of the omnipotent God as perceiving. Hylas: Ask the fellow, whether yonder tree hath an existence out of his mind; what answer think you he would make? Philonous: The same that I should myself, to wit, that it doth exist out of his mind ... . the real tree existing without his mind is truly known and comprehended by (that is, exists in) the infinite mind of God ... . the very being of a tree, or any other sensible thing, implies a mind wherein it is  ... The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of

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this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds. (TD, Third Dialogue, p. 177)

After all, his theory requires God to perceive the tree in order for it to exist when no one of us is around to perceive it. For though we hold indeed the objects of sense [world] to be nothing else but ideas which cannot exist unperceived; yet we may not hence conclude they have no existence except only while they are perceived by us, since there may be some other spirit [God] that perceives them, though we do not. (PHK, Part I, Section 48)

Berkeley therefore requires a theory that relates God’s perception and his conception. Such a theory is readily available, he thinks, no more than I daily experience in myself, inasmuch as I perceive numberless ideas; and by an act of my Will can form a great variety of them, and raise them up in my imagination: though it must be confessed, these creatures of the fancy are not altogether so distinct, so strong, vivid and permanent, as those perceived by my senses, which latter are called real things. (TD, Second Dialogue, p. 155)

Whatever our limitations in imagination, God is up to it. And from the variety, order, and manner of these [real things, sensible impressions] I conclude the author of them to be wise, powerful, and good, beyond comprehension. (TD, Second Dialogue, p. 156)

The imaginative power of God’s conceiving creates world, a world existing in His mind. To be is to be perceived for God and man both. Berkeley anticipates an objection by scientific naturalism to God’s mind as causing the (passive) Ideas that our Spirit then apprehends. ... does it not seem absurd to take away natural causes, and ascribe every thing to the immediate operation of spirits? We must no longer say upon these principles that fire heats, or water cools, but a spirit heats, and so forth. Would not a man be deservedly laughed at, who should talk after this manner? But surely, one might object, it is a step backwards to abandon our scientific theories and simply note that God causes what happens in the physical world. (PHK, Part I, Section 51)

Berkeley’s response is that we do not abandon science but recognize that science only explains the regularities in our ideas and has nothing to say about their ultimate cause, which is God’s department. For Berkeley it is God who does the heavy lifting. God has timeless ideas embracing all possibilities, but only wills certain of them. God is a plenum who whittles down the infinity of possibility. (To anticipate discussions further on, God is a symmetry which gets broken.) God wills these ideas in such a way, as a good God should, that they turn up just when we expect and need them, that is, the ideas are willed in concordance with natural law. God’s



Chapter 2.  Faith in world 

will is not blind; it is cognitive, intentional. Our ideas “subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit” (PHK, Part I, Section 6). God is the ultimate plenum of possible patterns. Our Spirits then meet God-given Ideas and we perceive an actuality that behaves in accordance with natural law. The whole operation is so smooth, so transparent, we are none the wiser as to what is really going on. We think the transcendent world is right there for our subjectivity hereabouts, but that is an illusion according to Berkeley. Borges, as we have seen, procedes in this idealistic spirit, only substituting for God a vertiginous series of Gods. Berkeley’s 18th century absolute is succeeded by Borges’ 20th century Turing-like halting problem. 2.5 Overview World-thrownness is overwhelming, impossible to doubt experientially. Even in the bitter schizophrenic complaint that the world seems “unreal,” yet there remains a world, devoid of meaning, “empty,” boring (langeweilig) and strange (unheimlich) though it may seem. In the treacherous ground at the interface between science and philosophy, world-reality appeals as something to hold on to. For adherents of direct realism world goes unquestioned. We pick up its information in accordance with our actions on it. For those committed to indirect realism world is re-presentation. Then there is a bifurcation in the concept of indirect perception: either the true world is there and our perceived world is a virtual version of it or there is no true world, but instead a reality not knowable directly but with the perceived world re-presenting its structural properties only. For direct and indirect perception both there are still “things of the world,” whether the things perceived, things re-presented in perception, or things in-themselves (whose structure is perceived in the things perceived). Even in absolute idealism, which seems to be the opposite of thing-realism, Berkeley feels forced to posit things that God conceives, so that we might still say there “is” a world-reality, though not the one we find ourselves transparently thrown amidst. Our world is merely “idea,” Berkeley thinks, but it corresponds to a true world in God’s mind. World survives in Berkeley’s idealism. The purest idealist is Borges, for whom world is no more substantial than a dream-world, and subjectivity is the ultimate ever-receding ground. The common denominator of direct realism, indirect realism and Berkeleyan idealism is faith in a world reality of some type. In the next Chapter  “process philosophies” of Whitehead, Heidegger and Bohm will be discussed. On these views world-reality is continually derivative of a more fundamental process, but still there is a world of things that warrants some faith in reality. Whitehead does comment that if his proposal works out successfully, then “it becomes natural at this point to ask whether the type of thought

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involved be not a transformation of some main doctrines of Absolute Idealism onto a realistic basis” (PR xiii). The role of faith in world on the part of process philosophy, too, will be brought out in the next chapter, which continues the deconstruction of world.

chapter 3

Process philosophies 3.1 Introduction The central idea of process philosophy has been expressed by Rescher. Natural existence consists in and is best understood in terms of processes rather than things — of modes of change rather than fixed stabilities. For processists, change of every sort — physical, organic, psychological — is the pervasive and predominant feature of the real. (Rescher 1996, p. 7)

The framework of process philosophy emphasizes dynamics over substance. Three philosophers who emphasize process will be considered here: Whitehead, Heidegger and Bohm — but not in historical order. Bohm is taken up first. Bohm offers something new to ontology — “enfolded,” “implicated,” interpenetrated orders which are superpositions, as in a hologram. The process thought of Whitehead and Heidegger come into easier focus in the light of Bohm’s formulation. Whitehead’s process philosophy is considered after Bohm’s and is seen to have significant overlaps. Whitehead connects his philosophy to physics more through the theory of relativity than quantum theory. (Quantum theory was in early development in Whitehead’s day.) Bohm’s physics is more in the spirit of Einstein than that of the Copenhagenists — Bohr, Heisenberg & company — which makes the interface with Whitehead more natural. Finally Heidegger will also be seen to engage in process philosophy, though displaced radically from the tradition of science and mathematics with which Bohm and Whitehead are closely identified. Heidegger calls his version of process das Ereignis and proposes a dynamics of great ontological power. Heidegger (CP) has a distinct antipathy toward science — he would “leave it to its mania for its own usefulness” (CP 198) — but as Pylkkö (1998) points out, Heidegger was not much acquainted with the revolution of quantum theory and so could not see its potential relevance to his thinking. Nor did Heidegger care about Dasein’s brain.

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3.2 Bohm’s holonomic dynamics Bohm’s fundamental dynamic is called the “holomovement” (Bohm 1980, 1986, 1987. 1990; Bohm & Hiley 1993). The holomovement is “holonomic” (under the law of the whole). What “is” is holomovement, but “is” must be carefully reinterpreted: it lacks any connotation of Being, presence, perceivability, worldliness, indeed any distinction. The holomovement is pre-difference, pre-world, pre-spacetime. We might only say of holomovement, in the manner of the Vedas, “Neti. Neti.” Not this, not that, not something else ... not even no-thing (which presumes an objectuality to negate). To counteract the overwhelming sense of Being implied by ‘is’ — a word that English does not allow us to avoid for long — it could be written ‘is-X’, using ‘is’ sous rature, as Derrida put it, “under erasure,” using the term and then crossing it out. There are two primary phases of this holodynamics according to Bohm: implication and explication. Both phases are continuous and operate simultaneously rather than consecutively. Implication is the “enfolding” of world to the whole and explication is the cotemporaneous “unfolding” of world from the whole. Each moment of unfolding/enfolding has a brief duration. (On the “moment” see 5.7.) Bohm’s unfoldment is akin to Whitehead’s “creative advance” (3.3.2). It seems certain to us in living our quotidian lives that the world subsists autonomously (“the earth abides”) but Bohm steadfastly denies it. He thinks the world is continuously upheld in the movement of explication. The world is explicate order continually unfolded from implicate order, rather than explicate order persisting. Thus for Bohm the particle does not follow a continuous trajectory (seemingly implied by its visible trail in a Wilson cloud chamber) but the particle is unfolded from the whole at one instant and re-enfolded in the next, while simultaneous with this reenfolding a particle is unfolded from the whole. The seeming continuity of world is accordingly an illusion according to Bohm. The world is instead continually and consecutively unfolded in the dynamics of the holomovement, a world hoisted1 in the dynamics. Bohm leaves no stasis; he presumes no subsistence in his thoroughly organic philosophy. Bohm’s theory of the holomovement is a “double aspect” theory in the tradition of Spinoza. The neutral “substance” becomes dynamical, however, the unknowable holomovement, a tertium quid whose double “aspects” are implicate and

1. I mean “hoist” in the general sense of hoisting a sail, unfurling something new, which takes some effort. (Of course hoisting a sail implies the metaphysics of a hoister, which process thought wants to avoid.)



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies

explicate. Bohm is very specific about his double aspect2 theory. In the universal flux of implication and explication, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement. (Bohm 1980, p.11, ital. added)

These different processes are at dynamical parity yet ontologically one aspect is primary and the other quite secondary. That is, implication and explication are dynamically cotemporaneous according to Bohm but the implicate order is more primary to the dynamics than the explicate. The technology of “holography” well illustrates Bohmian holodynamics, though in a frozen form. In holography the emission from a coherent light source is split into two identical beams. One of the split beams is diffracted off the object to be imaged and then rejoins the other undiffracted beam and interferes with it, as waves will do. The “hologram” is a static record of this wave interference pattern. Remarkably, it has the entire order of the object enfolded to every region of it. That is, the order of the object is enfolded to every piece of the hologram. Then on transillumination of any piece of the hologram with the original coherent light source, the object reappears. (As the piece of the hologram that is transilluminated gets very small, the resolution of the image produced decreases.) In Bohm’s terms, the order of the object that has diffracted the half-beam becomes implicated or enfolded to every region of the hologram, after it interferes with the undiffracted half-beam. In image production the order of the object can be explicated or unfolded from any piece of the hologram. But holography is too static a technology to illustrate well Bohm’s conception. Holography makes implication and explication different steps whereas Bohm’s dynamical holonomy has them simultaneous, co-operative. Here is Bohm’s account of the holomovement. ... all things found in the unfolded, explicate order emerge from the holomovement in which they are enfolded as potentialities, and ultimately they fall back into it. They endure only for some time, and while they last, their existence is sustained in a constant process of unfoldment and re-enfoldment, which gives rise to their relatively stable and independent forms in the explicate order. (Bohm 1990, p. 273)

A dynamic of implicate potentiality is primary and explicate world is secondary (a theme that recurs in Whitehead). The holomovement and its holonomic operation are never observable. 2. Bohm’s term “aspect” is somewhat misleading. Double aspects imply ontological equivalency, as alternative aspects of a more primary neutral substance, but the implicate order is clearly primary for Bohm and the explicate order secondary. Thus his “aspects” are not ontologically at parity.

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The geometry of space-time as an explicate order can be mapped into algebraic relationships that characterize Wheeler’s “pre-space” (Misner, Thorne and Wheeler 1973). Pre-space is a kind of very fine foam out of which the familiar patterns and forms of continuous space, time, and matter emerge as approximations on the large-scale level. (Bohm 1986, p. 192)

The world concretions of Whitehead’s “creative advance” emerge from this foam. Bohm verticalizes the implicate order into infinite levels, which include the levels of macroscopic world reality and atomic structures, with each level unfolding from levels that are more comprehensive and fundamental. The atomic structure and the properties of solids are both real in their contexts, which are, however, limited abstractions from a total reality that cannot be grasped in any specifiable context. (Bohm 1986, p. 187)

Bohm thus has no compunction about a role for the brain in the continual becoming of explicate order. ... the actuality of becoming must be based on a kind of implicate order in the activity of the brain and the rest of the nervous system [receptors and sensory pathways] (Bohm 1986, p.185, italics and brackets added)

An emphasis on the implicate order accordingly does not preclude discussion at the level of a relatively autonomous explicate order. 3.2.1 The law of overall necessity As just baldly stated, the theory of the holomovement does not specify why it is that a particular explicate order is unfolded out of the infinity of possibilities, only that it is particularly unfolded. Bohm specifies the particular choice of explication but not explication as such. The holomovement is governed by “a force of necessity” which is a law that binds together a certain set of the elements of the implicate order in such a way that they contribute to a common explicate end (different from that to which another set of inter-penetrating and intermingling elements will contribute). (Bohm 1980, p. 195)

An explicate order necessarily comes out of the implicate whole. We can never get behind such a “force of necessity” to a more fundamental level. It is primitive to the dynamics. The law of overall necessity is holonomic.



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

Bohm’s conception of the holomovement, then, supplements implication and explication with a “force of necessity” which “cannot be understood solely in terms of the explicate and implicate orders” (Bohm 1980 195) or any other kind of basic principle. ... such necessity has simply to be accepted as inherent in the overall situation under discussion. (p. 195)

Pylkkänen (2007) dismisses the importance of such an assumption as “a mere theoretical curiosity” (92), since the law of overall necessity is inherent to the whole that we might never encompass. Pylkkänen’s expression of resignation does arch the deconstructive brow and pique interest in this law of overall necessity. So the infinite diversity of explicated particulars entirely depends on a “law of overall necessity.” However this law, which is the law that shapes explication, is itself in part based on explication. For, Bohm says, an understanding of the force of necessity “would take us to a deeper, more comprehensive and more inward level of relative autonomy” and this level “would also have its implicate and explicate orders” (1980 196). There is always a “deeper and more inward force of necessity” (196) so there is no bottom to the force of necessity, nothing but unending Borgesian vertigo. (The intent of Borges’ dreamers does the work of the law of overall necessity acting in our world, which for Berkeley and Leibniz is God’s will.) While accounting for particular explicates Bohm is left with an indefinable abyss, whose alluring aura of mystery obscures the deficiencies in founding his theory of explication. He does makes two related attempts at filling in the theory of explication as a primary process of the holomovement: “soma-significance” and “active information.” But neither attempt appears to succeed. 3.2.2 Soma-significance Bohm’s theory of the mind-matter3 relationship is called “soma-significance.” Here Bohm introduces a strong notion of hierarchy. Although he emphasizes that reality is an undivided totality, yet it can “for convenience, be thought of as being constituted out of relatively autonomous levels, which are organized into a hierarchy” (Pylkkänen 2007 29, italics added). The hierarchy extends from the more manifest (material) to the more subtle (meaning). Further, at each level of the hierarchy there are both somatic and significant (i.e. meaningful) sides. This formulation makes for a somewhat blurred conception, since the distinction between subtle and manifest is both vertical and horizontal.

3. Bohm does not consistently distinguish mind and consciousness, so his “mind/matter” is equivalent to what is called here ‘ψ/ϕ ’.

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There is further blurring in that “what is considered to be ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ is relative to the context” (Pylkkänen 2007 185). This distinction is only a matter of conventional habits of reference. There is no absolute and strict distinction between the mental and the physical, but they are different in the sense that typically the physical refers to the less subtle and the mental to the more subtle levels. (Pylkkänen 2007, p. 188)

Once explication is seen as relative to habits of reference, the motivation for understanding its mechanism is sapped. So there is a “convenient” hierarchy of subtlety and each level has both mind and matter as aspects. Causal properties obtain within this hierarchy of mind/matter levels. There is both an upward causal process (“soma-significant”) and a downward causal process (“signa-somatic”). There are accordingly two causal directions in the dynamics of soma-significance. In the soma-significant direction of the process, information is gathered from the world and enfolded, as it were, and such enfolded information is carried over to higher levels where its meaning can be apprehended. When apprehended, the meaning of the information is unfolded, and as it unfolds, it can have an effect upon lower levels, which is the signa-somatic direction of the process. (Pylkkänen 2007, p. 30)

Since all matter has a mental aspect, according to the theory of soma-significance, this amounts to a Bohmian version of panpsychism. And all mind has a material aspect, too. Here Bohm unhelpfully makes the ψ/ϕ problem into a ψ/ϕ problematic at each level. But this expansion of difficulty is obscured from view by Bohm’s neutral monism, viz. that mind and matter are basically abstractions which do not really interact, though we may conceive as if they do. ... we may for the sake of thinking about the subject abstract any given level of subtlety out of the unbroken whole of the reality and focus our attention on it ... . But the deeper reality is something beyond either mind or matter, both of which are only aspects that serve as terms of analysis. These can contribute to our understanding of what is happening but are in no sense separate substances in interaction (Bohm 1990, p.285).

Bohm thinks the problem of mind/matter interaction can be elided, when he has actually complicated it. Bohm also introduces a peculiar criss-crossing interactive duality. That is, at each level there are two aspects, manifest and subtle, which are not causally connected, while between levels there is “a two-way traffic between manifest and subtle levels” (Pylkkänen 2007 32). On the one hand mind and matter are double aspects of the same level, “correlated projections of an underlying ground” (Pylkkänen



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

2007 237). (The quoted phrase reminds of the “fulgurations” of Leibniz’s God. See 5.15.) This implies no causal relationship between them at their level. On the other hand, there are causal relationships between levels. Mind affects matter which is at a less subtle level and matter affects mind which is at a more subtle level. So there is no causal relationship between aspects at a level, while there is causality between aspects across levels. This ad hoc criss-crossing interlevel causality greatly complicates the Cartesian interaction problem but is forced by other of Bohm’s theoretical commitments. 3.2.3 Active information Supplemental to the theory of soma-significance, Bohm presents a more physical theory of the force of necessity. This theory highlights the control of matter by mind, that is, control of the “manifest” by the “subtle.“ It is called the theory of “active information.” Bohm arrives at active information by deriving a potential directly from the Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics, the “quantum potential,” designated Q. Q does not fall off with distance (consistent with Bell’s theorem). In the quantum field theoretical model this potential is called by Bohm the “superquantum potential.” These super-Q potentials play a kind of cybernetic role; superQ is the “force of necessity.” The activity of Q controls where a particle will be found and the activity of super-Q controls the found configuration of explicate world. What we have here is a kind of universal process of constant creation and annihilation, determined through the super-quantum potential so as to give rise to a world of form and structure, in which all manifest features are only relatively constant, recurrent and stable aspects of this whole (Bohm 1987, p.43).

Super-Q is creative advance’s law (which to anticipate (3.3.6), Whitehead called “the primordial nature of God”). The super-quantum potential is “active information” that shapes the process of explication. Super-Q expresses the activity of a new kind of implicate order. This implicate order is immensely more subtle than that of the original field, as well as more inclusive, in the sense that not only is the actual activity of the whole field enfolded in it, but also all its potentialities, along with the principles [of overall necessity] determining which of these shall become actual (Bohm 1987, p. 43, brackets added).

The mental and the physical are inseparable aspects of active information. The more subtle mental levels and the less subtle physical levels are able to influence each other because “there is active information that connects the mental and the physical sides to each other” (Pylkkänen 2007 190). This causal connection is between

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The Transparent Becoming of World

levels in that “changes in the less subtle levels can affect the more subtle ones, and vice versa” (195), which is the inter-level cross-causality already brought out. To appreciate where Bohm’s theory of active information falls short, it is helpful to focus on super-Q as a form of control. This cybernetic property of super-Q presumes there is already something for the controller to control. Thus in Bohm’s analogy of a radio signal guiding a ship, there is, after all, a ship. But Bohm provides no account of how the implicate order becomes explicate order, only why one explicate order is unfolded rather than another, which is determined by super-Q. When Bohm says that the holomovement is a “universal process of constant creation and annihilation” (Bohm 1987 13), there is a potentially misleading connotation, an implication that a something has been created and then annihilated (as with creation and annihilation operators in quantum field theory), whereas Bohm holds that in “annihilation” the creation of a something has ceased. At t a particle is unfolded at position s and at t+1 it is no longer unfolded at s but a particle is unfolded at s+1. Thus there is only creation, a continual creation. What Bohm thinks of as annihilation should be thought of as no longer created. Super-Q organizes the actualization and persistence of world but annihilates only by default of creation. Further, super-Q includes an infinity of potentialities; it is a plenum of possibilia, “along with the principles determining which of these [possibilities] shall become actual (Bohm 1987 43, bracket added). Super-Q is both potentiality and necessity. But Bohm’s “principle” here is a principle of selecting a possibility for realization and says nothing about how the realization is actually achieved. Pylkkänen is aware of this lack. He quotes Bohm, It is natural to suppose that the explicate space and time that we consciously experience is projected from its enfoldment in these deeper implicate orders (Bohm, 1986, p.198).

But Pylkkänen immediately observes, “However, he did not provide a detailed theory of exactly how it is projected” (Pylkkänen 2007, p. 181). Pylkkänen considers one explanatory option along the lines of Pribram’s (1973) holographic theory but this is a classical theory so will not do for super-Q. Pylkkänen also brings up the possibility that the brain constructs a “virtual reality” along the lines of Revonsuo (2006) but gives no account of how such a projection might actually be accomplished. He comments regarding the how of projection, However, we shall not consider this very interesting issue here. Instead, we shall move on to consider ... (Pylkkänen 2007, p. 181)

The deconstructive eye widens at such a “very interesting issue” so easily pushed aside to the margins of what is otherwise a wealth of presentation and discussion.



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

3.2.4 Bohm’s theory of consciousness Another area of Bohmian theory that draws notice is his theory of consciousness. Consciousness is both implicate and explicate. Bohm thinks it is a mistake to think that, as Pylkkänen (2006) puts it, this explicate order that we experience in consciousness is the essence of consciousness. Rather it ought to be seen as a relatively autonomous sub-totality that arises from the underlying implicate order of conscious experience ... the deeper essence of conscious experience has to be understood in terms of the implicate order ... . (p.103–104).

So consciousness is deeply implicate and superficially explicate. The explicate order is but the “‘manifest content’ of our conscious experience” (Pylkkänen 2007 127), a virtual reality ontologically distinct from the world. Bohm rejects any hint of idealism. ... we do not actually create the world. In fact, we only create an “inner show” of the world in response to our movements and sensations. (Bohm 1965c, p. 216) p 130

There is no doubting of the external world here, only the recognition that the world we actually experience is but the “inner show” of the true one. This is indirect realism. The explicate order of consciousness is a re-presentation of world but Bohm comes to the indirectness of perception out of Pribram’s (1971) holographic brain theory. There information is tranduced at the sensory receptor, is encoded by enfoldment into a hologram-like plenum of memory traces, and unfolded to the “explicate order of consciousness” under the influence of fresh input. The “inner show” is generated in brain unfoldments. But the “inner show” is not a mere passive mirroring of nature; it is shaped by the brain, which situates us. ... the information that is already in the brain can play a key role in shaping our experience. Thus, in principle, the brain could supply the “forms of perception” (space and time) and the “categories of understanding” (e.g.  causality) which could then be used to shape sensory input and make it into the “virtual reality” of a spatio-temporal conscious experience in which certain regularities (e.g. causality) prevail. (Pylkkänen 2007, p. 107–8).

The theory here is that of transcendental realism, though the mechanism of representation is new. Bohm’s world may be derivative, by explication from an underlying implicate order, but it is still a world with brains and all the other ordinary world furniture sitting in it.

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3.2.5 Discussion of Bohmian theory Bohm well qualifies as a process philosopher. The process is called the “holomovement.” This process is hierarchically organized, with higher levels more subtle, that is, more mind-like, and lower, less subtle levels more matter-like. Each level has two aspects — mind and matter — which have no causal connectedness, they are different aspects of a neutral reality. However, there is between-level cross-causality between the aspects. Bohm manages to be both neutral monist and interactionist, which blurs the failures of each. Bohm has the deep insight that the process’s fundamental order is “implicate” and that the process (of lawful creative advance) continually produces a derivative order that is explicate. Thus the holomovement has two equally fundamental phases, implication and explication, and two unequally fundamental orders, the primary implicate order and the derivative explicate order. The productive regime of the process is lawful, which Bohm calls the “law of overall necessity.” The law of overall necessity determines that some order will be explicated but its specific determinacy is left as primitive in Bohm’s theory as God’s will in Berkeley’s. Though Bohm decisively rejects substance metaphysics — his world does not subsist but is dynamical, created moment to moment — it remains an external world. Our brains actively create through holonomic mechanisms a virtual version of the external world — the manifest phenomenal world which we consciously perceive. For all of Bohm’s revolutionary process thought, he remains a classical indirect realist committed to consciousness. But his highly innovative proposal lays the groundwork for a more revolutionary process philosophy. 3.3 Whitehead’s philosophy of process4 3.3.1 Introduction Despite his reputation Whitehead is the most grounded of philosophers. Our datum is the actual world, including ourselves; and this actual world spreads itself for observation in the guise of the topic of our immediate experience. The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience. (p. 4)

4. All page numbers in the following discussion of Whitehead refer to Process and reality (PR), unless otherwise noted.



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

He is concerned with “stubborn fact” (xiv) as given in immediate experience while looking to the underlying process. The present intent is only to consider Whitehead’s philosophical system to the extent necessary for appreciating how world fits into it. Whitehead calls his system the “philosophy of organism,” which implies relatedness, inherent dynamic change, and holism, indeed, life. The philosophy of organism remains steadfastly pre-Kantian. Indeed, Whitehead is a great critic of Kant’s influence and of the conventional scientific realism which owes much to Kant. The philosophy of organism’s “principle of process” is that the being of an actual entity is “constituted by its ‘becoming’” (23). Materialistic philosophy is opposed to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism in that the matter of materialism has a “vacuous actuality” which is factual, simply commonsensically there, lacking experience or value, purely transcendent. The world for materialism lacks immanent interiority. The term ‘vacuous actuality’ [in materialism] means the notion of a res vera devoid of subjective immediacy. This repudiation [of the term] is fundamental for organic philosophy. (p. 29)

With this repudiation, what has vanished from the field of ultimate scientific conceptions is the notion of vacuous material existence with passive endurance, with primary individual attributes, and with accidental adventures. Some features of the physical world can be expressed in that way. But the concept is useless as an ultimate notion in science, and in cosmology. (p. 309)

For the philosophy of organism reality is instead rich in the fullness of its possibility. Whitehead anticipated Bohm’s “holonomy,” in which the whole has primacy. ... no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the notion of the universe ... it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. (p. 3)

Bohm has greatly furthered that endeavor. Whitehead himself and most commentators play down his coherence with Leibniz and emphasize the differences. When discussing process philosophy, Whitehead is much more inclined to bring in Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Bergson and James. Whitehead’s unabashed discussion of God does bring him to the vicinity of Leibniz, whereas God as such does not enter integrally into Bohm’s considerations. Like Einstein, Bohm equates God with Nature along the lines of Spinoza, while God in Heidegger is more poetically rendered. A further overlap of Whitehead with Leibniz can be seen in the relation of “prehension” to the “appetition” of Leibniz’s monad — the monad’s tendencies — though Whitehead’s account is far more elaborated. Each actual entity has an indefinite number of prehensions which have a “vector character” (19) in that they

 The Transparent Becoming of World

point to an external world in virtue of being tendencies for certain external worlds. (In their vectorial directedness prehensions can be construed as “intentional.”) Prehensions can be emotional, purposive, valuating and predisposing to act, as well as perceptual. Prehension thus resonates with Leibniz’s “appetition.” In more contemporary terms prehension is a “constraint” upon a nonlinear dynamical process. 3.3.2 Creative advance and novel concrescence A characteristic feature of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is that novelty is not adventitious, not the mere play of chance. Perpetual novelty leads to an untiring “creative advance.” With regard to the one (“conjunction”) and the many (”disjunction”), The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction ... . it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. (p. 21)

This is an “insistent concrescence into unity” (57). (‘Concrescence’ literally means growing-together.) In Whitehead this creativity is seen as ontological whereas in the metaphysics of the unmoved Mover found in Leibniz, creativity is a metaphysical principle identified with God. As will be discussed, for Whitehead “creative advance” is prior to God. What is fundamental for him is not a mere dynamics in which states succeed one another transformatively — which would be a dynamical version of metaphysics — but a productive dynamics, repeatedly productive of “stubborn facts,” generating world moment to moment. Whitehead’s dynamics can be translated into Bohmian terms, as already suggested. Creative advance as the “advance from disjunction to conjunction” is for Bohm a process of explication, that is, the many implicate disjuncts express an explicate conjunction or, as Whitehead would say, express a “concretion.” Of course the disjunctive in Bohm are not individuated, as Whitehead seems to do, but are interpenetrated disjuncts, superpositions. For Whitehead the many (disjuncts) become one (conjunct) whereas in Bohm ‘many’ is drained of meaning in the interpenetrations of the implicate order. The idea of many is succeeded by the undivided whole. Bohm is the more holonomic thinker in this regard.



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

3.3.3 Actual events A key concept of Whitehead’s is the “actual entity,” which is a successor concept to Leibniz’s monad. An actual entity is the facticity of an actual event and that alternative term of Whitehead’s will generally be used here. Actual events are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space ... . The final facts are, all alike, actual entities ... . (p. 18)

Thus “the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism” (35). However in the unity of their interrelatedness actual events form “nexūs” with varying degrees of complexity. Actual events entered into a compositional nexus can be unfolded in an indefinite number of ways. Each way of analysis is called a “prehension” (literally a grasping). The ultimate facts of immediate actual experience are actual entities, prehensions and nexūs. All else is, for our experience, derivative abstraction. (p. 20)

Prehensions can be divided and combined. They involve emotion, purpose, valuation and causation. There is a “concrescence of prehensions, which have originated in the process of becoming” (23). A concrete unified actuality is achieved by the various prehensions in the process of concrescence. Being is not autonomously there: it is a continual achievement. Whitehead’s process philosophy does not naturalistically assume Being, like we do in ordinary life, but describes the organic production of Being through a process of concrescence under constraint of prehension. Again, the many becoming a unity is akin to the many implicate orders exfoliating one explicate order. However prehension is not equivalent to the Bohmian law of overall necessity; prehension is a specific action, not a general principle. The ultimate real things (“creatures”) derivative from the creative process are like Leibniz’s monads in that they are experiential, “drops of experience” (18). Whitehead is a panexperientialist; experience pervades all reality. Actual events are, as experiences, sub-jective in character, but at the same time actual events are “super-jective,” in their tendencies. However Leibniz’s monads undergo changes of state — states are transformed to other states — whereas the monads of Whitehead’s conception become a new state at every moment. In this regard Leibniz is wanting as a process theorist.

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3.3.4 Time Time is similarly conceived in Whitehead and Bohm, another topic where their discourse stalks are braided. The past and the future are already implicit in creative advance, just as in the holomovement. Experience “perpetually perishes” as conscious experience, but leaves a trace in the new concrescent moment of becoming. The past is carried along in each moment.5 “The many become one, and are increased by one” (21). Not only the entire past, but the entire future, too, is integral to creative advance. ... the future has objective reality in the present, but no formal actuality. For it is inherent in the constitution of the immediate, present actuality that a future will supercede it. Also conditions to which that future must conform, including real relationships to the present, are really objective in the immediate actuality ... . In this sense, each actual occasion experiences its own objective immortality. (p. 215, italics added)

So the future is implicit in creative advance as constraining “conditions to which that future must conform.” These demanding conditions connect to Bohm’s “law of overall necessity.” For Bohm both past and future are implicate in that all possibilities are interpenetrated in the holomovement at any instant. Einstein’s universe is conceived as a “block” of space-time instants, whereas Bohm enfolds the block’s instants simultaneously to the holomovement. 3.3.5 Eternal objects Another key concept in Whitehead is the “eternal object,” which in fact does not have properties that we ordinarily think of as object-like. The eternal object is really a potential for matters of fact, so “eternal potential” might be substituted. In the case that an eternal potential is realized in an actual entity, Whitehead calls it the “ingression” of the eternal object. In Bohmian terms these potentials are implicate, and so never subject to decay or removal, hence “eternal.“ Infinite possibilities are interpenetrated in the plenum of the holomovement. The plenum of interpenetrated possibilities enfolds past and future too. The potentiality of eternal objects becomes realized in a particular actuality; ingression is equivalent to explication. The fruit of this process of realization is the “concrescence” already discussed. ‘Concrescence’ is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relation of each of the ‘many’ to its subordination in the constitution of the novel ‘one’. (p.211) 5. For the brain correlative to such conscious experience, an infinite capacity for memory traces is required—which is just what thermofield brain dynamics proposes. (See 4.6.2.)



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

The concrescence fruit of creative advance is an explicate order. The process of concrescence is neither a transformative progression nor a transformative regression in Whitehead but an “ingression.” So the eternal object is a pure potentiality for “ingression into the becoming of actual entities” (23), a potentiality that concresces into an actuality, or it might be said, an implicate order that is lawfully explicated under some necessity. The discourse stalks of Whitehead and Bohm are entwined. 3.3.6 God for Whitehead It must be made clear at the outset that Whitehead is anything but dogmatic about the introduction of God into his philosophy. ... we must investigate dispassionately what the metaphysical principles, here developed, require on these points, as to the nature of God. There is nothing here in the nature of proof. There is merely the confrontation of the theoretic system with a certain rendering of the facts. But the unsystematized report upon the facts is itself highly controversial, and the system is confessedly inadequate. (p. 405)

Whitehead then makes clear his motivation. Any cogency of argument entirely depends upon elucidation of somewhat exceptional elements in our conscious experience — those elements which may roughly be classed together as religious and moral intuitions. (p. 405)

In his predilection for God, Whitehead follows in the footsteps of Leibniz. Of course the God of Leibniz is a species of Aristotelian unmoved Mover. Contrastingly for Whitehead, God is not a meta-physical principle standing outside actual entities and controlling them. ... God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification ... . he is not before all creation but with all creation. (p. 405)

In Leibniz’s time, such a conception of God as created would have seemed blasphemous. More fundamental than God on Whitehead’s view is creativity. ‘Creativity’ is the universal of universals, characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. (p. 21)

Creativity is holonomic. In the creative process conceived by Whitehead there is the becoming of actual entities/events. God’s role in this is two-fold: “primordial” and “consequential.”

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The Transparent Becoming of World

The primordial nature of God is the constraint within the creative process and has no Being. God primordially is pre-Being, pre-actual, pre-spacetime, pre-conscious, pre-existential. ... we must ascribe to him neither fullness of feeling, nor consciousness. (p. 344

God imposes order on the ontologically primary process of creation. He makes certain eternal potentials relevant. God’s conception is “a free creative act,” an act “deflected neither by love nor hatred” (344). God is the principle that initiates a particular concretion from the infinite wealth of potentiality. God as primordial principle expresses what for Bohm is “the law of overall necessity.” God for Whitehead is on one aspect both primordial and highly abstract. His feelings are only conceptual and so lack the fullness of actuality. (p. 343)

Conceptual feelings are “devoid of consciousness in their subjective forms” (343). In stark contrast to Berkeley, nothing appears to a primordial God “who” is insentient and unconscious, “who” creates a particular outcome from the infinite wealth of potentiality in an unceasing creative advance. For both Whitehead and Bohm God constrains the dynamics. Whitehead’s “creative advance” with its continual flow of concretions does the same theoretical work as Bohm’s continual explications from the holomovement under the law of overall necessity. However the idea of interpenetration of “eternal objects” is not available to Whitehead. Platonic values in Whitehead are physically unlocated whereas Bohm’s way of thinking provides a potential physical home for them, as implicate tendencies inherent to the law of overall necessity. Platonic values enfolded a priori to the holomovement participate in structuring the flow of explicate orders, or in Whitehead’s terms, God constrains the flow of concretions by weighting the eternal objects. The divine ordering conditions creative advance. What has just been discussed is the “primordial” side of God, but Whitehead conceives a “consequent” side to God as well. ... the nature of God is dipolar. He has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. (p. 345)

Every concrescence is objectified in God. The world reacts on God and consequently completes his nature. If God were only primordial, then Whitehead’s ontology would consist in unchanging abstract eternal objects and a pure flux in which nothing lasts, so another aspect of God is called for which is more than conceptual — “completing the deficiency of his mere conceptual actuality” (349) — an aspect that is everlasting. This derivative nature of God “is consequent upon the creative advance of the world” (345).



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

The property of combining creative advance with the retention of mutual immediacy is what ... is meant by the term ‘everlasting’. (p. 346, italics added) ... the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost. (p. 346)

The consequent nature of God is devoid of “perpetual perishing” (347); concretions are never lost. In a contemporary word, the consequent nature of God is trace, a trace that saves. He does not create the world, he saves it. (p. 346)

Trace is a “perfected actuality” in which the many of the world become one everlastingly (350), that is, the permanent trace of the world’s many is continually and seamlessly unified and traced in God’s consequent nature. “The many become one, and are increased by one” (21). This is an “objective immortality ... everlasting in the Being of God” (351). So the primordial nature of God is to constrain the relentless creative advance by weighting the eternal objects. The consequent nature of God is to retain traces of the concretions achieved in creative advance. Without the primordial God, there would be no concretions that comprise world. Without the consequent God there would be only the forgetting of incessant flux. Whitehead thus distinguishes a cycle in creative advance “in which the universe accomplishes its actuality” (350). There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in actuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation. (p. 413)

This phase of the cycle lacks consciousness and is entirely conceptual. It provides “an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation” (350), tuning (determining the relative relevance of) the eternal objects. The next phase brings an ununified multiplicity of full actualities in accordance with the primordial God’s valuation of the eternal objects. The third phase is holonomic such that multiplicity is both unified and everlastingly traced. Then the cycle is begun again in retuning (“valuating”) the eternal objects. The introduction of God is not conceptually required by the cycle of creative advance, as noted in the introduction to this section. It is Whitehead’s predilection to bring in God, to delineate the phases of creative advance in God’s name, to recognize God’s patience, fellow-suffering and love in the process of creative advance. In this regime Whitehead follows in Leibniz’s footsteps. But we might also speak Godlessly, with Bohm, of a “law of overall necessity” that includes Platonic values, of explication and re-implication. What is important for process thought is the dynamical ontology, and here Whitehead and Bohm appear to converge.

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Whitehead’s God has strongly religious connotations, whereas the equivalent concept in Bohm is Nature. The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom ... (p. 346).

God is patient and tenderly saving. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty and goodness. (p. 346)

In the apotheosis of Process and Reality Whitehead writes that “the kingdom of heaven is with us today,” writes of “the love of God for the world” and that “God is the great companion — the fellow-sufferer who understands” (351). The discourse stalks of Whitehead and Bohm are separated here in the sheaf of discourse. 3.3.7 Whitehead and world Whitehead believes in an actual world available to observation as much as any substance philosopher. Our datum is the actual world, including ourselves; and this actual world spreads itself for observation in the guise of the topic of our immediate experience. (p. 4)

There is the case (if we are not deluded) “when we see a chair-image and there is a chair” (64). But he also emphasizes potentiality. Potentiality involves more than the possibilities offered by the eternal objects. There is also “the ‘real’ potentiality, which is conditioned by the [sense] data provided by the actual world” (65). The actual world concretion meets a prehension. Whitehead ends up with a process version of indirect realism dependent on sense data prehended in various ways. For example, the ingression of a visual sense-datum involves the causal objectification of various antecedent bodily organs and the presentational objectification of the shape seen ... the animal body is nothing more than the most intimately relevant part of the antecedent settled world ... . When we perceive a contemporary extended shape which we term a ‘chair,’ the sense-data involved are not necessarily elements in the ‘real internal constitution’ of the chair-image: they are elements — in some way of feeling — in the ‘real internal constitutions’ of those antecedent organs of the human body with which we perceive the ‘chair.’ (p. 64–65, italics added).

The concretions that world consists in are “antecedently settled” before our prehensions but not permanently so. They are continually exfoliated in the unceasing



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

process of creative advance, and the exfoliation provides sense-data that the brain processes through various stages of “causal objectification.” A “chair-image” is caused. Here Whitehead’s innovative process philosophy reverts to traditional indirect realism. 3.4 Heidegger’s process philosophy 3.4.1 Preliminaries There are numerous impediments to an appreciation of Heidegger’s philosophy so that it might be thought with process philosophy. As a sympathetic Schmidt (2001) says of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), “... I must be honest and say that what is fundamentally prominent about this book is that it is exceedingly difficult” (33, italics original). I shall refer informally to this major work as the Beiträge. Troubled translators of Heidegger are moved to write an extensive preface (Emad and Maly, CP) or add an appendix (Hofstadter, BP). But this is not just a German to English translation issue, more importantly our language is imbued with what Heidegger calls the “first beginning.” This is the tradition of metaphysics that began with the Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece. Heidegger wants an “other beginning” that is pre-Socratic in nature and difficult to speak of, indeed unspeakable. It is arguable, as Heidegger believes, that German is better suited than English for the other beginning, because closer to the original Greek, but return to the other beginning is arduous in both languages. There is another problem in discussing Heidegger in the present context. What we are presently attempting is an exposé of the perceptual, the transparent disclosure of world, whereas Heidegger is more concentrated on thought. His central problem in the Beiträge is how to think the unthinkable process he exposes in his work. He call his task “be-ing-historical thinking.” Of course Heidegger (BT, BP) is also concerned with Being as presence, especially in his earlier writings. His phenomenological descriptions of our existential world-thrownness are unsurpassed (and unencumbered by the weight of Husserlian methodology). But his focus in the Beiträge of the thirties is on being-historical thinking. Even with the clarification that we must forgo the first beginning for an other beginning, Heideggerian terminology remains inconsistent and confusing. We have to “think-together” with Heidegger in each context to grasp what the terms really mean. Let me give a little hint on how to listen. The point is not to listen to a series of propositions, but rather to follow the movement of the showing. (TB, p. 2)

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The Transparent Becoming of World

He even comments early in the Beiträge, “No one understands what ‘I’ think here” (6) and “No one grasps this” (7), though “the ones to come” (Sect. VI) will do so. Conceiving of Heidegger as a process philosopher will take considerable effort, and not only for those unfamiliar with Heideggerian thought, since Heidegger is radically “re-trieved” here. Heidegger never wonders what the brain has to do with world-thrownness. Dasein’s brain is of absolutely no interest to him, for that would be science, and science is utterly lacking in “truth” (CP 89). To bring science into philosophy, and so to bring in quantum brain dynamics, is a very great mistake according to Heidegger. Even more shortsighted is the alignment of philosophy with the ‘sciences,’ which has become customary — and not accidentally — since the beginning of modernity. (CP, p. 32)

He portrays himself as neutral with respect to science but his deep scorn easily shows through. Philosophy is neither against nor for science but leaves it to its mania for its own usefulness — for securing, always more easily and quickly, increasingly more useful results ... . (CP, p.198)

So the present book is at odds with Heidegger’s intentions, which contributes to the burdens of discussion. Like most philosophers of his time6 Heidegger simply did not see the brain as relevant. The present work unapologetically seeks to light the neglected interface of Existenz with “Dasein’s brain” (Globus 2003). The following sections offer a way of understanding key terms that Heidegger uses, or more carefully put, this is an “appropriation” of these terms (a maneuver to which Heidegger himself was no stranger). Apart from Sein, these terms tend to bleed excessively into one another. Heidegger does not share the definitive physicomathematical aspirations of Whitehead and Bohm, and so the present work goes against his will. At the same time it is a tribute to the resonant richness of Heideggerian texts that they might be taken within a quantum field theoretical horizon. Conversely, in the investigation of Dasein’s brain it becomes clear how quantum neurophysics is existential (Globus 2003). The strategy of the following rather dense discussion is to appropriate Heidegger as a process philosopher through consideration of key terms, a kind of terminological unfoldment. Of course different meanings might be explicated from the implicate richness of Heidegger’s meanings, so there should be no dispute over what Heidegger “really means.” 6. Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1963) is a clear exception.



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

3.4.2 Sein, Da-sein, the Dasein Sein is the easiest of Heideggerian terms to grasp ... this is usually just “Being” in the sense of presence. From the dawn of Western-European thinking until today, Being means the same as presencing. (TB, p.2) Being, by which all beings as such are marked, Being means presencing. (TB, p. 5)

World appears seemingly unproblematically. This is what Sellars (1963) called the “manifest world,” a world ready-to-hand (Zuhanden). Science, reliant on the manifest world in the transparent observation of scientific instruments, forgets the problematic of Being (Seinsvergessen) and unquestioningly uses it. What complicates the grasping of Sein’s meaning is that Heidegger has two deeply different versions of it: (1) The presencing Sein of metaphysics just discussed, which is the Sein of what Heidegger calls the “first beginning,” and (2) the Sein of the “other beginning,” which has no intimation of presence whatsoever. We know the actual as what is present, as the constant ... . In the other beginning, however, a being is never actual in the sense of this “being-present.” (CP, p.181)

In the Beiträge Heidegger usually distinguishes this second sense of Sein by Seyn, which the translation reminds of orthographically, by ‘be-ing’. But I shall consistently use Seyn for “Be-ing” in this unactualized sense of the other beginning. The term Da-sein emphasizes the disclosedness of Sein. The entity that is the Dasein has the “peculiar” character of “not being closed-up” (Unverschlossenheit) (BT 171). [T]he expression Da means ... essential disclosedness. (BT 171)

Hofstadter (BP), in translating Heidegger’s Basic problems of phenomenology (hereafter the “Grundproblem”), takes the “peculiar” Da to be an ability, The ability to open-up, to let-be-unveiled as uncovered or disclosed is the ability to exist as the Da. (p. 334)

So Sein refers to the presence of world and Da-sein refers to the ability to disclose Sein on the part of the entity Dasein. The Dasein is an entity, a special being among the beings that comprise world, a being like you and me. This being, the Dasein, like every other being, has a specific way of being. To this way of the Dasein’s being we assign the term “Existenz” ... . (BP, p. 28)

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The Transparent Becoming of World

The Dasein is a special entity in that it is not closed up. The Dasein’s opening discloses world, “clears” a world. (The affinity of “clearing” to light can be heard in Heidegger’s term die Lichtung.) Da-sein is naturally expressed in Bohmian terms7: the entity Dasein has the ability to explicate world. Explication dis-closes world from the impenetrable closure of implication. Strictly speaking,8 entities that are not the Dasein remain closed. The closure of entities is transparently breached by the Dasein. It is the Dasein’s great ability — founded in the biological evolution to the Dasein’s brain — to disclose world by explication from the holoworld. Heidegger does not discuss the Dasein’s brain, relegating that whole issue to science, as if the Dasein’s brain is merely an empirical matter without ontological import. However the Dasein’s brain strictly correlates with the Da, correlates with the essential disclosedness supported by the Dasein. The Dasein’s brain sustains the process of lighting, of transparently clearing, of Unverschlossenheit. Breathe an anesthetic gas and die Lichtung — the lighted place — rapidly dims and dis-appears. Under deep anesthesia there is scarcely more light than an old cabbage has, an unmemorable light. Verschlossenheit prevails when the Dasein’s brain is fed an anesthetic and Unverschlossenheit returns once the anesthetic wears off. What reaches its epitome in the Dasein’s fully functioning brain is flexible control on die Lichtung. The lighting-process is not passive; the Dasein’s brain constrains what lights up. Heidegger, of course, had no interest whatsoever in this as an ontic fact; his concerns are purely ontological. 3.4.3 Zeit Zeit is translated as “time.” However Heidegger’s sense of “time” is definitely not ordinary. What is “peculiar” to time, he says, “can no longer be determined with the aid of the current characteristics of time as commonly represented” (TB 10). Time is not a succession of Nows for Heidegger. And the Now that is always just now, Heidegger observes, “differs so vastly” (TB 11) from Being. Time is “a calculable sequence of nows” (TB 12) which differs from the Being of presencing world. Further, past Being and future Being are “stretched out” (erstrecken) within the time of the Now, whereas in the ordinary sense of “now” past and future are precisely what are excluded. A significant part of the lecture “Time and Being” (TB) is devoted to Heidegger’s characterization of his special sense of “time.” For time itself is nothing temporal, no more than it is something that is. (TB, p. 14) 7.

I of course force a marriage here between Heidegger and Bohm which neither would enjoy.

8. The issue of whether a chimpanzee, say, might in a certain sense disclose an extant world is bypassed here as not central to present purposes. Heidegger restricts Da-sein to man alone. See his discussion of animals in FCM.



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

To remind that Heidegger uses “time” in a very special sense, I shall just use Heidegger’s Zeit. That the Title  of the lecture Time and Being reverses the Being and time of Heidegger’s early book is noteworthy. Time becomes primary and Being secondary. An “echo”9 of this statement can be heard in Bohm’s formulation: implicate order is primary and explicate order is secondary. But implicate Seyn has a characteristic connotation in Heidegger, not found in Bohm, for Seyn “approaches,” it is “coming toward us” and “prevails” (13). An absence, to the extent that it concerns us, still presences, whether it be “not yet” or “gone before.” Of course Seyn does not approach us like a messenger on horseback but comes toward our concerns, at the same time withdrawing. There results a continuous, impermanent, transparent unfolding from the whole. Zeit has yet another characteristic in Heidegger’s rich sense. “It is in itself a reaching” (13). He applies the name Zeit to “the unity of reaching out and giving” (14), an ever-withdrawing unity that holds in embrace what has been, what is and what will be. Heidegger’s “time” accordingly has a “timeless quality.” In the reaching of Zeit there is the stretching of dimensionality. There can be “now” this minute and “now” this semester. There is the “future” that will be tomorrow and equally “future” in Doomsday. There is the previous moment and the previous year. Zeit temporalizes so that there is always already a not-yet, a now and a no-longer. Space is stretched, too. The child stands near its mother. Laguna Beach is near Newport Beach. Space is not statically a container but is continually provided. Thus Heidegger prefers to speak of a “time-space.” Dimensionality consists in a reaching out that opens up ... . Dimension, we repeat, is here thought not only as the area of possible measurement, but rather as reaching throughout, as giving and opening up. Only the latter enables us to represent and delimit an area of measurement. (BP p. 15)

Zeit is an opening that is pre-spatial, pre-temporal, pre-measurement, an opening indeed that is transcendental to dimensionalization. Heidegger develops a richer meaning of Zeit, perhaps most clearly in the 1929 Grundproblem lectures (BP), where he speaks of Temporalität, temporality. More than the mere dimensionalizing of Zeit, Temporalität is additionally horizonal; it does the work of intentionality’s directedness. Temporalität is ecstatic-horizonal, stepping outside-itself, transcending to world, transcending within some horizon. Heidegger appropriates here the Greek ekstaticon, which is originarily outsideitself. (Cf. how we are “transported beyond” ourselves in “ecstasy.”) The “temporal 9. “Echo” is the pregnant Title of Section 2 in Heidegger’s Beiträge. The metaphor of the echo conveys a sense of resonance, of extensive coherence.

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The Transparent Becoming of World

ekstases” are Heidegger’s attempted solution to the duality of the Scholastics’ immanence and transcendence. Ekstasis straddles the divide. It is a “just-so” solution. Since the Dasein does in fact find himself amidst (bei) a world, then Heidegger just assumes that the Dasein has such powers and calls them the “ekstases” of temporality. Heidegger is quite specific about the relation of Temporalität to intentionality. Intentionality — being directed toward something and the intimate connection of intention and intentum present in it — which is commonly spoken of in phenomenology as the ultimate primal phenomenon, has the condition of its possibility in temporality and temporality’s ecstatic-horizonal character. The Dasein is intentional only because it is determined essentially by temporality. (BP, p. 268) As ecstatic-horizonal unity of temporalizing, temporality is the condition of possibility of transcendence and thus also the condition of possibility of the intentionality that is founded in transcendence. (BP, p. 318)

Temporalität is the foundation for all of the Dasein’s horizonal openness, as “comportments” toward entities, “whether toward itself, toward others, or toward the handy or extant” (BP 318). The “horizon” that Temporalität “projects” (Entwurf) is an “open expanse” (BP 267). Temporalität opens in a specific way; it is situating, keeping us within certain possibilities. Temporalität “predelineates” world, has a “completely determinate schema” that it projects (BP 302). So Temporalität is both dimensionalizing and situating, that is, stretching time-space and situating in virtue of weighting possibilities for disclosure. 3.4.4 In-der-Welt-sein The entity the Dasein always finds itself in the world, already amidst (bei) the world, with a pre-understanding of world. ... before the experiencing of beings as extant, world is already understood; that is, we, the Dasein, in apprehending beings, are always already in a world. (BP, p. 166)

Heidegger’s expression for this pre-understanding is in-der-Welt-sein. The “world” we always find ourselves already “in,” a non-extant “world” in the sense of in-derWelt-sein, is not the sum total of extant entities. It is, quite generally, not extant at all. It is ... a moment in the structure of the Dasein’s mode of being. The world is, so to speak, Dasein-ish. (BP 166). World is not something subsequent that we calculate as a result from the sum of all beings. The world comes not afterward but beforehand ... .(BP 165)



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

In Heidegger’s sense of the word, “the world is not extant but rather it exists, it has the Dasein’s mode of being” (BP 166). The world is “something subjective” (167). This seems to open Heidegger to the charge of subjective idealism, a position that Heidegger finds “untenable” (167), while openly admitting that there are no decisive arguments against it. His attempt to deal with the issue of subjective idealism — remembering that the text under discussion is an actual lecture — is revealing. Heidegger first attacks conventional philosophical thought as “demagoguery,” then tries to mitigate the subjectivity problem by saying that realism is equally as unproved as idealism, and then tries to shift the problem to “the subjectivity of the subject” (167) and Da-sein’s projection of world (a “pre-delineation” of extant world in a “horizonal schema” (302)). Being-in the kind of “world” which Heidegger means is pre-ontological. The “world” of in-der-Welt-sein, then, is “an a priori of the Dasein” (Hofstadter’s footnote, 168), a world that exists “if, and as long as a Dasein exists” (170). World as transcendent nature, in contrast, “can also be when no Dasein exists” (170). Thus Heidegger decisively rejects idealism. The only way (pre-Kehre10) Heidegger provides for Da-sein to reach the autonomous transcendent world is by the “ecstatic” property of projection. In this projection the Dasein has always already stepped out beyond itself, ex-sisteri, it is in a world. Consequently, it is never anything like a subjective inner sphere. (BP, p.170) ... it is the “subjects” — in the rightly understood sense of the Dasein — which transcend, step through and step over themselves. Only a being with the mode of being of the Dasein transcends, in such a way in fact that transcendence is precisely what essentially characterizes its being. (BP, p. 299)

So in-der-Welt-sein is integral to existence and is to be sharply differentiated from beings within the world (“intraworldliness”), with ekstasis connecting them by assumption. Although Heidegger has a few kind words for Leibniz (BP 174–5, 300–1), Heidegger is no monadologist, though he does twice call the Dasein a monad (301). Heidegger observes that for Leibniz, ... the monads have no windows, do not look outside themselves, do not look out from inside their own capsules. The monads have no windows because they need none ... . each monad already represents in its interior the whole of world. (BP, p. 300)

10. There is disagreement as to just what was Heidegger’s Kehre, his turn, which is testimony to both Heidegger’s richness and obscurity. In the context of the Beiträge the turn is from the first beginning to the other beginning, from conceptual to inceptual thinking.

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The Transparent Becoming of World

But crucially for Heidegger, Nature can also be ... without a Dasein existing. (BP, p.175)

There is something which is not “world” in the sense of in-der-Welt-sein, but nonetheless “can also be.” The Dasein does not need a window to see Nature because in its transcendence Da-sein “is already outside among other beings” (BP 301). Heidegger does not doubt handy and extant external world. Transcendence is not instituted by an object coming together with a subject, or a thou with an I, but the Dasein itself ... transcends. The Dasein as such is beingtoward-itself, being-with others, and being-among entities handy and extant. In the structural moments of toward-itself, with-others, and among-the-extant there is implicit throughout the character of overstepping, of transcendence. (BP, p. 301).

So in early Heidegger the Dasein is a non-Leibnizian “monad” (BP 301) that ecstatically gets outside itself to an extant world. Heidegger clearly believes in an external world (while preferring to reserve the term ‘world’ for the attunement that is ‘being-in-the-world’). As the condition of possibility of the “beyond itself ” of transcendence, the projection upon praesens-present has within itself a schematic pre-designation of the where out there this “beyond itself ” is. (p. 306) ... the present is a being-open for entities confronting us, which are thus understood antecedently ... . (p. 306)

Heidegger never concedes an inch to idealism, never doubts the extant world “out there,” always accepts a world of “entities confronting us.” Being-in-the-world is transcendental (Pietersma 2000), a condition for the possibility of world disclosure. This belief in an external world is carried forward into the Beiträge, though masked in Heidegger’s Kehre (turn) to the “other beginning” and inceptual thinking. There remains the “ontological difference” between be-ing (Seyn) and beings (Seienden) but this distinction is not originary and indeed distracting, so it must be leaped over. Therefore the task is not to surpass beings (transcendence) but rather to leap over this distinction and thus over transcendence and to inquire inceptually into be-ing and truth. (CP, p.177)

A transcendent world is never denied by Heidegger. The Beiträge shifts the focus from Dasein’s ecstatic self-transcendence to the co-occurrence of being-there and what there is there, in its time-space specificity, including its whole context in world, community, history, language, memory and anticipation, textures of practice, etc. (Crownfield 2001, p. 216)



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

So there is both: a “my being in the world” and of what there is there and then, and before and after and round about. Be-ing happens. (Crownfield 2001, p. 216)

There happens to be a transcendent world, which Heidegger does not doubt in his thinking inceptually of the other beginning. This stance with respect to the transcendent world is coherent with the reality of Whitehead’s concretions and Bohm’s explicate order, while in-der-Welt-sein constrains, fulfilling the same role as Whitehead’s primordial God and Bohm’s law of overall necessity. 3.4.5. Seyn, Wesen11 Seyn (be-ing) is Heidegger’s most general name for what “is” but when deeply understood, Seyn “is not.” So Seyn is a “ground” in the peculiar “hesitating” sense (Zögerung) of abground. In Heidegger’s usage Wesen typically does not signify any essence as such. In Emad and Maly’s (CP) translation Wesen becomes Seyn’s “essential swaying.” The connotation of this translation of Seyn as “sway” implies control, tuning. (The demigogue “swayed” the crowd. As we turn the dial on the old analog radio we “sway” what the radio receives, adjust its receptivity.) Schoenbaum (2001) (also Vallega (2001)) has a different understanding of Wesen (different enough to catch the deconstructive eye). Here Wesen no longer implies the “sway” of tuned situating control. Wesung, then, means something like the simultaneous arising-and-falling or appearing-withdrawing of Seyn. (Schoenbaum 2001, p. 29)

Wesen here is not a certain constraint on the process but quite different: a singular, unique disclosure, an “appearing-withdrawing-from-appearing, coming-passing occurrence” (Schoenbaum 2001 20). There is no contradiction in the two translations of Wesen as swaying and as appearing-withdrawing. As an “occurrence” Wesen has a process character of presencing while withdrawing. As a “swaying occurrence” that is singular and unique, Wesen influences the process. These different translations show the complexity of Wesen, which is disclosive in a particular way. We can immediately recognize this dynamics of appearing-withdrawing or coming-passing as akin to what in Bohmian terminology is explication-reimplication and we can associate Wesen’s “sway” within that process with Bohm’s law of overall necessity. When Wesen is used below, then, it implies the essentially swayed

11. Emad and Maly (CP) consider Wesen and Wesung to be “the most crucial words for translating Contributions ... which defy a uniform English rendition” (xxiv).

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The Transparent Becoming of World

dynamics of a coming into presence whilst the swaying withdraws. The role of “withdrawal” in Heidegger is covered in the present discussion by “transparency.” 3.4.6 Abgrund and Zeit-Raum In metaphysical thought Sein is grounded — in atoms or monads or quanta, some type of matter — but Seyn is not a ground like that beneath our feet. Yet language forces us to say that “it” “is.” So Heidegger uses the term ‘ground’ (Grund) and in the same moment moves away from it: ‘ab-ground’ (Ab-grund). We can say, “There ‘is’ an abground,” but “it” has no connotation of thingness or presence. Even nothing is annihilated “in” Abgrund, in that no-thing presupposes a thing to negate. So Abgrund is not a groundlessness, or as Heidegger puts it so felicitously, not a “no” to every ground “but rather the yes to the ground in its hidden expanse and remoteness” (CP 271). Strictly speaking Abgrund is unspeakable, the whole about which nothing can be said, but Heidegger finds ways of speaking richly of it in Section 242 of the Beiträge, which is entitled “Time-Space as Abground.” (Occasional modifications of Emad and Maly’s translation are indicated by footnotes.) Abground is the “originary onefold of space and time” (CP 264), a unification as time-space which “above all lets them go apart into their separateness (264). Heidegger’s language in discussing abground is the language of active process. Abground is the staying-away (Weg-bleiben) of ground. (269)

Abground is withdrawing and so concealed. It conserves itself in its withdrawal, preserves itself but without any presence, “refuses itself ” (Sichversagen) and in this selfrefusal brings into the open its sheer “emptiness” (Leere). This emptiness is no mere absence of calculable and extant world; it is not no-thing but filled with possibility. ... “emptiness” is actually the fullness of what is still-undecided, what is to be decided ... (266).

The abground’s emptiness is inexhaustible and undecidable, “the sheltering-concealing of that which we call god” (267). (To anticipate 4.6.1, god is unbroken symmetry.) As abground withdraws, it at the same time in a sense saves itself in the disclosed form of world; abground “self-shelters” (verbergen), saves itself in clearing truth. What is ownmost (Wesen) to truth is “the sheltering of Seyn that lights up” (265). That is, truth is dis-closure which saves Abground in its very withdrawal. This preserving (sheltering, saving)-clearing “lets beings be” (p. 49). The sheltering itself is enacted in and as Da-sein. (p. 49)



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

The world for Da-sein is fascinating (Berückung12), a sheltered “wondrous arising” (Schoenbohm 2001 22), and only in “startled dismay” (Erschrecken) is Da-sein released from world toward withdrawing abground. This requires a “leap” (Sprung, Division IV) into abground, which only “the few and the rare” (Section 5), the “ones to come” (Division VI), can withstand. The leap inaugurates the “other beginning” and thought that is “inceptual” (sections 20–23), determining what is ownmost to emptiness itself — that is to say, to think the ab-groundness of abground, i.e. how ab-ground grounds. (266)

Abgrund has no “in” or “out,” no now hence no time. It is “prior to any dimensionality” and has an “undecidability” (CP 267). Abground is pre-objectual. Though “empty,” abground is not passive. It is both anticipating and remembering, “removing unto futurality and ... at the same time breaking open what has been” (268). Abground is “attuned from within” (268), “prior to any dimensionality” (267). In dimensionalizing, abground is “above all temporalizing and spatializing” (268). In their most original sense, “Time and space ... ‘are’ not, but hold sway (wesen)” (269). Abground is both pre-time and pre-space, transcendental to the unfolding of dimensionalized time and space. The mathematization of space and time is a construction of the “first beginning,” a constructing unnoticed in fascination with fallen commitment to the world in which we always already find ourselves. 3.4.7 Das Ereignis Heidegger conceives Seyn as a dynamics of abground, which plays a comparable role to Whitehead’s creative advance or Bohm’s holomovement. The character of this dynamics is that of das Ereignis. The translation of Ereignis is highly problematic. It is often translated as “event,” or more decisively, “event of appropriation,” but Emad and Maly (CP) sensitively translate it as “enowning.” Ereignis implies a movement of welling-up (which is the meaning of Er- (en-)). The connotation, however, is more intense than the welling-up of a spring in the verdant forest or the quiet river’s ever-changing flow. Welling has somewhat of an eruptive sense here, as when the well strikes oil and possesses its own gushing forth. But then, nothing is literally “owned” (-eignis), nothing possessed in the enabling of Ereignis. Abground is pre-owning, along with pre-space and pre-time. Seyn wells in two modes that resonate, belong-together. In the welling process each owns and is owned

12. Emad and Maly translate Berückung as “charming.” Dreaming Da-sein shows this fascination with world most strikingly—we are held rapt by the sometimes bizarre dream happenings—save for the occasional moments known as dream “lucidity.”

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The Transparent Becoming of World

by the other. Remarkably, this conception anticipates the belonging-together of the dual modes of thermofield brain dynamics (4.6). So Da-sein is situated, attuned in the unceasing welling-up. Da-sein and Seyn belong-together, fulfilling each other’s need for coherence in mutual resonance. The Ereignis character of the ontological process is that counter-resonance of be-ing and Da-sein in which both are not extant poles but pure and deep resonance itself. (CP, p. 201)

A process erupts out of abground, a welling process with two modes that resound in resonant belonging-together. 3.4.8 Das Zwischen Despite some sympathy for Leibniz (3.4.4), Heidegger does not want Da-sein to be a windowless monad. For pre-Kehre Heidegger a monadology is avoided by the positing of an ekstasis in which the Dasein gets outside himself in an originary “stepping-over” boundaries to a transcendent world surround. Transparent worldthrownness is the operation of monadic ecstasy in which the monad gets beyond its own boundaries. Heidegger post-Kehre shifts from ekstasis to Seyn and its character of Ereignis. The Dasein’s role is to disclose world, to reveal appearances within time’s opportunity. Looked at formally, there is a dual mode process — Seyn — whose state is “between two” (das Zwischen). The state of the between-two is where these duals transparently belong-together, which state is Da-sein. The duals are Being (presence) and time. Es gibt Sein. Es gibt Zeit. (TB 16). It is consistent with Heidegger’s position to say that the state of a statue of man, say, is between-two, but where the time aspect of the between is null. The statue is unable to accept Seyn’s gift, neither stretching dimensions nor tuning conditions of its own satisfaction under temporality, so the statue is not world thrown. Seyn (the Es with its Ereignis character) upholds Being and time, which belong-together as Da-sein, who finds himself transparently world-thrown. To support this re-trieval of das Zwischen some quotations from Zeit und Sein will be read closely. Man: standing within the approach of presence, but in such a way that he receives as a gift the presencing that It gives ... . (TB p.12)

Seyn sends Sein and Man accepts it. Man lets Sein appear in perception. [R]eceives as a gift the presencing that It gives by perceiving what appears in letting-presence. (p. 12)



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

Man lets Being be as world. If what Seyn offers does not reach man (e.g. under anesthesia), there is still Being — but a “Being” that is “concealed,” “closed off,” rather than disclosed. If man were not the constant receiver of the gift given by the “It gives presence,” if that which is extended in the gift did not reach man, then not only would being remain concealed in the absence of [acceptance of] this gift, not only closed off ... . (p.12, brackets added)

Being “remains” without man’s existence. Man is approached by Sein (presence), which is a gift from Seyn, and at the same time man cares about the gift, is concerned with what approaches. [M]an, who is concerned with and approached by presence, who, through being thus approached, is himself present in his own way for all present and absent [formerly present] beings. (p.12, brackets added)

Man finds the gift attracting (Berűckung) and in accepting it becomes “present in his own way” as Da-sein. Seyn’s gift is actually present but the process of receiving this gift is transparent for man. True, man always remains approached by the presencing of something actually present without explicitly heeding presencing itself. (p. 13)

Seyn “needs” (Not) man to dis-close Being. And man would not be man without the gift; man “needs” Seyn too. [I]f that which is extended in the gift did not reach man ... man would remain excluded from the scope of: It gives Being. Man would not be man. (p. 12) Because Being and time are there only in Appropriating (Ereignen), Appropriating has the peculiar property of bringing man into his own as the being who perceives Being by standing within true time. Thus Appropriated (geeignet), man belongs to Appropriating (Ereignis). (p. 23)

So man is not independent of Seyn: Seyn attunes Da-sein. “[B]eing attuned is to be grasped as the fundamental nature of our Dasein” (FCM 89). The attuning process is Zeit, a “reaching out and opening up of future, past and present” (14), a stretching of the dimensionality of space in addition to time, and a situatedness (in-derWelt-sein) too. Man accepts Seyn’s gift while under the “sway” (Wesen) of Seyn. Zeit is “the realm of the open” (19). Process is ontologically prior to thing; the latter is an event that is the creative explicative advance of world-disclosures. What determines both, time and Being ... in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the event of Appropriation. (TB, p.19)

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The Transparent Becoming of World

In the same moment that the dynamical process which is Seyn offers Sein and attunes Da-Sein, Seyn withdraws. This process in which world is dis-closed is accordingly purely transparent, and can only be fathomed in the “leap” (Sprung) to the unfathomable (unergründlich, cf. faden) and the “other beginning.” So the “pure and deep” resonance of belonging-together is the movement of Ereignis. Belonging-together is the achievement of matching between the Dasein’s dimensionalizing-situating and Seyn. Da-sein is the state of the between-two in which Seyn and the Dasein’s stretching-attuning belong-together. 3.5 Process and world in Whitehead, Heidegger and Bohm When viewed from a sufficient distance within the horizon of process philosophy, then Whitehead, Heidegger and Bohm can be well thought-together. Whitehead calls the process “creative advance,” for Heidegger it is Seyn and for Bohm the “holomovement.” There is a dynamical constraint on the process, similar across the three thinkers but with very different semantic resonances. God’s “primordial nature” provides the constraint for Whitehead. Heidegger calls the constraint Zeit (or in the Grundproblem, Temporalität), while in Bohm the constraint is termed the “law of overall necessity.” The constrained process has a product: “concretions” (Whitehead), Sein (Heidegger) and “explicate order” (Bohm). The process as such is without limitation. As Heidegger says in his rendition of holonomy, “Limitation (Einschränkung) is always subsequent to the originary whole” (FCM 333). This product — which I am calling “world” — is subject to continual creation and annihilation operations. A trace is left of the annihilated. This trace is called the “consequent nature” of God by Whitehead: the consequent God saves. God’s consequential love insures that nothing worth saving is lost. Trace in the consequent God provides “objective immortality” for what the primordial God conceives. For Bohm the trace is re-implication. The implicate order has room in it for something like memory, in the sense that previous moments generally leave a trace (usually enfolded) that continues in later moments, though this trace may change and transform almost without limit. (Bohm 1980, p. 208) ... each moment “remembers” the previous moments ... moments that no longer exist are in some sense present in the present moment. (Pylkkänen 2007, p. 137)

Whitehead’s objective immortality becomes an implicate immortality. Trace is more obscure in Heidegger. Heidegger applies the term ‘saving’ not to trace but quite the opposite. What is saved is a gift from Seyn, saved from the withdrawing that characterizes Seyn whilst es gibts, saved in momentary disclosure as Da-sein. Yet what is thus saved is retained as the what-has-been, in addition to the



Chapter 3.  Process philosophies 

what-will-be. Temporalität’s ekstases stretch past, now and future, and so Heidegger does provide for trace. What is most relevant to the present work is the status of “world” in the three process philosophies under discussion. The ontological priority of external world is undermined in the name of “process,” but there remains faith in a world out there, a world though upheld moment to moment by creative advance, by Seyn, by explication, nonetheless a world believed in. Whitehead, Heidegger and Bohm are equally committed to world and equally opposed to any taint of idealism. In this regard they are consistent with the direct and indirect realists discussed in Chapter Two. They would agree with Metzinger (see 2.3.4.) that there really is a book in your hands right now. Berkeley, too, remains committed to world, though now in God’s concipi rather than our percipi. (2.4.2) The storyist Borges (2.4.1) does stand out in his consistent deconstruction of world, but at the cost of an unacceptable metaphysical subjectivity. Chapter Five will offer a solution that involves a physical realization of Heidegger’s das Zwischen as “between-two,” but first in preparation, quantum brain theory will be presented in Chapter Four.

chapter 4

Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 4.1 Marching to a different drummer The first systematic attempts to view brain functioning from a revolutionary quantum theoretical perspective were made in the late sixties (Fröhlich 1968, Ricciardi and Umezawa 1967) and there has been extensive development since. The present Chapter discusses the three most prominent of quantum brain theories and critiques their neurophilosophical interpretations. Although differing in their visions of consciousness, these revolutionary theories share a comforting belief in the external world. It must be admitted that after over forty years of work in quantum brain theory, it still has not entered the main stream of brain science. There are several reasons that quantum brain theory must still actively lobby for attention. Brain science has been spectacularly successful under the background assumption that the “physics” of biophysics is mainly classical physics, relegating quantum physics to the ultra small. There is widespread contentment, furthermore, with the idea that the brain computes,1 however wetly rather than by dry silicon. Even with the interest in quantum computation that utilizes “qubits” and their superpositions, this remains essentially a mechanical process. (The Schrödinger equation, after all, is fully deterministic.) Fringe calls for “scientific revolution” simply go unheard in the triumphant clamor of contemporary brain science. A second reason that quantum brain theory remains isolated from brain science and its related disciplines is the widespread belief (Tegmark 2000) that the quantum “wave function” would quickly collapse in the environment of living tissue, which is so different from the near-absolute zero conditions of the laboratory. Given the hot wet brain environment, it is thought that the quantum state could not last but the briefest instant, and so quantum theory seems peripheral to brain science interests. Experimental investigation of quantum states in the living brain is in fact so difficult to accomplish that researchers confine their efforts to the

1.

For some contrarian views see Globus (1992), Mender (1994, 2007, 2008), Penrose (1994).

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The Transparent Becoming of World

rewarding doable.2 Quantum brain theory has no experimental underpinnings and so is waved off as “mere theory.” (But see Freeman and Vitiello 2008.) This issue of quantum state destabilization under biological conditions is where the “quantum Zeno effect,” first described by Misra and Sudarshan (1977), becomes relevant. This is a stabilizing effect of rapidly repeated measurements on the brain’s quantum state. As the number of measurements per unit time increases without limit, the probability of quantum state transition goes toward zero. So the Zeno effect sustains the quantum state against thermal interference. This “holding in place” effect of rapidly repeated observations ... is a macroscopic quantum effect in the conscious brain that is not diminished by the very strong interaction of the brain with its environment. (Stapp 2004, p. 254)

Vitiello (2001 97) observes, furthermore, that coherent interactions taking place at 10-14 seconds are, in their extreme rapidity, unaffected by thermal effects. So thermal noise does not shoot down quantum brain theory. Bohm and Hiley (1993) have wisely emphasized the connection of the quantum Zeno effect to process philosophy. The quantum Zeno effect brings out once again the essentially participatory nature of quantum interactions. To make measurements in very short times requires very strong interactions, hence very intense participation. The idea of measurement which implies that we are simply watching what is already there and not participating significantly, is seen to be particularly inappropriate in this example. (p. 132)

Hameroff (2006 241–2) has even suggested that such mechanisms as the quantum Zeno effect are selected in evolution for progressively larger superpositions and that a rapid sequence of orchestrated reductions of such high level quantum states “gives rise to our familiar stream of consciousness” (235). There is yet another obstacle to brain science taking seriously quantum brain theory, an even deeper obstacle that is philosophical in nature. Brain science proceding under the aegis of classical physics fully recognizes there is a deep problematic about consciousness but has faith that scientific advance will some day resolve it — and in any case, it is for the philosophers to figure out. Symptomatic of this belief is a contentious debate between two distinguished brain scientists, entitled 2. It should be noted that “quantum mechanics” applies only to certain aspects of living brain. The application of quantum mechanics to the atomic elements of macroscopic matter in thermal equilibrium assumes that those elements are vanishingly correlated (“thermalized”) and so can be approximated statistically. The diffusion process of ions across the cell membrane is well described by quantum mechanics. But in the case of the living brain there is also a strong mutual correlation between the atomic elements and so quantum statistical mechanics cannot be used in such a circumstance. Instead quantum thermofield dynamics should be applied. (See Jibu and Yasue 2004.)



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

“How does consciousness happen?” They find common cause in deferring the very issue of their title. (Such a disjunction between Title and text is a “marginal” that draws the deconstructive attention.) So where does the solution begin? Neuroscientists do not yet understand enough about the brain’s inner workings to spell out exactly how consciousness arises from the electrical and chemical activity of neurons. Thus, the first big step is to determine the best neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC) — the brain activity that matches up with specific conscious experiences. When you realize you are seeing a dog, what has happened among which neurons in your brain? When a feeling of sadness suddenly comes over you, what has happened in your brain? We are both trying to find the neuronal counterpart of each subjective experience that an individual may have. And this is where we differ. (Koch and Greenfield 2007, p. 76–77)

The dispute remains perfectly mechanistic, leaving the the ψ/ϕ issues deferred. Here revolutionary quantum brain theory (completely ignored by Koch and Greenfield) tries to come to the rescue, hoping to surpass the ψ/ϕ correlation and finally explain how consciousness “happens.” But this strategy jumps off on the wrong foot. “Consciousness” is ensconsed within traditional metaphysical notions and so there is mismatch with a quantum theory that deeply criticizes classical metaphysics. “Existence” and “Dasein’s brain” would be a better incision point (Globus 2003), but this continental perspective does not fit the conceptual habits of scientists, whether classical or quantum. In order to advance discussion we must march determinedly to a different drummer. 4.2 Stapp’s Copenhagen re-interpretation Henry Stapp (1999, 2004, 2007) explicitly places himself in the tradition of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory by Bohr and Heisenberg with its later amendments by von Neumann and Wigner, and carries that tradition to reach further and more consistently. Philosophically Stapp is an avowed pragmatist in the spirit of William James, while the Copenhagenists at the 1927 Solvay Conference (Henry 1984) were more implicitly pragmatic in the fashion of practicing positivistic scientists. Stapp describes the original Copenhagen conception and its extension as follows. The quantum wave function of a system, according to Schrödinger, is a deterministic equation. Under the early Copenhagen interpretation, from which Bohr did not waver, the wave function represents our knowledge of the system, a knowledge that before observation is inherently probabilistic. It is not until we actually make an observation that our knowledge becomes determinate. The

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The Transparent Becoming of World

observable states of the system that we might know depend on the measurements taken. Stapp labels the act of measuring the “Heisenberg choice,” which will be termed here (less subjectivistically) the “Heisenberg action.” It is the basic probing action that partitions a potential continuum of physically described possibilities into a (countable) set of empirically recognizeable alternative possibilities. (Stapp 2007, p. 24)

Prior to measurement there are only possibilities (Heisenberg’s “objective tendencies”) which are “eigenstates” of the quantum system. The collapse of the wave function on measurement to a specific state of affairs is “a choice on the part of nature” (24), a choice subject to chance. Nature’s random choosing of the particular collapsed state is called the “Dirac choice.” Stapp adds yet another process: the von Neumann choice is our free choice of the experimental apparatus to measure the quantum preparation, our willful decision regarding which experiment to make. The von Neumann choice is purely a subjective phenomenon which the Heisenberg action enacts at some moment. The von Neumann choice stands completely outside the physics; it is literally meta-physical. Consciousness, then, has two points of entry into the measurement problem: 1. The free conscious choice of experimental setup and measurement operations, which is “not determined by the quantum physical state of the entire world, or by any part of it” (Stapp 2009 248), not entailed by quantum theory as such, and 2. Conscious observation. To summarize Stapp’s discussion: The von Neumann choice is our free choice of a specific Heisenberg action for making an observation on the prepared system, which is deterministically/mechanically evolving according to the Schrödinger equation. Nature provides a probabilistic response (the Dirac choice) to our question freely asked. Our knowledge of the system changes discontinuously on measurement, jumping from interpenetrated probabilistic possibilities to a particular actuality. Thus our knowledge is only probabilistic before the chosen measurement but becomes specific on consciously observing the result of the freely chosen measuring action. Now the Copenhagen interpretation assumes a certain demarcation, proclaims a “partitition” between the distal quantum state preparation to be measured and some proximal classical measuring instrument. The philosophically wary might conceive another type of demarcation, between the consciousness of the experimental observer and the classical measuring instrument, which would be a “partition” between incompatible categories, but for early Copenhagenism conscious observation is just assumed naturalistically. There is an unquestioned quotidian power of a technician simply to read off the value of the experiment’s meter, wherever its arrow happens to point, exactly as in classical physics. Quantum physics merges into classical physics in the facticity of observation — a suspicious



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

anomaly in their otherwise radical discrepancy. Just cavalierly let Planck’s constant go to zero and the equations act classically. Von Neumann and Wigner pushed the Copenhagen idea further. The categorical partition between classical measuring device and quantum preparation is, after all, moveable. The measuring device just considered might be instead taken to be a part of the quantum preparation and a second classical measuring device brought in to collapse this more elaborate wave function. That is, the measuring device first considered could in turn be considered part of the quantum preparation, and the same in turn for the second apparatus. This view keeps “passing the buck” but not ad infinitum, for a terminal measuring device in the depths of the technician’s observing brain is finally reached. The brain is the final classical apparatus in this “von Neumann chain,” with the moveable partitition now situated between the brain’s depths and consciousness. Whereas in early Copenhagenism both sides of the partitition are ø, now one side of the partition is ψ. Here the purity of quantum mechanics becomes muddied by the consciousness/brain problems, doing it no service. So the observer’s brain becomes integral to the wave function as the moveable partition is shifted through it, ever more deeply — but finally there is nothing left on the proximal side of the partition ... except consciousness. Copenhagenism as revolutionary stalls at a crucial point. Stapp, extending von Neumann and Wigner, tries to bridge this residual ontological duality. I follow, therefore, the von Neumann/Wigner formulation, in which the entire physical world is represented by a quantum mechanical state, and each thinking human being is recognized as an aspect of the total reality: each thinking human being is a body/brain/mind system, consisting of a sequence of conscious events, called knowings, bound together by the physical structure that is his body/brain. (Stapp 1999, p. 9, italics added)

On close examination this move does not succeed. Stapp’s lumping of “mind” with “body/brain” goes unexamined. How are we to understand that conscious events might be “bound together” by physical structure? The conscious events/physical structure assimilation quite ignores the ψ/ø problematic. Again, But the central issue in the present context is precisely the character of the brain states that are associated with conscious experiences. (Stapp 1999, p. 8, italics added)

The “associatedness” here is just the correlation between ψ and ø, on which near everyone agrees since there is overwhelming empirical evidence for the correlation. Stapp thinks that every conscious event has “its physical image” to which that

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The Transparent Becoming of World

experience “belongs.” The correspondence of conscious and brain events is illegitimately segued to their integration. The mind of the human agent is now an integral part of the dynamical body/ brain/mind ... . (Stapp 1999, p. 12)

This is no advance over the Cartesian fiat of interaction between res cogitans and res extensa in the pineal gland. Stapp has assumed consciousness on one side of a partition and gives it the ability to make the von Neumann and Heisenberg choices that collapse the wave function on the other side of the partition, as if the partitition did not exist, or better, fundamentally changes the meaning of “partition” given in the Copenhagen interpretation: the partitioned sides have become categorically incompatible. What compels Stapp to breach the partition between ø and ψ? ... a person’s conscious thoughts can — and evidently must, if no new element is brought in — play a role that is not reducible to the combination of the Schrödinger and Dirac processes. (Stapp 1999, p. 12)

Since the Schrödinger deterministic evolution of the wave function and the Dirac choice by nature are logically insufficient for explaining the von Neumann and Heisenberg choices made, Stapp feels compelled to bring in “pure conscious experience,” which he considers both intentional and attentional, a von Neumann process that decides on and implements the Heisenberg choice. This is where Stapp’s naturalistic pragmatism comes to the rescue of ontological rupture. The only other known aspect of the system is our conscious experience. It is possible, and natural, to use this mind part of the body/brain/mind to produce the needed choice. ((Stapp 1999, p. 15, italics added)

In that the Copenhagen interpretation, when pushed out logically, needs to explain the von Neumann and Heisenberg actions, Stapp considers no other option for rescuing the theory than to haul in consciousness on the back of what is “possible,” “natural’ and “needed.”3 That revolutionary quantum theory goes metaphysical at a crucial point widens the deconstructive eye. 3. The role of consciousness here could be succeeded by Existenz, with the Heideggerian experimenter disclosing the experimental result. Without the experimenter’s Dasein no result would be perceived and the wave function would continue on its merry superposed way. For the Heideggerian rendition of the observer what is essential is world disclosure, which is the Dasein’s experimental calling. Without the experimenter-Dasein, the wave function evolves uncollapsed forever. Without the disclosure, without the lighting-up, there are only probabilities of what will be disclosed when some Dasein finally comes along. In disclosure the experimenterDasein fulfills his role.



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

... our experiences are elements of the causal structure that do necessary things that nothing else in the theory can do. (Stapp 1999, p. 20)

Stapp has no trepidation, nor sense of irony, at rescuing a bizarrely uncommonsensical quantum theory by an ad hoc quotidian maneuver. He wants “to find a rationally coherent conception of the reality that lies behind the empirical facts” (Stapp 2004 267). The only successful effort that he knows is the one that accepts as real the subjective elements of experience that are the basic elements of Copenhagen quantum theory, and relates them to an equally real, but nonmaterial, objective physical universe. (Stapp 2004, p.267)

This subjectivity is pure metaphysics, both a free conscious will that chooses the actions of measuring and a conscious perceptual observation that registers the measurement results. Stapp does recognize a residual ψ/ø problematic. He tries to deal with it by adopting a Jamesian neutral monism, whose roots lie in Spinoza’s double aspect theory. To form a rational comprehension of the interplay between the matterlike and mindlike parts of nature these two components ought to be understood as aspects of some single primal stuff. (Stapp 2004, p. viii)

These double aspects of the primal stuff are correlated. Thus (reminiscent of Whitehead) the brain has correlated “feelings,” the feels of certain actualized patterns of neural activity, [which] would be different if the patterns of neural activity representing those symbols were different. (p. 162)

(“Symbols” are patterns of neural excitation (153).) As in indirect scientific realism, Each experience exists, and has a structure that mirrors the structure actualized in the brain by the event it reifies. What could be more simple and natural? (162)

(The flourish of the rhetorical question raises deconstructive suspicions.) The event of the Heisenberg action “unites as its two faces the subjective and objective aspects of mind-brain action” (2004 172). These “two faces” are correlated double aspects with a common abstract structure. Certain Heisenberg events that actualize large-scale patterns of neuronal activity in human brains will be identified as the physical correlates of human conscious events. The critical condition for such an identification is that the two correlated events (i.e., the physical event in the brain and the psychic events in the mental world) be images of each other under a mathematical isomorphism [which] maps conscious events in a psychological realm to corresponding Heisenberg events in a physicist’s description of a brain. (Stapp 2004. p.20)

 The Transparent Becoming of World

Thus Stapp thinks that there are dual aspects of some presumed primal neutral stuff, dual aspects that conserve a common structure. This unresolved ψ/ø issue can also be seen in Stapp’s equivocation on “feelings.” On the one hand, there is “the experiential or felt quality of actual events” or “qualia” (157). Conscious mental events are “immediately present” (160). On the other hand, the feeling is an action, in that “brain processes are causally influenced by subjective conscious experience” (Stapp 2004 4). He quotes James approvingly to the effect that “consciousness is at all times primarily a selecting agency” (11), an agent that is efficacious. There are “actual events” in the alert brain “where a [von Neumann] choice is made ... between alternative possible instructions in the top level process” (Stapp 2004, 155, italics original). It is consciousness that makes this free choice, and so “consciousness becomes the efficacious agent that it veridically feels itself to be” (170). So one “aspect” of the “primal stuff ” is matter and the other “aspect” is a “feeling” that in turn bifurcates into the will and qualia. Despite all the quantum theoretical innovation introduced by Stapp, duality multiplies, which flags some defect in his formulation. The will plays its traditional metaphysical role in Stapp’s theory. Free von Neumann choices “are not specified by the currently known orthodox laws of physics” (Stapp 2009 224). Willful effort “triggers a quantum Zeno effect” (290) which holds an integrated quantum brain state in place against environmental decoherence and thermal effects. The greater the willful effort, the more rapid the actions and the more stable the state. Through the quantum Zeno effect, according to Stapp, “we can rationally explain, by using the basic principles of orthodox contemporary physics, the causal efficacy of conscious thought in the physical world” (256). But these feats of will presuppose an effect of ψ on ϕ. The quantum Zeno effect merely explains the continuity of ϕ as quantum state. 4.3 Stapp as process theorist Stapp is stoutly opposed to any “synthetic ontology” in which fundamental parts are substances assembled into a whole and feels a strong affinity to Whitehead (Stapp 2007, Chapter 13). His strategy goes from ontologically fundamental wholes to parts that are ontologically subordinate, and he states decisively: This shift from synthetic ontology to analytic ontology is the foundation of the present work. (Stapp 2007, p. 159)

Primacy goes to the dynamical whole and parts are derivative in the ongoing process. Quantum theory is not a tool, Stapp (1986) insists against Bohr, for forming expectations about observations under defined conditions.



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

Quantum theory describes instead a segmented unfolding of the classical world, which vindicates Whitehead’s “concretions” of “creative advance.” In particular, the actual is represented not by an advancing infinitely thin slice through the space-time continuum, but rather by a sequence of actual becomings ... . (p. 267)

Creative advance occurs in steps, but the unfolded world seems continuous, due to the “quantum Zeno effect” already discussed, in which rapidly repeated measurements on a quantum system will hold the macroscopic result in place so that the state is continuous despite the staccato process. The problem left unresolved here is that this macroscopic result is a macroscopic quantum state which is no actual becoming. Each moment of becoming induces restrictions on the tendencies for the next actual event (wave function collapse), which also lend to continuity. Although this becoming is an undivided process outside of space-time, the actual event is within space-time. Thus as regards tendencies the entire space-time continuum of relativity theory is involved in each step of the process of becoming. But as regards actuality, each actual event is associated with a bounded region in space-time. (p. 268)

The classical world that we engage continually collapses out segmentally in the quantum process of becoming, an interrupted process which is smoothed over by the quantum Zeno effect and the continuity in tendencies. Stapp’s ultimate pragmatic faith in world and his indirect realism shows through in the following quotations. To do its job the brain must evidently possess a representation of the body and its environment. I call this representation the body-world schema. (2004, p. 152)

He considers a triangle in the world and has no doubt as to its concrete externality. The act of attending to the external triangle implants this symbolic representation of the external world into the body-world schema. More specifically, this act of attending leads to an actual event that updates the body-world schema by actualizing an integrated chord of symbols that is “congruent” to the external triangle, in the sense that it will contain symbols that are the analogs of the various structural features that characterize the external triangle itself. (p. 156)

These neural “symbols” are re-presentations of a world that continually (in the quantum Zeno sense) collapses out of the dynamical becoming. The realization of an external world is already implicit in Stapp’s taking over the Copenhagen interpretation. As we have seen, the measuring instrument collapses the wave function into an observable world and the brain is just the last

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The Transparent Becoming of World

measuring instrument involved. The particular measurement is chosen by free intentional consciousness — and in the equivocation on “feelings” noted above, the world concretion is re-presented in the form of “qualia.” So when it comes to perception, Stapp reverts to classical views. What Stapp thinks of as the Heisenberg action does the work of “explication” in Bohm. They are equally process theorists. The explicate world of Bohm that is continually unfolded from the holomovement is governed by the law of overall necessity and is deterministic. In this determinism Bohm is true to the spirit of Einstein, and as we shall see in the next section, Penrose continues in this line of thought, too. Bohm (1957) does not ignore chance, the Dirac choice. Both causality and chance enter in. What is deterministic at one level can be at a deeper level a statistical average of chance fluctuations. Since Bohm does not assume a most fundamental level, determinism and chance are relative to the level of analysis.4 So although Stapp emphasizes the role of chance in nature in virtue of the Dirac choice and Bohm emphasizes determinism in the law of overall necessity that governs explication, there is not such a wide gulf between them. And Bohm has an unshaken commitment to world as much as Stapp. For both the world is gifted by process and the brain re-presents it, just as indirect scientific realism holds. Stapp and Bohm are both antithetical to traditional substance philosophy in their commitment to process, but pragmatically conservative with regard to the ontological status of world. 4.4 The Penrose-Hameroff hypothesis 4.4.1 Objective reduction (OR) Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff offer a very different view of wave function collapse than does Stapp, called “objective reduction” (OR).5 OR does not require any conscious von Neumann choice but takes place automatically. At the fundamental level of Planck scale geometry (10-33 cm, 10-43 sec) there becomes an actual separation of the entangled participants in the superposition. The Planck scale geometry curves in different directions; the geometry “blisters.” These separations are unstable and a spontaneous reduction occurs. Here nature makes the Dirac choice. The greater the mass of the participants and the greater the separation, the more rapidly the reduction takes place. For Stapp the 4. See the discussion on this point by Pylkkänen (2006 17). 5. See Hameroff 1994, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2006; Penrose 1989, 1994; Hameroff and Penrose 1996; Hameroff and Powell 2009. For a sympathetic account but in a postmodern spirit of decentered subjectivity see Mender (2007).



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

evolution of the wave function continues on until a subjective von Neumann choice is made. (In the famous story of the Schrödinger cat6, the cat is both dead and alive until observed.) For Penrose and Hameroff the wave function reduces in objective fashion due to the instability of separations in space-time geometry. (The cat is quickly either dead or alive before there is any observation.) The theory of orchestrated reduction avoids the ontological profligacy of “multiple worlds theory,” in which each of the possibilities continues to evolve independently — so the cat is dead in one world and alive in another — and the reduction to our world is one version of many worlds. OR reduces to but one world. 4.4.2 Qualia A further difference of Penrose and Hameroff from Stapp is that they introduce a qualitative “protoconsciousness.” Qualia are “primitive fundamental aspects of reality, irreducible to anything else, something like spin, or charge” (Hameroff 2000 11). The qualitative proto-consciousness is inherent to the Schrödinger equation in that all quantum superpositions are protoconscious. Protoconscious qualia are presumed to exist in Planck scale [1.6 x 10-35 m.] geometry everywhere, including the space-time geometry within the brain. Because spacetime at the Planck scale is nonlocal (e.g. as entanglement according to Penrose) the Planck scale configurations manifesting a particular set of qualia would exist both in the external world and in the brain. (Hameroff 2006, p. 240, italics added)

Precursors of consciousness “are presumably embedded in some way as discrete information states, along with other entities that give rise to the particles, energy, charge and/or spin of the classical world” (Hameroff and Powell 2009 124). Since the ubiquitous superpositions at the Planck scale support qualia, this theory is a form of panexperientialism, akin to Whitehead. All objective reduction “would be conscious/have conscious experience, perhaps as flashes of meaningless awareness” (241). Panpsychism survives even at Planck scale.7

6. Schrödinger describes a gedanken contraption in which quantum theory considers a cat to be in a superposition of an alive state and a dead state. Observation collapses the superposition so that the cat is either in an alive state or a dead one. 7. For Globus (2009) the descent of panpsychism halts below the coherence length which can be microns in scale. Hameroff appears to waffle on this point of the survival of bare awareness at all scales since the conditions for objective reduction are “rather stringent” (Hameroff and Powell 2009 124). A single electron in superposition would take ten million years to collapse and have its moment of bare consciousness (124). The descent into panpsychism may not halt for Hameroff but it can certainly be delayed.

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The Transparent Becoming of World

4.4.3 Objective reduction is orchestrated (Orch-OR) There are constraints on the Planck scale objective reduction; it is “orchestrated.” The brain specializes in orchestration (see 4.4.5) but orchestration is inherent to space-time geometry. There are “Platonic values” embedded in space-time geometry at the Planck scale, an a priori world of profound, timeless and universal mathematical forms, abstractions encoded to the geometrical ground. If the classical external world is not brought into being by a von Neumann subjectivity choosing the Heisenberg action, it must in some sense independently exist. Thus the natural numbers, the algebra of complex numbers, Euclidean and nonEuclidean, indeed all geometries, electromagnetic and gravitational equations ... It may well seem to the reader to be just a rag-bag of abstract concepts that mathematicians have come up with from time to time. Yet its existence rests on the profound, timeless and universal nature of these concepts, and on the fact that their laws are independent of those who discover them. The rag-bag — if indeed that is what it is — was not of our creation. The natural numbers were there before there were human beings, or indeed any other creature here on earth, and they will remain after all life has perished. (Penrose 1994, p. 413)

It is through the assumption of non-computable Platonic values embedded at the Planck scale that Penrose overcomes chance without having to resort to a von Neumann consciousness freely taking a Heisenberg action. The brain is unique in its orchestrative abilities. The brain’s inherent Platonic values might be compared to the Jungian archetypes, but more, the intentionality that brain upholds is an orchestrating process. Hameroff (1987) provides a detailed biological mechanism for the orchestration of objective reduction in living brain. (See 4.4.5.) 4.4.4 Consciousness The orchestrated objective reduction associated with consciousness is distinct from Planck scale qualia and embedded Platonic values. Qualia are a proto-consciousness inherent to space-time geometry everywhere and every time but consciousness at its ripest is solely a brain thing, something additional to the particular qualia that happen to be inherent to the brain’s space-time geometry. (Of course the brain’s qualia would be quite different from the qualia, say, of a pin.) Instead of the consciousness found in Stapp — the von Neumann choice initiating the process of collapse — consciousness is the result of that process. The state of orchestrated objective reduction is bluntly identified with consciousness. Consciousness is OR. OR is consciousness. (Hameroff 2006, p. 240)



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

Consciousness arises “at the instantaneous moment of reduction” and a sequence of reductions (which would be susceptible to the Quantum Zeno effect that Stapp enlists) “gives rise to our stream of consciousness” (240). Hameroff equates these reductions to Whitehead’s “occasions of experience.” 4.4.5 The brain’s orchestration of objective reduction Whereas Bohm by and large disregards brain biology and Stapp has a rather distant view of it,8 Hameroff details how the mechanisms would actually work in living brain tissue. Hameroff manages to make quantum brain theory seem less theoretical, even though not yet experimentally demonstrable due to methodological limitations in researching living tissue. Hameroff (2006) locates orchestrated objective reduction to the “microtubules” inside the neurons.9 These tubules occur at a very small scale, being 25 nanometers (nm = 10-9 m) in diameter. They are filled with water molecules, whose diameter is approximately.275 nm, so the tubule is less than one hundred water molecules across. The walls of the microtubular polymer consist of thirteen longitudinal chains of the protein tubulin. Each peanut shell-shaped tubulin (measuring 4 nm by 4 nm by 5 nm) can exist in two conformational states. Tubulin switching between conformational states plays the role of bits in computers. Tubulins are “dipoles” with positive and negatively charged ends. Fröhlich (1968) showed that “a set of dipoles constrained in a common geometry and electric field would oscillate in phase, coherently like a laser, if biochemical energy were supplied” (Hameroff 2006 221). Inside the microtubules there is a “water laser” (Jibu et al 1994), whose coherent oscillations are in the range of 10-9 to 10-11 seconds. Since a neuron contains at least 107 tubulins that switch conformation in nanoseconds (109 per second), there are on the order of 1016 operations per second for each neuron. Hameroff proposes that dipole tubulins, each in a particular information state, are capable of entanglement into a superposition. While in superposition, tubulin qubits communicate/compute by entanglement with other tubulin qubits in the same MT [microtubule], other MTs in the same dendrite, and MTs in other gap-junction-connected dendrites [where there is continuity between neuronal dendrites rather than separation by a synapse] 8. The exception is Chapter 4 in Stapp (2007). 9. All cells contain microtubules (formerly called the “cytoskeleton,” since it was thought to provide the structure around which cells are organized). However the microtubules of neurons have unique properties. For a highly detailed discussion of what is known about microtubules, see Wolff (2006).

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The Transparent Becoming of World

(i.e. within a hyperneuron). Thus quantum computation occurs among MTs throughout macroscopic regions of brain via tunneling through gap junctions or other mechanisms. (Hameroff 2006, p.233, brackets added)

So there is a microtubular basis for macroscopic quantum brain states. The dendritic interior alternates (at 40 Hz) between two phases: sol and gel. In the sol phase the tubulins are connected with neurons and hyperneurons and through them to the environment (for both input from the environment and action on it). Here information processing procedes classically. In the gel phase, in great contrast, the tubulins are isolated from their classical environment and partake in quantum information processing on tubulin entanglements. The “orchestration” of objective reduction is governed by information from the environment and by memory traces. The reduction as such realizes classical neurophysiological events and occurs at 25 ms intervals. The mechanism of OR, as we saw in 4.4.4, depends on the operation of the law of gravitation at the level of Planck scale space-time geometry (Penrose 1994, sect. 6.10). The orchestration of OR is by the intentionality realized in microtubular functioning. 4.5 Penrose-Hameroff v. Stapp Penrose’s geometrical perspective is influenced by Einstein and has an intimate connection with the tradition of substance philosophy. (Einstein’s general relativity theory is geometrodynamical.) Stapp’s more epistemological perspective is rooted in the Copenhagen interpretation and process philosophy. Penrose and Stapp in a way revive the famous Einstein-Bohr debate. Penrose (1993) is notably tentative in his proposal. He asserts that his “purpose” in Part II of his book is “to search, within scientific explanation, for some place where subjective experience might find a physical home” (406), but he does not find it. I must make clear ... that the arguments I have been presenting have very little to say on the positive side. They say that present-day computers are not conscious, but they do not have much to say about when an object would be expected to be conscious. (p.406)

Penrose seeks a non-computational process that might encompass consciousness in the terms of science. The conclusion is that whatever brain activity is responsible for consciousness ... it must depend on a physics that lies beyond computational simulation. (p. 411)



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

There is a mystery of how it is that perceiving beings can arise from out of the physical world. How is it that subtly organized material objects can mysteriously conjure up mental

entities from out of its material substance? (p. 413–4)

We simply do not know the nature of matter and the laws that govern it, to an extent that we shall need in order to understand what kind of organization it is, in the physical world, which gives rise to conscious beings. (p. 419) ... our mental existence emerges from but a minute portion of the physical world — a portion where conditions are organized in the very precise way needed for consciousness to arise, as in human brains. (p. 417–8)

Penrose has faith that science will ultimately describe a very precise neural organization which would give consciousness a plausible home and he is patient with the mystery. Hameroff passes over Penrose’s puzzlement over how ψ and ø might be brought together, by assuming it is so and rejoicing in the resulting consistency. To be consistent: 1) all quantum superpositions are protoconscious, and 2) any Penrose OR must be conscious [qualitative], regardless of where or how it occurs. (p. 240)

The rich consciousness that we enjoy is for Hameroff an evolutionary achievement founded in the proto-consciousness of all matter. Reduction for Stapp is in contrast dependent on von Neumann conscious choice, so the epistemological has primacy, diluted by the chance choice of Dirac from the weighted possibilities of the deterministic Schrödinger process. However consciousness is no less mysterious in Stapp than in Penrose and Hameroff, though it seems so, because of Stapp’s equivocation between consciousness as action and as qualia (4.2). Penrose’s formulation turns out to be the most authentic in the acknowledgement of mystery. Neither Penrose and Hameroff nor Stapp question the external world. Penrose clearly subscribes to good old indirect realism. There is an internal world “containing mental images of chairs and tables, and where smells and sounds and sensations of all kinds intermingle with our thoughts and our decisions to act” (Penrose 1994 412). And then there is the external physical world with its superficial and deep levels. Penrose catalogs its furnishings. It contains actual chairs and tables, television sets and automobiles, human beings, human brains, and the actions of neurons. In this world are the sun and the moon and the stars. So also are clouds, hurricanes, rocks, flowers and butterflies; and at a deeper level there are molecules and atoms, electrons and protons, and

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The Transparent Becoming of World

space-time. It also contains cytoskeletons [microtubules] and tubulin dimers and superconductors. (Penrose 1994, p. 412)

Then Penrose’s burst of eloquence suddenly falls flat. It is not at all clear why the world of our perceptions should have anything to do with the physical world, but apparently it does. (p. 412)

Hameroff is a staunch indirect realist too, for whom the world is virtual (as in Metzinger and Revonsuo discussed in 2.3.4 and 2.3.5). Consciousness involves phenomenal experiences, self-awareness, feelings, choices, control of actions, a model of the world  ... a simulated external world  ... . (Hameroff 2006, p. 193–4)

As for Stapp, the classical world that appears is not questioned. When one is describing one’s perceptions of devices lying outside one’s body the experience itself is well described in terms of classical ideas about where the parts of the device are and how they are moving. (Stapp 2007, p. 83)

World facticity overpowers these quantum brain theorists too. The next sections turn to another form of quantum brain theory called “thermofield brain dynamics” (TBD). TBD is not deeply inconsistent with the Stapp and Penrose-Hameroff formulations, or Bohm for that matter, but introduces a new thermodynamical degree of freedom and a somewhat different philosophical construction. It will be argued, however, that the development of thermofield brain dynamics comes no closer to resolving the ψ/ø problem, still foundering on the interpretation of world. 4.6 Thermofield brain dynamics 4.6.1 Symmetry and the water dipole field There are crucial differences between quantum field theory (QFT) and quantum mechanics (QM). QM supports but one physical phase, whose states are time-reversible and do not have a preferred basis in Hilbert space, that is, the states are “unitarily equivalent” as demanded by the von Neumann theorem fundamental to QM. The inequivalence of Hilbert space representations sharply distinguishes QFT from QM. These infinitely many unitarily inequivalent physical phases that are ground states are not reversible in time. Unitary inequivalence according to Umezawa (1993) provides “the basis of the physics of symmetry breakdown, ordered states and macroscopic quantum states” (xi).



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

It should not be thought that QFT applies only to the very small “microscopic objects” (in the physics, not the biological, sense) and that macroscopic objects do not come under quantum description (in virtue of letting Planck’s constant go to zero). Umezawa (1993) devotes the entirety of Chapter 6 to macroscopic quantum objects. It is a “misconception,” Umezawa emphasizes, “that quantum means micro and classical means macro” (p. 99), and explains, ... particle condensations create a rich variety of macroscopic orders in a system of quantum fields ... . any boson can form a condensate in a vacuum to create a variety of forms of macroscopic objects ... . the creation of a macroscopic object does not need a vanishing Planck’s constant but can use a condensation of a large number of particles. (p. 99)

To emphasize Umezawa’s point: Condensations of huge numbers (on the order of Avogadro’s number) of zero-energy bosons can occur over macroscopic domains while leaving Planck’s constant quite unmolested. Macroscopic properties of ferromagnetic systems, indeed any system having ordered patterns (lattice structure), “cannot be explained without recourse to quantum dynamical mechanisms” (Vitiello 2001 14). Size, then, is not a difficult issue for quantum field theory. It is the relationship between macroscopic world and macroscopic quantum objects that calls for explanation. This issue is integral to the “measurement problem” of early quantum mechanics, which still has no consensus resolution. “Macroscopic” flows consistently from QFT but this is not yet “world,” unless you assume it as is usually done. QFT also differs from QM in the former’s great enrichment by symmetry considerations (Rosen 2008, Zee 1986). “Symmetry” implies an undifferentiatedness, a lack of change on state transformation — transformation which does not distinguish — or put in physics terms, symmetry is the invariance of the dynamical equations, indistinguishable across states of the system. The group of transformations under which the form of the dynamical equation remains unchanged defines the symmetry. A change in the situation leaves some aspect of the situation unchanged; that is, under symmetry the transformed state is indistinguishable from the original state with respect to some aspect. For example, physical law is symmetrical under spatial translation. The laws of physics are the same here as there. Symmetry in QFT can be conceived as a form of plenum, a potentiality for differences. Order in this context is a breakdown of symmetry, brought about in the action known as “symmetry-breaking.” In the case of memory — the brain’s great achievement — broken symmetry is an order preserved. To illustrate, we consider constituents of the symmetry that have two poles with opposite electric charge, “dipoles,” imagined as double-pointed spinning tops. A vector arrow — the “electric dipole moment” — connects the poles, pointing

 The Transparent Becoming of World

from the negative to the positive pole. These poles are Heraclitean, having opposite charge with an electric dipole moment between them. Crucially for brain functioning, the water molecule has an electric dipole moment because the hydrogen side of the molecule has a small negative charge and the oxygen side has a small positive charge. (Biomolecules may also have electric dipole moments.) Then water molecules can be conceived as spinning tops with constant electric dipole moment. Now, water molecules are found in the deepest recesses of the neuron, inside the nanolevel microtubules. Because of the physical properties of water molecules, they form a crystal-like structure inside the microtubules. The dipole nodes of the water quasi-crystal are somewhat unstable, nothing like the lattice structure of a diamond. The quantum field theoretical structure of such a water quasi-crystal is called the “water dipole field.”10 The water-filled microtubules provide the interface of the classical brain system, as electrochemically described in normal brain science, with the quantum field theoretical structure that is the water dipole field (Hameroff 1998; Jibu et al 1994). Incoming classically described sensory inputs are capable of creating energetic quanta out of the vacuum state of the water dipole field. These energetic quanta are “corticons” and photons. There are no corticons or photons in the QBD [quantum brain dynamical] vacuum state; however, they are created as energy quanta and give rise to sophisticated physical phenomena through creation and annihilation dynamics if sufficient energy is supplied to the QBD system of the cortical field and the electromagnetic field. When a sufficient amount of energy is put into the QBD system from an external system  ... a number of corticons and photons corresponding to the amount of energy given from the external system are created, and further creation and annihilation dynamics of corticons and photons are triggered as a chain reaction. Then, the QBD system will lose energy to the external system and will fall once again into one of the QBD vacua. The vacuum state will be maintained there until another sufficiently high amount of external energy is injected. (Jibu and Yasue 1995, p. 172)

This activation-relaxation of the ground reminds of Freeman’s electrophysiological “frames” which segment the brain state (Freeman and Vitiello 2008). Jibu and Yasue utilize this formulation to identify corticon and photon excitation with “consciousness.” The vacuum state arises to consciousness by injections of external energy, failing which the system falls back to the unconscious vacuum state. Here the quantum Zeno effect (Mishra and Sudarshan 1977) would lend continuity to a segmented process. 10. Biological molecules are commonly dipoles, too, and form electric dipole fields, but for simplicity of presentation the present focus is on the water dipole field.



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

4.6.2 Symmetry-breaking and memory A strength of quantum brain dynamics is its account of memory trace in terms of the fundamental quantum field theoretical concepts of symmetry and symmetrybreaking. (Half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Yoichiro Nambu for his work on symmetry-breaking.) Symmetry-breaking in the dipole field of the water quasi-crystal inside the microtubules can be intuitively grasped in the analogous case of a bar magnet (where the dipole moment of the particles is magnetic rather than electric). When the bar is unmagnetized, the vectors of the dipoles are pointing every which-way, indiscriminately. Rotate each vector by the same number of degrees and nothing really changes — there are still a number of dipoles pointing every which-way with zero magnetization. Or translate each dipole of the unmagnetized state continuously in some direction and the overall relationships do not change. The whole is unaffected by continuous spatial translation of all the unmagnetized particles. In physics terms the particles of the unmagnetized bar just described have “rotational and translation symmetry,” their states remaining unchanged through rotations around the magnetic moment vector and through continuous particle translations. Rotational and translational changes leave aspects of the situation the same. However there is a fundamental shift with magnetization, when the magnetic dipoles are in their “ground state,” the least energy vacuum state. Now instead of pointing every which-way they all point in the same direction, are “correlated” pointing north. In this case symmetry is broken, the undifferentiated every which-wayness, whose transformations make no difference, is lost. Now there is only one way. Raise the temperature high enough and magnetization is lost, with every which-way symmetry restored. So on magnetization the undifferentiatedness that is symmetry is lost in the ground state. There all the magnetic dipoles point in the same direction, so if each were rotated by a fixed amount, there would be a change of state. Rotational symmetry is lost on magnetization. Further, this magnetic ground state has a crystal structure — with the particles at the nodes of a lattice — and so continuous translational symmetry is lost. (There can be no particle between lattice nodes.) The loss or “breaking” of symmetry with magnetization of the bar has to be balanced under fundamental physical law. The lost symmetry must be somehow preserved (a consequence of Noether’s theorem). According to the fundamental Goldstone theorem of QFT, conservation of the symmetry broken in magnetization is accomplished by the formation of massless particles (“magnons”). The Goldstone theorem extends Noether’s theorem to the symmetry-breaking case. Symmetrypreserving near-zero energy Goldstone bosons (or Nambu-Goldstone bosons) “condense” (Bose-Einstein condensation) into a coherent macroscopic whole when magnetization breaks the symmetry in the ground state.

 The Transparent Becoming of World

The case of the water dipole field inside the microtubules is analogous to the magnet. The dipole moment is electric, not magnetic, and the nodes of the water crystal inside the microtubules are somewhat unstable, but still in the minimal energy vacuum state of the water dipole field, rotational symmetry is broken when incoming signals from sensory and intrinsic brain systems dissipate their energy and rain into the vacuum state where the dipole vectors become cooperatively aligned. The rotational symmetry thereby lost is preserved by a macroscopic condensate of coherent Goldstone bosons, indeed stably preserved in the vacuum state. What initially excited Umezawa and coworkers (see Umezawa 1995) was the possibility of explaining memory traces by symmetry-breaking when the vacuum state becomes thus polarized. The brain’s Goldstone quanta, labeled “symmetrons,” which preserve the broken symmetry, might in effect preserve incoming order for later recall. Now as discussed in the preceding section, there is not just one vacuum state but an infinite number of physically distinct (unitarily inequivalent) quasi-zero energy vacuum states — labeled “θ-vacua” — on each of which a full state space of energetic states can be built. So there are infinitely many states spaces in QFT. Each of these θ-vacua of the water dipole field in the brain’s microtubules may become coded by the number of particles condensed there (the “order parameter”). The number of particles in the condensation is the only parameter of physical significance (Umezawa 1993 2.4.3)). The order parameter preserves the symmetry lost as a consequence of sensory input. These “symmetrons” function as traces of the brain’s sensory and internally generated input. Symmetron theory provides quantum brain dynamics with a mechanism for the infinite memory discussed in the preceding section. ... incoming energy changes the QBD [quantum brain dynamical] system and the result of modification is maintained as the transformed vacuum state. In this sense, the QBD system realizes a “learning” ability. (Jibu and Yasue 1995, p. 182)

It should be noted that as each new memory trace is laid down, the previous vacuum state is carried along to the new one. The resulting vacuum state reflects “both the former vacuum state and the creation and annihilation dynamics triggered by incoming energy from the external systems” (p. 174). It is remarkable that the entire past is continually carried forward into the immediate present, recreated as a relevant whole. So the current vacuum state reflects the entire past into which the present is continually enfolded.11 As a consequence, 11. A professor of psychology, highly intelligent and a keen observer, mentioned that up until late adolescence he was able to picture faithfully pages of text previously read. His eidetic memory was so good that even if during study he had skimmed over a page without really understanding it, he could visualize the page at the time of examination and read off the answer. He recalled feeling guilty about “cheating” by looking up answers in his eidetic memory. No theory



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

Once the vacuum state has been modified by the incoming energy — that is, by corticons and photons engaged in creation and annihilation dynamics — the QBD system will respond differently to energy received subsequently because the current vacuum state is no longer the same as the former one. (Jibu and Yasue 1995, p. 175)

Not only is the entire sequence of external stimuli throughout a life stored — a “total memory” — but remarkably, internally generated stimuli by the brain are also stored, “including all that one has thought, considered, or imagined” (189). Memory traces are subject to decay over time, that is, forgetting, due to quantum tunneling (Jibu and Yasue 1995, Section 55). So QFT can explain both total memory and forgetting in fundamental terms. 4.6.3 Consciousness Sensory and internally generated input reaching the Goldstone modes of the vacuum state triggers the excitation of corticons and photons which are coordinate with consciousness, according to Jibu and Yasue (1995). We regard the creation and annihilation dynamics of corticons and photons as the physical process of consciousness, which can be created out of the existing vacuum state by incoming energy. (p. 182)

When dynamical events trigger such creation and annihilation dynamics, the energy of the corticons and photons thereby excited is rapidly dissipated and the water dipole field settles into a particular θ-vacuum state, whose symmetrons encode the input order (along with all the orders from the past already encoded). Memory traces are symmetron traces. When the same or a similar input recurs, corticons and photons are excited, which recovers a conscious memory from the symmetron trace. So from the quantum brain dynamical point of view, the brain’s ground state consists in an infinity of θ-vacua some of which contain symmetron memory traces in the form of Goldstone boson condensates. The vacuum state undergoes irreversible transitions between θ-vacua (mathematically described by the Bogoliubov transformation). The θ-vacua are distinct, “unitarily inequivalent,” and offer an infinite memory capability. Symmetron traces are excited by inputs similar to those that originally laid down the traces, which recalls the memory into consciousness. For Jibu and Yasue incoming energy provokes the creation and annihilation dynamics of corticons and photons which constitutes consciousness. of memory based in classical physics could explain such a phenomenon. But the infinite resources of the quantum vacuum state makes such an eidetic ability intelligible.

 The Transparent Becoming of World

In Jibu and Yasue’s formulation memories are put into the vacuum state in symmetry-breaking but it seems also conceivable, following along the lines of Penrose, that Platonic values are a priori to the vacuum state, and their revival as corticons and photons is consequent to sensory inputs that match these a priori Platonic values. Jibu and Yasue further provide a specific quantum field theoretical mechanism for the “consequent” nature of Whitehead’s God. The consequent nature of God remembers everything in virtue of preserving broken symmetry and the unitary inequivalence of the θ-vacuums. Here two seemingly disparate stalks cross in the sheaf of discourse, an unexpected “belonging-together” which enhances the credibility of them both. Jibu and Yasue’s view, however, makes the usual category mistake that bedevils discussions of ψ and ø. Whether the brain is considered in terms of classical dynamical neuronal networks or quantum brain dynamics, these are physical categories which are prima facie incompatible with consciousness. The correlation of ψ and ø is not the most perplexing issue, which is how ø properties might “constitute” ψ properties. Ground state shenanigens be what they may, it is a great leap to consciousness. 4.6.4 Symmetry-breaking and macroscopic order Goldstone modes not only provide a mechanism for memory but also a bridge from Microwelt to Mitwelt quantum field theoretical descriptions. It is such a coherent collective behavior that macroscopically manifests itself as the ordered pattern: the microscopic quantum behavior thus provides macroscopic (collective) properties. We have a “change of scale,” from microscopic to macroscopic, and the ordered state is called a macroscopic quantum state. NG [Nambu-Goldstone or Goldstone] quanta are therefore also called collective modes. In the dissipative model of the brain these NG quanta are called “dipole wave quanta” (dwq) since they originate from the breakdown of the electrical dipole rotational symmetry. (Vitiello 2003, p. 317)

Such macroscopic quantum states can be superposed. This is the case of the Schrödinger cat gedanken experiment, where a situation is devised in which, according to quantum theory, a macroscopic structure inside a box is a superposition of a dead cat and a live one. What is argued over is not the superposition of macroscopic quantum states but the mechanism and timing of wave function collapse to a dead cat or a live one (Leggett 2005). (This is the transition from “mixed state” both to “pure state” one or the other.) In traditional Copenhagenism the collapse does not take place until conscious observation occurs but most physicists believe the collapse from mixed state to pure state occurs spontaneously before the



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

conscious observation; however the actual outcome is unknown (that is, known only probabilistically) until some conscious observer looks inside the box. That the observer finds a state of world on opening the box — with a dead cat or a live one — is taken as a matter of course. The segue from macroscopic quantum state to world state is obscured by a convention that is at heart metaphysical. (This issue will be taken up again in 5.5.) 4.6.5 The brain’s “connectivity” Classical brain theory can be recognized as a form of substance metaphysics. The discrete elements of substance are 100 billion neurons which are multiply interconnected at the many more billions of “synapses” between them. These synaptic elements are what classical brain theory focuses on, abetted by the analogy to the digital elements of computers, which is the defining technology that limits the contemporary imagination. There are other well-known ways, however, in which the neurons are actually continuous with one another.12 At numerous “gap junctions” there are breaks in the neuronal membranes so there is an actual continuity between neurons. Furthermore, there is an ultra-fine web that pervades the nervous tissue at the nanolevel (10-9 m.). The filaments of the nanolevel web are protein strands that do not respect neuronal membranes, but achieve continuity between intraneuronal and extraneuronal spaces via protein molecules in those membranes. (This web also pervades neuroglia cells, which are ten times more numerous than neurons.) The pervasive nanolevel filamentous web terminates as the hollow water-filled fibers of the microtubules. This pervasive web knits together a region of brain in a way distinct from much slower classical action potentials which are interrupted by synapses. So the water dipole fields of all neurons and neuroglia in an anatomical subsystem are a functional whole in virtue of a pervasive nanolevel web of protein strands and gap junctions. Communication takes place over the nanolevel web by means of “dipolar solitons” and “Fröhlich waves” (between 1011 and 1012 Hz in frequency). Solitons (Davydov 1973) are stable self-sustaining macroscopic dipolar excitations that are collective modes of many dipole oscillations. Dipolar solitons propagate with minimal loss of energy through the filamentous web. These collective soliton modes are capable of transferring energy with little dissipation along protein molecular filaments. Fröhlich waves are coherent electric dipole oscillations which propagate with minimal loss of energy through the nanolevel web. Gap junctions and the 12. This idea is along the lines of the “syncitium” envisioned by Golgi a century ago, before Cajal’s neuron doctrine came to dominate.

 The Transparent Becoming of World

nanolevel web, then, provide rapid intercommunication between brain regions. Indeed, it is known from electrophysiological recordings that communication between distant regions of the brain takes place too rapidly to be explained by classical mechanisms, which are slowed both by axon conduction velocity limitations and especially delays at synapses between neurons (Freeman and Vitiello 2006, 2008). Such cryptic mechanisms provide a quantum field theoretical account of the brain’s connectivity which is sharply distinguished from the classical mechanisms of neural network theory. This is tantamount to a thermodynamical model of information processing under nonlinear brain dynamics (Freeman 2008). Jibu and Yasue (2004) consider the dipole soliton and the water dipole field to be a single degree of freedom: the electric dipole field which spans macroscopic brain regions. This in effect translates quantum brain dynamics (QBD) into quantum electrodynamics (QED), which is well known and highly elaborated within quantum field theory. Remarkably, QBD is nothing but QED of the electric dipole field with symmetry under the dipole rotation. (Jibu and Yasue 2004, p. 278)

The total energy of the system is the “Hamiltonian” of the system. The symmetry property of the system is that the Hamiltonian is invariant under rotation of the dipole moment vector, with the momentous exception of the vacuum state which is of the symmetry-breaking type. 4.6.6 Dissipative systems For both QFT and QM the nondissipative system under quantum description may be treated for all practical purposes as if isolated, a system which does not exchange energy with an environment and so one whose energy is constant. When an environment is brought in, for the “dissipative” system to exchange energy with, then the system plus its environmental “heat bath” (which is in principle the rest of the universe) is treated as an isolated system whose total energy is constant. That is, the rest of the universe (or an immediate part of it as an approximation) is treated as the heat bath of the dissipative system under consideration. The dissipative system undergoes charge and discharge regimes in the interplay with its heat bath. Physics conveniently represents the dissipative system by a damped harmonic oscillator and its heat bath by an amplified harmonic oscillator. The living dissipative system is able to store energy as negative entropy (negentropy), an increase in order which is balanced by a decrease in order on the part of the environment, and later dissipate it back to the environment thereby reversing the process. The brain is a magnificent dissipative system for exploiting the balanced exchange of energy between system and environment. Its superb



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

ability to make quasi-permanent traces is negentropic. Such a dissipative brain naturally falls under quantum thermofield theoretical description. Quantum thermofield dynamics offers a theory of the dissipative system and its environment (Celeghini, E., Rasetti, M. & Vitiello 1993; Takahashi and Umezawa 1975; Umezawa 1993; Vitiello 1995, 2001; Vitiello and Freeman 2006, 2008). Dissipative system and environment are taken to be “mirror-images” of a certain kind. The ground state of the neurobiological thermofield system is of the symmetry-breaking type. The ground state is the least energy state, with its broken-symmetry-preserving Goldstone condensates. The “mirror-image” is a second quantum mode which is entangled (superposed) with the image mode in the ground state. The system mode is taken as the image by Vitiello and the environment mode is the mirror-image mode. The system mode is labeled ‘non~’ (nontilde) and the environment mode — which Vitiello calls the “Double” — is ‘~’ (tilde), e.g. A and A~.13 Vitiello’s segue from the dissipative brain and its environment to A and A~ requires a very careful reading, for his theory of consciousness will depend entirely upon it. Vitiello’s strategy is to portray the environment’s interactive exchange with the brain system in vacuum state terms. The only explicit condition imposed by the strategy has already been mentioned: that the energy flux between the modes is balanced. If one adopts such a strategy, a change in the system-environment reciprocal influence would corresponds to a change in the choice of the system vacuum: the system ground state story is thus the story of the trade of the system with its environment. (Vitiello 2001, p. 108)

Since the mathematical underpinnings of this theory provides the equations that describe the evolution of the vacuum states, the formalism must be capable of mathematically representing the environment. The environment may be mathematically represented “in the simplest way one likes, provided the energy flux balance is preserved” (109). (Note the great latitude granted in “the simplest way one likes.”) The simplest way is to have system and environment matching in energy. Then the environment is simply represented as the time-reversed copy of the system, the system’s “Double.” Vitiello represents this doubling of degrees of freedom within the vacuum structure, representing system and environment by the non-tilde and tilde modes of the vacuum respectively. The tilde modes are the ground state representation of the environment, whereas the non-tilde modes are the ground state representation of the brain system. 13. It should be noted that the ‘~’ does not have the sense of negating something because “thing”—objectuality—does not apply. We can only infinitely repeat, Neti. Neti., not this, not that, not ... .

 The Transparent Becoming of World

The mathematical and physical meaning of the tilde-system is to describe the environment to which the brain is permanently coupled (linked). (Vitiello 2001, p. 140)

In this way the duality of the dissipative brain and its environment becomes the duality of non-tilde and tilde modes of the vacuum state. The “Double” of Vitiello’s (2001) book title, My double unveiled, is the environment mode required by quantum thermofield dynamics as double to the system mode. The new and profound ontological resource provided by thermofield dynamics is this doubling carried to a vacuum state of the symmetry-breaking type. The idea of a “doubling” of modes is already contained in the relevant mathematics. The q-deformed Hopf algebra (which Vitiello considers the most appropriate mathematics for dissipative systems) has doubled degrees of freedom, and doubling is also assumed in the Bogoliubov transformation that describes the transitions between θ-vacuum states. The vacuum state evolves through θ-vacua states, its transitions under the Bogoliubov14 transformation, which carries points to superpositions. The notion of doubling is not only a commonplace in quantum physics with many practical applications but is demanded by a quantum thermodynamics that would surpass conventional quantum statistical dynamics. Quantum field theory assumes a thermal equilibrium that can be treated statistically and which does not apply to living dissipative systems like the brain. The basic assumption of quantum statistical mechanics is to incorporate an approximative viewpoint that typical physical characteristics of macroscopic matter in thermal equilibrium are the same as those of less complex systems of ideal disordered atomic ingredients without mutual correlation ... . macroscopic matter in thermal equilibrium can be thought of as a complex system of atomic ingredients manifesting completely disordered (i.e., uncorrelated or thermalized) dynamics so that quantum statistical mechanics happens to give appropriate approximations. (Jibu and Yasue 2004, p. 270)

In order to deal properly with dissipative systems, a heat bath must be introduced and energy exchange balanced. This justifies the dual modes. The system and its Double are not distinct. The ground is doubled yet system and Double are indivisible; the dual modes always entangled. The relation between system and Double is “intrinsic,” neither one without the other. The ground is ontologically between-two.

14. Nikolay Bogoliubov was a Russian mathematician. By a strange Jungian “synchronicity,” Bogo in Russian means God and liubov refers to love. So literally, the dynamics of the transitions in θ-vacuum states are given by God’s love. Otherwise there could be no dissipative brain functioning and no Existenz.



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

... the system vacuum structure at a given time depends on both the sets of the degrees of freedom ... . The structure of the vacuum turns out to be a condensate of couples ... . (Vitiello 2001, p. 110)

This condensate of couples is a dynamical creation in the process of system-environment reciprocal influence. There is, then, an infinite number of unitarily inequivalent θ-vacua, which may become coded by the number of Nambu-Goldstone quanta pairs condensed there. This density code is an ideally infinite resource for memory traces, subject to slow decay due to quantum tunneling (Jibu and Yasue 1992, 1993). The traces are recoverable by inputs similar to the input at the time of trace recording. 4.6.7 Empirical support for dissipative quantum brain dynamics Freeman and Vitiello (2008) have utilized functional brain imaging of cortical dynamics and found it consistent with dissipative quantum brain dynamics. Coherent domains of synchronized oscillations of many neurons with distinct amplitude modulation (AM) textured patterns and phase transitions observed neurophysiologically are predicted by the dissipative model. Each spatial AM pattern is described to be consequent to the spontaneous breakdown of symmetry triggered by an external stimulus and is associated with one of the unitarily inequivalent ground states of quantum field theory. Their sequencing is associated with the non-unitary time evolution implied by dissipation. (Freeman and Vitiello 2008, p. 11)

The brain demonstrates “mass action” (Lashley 1948) in which there are general fields of activity which appear independent of the activity of particular neurons and which propagate too rapidly to be explained by local activity with multiple synaptic delays. Mass action is consistent with dissipative quantum brain dynamics. 4.6.8 Dissipation and consciousness In developing his version of quantum brain theory Vitiello seeks to avoid the heated controversies over consciousness, insisting that he is not in the business of doing philosophy. Moreover, in my discussion the issues related to the consciousness debate will not be considered from a philosophical point of view. Commenting on the consciousness literature or considering philosophical questions is outside the scope of this book. Even if some of the words I use could be evocative of a certain philosophical content, they only refer to the limited sense I specify each time for them. (Vitiello 2001, p. 125)

 The Transparent Becoming of World

He tries to quarantine the infections of philosophy, in this telling aside. Incidentally, it is interesting that Stuart, Takahashi and Umezawa use the words “consciously feels.” This may appear to disappoint from a philosophical point of view, since no further or independent “explanation” of these words is given. Nevertheless, this is exactly what one does in physics: physical processes define by themselves concepts otherwise outside of physical control. Of course, this does not exclude that other levels of search (e.g. the philosophical level) may be explored beyond the tasks of the physical investigations. (Vitiello 2001, p. 113).

To the contrary, when philosophy is excluded from the discussion, then tacit philosophical assumptions — in all likelihood metaphysical assumptions! — go unquestioned. And as for an objective “world,” Vitiello harbors no doubts. I do not attach any philosophical significance to the expression “external world.” It is only used in a mathematical and physical sense: there are two interacting systems, the brain and the external world ... . (Vitiello 2001, p. 135) Although it might sound philosophically unpleasant, I adopt the physicist’s working hypothesis that the external world is objectively existing. (Vitiello 2003, p. 332). Objectiveness of the external world is the primary, necessary condition for consciousness to exist. (Vitiello 2003, p. 327)

To look at consciousness and the world in the way of physicists happily practicing their trade is of course to assume metaphysics. We should not anticipate that a truly revolutionary theory of quantum brain functioning should meld seamlessly with quotidian conceptions of consciousness and world which physicists accept as a matter of course. This attitude further precludes any back-reaction of philosophy on quantum neurophysics, any listening for “echoes,” as Heidegger (CP) puts it, of hard-won philosophical insights applied to quantum neurophysics. The physicist’s unexamined commitment to world precludes discovering the crossing of stalks in the sheaf of discourse. Chapter 7 of Vitiello’s (2001) book is entitled “Dissipation and Consciousness.” It contains subtle philosophical insights, despite Vitiello’s disclaimers about doing philosophy. Consciousness as presented there is both “first person” and “second person,” subjective and objective, self and other. The objectivity of consciousness arises in the dissipative dynamics, in the interchange (“dialogue”) of self with the environmental “Double.” Without dissipation consciousness could be nothing but subjectivity. With dissipation the objective environment gains influence in virtue of participating in a process that culminates in a kind of “match” between environment and system modes. This is the match of complex conjugate



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

numbers, a+bi and a-bi, whose product is real: a2 + b2, since the cross-terms cancel and i2 = -1. Subjectivity transcends itself through the match with environment. So according to Vitiello, consciousness is a function of the match between environment and self-system modes. This match excites corticon (dipole wave quanta) modes. The external signal from the environment which makes a match is essentially a replication of an earlier input that had been printed into memory. Here trace becomes essential to the theory of consciousness. The match that is consciousness is between replication signal and signal trace. It is not clear that Vitiello consistently identifies consciousness with corticon excitation, as do Jibu and Yasue (4.6.3). This quotation sounds like the original notion of Umezawa and coworkers. When dwq [dipole wave quanta] are excited from the vacuum state the brain “consciously feels” (Stuart, Takahashi and Umezawa 1978, 1979) the presence of the condensate pattern in the corresponding coded vacuum. (Vitiello 2001, p. 112–3)

But other quotations suggest that Vitiello’s notion is more subtle, in focusing on the state of the vacuum rather than corticons excited from it. My attention is rather on the dynamics, the “inter-action,” the trade, the “between” (as Gordon Globus would say), “l’entre-deux” (as Nadia Prete (2004) would prefer. (Vitiello 2003, p. 325)

The dual modes “share a common, entangled vacuum at each instant of time” (Vitiello 2003 326), so that there are “recurrent resolutions” (327) (as in Whiteheadian creative advance) into new syntheses which are Now. The Nows are “singular points” (327) which divide past and future. It is important to note that Vitiello does not mean to imply that Now is a singularity in time. Now is considered in time, part of its flow, participating witness. And such a truly dialectic relation with the Double is inserted in the unidirectional flow of time, it is itself a “witness” of the flow of time ... . (p. 322) The Now is that point on the time-mirror where the non-tilde and the tilde, reciprocal time-reversed images, join together, in the present (Vitiello 1997, 2001). The non-tilde unveils its double and they conjugate in a circular (non-linear) recognition, each being “exposed” to the other’s eyes. (p. 329).

So Vitiello appears to identify the conscious Now with the vacuum state dialectic rather than corticon excitation from it. This position will be critiqued below. (The identification of corticon excitation with consciousness was already seen in 4.6.3 to be prima facie a category mistake, at best an unexplained correlation.) The preceding quotation from Vitiello bears very careful reading. Subjective self “unveils” its world double and equally world double unveils subjective self ...

 The Transparent Becoming of World

but “unveiling” has a misleading connotation, as if something was there, however hidden, and the interaction reveals that which is hidden. However there is no back-and-forth of a dialectic but instead phenomenal world “unveiled” in the conscious joining-together of the between-two. 4.6.9 Consciousness as “intentional” A term that can easily muddle conversation between philosophers and brain scientists is “intentionality.” (For a lucid discussion see Freeman (2007).) Philosophers tend to think of “intentionality” in the sense of “consciousness of,” along the lines of Brentano and Husserl, whereas brain scientists mean “intentionality” as intending to do something or other. Thus Freeman (2000) conceives intentionality as “the process by which goal-directed actions are generated in the brains of humans and other animals” (8). Intentionality is a kind of operator that modulates brain processes so that they are not passively driven by sensory input. For Vitiello (2001 143), too, intentionality is globally operative and constraining. The system mode does not passively and faithfully encounter the environmental mode in the vacuum state but is “an active point of view” of the world (Desideri 1998; Vitiello 1997), which naturally carries in it the “unfaithfulness” of subjectivity. (Vitiello 2001, p. 143)

In spontaneous breaking of symmetry, The response of the system to the breaking stimulus depends on the situation as it impacts the state of the system, bringing in such biological and psychological factors as prior learning, context, motivation, fatigue, etc. (Freeman and Vitello 2006, sect. 4b)

Vitiello’s system mode of the thermofield brain is accordingly inherently intentional in the operative sense. 4.6.10 Consciousness and world An objective external world reality is never doubted by Vitiello. There is no conflict between the subjectiveness of the first person experience of consciousness and the objectiveness of the external world. Without such an objectiveness there would be no possibility of “openness” (openness on what?), no dissipation out of which consciousness could arise. Objectiveness of the external world is the primary, necessary condition for consciousness to exist. (Vitiello 2003, p. 327)



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

There has to be an “environment” to serve as heat bath for the thermodynamic interplay with the dissipative system, an “environment” that Vitiello takes to be the external world. No “trade” between the system with its traces and the system’s environment, then no consciousness — but this does not necessitate that the environment is external world-like, as Vitiello thinks. Strictly within quantum thermofield theoretical terms, “environment” is a macroscopic wave function with a boundary structure. “World” is something else again ... take whatever stand you like on the unresolved “measurement problem.” (As discussed in the next section, this whole issue is fudged when physics refers to mathematical operators in the formalism as “observables.”) It is quite clear that Vitiello is at heart an indirect realist. Without the “objective” external world there would be no possibility for the brain to be an open system ... . The very same existence of the external world is the prerequisite for the brain to build up its own “subjective simulation” of the external world, its own representation of the world. Of course, I am here assuming the standpoint of the physicist, not questioning the “existence” and “objectivity” of the external world. (Vitiello 2001, p. 141)

So the external world is there and consciousness of a simulation of world arises out of the vacuum state, a representation which is tantamount to the virtual world of Metzinger (2003) and Revonsuo (2006) and their assumption of an external world, already critiqued in 2.3.5. Vitiello’s position is plausible, pragmatic and in its indirect realism conventionally unremarkable. Nonetheless world is outright assumed, so much consistent with common sense that revolutionary quantum brain theory ought to be wary. It is not that the system unilaterally unveils its world heat bath in the present; they are equal participants in a kind of Rundtanz (that even Heidegger might gaily dance to, were he not so estranged from science). Consciousness is an “instantaneous apprehension,” a Now that arises through the vacuum state. This is a different insight than Umezawa’s initial idea that consciousness arises with excitation of symmetron traces, a Now remembered. For Vitiello Now is a vacuum state phenomenon as such, and so Now is between-two. The unveiling of world is a function of the vacuum state in which system participates equally with its environment, in which the round dance of the two modes achieves a match under an energy minimization principle (“least action”). 4.6.11 Critique There are two problematic considerations for Vitiello’s theory that are pointed to here. First the assignment of modes to brain and environment is quite arbitrary.

 The Transparent Becoming of World

Brain and its environment may each be considered macroscopic quantum objects and the vacuum state of each has dual modes ex hypothesi. To assign the non~ mode to the brain system and the ~mode to its environment neglects the ~mode of the system and the non~ mode of the environment. Vitiello’s assignment takes advantage of the mathematical formalism. As quoted above, he grants mathematical representation of the environment “in the simplest way one likes, provided the energy flux balance is preserved” (Vitiello 2001 109). It is indeed simplifying to neglect the other vacuum state mode of the environment, and the other mode of the system too. This is a typical kind of simplifying maneuver for physics, whose fruit is that consciousness can be nicely located between-two, something so palatable to conventional thinking that the arbitrariness recedes into the background. The second problem is that Vitiello’s underlying philosophical framework puts his revolutionary proposal squarely within the anti-revolutionary horizon of metaphysics: the self, objective world transcendent to it, and consciousness immanent in their match. Consciousness is vaguely identified with the state of “trade” or “coupling” between the brain and its transcendent environment. In some sense, the unavoidable coupling with the external world is “internalized” in the dialectic, permanent relation with the Double [tilde-mode environment]. (Vitiello 2001, p. 142, italics and brackets added)

This is by assumption a trade between equals, but “trade” has too much the connotation of dialectical back-and-forth. Better, there results an achievement of “belonging-together” of mutually accommodating system mode and heat bath mode. This thermodynamical achievement maintains the lawful balance of creation and annihilation operations on the dual modes and in the exchange between modes under the “tilde-conjugation rules” (Umezawa 1993 7.2.2). The mathematical representation of this belonging-together is by two operators which are assumed “Hermitean.” When multiplied, these adjoint operators give real numbers ... and real numbers are associated with observables, not consciousness, which is precisely not an observable ... that’s the problem! “Operators” in quantum theory (represented in QM by Heisenberg’s matrices) are dynamical variables that represent observables. In quantum physics “observables” does not mean actually observed objects but instead a probabilistic spectrum of objects possible to observe, once repeated measurements have been made on the quantum ensemble. Observables are “potentialities” (Heisenberg 1962) rather than actualities, potentialities for classical actual outcomes of measurements (e.g. the click of a Geiger counter, track in a Wilson cloud chamber, location of a speck on a photographic emulsion in the two-slit experiment). Even if a measurement operation reduced a “mixed state” of possible outcomes to a “pure state” that is a specific outcome, the pure state remains a quantum state which is not actual, only many



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

possibilities reduced to one possibility still not realized. For actuality an observer has to be smuggled in, and even before that, a von Neumann meta-physical consciousness orthogonal to the world of the experiment. This consciousness makes free choices with respect to measuring procedures (4.2). In ordinary discussion involving “observables” the segue from potential to actual goes easily unnoticed. “Observables” in quantum physical usage imply observed values but are not per se observed. The mean of actually observed outcomes on repeated measurements is called the “expectation value” of the observable; as “expectation” implies, something has to be done before getting the observable values whose mean is the expectation value. The vacuum state expectation value is real. But this does not fit with the consciousness Vitiello wants to locate to the vacuum state. Consciousness is exactly not observable — that’s just where the hoary problem of consciousness lies. What we are conscious of — world — parses with real numbers and such numbers do not apply to consciousness. So something goes awry in Vitiello’s theory of the trade between brain system and environment, with consciousness conceived as their between-two, since this between is associated with real numbers. Consciousness is no observable, though its objects are. That this line of thought gets snagged in a thicket is only to be expected, after a revolutionary extremely counterintuitive quantum theory is mixed with traditional intuitions of consciousness. In the end Vitiello’s theory runs into the same problem that has always bedeviled attempts to explain ψ in terms of ϕ. Whether the state of neural networks described in terms of classical physics or the quantum vacuum state match of brain system and its environment, there is no way to get from a correlation between ψ and ϕ to their identification. The match unfolds an explicate order of res extensa and consciousness is non-explicate res cogitans. There is enough aura of mystery conjured up by the term “quantum” that it is enticing to assign consciousness to it, but this appears to be a category mistake. It will be argued in the next Chapter that the between-two state of match should not be interpreted as that of consciousness but instead as world-thrownness, Existenz. The heavy price exacted by this move will become apparent in the monadological isolation that results. 4.7 Review We have seen that Stapp sticks close to the Copenhagen interpretation and brings in a hovering metaphysical von Neumann consciousness that decides on the experimental arrangement and when to cash it in so as to collapse the wave function (subject to Dirac chance). Consciousness here is a metaphysical Atlas holding up the world by its own rapidly repeated willful intentions that exploit the quantum

 The Transparent Becoming of World

Zeno effect. Stapp extends the Platonic tradition into quantum theory and thereby betrays the latter’s revolutionary credentials. Penrose and Hameroff avoid meta-physics by making consciousness already integral to space-time geometry. For their “pan(proto)psychism” qualia just are inherent to the Planck scale. Here traditional metaphysics is replaced by traditional panpsychism clothed in revolutionary guise. (See especially Hameroff and Powell (2009).) By conceiving of the brain as a dissipative system Vitiello to some extent dethrones consciousness, making it subject to the between of the environment mode and the symmetron memory traces of the system mode. But Vitiello still distinguishes consciousness from an external world. For the three versions of revolutionary quantum brain theory discussed, the perfect transparency of the dynamical process of being world-thrown keeps “the-world-out-there” compelling. This world, with which we are so fascinated,15 about which we care so intensely,16 is central to philosophical deliberations. But focus easily slips away from world as a consequence of the transparent power of brain to matter-of-factly disclose it. The Goddess Māyā drops her veil, hiding the quantum “machinery” that keeps the illusion of transcendency going. World-thrownness — that we always find ourselves already amidst some ready and beckoning world — seems to just happen; it is so. Theoretical attention segues to the transparent process of our being thrown into something already there. The various ways of explaining the transparent process considered in Chapters 2 and 3 all presume an external world. The essential disagreement between substance metaphysics and process philosophy has been whether world abides or is continually produced, leaving world as such undoubted. For brain science the external world is just there and brain science’s task is to figure out the primed pickup of information and its “intentional” processing. The brain process has its representation that is distinct from world. For direct scientific realism this representation is the world’s information picked-up in the brain-body’s pragmatic agility so that the brain re-presents world in having its information. For indirect scientific realism this representation is an informed construction of an appropriate virtual world by brain wizardy. So direct and indirect realisms are not so different

15. Our fascination with world is nakedly revealed during the dream experience in which we typically are held rapt, fascinated by the dream life, for some broken by occasional moments of dream “lucidity” when the world is recognized as “only” a dream world. 16. Heidegger (BT) emphasizes that care (die Sorge) is the ontological structure of Dasein. It can be inferred from lobotomized patients and the negative symptoms of schizophrenia that care depends on the frontal lobe.



Chapter 4.  Quantum brain theory and its neurophilosophical interpretation 

as their persisting conflict implies, indeed the fervor of disagreement is a marginal that calls for deconstruction. To reject direct and indirect scientific realism seems to consort with idealism which scientists of course shun. We saw in 2.4.2 that even George Berkeley accepted an external world, only it is a world God conceives, not the one actually disclosed to us. God would not treat us so unkindly as to leave us each in our world alone, parallel bubbles of perception, sovereign monads with all the rest an abyss! Borges (2.4.1) abandons world altogether but is left with an awkward, recursive, never-halting subjectivity, subject meta to subject, each dreaming worlds that hold rapt the next fellow. Borgesian vertigo is deep down a metaphysical ailment. In process thought an external world is still entertained. It is just that this world does not abide but is continually upheld in a process. In Bohm’s rendition external world is continually both created and annihilated, in explication and implication respectively. World continuity is an illusion — Hiley’s (2001) “moments” are discrete — but not external world as such. Bohm does not doubt the external world, only its self-subsistence. Our brains holographically produce images of a world that is a concretion in Whitehead’s creative advance. No hint is given that the process of world production is segmented (explications, concretions) because the quantum Zeno effect (4.1) sustains a continuous product from what is actually a discontinuous process. Pragmatic success dulls the desire to deconstruct. Heidegger’s belief in world dis-closed through a fully transparent process is as staunch. Now the process becomes Seyn with its Ereignis dynamics, continually gifting both external world and the dimensionalizing and situating Dasein that can belong to it. The belonging-together of Sein and Zeit is the state of world-thrownness. Das Ereignis may be abyssal but it still offers up a transcendent world that the ekstatic Dasein in his temporality may disclose (with his customary inauthenticity). Chapter 5 will retain the dynamical insights of process philosophy but deconstructs world further. It is not consciousness but world-thrownness that will be claimed to be “between-two.” The task is to discern our condition as parallel “bubbles” of world disclosure without falling into some kind of idealism abhorrent to science. Quantum thermofield brain dynamics will be seen to offer a new way of understanding our existential condition.

chapter 5

The between-two God is a Lobster, or a double-pincer, a double bind ... each stratum is a double. (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari)

5.1 Introduction Narcissus perceives a beautiful youth, and in leaning to kiss his mirror-image, ends up drowning. It is the fate of Narcissus that he will clear neither world nor mirror-world. The ontological significance of this myth is overshadowed by the dire warning about the consequences of self-love. A fascinated subject-object abruptly terminates in the extremity of an action ... loss of detached objectivity will be lethal according to a fearful metaphysics. The “between-two” in this classical sense — the reflective tain of a watery mirror — serves to obscure world-thrownness, which is easy enough given the transparency of brain processing. The present Chapter develops the idea that there is no external world-in-common, no abiding world out there which we each take in our various ways, no common sense pragmatically vindicated “phenomenal reality.” There are instead multiple worlds in parallel — as many worlds as there are Daseins — transparently generated world-thrownnesses in waking and dreaming. We are complex monads, but more bereft of world than Leibniz thought. In his system the monads are parallel bubbles of perception but thankfully there really is a world corresponding to those world perceptions, a world pre-established by a loving God. (Malebranche’s busy God would post-establish world on every occasion.) For the present view there is no transcendent external world, only macroscopic quantum objects with their energy exchanges. Certain highly specialized macroscopic quantum objects are within themselves disclosive of worlds, at best worlds in parallel. This position is not a solipsistic idealism in which only mind exists. There is a physical reality, a reality that is Abground, an infinite, timeless resource of dynamical symmetry, reservoir for all possibility. Abground “gifts” perceived worlds to the parallel Daseins, through the belonging-together of the “between-two” in each of them, the ground state between two quantum thermofield theoretical modes. Heidegger strongly emphasizes that in the gifting of world-thrownness the giver simultaneously and secretly withdraws, and so it is for the present proposal. The transparent becoming of world is a bubble of world-thrownness hoisted in

 The Transparent Becoming of World

parallel across between-twos. Save for this there is only the Abground’s holomovement that continually unfolds macroscopic quantum objects. Unfoldment to macroscopic scale is not yet explication of world. (For Bohm “unfoldment” and “explication” are interchangeable.) We are not lighted bubbles amidst a vertiginous sea but pro-jects from an abyss. Now a theory that so departs from common sense ought ameliorate the abyssal shudder in some fashion. However the present theory soothes but scantily in its parsimony: An external world need not be tacitly assumed, as it is both in direct realism and indirect realism, each with its “fallen” pragmatic self-justification. We should indeed expect that a philosophy founded in strange quantum theory would properly be strange too. The way is perhaps mitigated by some splendid knots coming into view, where seemingly disparate stalks in the sheaf of discourse unexpectedly cross and interlace, surprising junctures of coherence between Bohm, Whitehead, Heidegger and Umezawa, which encourage the present inquiry. There is another small compensation that accompanies the pain of losing the world-in-common (however much we are at odds over it, with that very absorbing conflict distracting from our true condition). A philosophical perplexity is relieved ... the ψ/ϕ problem dissipates. Subjective consciousness is no longer something perceptual, it is only cognitive (which leaves consciousness plenty to do). The monadic existential isolation in the extremity of losing the world-in-common is just something we have to bear for the odd moment before returning to concerned engagement with world. 5.2 The Tao symbol and the between-two The ancient Tao symbol offers an intuitive understanding of the between-two.1 The symbol provides a suggestive static visual representation, a snapshot of a dynamical process in which the belonging-together of dual modes in the betweentwo transparently “gifts” world-thrownness (Globus 2009a).

1. The interpretation offered is of course not canonical. The very richness of this ancient symbol provides for multiple interpretations. Neils Bohr chose the symbol of the Tao for his coat of arms, to remind of his principle of complementarity: Contraria sunt complementa.



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

In this “diagram of the supreme ultimate” (T’ai-chi T’ u) flowing polarities of black and white belong-together in harmonious balance. A dynamical unity is achieved in their belonging-together. Furthermore, each is a singularity in the other. These singularities are represented as small circles of opposite color inside the polarities.2 These inner circles do not flow, suggesting an unchanging facility. The duals each signify its other through its own default. The trace of the other is by default of the own. In such a logic altereity gains representation. The ontological process symbolized by the diagram of the Tao is a polarized dual mode abground that portrays the belonging-together of the dynamical between-two. The dual defaults implied by the symbol can be understood thermodynamically: the diagram represents a thermodynamically closed system. The annihilation operator symbolized by the small dark circle within the lighted aspect of the duality must be balanced by a creation operator within the dark aspect. This is the economics of thermofield dynamics under energy conservation law, where the annihilation dynamics of quanta by excitation out of the non~mode of the vacuum state is necessarily balanced by an equivalent creation dynamics of quanta in the ~mode, such that the whole is preserved. This is a logic that encompasses alterity. The diagram can be interpreted, then, as a visual representation of the peculiar thermofield logic of the between-two. An unremitting dynamical belonging-together is symbolized and the whole remains unchanged in the reciprocating compensation between creation and annihilation operators. The fruit of this transparent dual mode process is “world-thrownness,” “creative advance,” “explication” of world, in the language of Heidegger, Whitehead and Bohm respectively.

2. A traditional alternative interpretation is that each of the duals already contains within itself the seed of its opposite. (See Capra 1975, p. 107.) The seed interpretation implies only timeforward whereas the present interpretation has time-reversal in one of the modes.

 The Transparent Becoming of World

5.3 Some previous approaches to the between-two Perhaps the clearest anticipation of the between-two can be found in Heraclitus (circa 500 B.C.), during the “other beginning,” as Heidegger says (3.4.1), before the “first beginning” of metaphysics. That Heraclitus is a process philosopher is clear from this often quoted fragment (via Plutarch): One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs. (LI, Kahn 1979)

(This quotation can be read in a Bohmian way by making the “gathering” the process of explication and the “scattering” the process of implication.) But even more telling of Heraclitus as processualist, and in his characteristic “studied ambiguity” (Kahn 1979 7), are these two vivid paradoxical fragments (via Plotinus). It rests by changing. (LII) It is weariness to toil at the same tasks and be always beginning. (LIII)

For Heraclitus change has ontological primacy; the primordial flux cannot remain the same. This is most reminiscent of Whitehead’s unceasing dynamics of “creative advance” (3.3.2). The ancient Greek philosophers were much taken with polarities in conflict, so obvious in their daily life (day/night, winter/summer, war/peace), none with greater subtlety than Heraclitus, who finds unity in opposition. They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself; it is an attunement [harmoniē] turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre. (LXXVIII)

The archer’s hands are pulling equally in opposite directions, creating a balanced tension from diversity that is unified in the flight of the arrow. Harmoniē is a joining, a fitting-together, a belonging-together. The strife of polarities is balanced in their between-two. Of course the “polarity” of complex conjugate numbers is unavailable to Heraclitus and he does not suggest that the between has ontological primacy with respect to the two, an idea that must wait two-and-a-half millenia. Nonetheless the seeds of process philosophy and intimations of the between-two are present in Heraclitus. The pineal gland might be said to be “between-two” for Descartes but this would only be in an impoverished sense. The ontological emphasis in the Cartesian case is on the “two” — the different substances res cogitans and res extensa — and the between is where the two happen to interact. In Spinoza the between might at first blush be considered more weighty: a neutral substance “between” its two “aspects.” But the one substance — God — is conceived under the attributes of



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

extension and thought. God is not the between of these two ways of conceiving but more fundamental than either. A Hegelian metaphysical formulation of the between has been presented by Desmond (1995). It is so nuanced and layered over 546 pages of dense text seeking the meaning of being between that it is impossible to summarize. The text is fortunately relieved by occasions of eloquence. What is being? What does it mean to be? This is the question of metaphysics ... . It is the dark question of philosophy, and the light without which other questions would be dark ... . the question bespeaks an elemental perplexity that perennially calls for renewal. Even where it has been answered, often the meaning of the proferred answer grows faint and needs refreshing. Again and again mindful human beings are troubled, perhaps shaken by this perplexity. (Desmond 1995, p. 3)

And half-way through the book Desmond is cognizant of the laboring reader and offers reassurance. Has my reader wearied? I hope not. Is there someone listening out there? I hope so. I know these thoughts put us to the test, and I would I could make them as light as heaven. I can assure my reader I am not lost in the bosom of the Lord. (p. 290)

For present purposes we need only to see that Desmond’s “between” is categorically different from the “between” of dual mode thermofield dynamics. Being is a “dynamic happening” (xiv) for Desmond, a many-sided plenitude concretely manifesting itself in the between. Beings and the mindful human come together in the determinacy of the very happening of the between (161). We find ourselves in this middle, in the midst of things, with these “key constituents” of our habitation of the between: “creation, things, intelligibilities, selves, communities” (xv). The human being, mindful in its restless self-transcendence, determines itself to enter the middle and there progressively becomes more clear, both about itself and what is other. The two sides, each a different dialectical self-transcendence, meet in the middle; this is the community of their togetherness. (p. 161–2)

The happening of the between is not a univocal concordance “but a tense and fragile equilibrium between a plurality of participants, each a dialectical whole unto itself ” (163). The thingness of things comes into the between, each out of themselves towards the others and towards us as well. So the between is “the universal milieu of conjunction” (291). Desmond’s concept of the between scatters widely, unlike Umezawa’s crisp formal between.

 The Transparent Becoming of World

My point is this: in the community of the between, there is a convergence of the inner and outer infinitudes. In the doubled middle, the extremes cross and crisscross: birth and death, the womb and the grave, being and nothing, givenness and freedom, finitude and infinitude, the void and fulfilled being. (p. 207)

Most crucially for present purposes, Desmond does not doubt those singular happenings in which world consists. Things are for themselves, are in themselves, encountered with a recalcitrant thereness, a thereness not to be reduced to mere things. The stubborness of things, the fact that they are there, that they are something rather than nothing, that as there they stand before us, stand there as themselves — all these things must be thought metaphysically. (p.299)

Desmond’s “between” is thus proudly metaphysical, whereas the present work undermines the world of metaphysics, with its concrete external world that still survives in Whitehead’s creative advance, in Bohm’s explicate order, and even for Heidegger an external world disclosed in the belonging-together of Seyn and Zeit. It should not be thought that Whitehead’s creative advance is between-two. The primordial God constrains creative advance and the consequent God traces its concretions. Process is more fundamental than any between. Nor is there any vigorous sense of a between to be found in Bohm. The implicate order is prior to any two and the explicate order is a derivative unfolding from a primary whole. With Heidegger, however, a far richer concept of the between-two (das Zwischen) emerges. Heidegger locates truth to the between-two, the domain of the not hidden (aletheia), the ground of the very beingness of beings, of world disclosure. For truth is the between [das Zwischen] for the essential swaying [Wesen] of being [Seyn] and the beingness of beings. This between grounds the beingness of beings in be-ing. (CP, p. 10)

The between is a “mid-point that is open and thus sheltering between [verbergende Zwischen]” (CP 23), in which truth is disclosed and preserved. The t/here [Da] is the open between that lights up and shelters ... . (CP, p. 226)

The between-two engrounds Seyn as “the knowing awareness that is held to abground as Da-sein” (CP 358).3 Man is “rooted” (23) in the between-two and recoils from the abground. ... what is neither day nor night, what no one grasps, and wherein man — reaching the end — still spins around, in order only still to numb himself with the products 3. Das abgründige Wissen als Da-sein. Da-sein als er-eignet. Grund-los; abgründig. The cryptic origin of Da-sein is lost in the translation.



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

of his machinations, pretending that they are made for eternity, perhaps for that et

cetera that is neither day nor night. (CP 185)

While thematizing the between-two, Heidegger’s conception of it retains world as one of the two given by Seyn in the Ereignis process: Es gibt Sein. In this sole but crucial regard Heidegger remains conventional. 5.4 Thermofield theory of traces and recognition traces To recall the earlier discussion (4.6), the thermofield theory of trace is founded in vacuum states of the symmetry-breaking type. There is an infinite capacity for trace in the infinite number of unitarily inequivalent irreversible theta-vacua of the dissipative brain’s water-filled microtubules (Vitiello 2001). The broken symmetry rearranged by inputs dissipating their energy and falling into the vacuum state is preserved by macroscopic condensates of zero energy Goldstone bosons. This trace is structured into 50 micron domains of coherence that may attain synchrony over larger regions.4 The cortex contains 1010 such domains, giving nonlocality a macroscopic domain structure. Nonlocality is put to work locally in domains. Such “symmetron” condensates of bosons over the domain structure provide the memory trace (subject to decay by quantum tunneling (Jibu and Yasue 1995, 2004)). A signal replicating a previous input excites this condensate out of the vacuum state, and in Umezawa’s original theory the “corticons” thus excited are tantamount to memories becoming conscious. Trace is prior to consciousness. This account complicates when dual modes are brought in by Vitiello (1995). The process in which Bose condensates are formed in the vacuum is mathematically represented by a “creation operator” acting on the non~ mode of the vacuum. Given the thermodynamical relationship between the dual modes under the tilde conjugation rules laid down by Umezawa (1993 7.2.2), an “annihilation operator” must simultaneously subtract quanta in the tilde mode, leaving “holes” there. The symmetron trace left by the sensory signal is accordingly dual mode: the pair non~ particle/~hole. 4. The domain structure halts the descent into panpsychism which finds experience in all matter. It has been thought that no line can be drawn below which there is no experience (Skrbina 2006; Strawson 2006) and this idea is the main support of panpsychism. But the descent into panpsychism halts due to the domain structure (at 50 microns in the case of the water dipole field). At less than the coherence length quanta are uncorrelated; such randomness is nonexperiential. There can be nothing experience-like at less than the coherence length and so absolute panpsychism fails. But if noisy heat has no mind, this would not detract significantly from the point of panpsychism. See the discussion in Globus (2009).

 The Transparent Becoming of World

When the sensory signal is replicated, Goldstone traces are excited out of the non-tilde mode of the vacuum state — which annihilates them in our mode of the vacuum state, leaving holes. Then quanta must be simultaneously created in the alter mode, resulting in non~ hole/~particle pairs. One can show that, in the vacuum state, the annihilation of the quantum A corresponds to the creation of quantum A~, and vice versa. (Vitiello 1995, p. 113)

The dual mode trace, then, consists in paired quanta and holes. In fact the coded vacuum is a condensate of couples (i.e. of equal number) of A and A~ modes, one acting as the “hole” (the address) of the other one. (p. 113)

So when the trace is first recorded, the couples are particles:holes. However in recognition of the replication signal, when the trace in the non~ mode becomes excited out of the vacuum, this mode is left with the holes, left annihilated, while the creation operator on the alter mode registers particle traces of the recognition. ... the excitation of quantum A from the vacuum (its annihilation in the vacuum) corresponds to the creation of its hole in the vacuum, namely to the creation of the corresponding A~ mode, which may indeed occur under the external replication signal. (Vitiello 2001, p. 113)

Now the vacuum state couples are hole:particle, which are named here re-traces. So when an input is encoded to memory, A modes are created and A~ modes are annihilated. However when that input is later recognized, A modes are annihilated from the non~ phase of the vacuum (in becoming excited by the replication signal) and A~ modes are created in the alter tilde phase. The particle component of the trace is non~ mode in registration and the particle component of the retrace is alter mode post-recognition. In recognition of the replication signal the particles (and holes) “trade places,” so to speak. This recognition hole-particle trace is not a simple tally that a condition has been met, not a mere trace of blunt satisfaction, but the trace of indifference which had been lost is re-traced. Such a conception subverts the usual way we think about things: the unquestioned sequence input→perception→memory-trace-of-perception no longer holds. Now the sequence goes: input→memory trace→perception. Memory precedes world-thrownness (which reminds of Plato’s doctrine of reminiscences (Weimer 1976)). Trace is prior to Being. The consequent nature of Whitehead’s God is necessary for ever finding ourselves amidst a world. Those corticons excited by a replication signal will dissipate their energy and mingled with new expressions of sensory input fall back into the vacuum state where the dipole moment vectors realign, irreversibly shifting the broken symmetry. Combining with the memory traces already there, a new trace is formed



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

(by Bogoliubov transformation) in a θ-vacuum that is a total memory ... but now with traces of recognitions as well, “re-traces” of previous satisfactions. Now the re-traces might belong-together with refreshments to the vacuum. Re-traces make possible a dual mode match that is real in the match of complex conjugates. This dynamical process of trace, re-trace and match has profound consequences: Memory is prior to Being. Trace is pre-world. The state of the between-two depends upon its recognizing abilities. Re-traces offer the possibility of belongingtogether with input replications. The ~mode is tuned by signals generated from within the brain, becoming inclined toward making certain matchings with the play of signals generated from without the brain. World-thrownness is the state of match in a transparent dual mode process, where a complex-valued input encounters its matching complex conjugate re-trace, and their belonging-together is real. Only then does the beyond-darkness of Abground light up, die Lichtung, only then do we find ourselves, transparently as we always find ourselves, already amidst beckoning and ready-to-hand worlds. 5.5 Macroscopic quantum objects Macroscopic quantum objects (objectsq) were discussed above (4.6.1 and 4.6.4). A clear grasp of objectsq is crucial to understanding the ontological role of the between-two. Objects in the quotidian sense, phenomenal objects, will be labeled ‘objectsp’. Although conditioned by tradition to think of quantum theory as a theory of the unimaginably small, quantum theory in fact applies to the macroscopic scale, Mitwelt objects ranging in scale from microns on up to ordinary world metrics. That quantum theory is not restricted to apply only to the microscopic scale “is one of the most important achievements of quantum physics” (Vitiello 2001 15). Condensed matter theory can conceive of such macroscopic scale highly stable objects as consisting in extremely large numbers of quanta (on the order of Avogadro’s number) which are coherent and have sharp envelope structures where both empty space and other macroscopic objects are tangential. The boundary is part of the macroscopic system which is self-consistently contained by it. For such self-sustaining objectsq, ... a self-consistently created boundary surface may carry a variety of degrees of freedom such as infinite choices of its shape ... . (Umezawa 1993, p. 130).

Macroscopic orders are collective modes that emerge in the creation and annihilation dynamics. The key to the present problematic lies in understanding the relations between such a macroscopic quantum object — in particular, brainq — and the “phenomenal”

 The Transparent Becoming of World

brain object, even one’s own brainp that anyone might perceive by use of Feigl’s (1967) “autocerebroscope.”5 The macroscopic per se is not a difficulty for condensed matter physics. In the Schrödinger cat formulation of perplexity, there is creation of a superposition of two macroscopic quantum objectsq — a dead catq under macroscopic quantum description interpenetrated with a live oneq under the same description. As the story goes, when we make an observation on this preparation of a superposition, a quotidian macroscopic objectp is perceived, unpredictably dead or alive — that left to Dirac chance. Physics just takes the observation part of the story for granted; as an empirical science it could not get off the ground without it. Physics is content to leave the theory of perception to others, having got the size issue out of the way. In the framework of thermofield dynamics, the macroscopic quantum object is built on dual vacuum state modes that taken together are thermodynamically closed. However, the segue from such macroscopic quantum objects to quotidian objects of a surrounding world is not thematized and takes an attentive deconstructive reading to discern. It is significant that Umezawa (1993) opens Chapter One with this uncontroversial statement about observation. Many of the phenomena that we observe in nature are of a macroscopic nature. (p. 1)

Such a gross truism seems a strange place of incision into a deep discussion of quantum physics and raises deconstructive suspicions. Umezawa then quickly shifts from world observed to the “fundamental world” of quanta and their condensation into macroscopic quantum states where there are large numbers of them. Our immediate question, then, is to ask how microscopic systems ruled by the laws of quantum physics can manifest macroscopic phenomena ruled by the laws of classical physics. (p. 1)

The statement about perception of world (observation) is not integrated with the problematic but has slipped in at the very incision into the text. Similarly, Jibu and Yasue (1995) speak of the creation and annihilation dynamics of quanta realizing a macroscopic scale, described by a macroscopic wave function, and immediately shift to a statement about world nakedly seen. Here, the macroscopic scale corresponds to the ordinary scale of microns and inches, so the macroscopic objects can be seen with naked eye or at least with an optical microscope. (p.70, italics added) 5. Feigl (1967) proposed a gedanken device he called an “autocerebroscope” by means of which we might perceive our own brainp. 



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

The segue from quantum macroscopic to phenomenal macroscopic happens at ‘corresponds’. The next sentence abruptly shifts back again to the quantum description, with the covering transition “in other words.” In other words, the collective motion of the matter field may be described by a new notion of a macroscopic wave function. (p. 70)

The same avoidance of phenomenal macroscopicness can be found in Bohm as well. Bohm distinguishes the explicate order as a “sub-order” of the implicate order. ... the overall law (holonomy) may be assumed to be such that in a certain sub-order, within the whole set of implicate order, there is a totality of forms that have an approximate kind of recurrence, stability and separability. (Bohm 1980, p. 186)

Bohm continues, “Evidently,” and the appeal to what is evident catches the deconstructive eye, Evidently these forms are capable of appearing as the relatively solid, tangible, and stable elements that make up our ‘manifest world’. The special distinguished suborder indicated above, which is the basis of the possibility of the manifest world, is then, in effect, what is meant by the explicate order. (p. 186)

(The hedge “in effect” is another symptom that catches the deconstructive attention.) The implicate order is quantum, and as a “sub-order” its explicate form must be quantum too, that is, quantum macroscopic. The holomovement continually unfolds macroscopic quantum objects, which leaves the segue to the explicate “manifest world” unfounded. Unfoldment is not yet explication. Evidently once physics gets from microscopic to macroscopic, it thinks its job done. That task deferred in Derridean Differance6 is undertaken in the present deconstruction. Deconstruction of world opens the idea that world-thrownness is a quantum brain state that neither presents something else nor re-presents it but actually is world thrownness. The problem has always been how to get from brain to the clearing of world. But we can see now that the presentation that is lived existence is a function of the state of the between-two: World-thrownness stretched in space and time unfolds in the quantum brain’s ground state ~conjugate match of dual modes. Belonging-together is a new ontological resource opened by quantum thermofield physics.

6. By Derrida’s (1982) term Differance I imply the dynamics of discourse, a dynamics which differs and defers rather than operating under the traditional logos. (See Globus 1992.)

 The Transparent Becoming of World

5.6 Structural realism and the measurement problem Once the distinction between quantum macroscopic objectsq and phenomenal objectsp is grasped, it becomes apparent that structural realism (2.3.6) holds for their relationship (Born 1953, 1955). We do not know the things-in-themselves but only their invariant abstract structure. Under Kantian influences what is not brought out, however, is that objectsq are not persistent but explicated moment to moment, so rapidly that under the quantum Zeno effect the quantum objects have continuity. The underlying reality is a Bohmian holomovement (3.2) from which objectsq unfold and it is the invariance of these macroscopic objectsq which is conserved by phenomenal objectsp. Apparently the majority of physicists believe that the wave function in the Schrödinger cat formulation collapses on its own to a macroscopic objectq, dead or alive as the case may be. The link between the catq (dead or alive) and a catp (dead or alive) is left unexplained. When the observer is ready to make an observation the cat is already dead or alive. Physicists, including Bohr, just accept observation as a brute fact. Born (1953) concluded his Nobel lecture with this prophecy. The lesson to be learned from the story I have told of the origin of quantum mechanics is that, presumably, a refinement of mathematical methods will not suffice to produce a satisfactory theory, but that somewhere in our doctrine there lurks a conception not justified by an experience, which will have to be eliminated in order to clear the way. (p. 679)

That unjustified conception, according to the view developed here, is the conception of a transcendent world. The seemingly transcendent world-out-there is actually contained within the bubble of perception. What is “out there” are macroscopic quantum objects unfolded each moment in the holomovement. Certain of them are human brainsq, each of which disclose some world-thrownness or other in the belonging-together of its space-time dimensionalized and intentionally tuned between-two. This between-two is volumetric. Space is continually stretched (as is time) within the volume — Heidegger’s Temporalität (3.4.3) — and so in the lighting of belonging-together the world may contract to the palm of one’s hand under intense scrutiny of a splinter or stretch to the blue dome of the vast heavens far above while walking the fields. Dimensionalization of die Lichtung is an ongoing event. However stretched the space, each point is illuminated, whether filled or empty (Lehar 2003). Depth is a certain look of world amidst which we find ourselves thrown, a parameter of a certain volumetric symmetry. As in Alice’s Wonderland, some attacks



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

of migraine, and under psychedelic drugs, the world can look very small (“microscopia”) or very large (“macroscopia”), depending on the volumetric stretched. The neurological syndrome of “hemineglect” highlights the stretching of a volumetric. The left side of what we consider to be the world does not exist for these patients. They do not eat food on the left side of their plate because it is not seen. The left side of the face may be left unshaven. The left side of a sheet of paper is not written on. Even the left side in imagination may not exist (Bisiach and Luzzatti 1978). Hemineglect patients asked to imagine the Piazza del Duomo in Milan from one vantagepoint omitted features on one side of the central square and when asked to imagine it from the opposite vantagepoint, they omitted features on the other side of the central square. Nonetheless hemineglect patients still find themselves thrown amidst a world, not half a world. It is just that their volumetric is truncated compared to ours. Such volumetric considerations justify Bohr’s early insistence that the wave function is epistemic, that is, related to our expectations rather than reality as such. The wave function describes our situatedness — being situated-attuned for perceiving a dead cat interpenetrated with being situated-attuned for perceiving a live one — and wave function collapse describes being thrown amidst a world with a dead cat or a live one (depending on the state of the between-two) as the case may be. The macroscopic quantum state is already one or the other of the alternatives (by Penrosean or other collapse mechanisms) and disclosure of a dead cat or a live one depends on the belonging-together in the observing brain’s vacuum state. 5.7 The explicate order as between-two The relation between Bohm’s holomovement and Umezawa’s dual thermofield modes has been considered by Hiley (2001). The vacuum state for Bohm provides the basis for explicate order. In the general context of Bohm’s ideas the vacuum state should not be regarded as absolute and self-contained. Rather each vacuum state provides the basis for what we called an explicate order so that a set of inequivalent vacuum states could be thought of as providing an array of explicate orders, all embedded in the overall implicate order in which all movement is assumed to take place (Hiley 2001, p. 327)

(This set of inequivalent vacua is the theta vacua exploited by Umezawa (see 4.6.2).) But in the present context explication is interpreted as “belonging-together” (matching ~conjugately). Explicate order is the match state of dual mode theory. 7. Page numbers of quotes from BasilHiley/14MomentsANPA2001W.pdf

Hiley

are

taken

from

www.bbk.ac.uk/tpru/

 The Transparent Becoming of World

So Bohm’s holomovement takes on dual modes and the continual unfolding process is between-two. The movement between inequivalent representations, between inequivalent vacuum states, is then regarded as a movement from one explicate order to another. It was the implicate order that enabled this transformation to take place as an unfolding of moments. (Hiley 2001, p.33, italics added)

Where Hiley differs from Umezawa is in the “enabling.” The holomovement operates under a law of overall necessity or quantum potential that guides the order to be explicated. In this formulation explicate order — phenomenal world — is a function of unvarnished necessity operating within the dynamical whole. Under Umezawa’s formulation the dual mode match accomplishes all phenomenality as a ground state phenomenon, the state of belonging-together of dual vacuum state modes. Hiley makes another deep point: the explicate “moments” that unfold have a certain temporal thickness, a certain duration. Moments are temporal segmentations of unfoldment. Unfoldings through belonging-together take a brief time. This is “a moment where what has been is separated from what is yet to come” (35). Within this brief duration time becomes nonlocal. The ontological implications of the crossing between Bohm and Umezawa traditions are obscured when their ontology is wedded to traditional philosophical positions regarding consciousness and world. Both accept the external phenomenal world of practical bench physics — the world that we and any experimenter are conscious of — and this acceptance distorts ontology. What has been proposed above is that Heideggerian world-thrownness is between-two. This implies worldthrownnesses in parallel, in parallel between-twos, with no external world that they correspond to. The rest is holomovement — dynamical abground — with its implicate order of all possible worlds, a “holoworld” from which in multiple ways the many world-thrownnesses come to exist locally in parallel. Explication is by belonging-together. In non-dissipative systems the dual modes belonging together are tightly yoked so the between-two remains the same — just “is” undifferentiatedly — but for dissipative systems the duals can be for a time uncoupled. Certain dissipative systems, whose vacuum states are of the symmetry-breaking type, take on traces. This is the brain’s speciality. Here the between-two is variable, depending on memory traces and re-traces and also on what is brought up by sensory and intentional brain systems. Here the betweentwo keeps advancing — creative advance — explications — Hiley’s (2001) “moments” — in the ~conjugate match of dual modes. This is not a Heideggerian “ekstasis” in which an inside somehow gets outside of itself but a phenomenality of advancing momentary durations in virtue of dual mode belonging-togethers.



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

5.8 Qualities of world In 2.2.3 the widespread but certainly not universal conviction that there are mental “qualia” such as colors, tastes, and sounds was rejected and substituted by world qualities. This phenomenological point must be clearly grasped to appreciate the claims of the theory of the between-two, and ordinary language embodies assumptions which make that appreciation difficult. Stub your toe and the pain is in the world not your mind, in particular, that part of world that is your toe. Peeking at the injured toe shows visually world location of the pain, the place where it hurts. The pain is a quality of a region of world, not a quale of conscious mind. The pain is “in” a certain world region. A certain world area has a “feeling,” the feeling of pain, in the very same world region that is slowly growing purple. The remainder of the environment beyond the injured toe does not feel a thing and procedes on its merry way. We say that the toe pain is felt “inside,” the inside of a world location occupied by our bodies. However, our bodies are just the most familiar part of the world and one part of our body is in pain and purpling while the rest — body and world — shrinks momentarily to insignificance. The pain and purpling are part of world, the bodily part of transcendent world. The idea that the pain and purpling are in the mind or in consciousness is a purely theoretical construction that has caused no end of philosophical mischief. The phenomenological description just given coincides with that of Tye (1995) but the explanations differ radically. It is instructive to focus on Tye’s description and see where the divergence arises. Why is it that perceptual experiences are transparent? When you turn your gaze inward and try to focus your attention on intrinsic features of these experiences, why do you always seem to end up attending to what the experiences are of? Suppose you have a visual experience of a shiny, blood-soaked dagger. Whether, like Macbeth, you are hallucinating or whether you are seeing a real dagger, you experience redness and shininess as outside you, as covering the surface of a dagger. (p. 136)

If you try to focus on the intrinsic properties of the visual experience, something different from what the experience is of, the task proves impossible. Tye continues, ... one’s awareness seems always to slip through the experience to the redness and shininess, as instantiated together externally. In turning one’s mind inward to attend to the experience, one seems to end up scrutinizing external features or properties. (p. 136)

Tye gives a similar version of pain experience as just offered above.

 The Transparent Becoming of World

Suppose you have a pain in your toe. Then your toe is where you feel the painful disturbance to be. Now try to turn your attention away from what you are experiencing in your toe to your experience itself apart from that. Again, inevitably, what you end up focusing on is simply what is going on in your toe ... . (p. 136)

But then Tye segues smoothly (the slip is at “or rather”) to an indirect representational realism. Again, inevitably what you end up focusing on is simply what is going on in your toe, or rather what your experience represents is going on there. The phenomenal character of your experience — certainly something you are introspectively aware of on such an occasion — must itself be representational. (p. 136)

Tye is an indirect realist who confidently assumes an external world. ... the human visual system has, as one of its functions, to detect the real, objective colors of surfaces. Somehow, the visual system manages to ascertain what colors objects really have, even though the only information immediately available to it concerns light wavelengths ... . the visual system solves a complicated computational problem and delivers a representation of a distal property on the basis of information about proximal stimuli. (p. 146)

Direct and indirect realists both are committed to an external world. In rejecting qualia a problem is left for world qualities. If the world disclosed is between-two, then how might the distinct differences between qualities of world be understood? How could we explain that the pain in the toe is incorrigibly different from the sweet smell of new-mown hay while limping down the country lane? The explanation depends on the concept of “emergent symmetries,” new forms of plenum that arise as certain system parameters are changed, distinct characters of undifferentiatedness that are not present in the basic Hamiltonian dynamical equation of the system. Emergent symmetry “provides quantum field theory with a rich capability for describing a variety of natural phenomena” (Umezawa 1993 129). The point of significance is that the creation of macroscopic objects may induce emergent symmetries, depending on the structure of the objects. (p. 112)

This “emergence” is completely different in character from the emergence of, say, Sperry (1969), for whom the emergent is more than and different from the sum of the component parts. Emergent symmetry offers distinctive plenums of undifferentiatedness. Parametric differences in the structure and functioning of different cortical areas (Chakraborty, Sandberg and Greenfield 2007) would provide distinct emergent symmetries. Different types of input end up breaking different types of symmetry and their respective replication signals will eventuate in distinct types of match in the respective between-twos. We would accordingly find



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

ourselves amidst colorful, tactile and tasty worlds, depending on three different symmetries. Meanwhile the complexity of interpenetration is the same, so the intensity of awareness does not vary in different perceptual areas of the brainq, only the emergent symmetry differs. So the quality of the between-twos of macroscopic quantum objects unlike brainq, say a diamondq, are distinct.8 The indelible diamond has no trace of inputs. The between-two of the diamondq also “is” but always is the same, and in terms of its complexity negligibly so. The diamondq is unresponsive to stimuli impinging on it, lacking receptor-transducers like the brainq has. The diamondq does not participate in controlling its between-two, like the brainq does in its intentional self-tuning. The regions of the diamondq all have the same type of symmetry whereas there are parametric differences between brainq subsystems so that their symmetries vary. A related issue is why the between-two of different brain regions with their different emergent symmetries should have any feel at all? Not the difference between the pain of stubbing your toe and the salty taste in your mouth, but the difference of both from transparent brain dynamics. These and other qualities are brute facts. That there are different qualities is explainable in terms of different emergent symmetries but that pain is painful and sugar sweet is just the case of belonging-together in different brain regions. Through belonging-together there is Being, whether the constancy of the diamond or the “kaleidoscope of existence,” where different phenomenalities unfold with every twist of the barrel by sensory fate and conditioned intention. 5.9 The problem of consciousness In its sixteenth year of operation, twelve issues per year, the Journal of Consciousness Studies devotes an entire issue to the definition of consciousness. Seemingly a bit late in the game, such an event attracts the deconstructive eye. The issue opens with this statement by the issue editor. A frequently ignored elephant in the room of Consciousness Studies is the looming question of what we actually mean by ‘consciousness’. A plethora of meanings attaches to the term, some of which are only subtly different from one another, others mutually incompatible. Take any two people at random, get them to discuss 8. To remind, the terms “diamond” and “brain” immediately and overwhelmingly evoke the idea of quotidian world objects but we must wrench ourselves away from such concessions and understand the terms as referring to distinctive macroscopic quantum objects in different spacetime locations with their own boundary structures.

 The Transparent Becoming of World

the topic, and they will almost certainly have dissimilar concepts in mind; hardly an ideal recipe for agreement! (Nunn 2009, p.5)

Indeed Vimal (2009) finds at least forty distinguishable meanings attributed to consciousness! And the upshot of these ten articles on defining consciousness is distinctly underwhelming. There does seem to be fairly general agreement that we should all try harder to both specify what we mean when referring to ‘consciousness’ and pay more attention to the context within which that meaning applies. (Nunn 2009, p.7)

Nor is there progress in grasping consciousness as an “inner experience.” I think that, for all the elapsed centuries of philosophical discussion of consciousness and the mind, we, the community of students of consciousness, are in our infancy here in terms of getting clear on what is and isn’t ‘inner’ about experience, thought, feeling, etc., and in clarifying what kind of kinds of ‘inner’-ness are being referred to in any given instance of the use of the word in this context. (Torrance 2009, p. 118)

The indefinability of consciousness and inner experience give one pause. Torrance is a sensitive phenomenologist, and finds something “puzzling” in his self-observation of inner experience. A brief reality check: I would say that, as I sit typing into my laptop, my attention fixed on the screen, or sometimes my fingers, what I am primarily conscious of is in the world, not in my ‘inner life’ — though there are lots of thought buzzing around ‘inside me’, as well as my experience of what is ‘outside’. Even to refer to the world ‘outside me’ as the ‘external world’ is puzzling, since really I experience myself as being in the world, I don’t experience the world as apart from and outside me. (Torrance 2009, p. 113)

Torrance’s puzzlement nicely sharpens the problem. The internal experience is actually just thoughts buzzing around and what’s really external is world: this is conventional. Torrance’s observation is in fact pure Heidegger: I don’t experience the world as apart from and outside me. I am always already in it ... which is just what is meant by “world thrownness.” This melts the dichotomy between immanent consciousness and transcendent world by making world-thrownness immanent to conscious existence. Consciousness cannot be defined independently of the beckoning world. The consciousness problem becomes tractable when “consciousness” is left purely cognitive — only thoughts buzzing around — excluding anything perceptual. The “lighting” (“inner experience”) of world-thrownness is between-two. The buzz of thoughtful commentary is a res apart, indeed meta, entailing Metzinger’s self-emulation (5.12), operationally detached from whatever is the case



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

between-two while modeling it. This is purely objective self-emulation conjoined with a tacit metaphysics. If we are parallel monads whose states are each lit between-two, then the world problematic resolves. World is multiply immanent. The reassuring transcendent is succeeded by an abyssal abground hoisting occasional bubbles of space-time dis-closure between-two. 5.10 Autotonoesis “Intentionality” is usually considered the directedness of consciousness, the noematic prescription that makes consciousness a consciousness-of something or other (Husserl 1960; Smith & McIntyre 1982). However “consciousness” on the present account is not perceptual and so the habit of equating the term ‘intentionality’ with ‘consciousness-of ’ gets in the way of understanding intentionality as a self-tuning. Dasein’s brain is not only “autopoietically” self-forming and selfmaintaining (Maturana and Varela 1980), and dynamically self-flowing or “autorhoetic” (Globus 2003), but is self-tuning as well. This character can be called “autotonoesis.” Self-tuning is something that neither an old cabbage nor a fine diamond can do. The living brain specializes in autotonoesis. Thermofield brain dynamics offers a way of conceiving such self-tuning.9 To recall Jibu and Yasue’s point (4.6.2): the vacuum state at any moment traces a “total memory” of everything that has gone before, repeatedly supplemented by what is happening now. Total memory is continually updated, quite a remarkable achievement, made possible by the dissipative brain. Yet the multitude of re-cognition traces are not equal at any moment; they are more or less primed to recognize what is available within the input flux and this priming is itself in flux. The recognition traces (re-traces) are weighted by repetition. Furthermore, re-cognition traces of disparate signals formed at the same time or immediately following — contingently associated — become coherent. Also coherent are signals with common abstract invariances. So a signal below threshold for belonging-together will not only prime a re-trace but all contingently associated and abstractly similar traces coherent with it. (Association is understood not as connections between elements but the elements’ coherence in superposition.) Internally generated brain signals attune the ~mode with its weighted recognition traces by adjusting what will be globally coherent when the signals derived from sensory receptor-transducers 9. This formulation differs from that found in Globus (2003) where intentionality is considered to be inherently tilde mode. In the present proposal intentionality depends on signals to the vacuum state generated internally by the brain, signals which tune up (attune) the tilde recognition traces.

 The Transparent Becoming of World

fall into the vacuum state. This internally generated attunement constrains the belonging-together in the between-two. There is a kind of competition between the activated traces of re-cognition to find the best match with the input flux. (This is a quantum version of the gestalt law of Prägnanz.) The result is based on an energy minimization principle (“least action”).10 The self-tuning of the re-cognition traces constrains the world-thrownnesses that might be explicated in the competition for belonging-together. Internally generated corticons that fall into the vacuum state evoke a low level ~mode resonance based on abstract similarity and prior contingent association. Externally stimulated corticons after dissipating their energy can belong-to certain of these resonant possibilities, generating world-thrownness in the dual mode tildeconjugate match. 5.11 I~ The subject is “infinitely near,” says Sartre (1957 86). Despite our perfect intimacy with it, “we cannot circle round it” (86). Subjectivity ever eludes our grasp. It is present, “too much present for one to succeed in taking a truly external viewpoint on it” (86). But what we are to understand by subjectivity’s “presence” is obscure. When Freud (1961) confidently states that the ego is “first and foremost a body ego,” the ego is objectified in typical fashion, a “me,” not infinitely near but feelings having a location in the body. An objective ego is not helpful, indeed remains classical when it comes to the philosophical meaning of subjectivity. What does it mean to say that subjectivity “is,” that “there is” subjectivity? Metzinger’s (2003 446, 558) solution is to dismiss any subjectivity as transcendental condition for the very possibility of objectivity and replace it with a phenomenal self-model. He further elaborates a second-order model of the intentional relation between the self-model and its surround. Instead of transcendental subjectivity Metzinger substitutes objective dynamical brain processes which have the capability of representing themselves. Mental self-presentation is a process by which some biosystems generate an internal, nonlinguistic portrayal of themselves. (Metzinger 2003, p. 265)

This “portrayal” is to be distinguished from both the brain’s representation of a physical object in its surround and from the emulation of another information processing system in its environment. Instead the brain emulates itself. The resulting self-model is phenomenal according to Metzinger, someone, but the 10. What is minimized is the free energy functional (Vitiello 1995).



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

self-emulation process is entirely transparent, “no one.” Here a computational selfemulation function does the work of transcendental subjectivity. This process is entirely objective: there is a “global workspace” (Baars 1988) of variably participating brain subsystems connected by “reentrant signaling” (Edelman 1987) that is capable of modeling world, self, and the self-world intentional relationship. The brain’s quantum thermofield theoretical tilde mode fulfills the meaning of subjectivity in terms of trace and intention, that is, traces intentionally primed for the belonging-together. Intentionality is a bias on the belonging-together. This tilde mode is no one, no thing, pre-Being, while at the same time situating for perceiving, thinking, speaking, deciding and acting. It is a horizon, horos, indistinguishable limitation on whatever might be distinguished. I am I~. The slogan “I am I~” needs unpacking. The subject is an operation on all existence — at any moment we might pause and say that “I” act in some way or other (perceiving, knowing, thinking, desiring, behaving, etc.) — yet the subject remains elusive. “I” am of an alter mode, constraining what might belong-together in the between-two, hence constraining all world-thrownness. “I” am not between-two hence never dis-closed, while always a required participant in disclosure. The spirit turns out tilde. 5.12 Some ontological comparisons. We smile today at Descartes’ notion that soul and body duals interact at the pineal gland. In a diffuse sense the pineal gland has been replaced above by the ground state which is the seat of an interaction now interpreted as a superposition. The tilde mode of the interaction plays the role of the Cartesian immaterial soul. I~ does not “exist” in the sense of Being, presence, being “there,” disclosed. The philosophically slippery meaning of “inexistence” gets pinned down as “I” in the tilde-mode, so near — infinitely near as Sartre (1957) says — yet not locatable, inexistent. The nontilde mode, however, does not play the role of Cartesian matter and this is where the present account departs decisively from Cartesianism. The nontilde mode is immaterial too, quantum. Explicate material is formed through dual mode belonging-together. Res cogitans “is” tilde mode and res extensa is betweentwo. They are not two substances at a primary ontological level. Res cogitans is a constraint whereas res extensa is a fulfillment. The meeting is not between inner and outer, subject and object, immanent and transcendent but between tilde-mode and non-tilde mode. World does not have stately participation in such an encounter but keeps erupting within it. The between-two is not something neutral which can be variously organized into the mental stuff and the physical stuff of neutral monism (e.g. Russell 1948).

 The Transparent Becoming of World

Nor is the between-two something that has two aspects (e.g. Feigl 1967), depending on how you look at it, like the Morning Star and the Evening Star. The between-two state of belonging-together does not emerge from interacting parts (e.g. Sperry 1969) in that the dual modes are pre-space and pre-time. The belonging-together of the between-two explicates from the dual mode holomovement. 5.13 “Phantom” worlds The transparency of world-thrownness obscures a monstrous truth: there is no external world but only sovereign world-thrownnesses in parallel. Reality is not world-like. Our true condition is revealed by the neurological calamity of Anton’s syndrome (Anton 1898, 1899), in which bilateral damage to occipital cortex leaves the patient functionally blind (visual anosognosia). Metzinger (2003) has provided, in his usual thorough way, a discussion of Anton’s syndrome. Patients who suddenly become completely blind due to a lesion in the visual cortex in some cases keep insisting on still being visually aware. While claiming to be seeing persons, they bump into furniture and show all the other signs of functional blindness. Still, they act as if the phenomenal disappearance of all visually given aspects of reality is not phenomenally available to them. For instance, when pressed by questions concerning their environment, they produce false, but consistent confabulations. They tell stories about nonexisting phenomenal worlds, which they seem to believe themselves, while denying any functional deficit with regard to their ability to see. (Metzinger 2003, p. 234)

What is so peculiar here is that Anton’s patients insist that they can see, are adamant that they find themselves amidst a phenomenal world, even while they stumble over the unseen dog. Despite what they steadfastly claim, Metzinger is confident that the patients are simply wrong and “confabulate” stories to maintain cognitive coherence. We are certainly in a position today to correct the confabulations of a patient suffering from Anton’s syndrome. There exist accepted procedures that allow us to arrive rationally at the belief that the patient does not have (and, sadly, never again will have) phenomenal vision ... . (Metzinger 2003, p. 588)

But why should we just disregard the patient’s insistent experience of seeing a world and from our privileged “rational” perspective label them mere “confabulators?” They obviously do not see the world that the sighted do but this does not mean they see no world at all and are making the whole thing up!



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

A better model for understanding Anton’s syndrome is found in the phantom limb. It is well known that someone who loses a limb may still experience having it. Even children who are born without one or more limbs may still experience having them. The brain somehow fills in the missing limb even though sensory data of it is lacking. In essence, I postulate that the brain contains a neuromatrix, or network of neurons, that, in addition to responding to sensory stimulation, continuously generates a characteristic pattern of impulses indicating that the body is intact and unequivocally one’s own. I call this pattern a neurosignature. If such a matrix operates in the absence of sensory inputs from the periphery of the body, it would create the impression of having a limb even when that limb has been removed. (Melzack 1992, p. 123)

In Anton’s syndrome the brain fills in a phantom visual world. The difference in mechanism between a phantom world and a phantom limb is only that in the former the filling-in is cross-modal whereas in the simpler (and much more common) phantom limb case the filling-in remains within the body mode. The phantom world is pragmatically deficient, since visual input cannot be processed, and so behavioral consequences are grave, whereas the phantom limb makes little difference in functioning. This profound pragmatic difference obscures the identity of mechanism. The phantom visual world in Anton’s syndrome is on the way to the phantom visual world that may appear vividly in dreams. The former relies on filling-in based on information available via non-visual senses. The phantom world of dreams does not rely on sensory information at all but fills in from memory traces of intentions (Globus 1987). But why conceive these worlds as mere “phantoms” in Anton’s anosognosia and dreaming? The etymology of phantom is akin to phenomenon: to bring to light (Gr. phainein). (The phantom’s connotation of illusion is a later overlay of meaning.) Worlds light up in Anton’s syndrome, in dreaming, and in ordinary waking life. Rather than arbitrarily taking the Anton’s and dreaming worlds to be illusory and the world of waking real, they should be considered ontologically at parity, world-thrownnesses all, differently constrained. 5.14 Connoisseurs of the between-two This Section takes up a most unexpected crossing of stalks in the sheaf of discourse. The academic stalk of quantum neurophilosophy developed above intersects a stalk which many, especially in the United States, consider to be traces of a scurrious

 The Transparent Becoming of World

charlatan: the late anthropologist Carlos Castaneda. (It would seem appropriate to call Dr. Castaneda an “anthropologist” since his controversial work did in fact merit a Ph.D. from a highly regarded Department of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles.11) As a graduate student Castaneda purportedly became apprenticed to a sorcerer while doing his field work among Mexico’s indigenous tribes, and allegedly studied off and on over many years a sorceric way to comprehend the human condition and achieve proper conduct. The teachings were mainly conducted by three sorcerers: “don Juan,” “don Genaro” and “dona Florinda,” who maintained that they were keeping alive the teachings of a historical lineage. Castaneda claims to have achieved initiation into their sorceric tradition. It is completely irrelevant for present purposes whether Castaneda’s account of becoming a sorcerer is a total fabrication or whether instead his struggles in attempting to follow “the warrior’s way” have some underlying verity. The point is that the present proposal and Castaneda’s stories “belong-together,” something so unexpected and surprising that their fit hooks the attention (at least an attention deconstructively attuned). Also quite irrelevant is the very unattractive (and apparently accurate) personal portrait of the later Castaneda, painted in a recent, carefully researched and detailed biography (Patterson 2008). What matters for present purposes is the discovery that Castaneda’s account of the “sorcerer’s way” dovetails with the present proposal.12 Sorcerers as “men of knowledge” can be considered the true connoisseurs of the between-two. They are adept are making use of the between-two’s capabilities. Heidegger’s few and brave “ones to come” (CP, Division VI) have according to Castaneda been around in a lineage dating back to the Spanish conquest of Mexico. 11. His dissertation thesis was essentially the text published under the Title  Tales of Power (Castaneda 1974). 12. Notwithstanding these caveats, I have my own view of Castaneda, based on having audited a graduate student seminar he taught at the University of California Irvine in the early seventies and some personal contact. Castaneda, who had accepted an assistant professorship in the School of Social Sciences (but never showed up), was clearly a great and expansive raconteur who held the large seminar spellbound. But at the same time I never had reason to doubt that his stories were at least to some extent based on actual experiences. (This should be distinguished from actual events under the conventional description of the world ... thus he might experience the sorcerer don Genaro bounding to the top of tall trees, whereas the conventional observer would see Genaro jumping evocatively off a log.) Castaneda’s demeanor was entirely consistent with something repeatedly commented on by others in the stories. At times he seemed a little dumb—unable to “get it,” as the stories repeatedly describe—and the graduate students would try to explain to him what “don Juan” and “don Genaro” were telling him. Castaneda indeed appeared to have a certain “dazed” quality, which could make him an excellent hypnotic subject. During the limited period of my observation he displayed neither the great charisma nor grandiosity that later characterized him.



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

Their parties (as in “war party”) learned to exploit the between-two, such that they were capable of unfolding world-thrownnesses at will (often abetted during initial training by psychedelic plant ingestion). To say that sorcerers are capable of selfinducing a kind of waking lucid dreaming would not do them justice, since waking and dreaming are at parity ontologically. Waking, dreaming, lucid dreaming and sorceric state are ontologically equivalent world-thrownnesses achieved by different means. Two of the key concepts in Castaneda’s anthropological account of sorcery are the nagual and the tonal. The tonal is the ordinary socialized description of the world inculcated in us from the moment of birth. Social science provides a scientific rendition of the tonal in the process of socialization. The nagual is an unfathomable indescribable abyss — an Abground — from which the world of conventional local description is unfolded moment to moment. The conventional world-in-common amidst which we find ourselves thrown is consensual within local communities. Each member of the community unfolds more or less consistent worlds from the dynamical holomovement, a nagual that superposes all possible worlds. That is, the nagual is a holoworld of implicate worlds from which particular worlds might be explicated in creative advance under the member’s intentionality. What distinguishes the “man of knowledge” or “warrior” after years of rigorous training, according to Castaneda’s story (whether fictional, true or some mix), is the ability to unfold an alternate reality — a separate world — according to the sorceric description rather than the socialized quotidian one. For those who are “stubborn,” like Castaneda was, psychedelic plants are needed to break down (“stop”) the ordinary world description and open possibilities for the world as the community of sorcerers perceives it. Others may have this ability more naturally. “Stopping the world” depends on “personal power” that accrues in living “empeccably” under the sorcerers’ code of conduct. Then when hurled into the nagual — whether by psychedelic plants, hypnosis, conducive stimulation (e.g. the glitter of a stream in sunlight) or even the self-generated resonance of the warrior’s cry which carries him into the nagual — a world common to sorceric adepts is explicated.13 This world by consensus of the sorceric community is a reality separate from the consensus world of the quotidian community, the everyday world perceived in the local milieu.

13. It should not be thought that the world under sorceric description is entirely unrelated to the stimulus flux. The sorceric community would be adept at picking up certain stimuli, ordinarily unnoted, that would constrain the world disclosed to them. Their sensitivity to these stimuli (“Allies”) could abet their “stopping the world” and promote being hurled into the nagual. 

 The Transparent Becoming of World

An appreciation of our capabilities for separate realities flows directly from the theory of the between-two. There are three factors that constrain belonging-together. (1) There is the sensory input flux and filterings of it by pre-afferent signals that tune sensory processing. (2) There is also an input flux generated within the brain, an intentionality (Freeman 2000, 2007) that constrains the match achieved, termed here “autotonoesis” (5.10). (3) Finally there are the re-traces of prior recognitions. Under the dominant regime of the tonal all three factors are locally socialized so world-thrownnesses within the community have much in common. The ordinary description of the world both creates and vouches for the world-in-common. The general process is the same for sorceric adepts who uphold an alternative world disclosed under the sorceric description. But the sensory input flux is differently filtered, the intentionality is that of a “sorceric description” rather the description of ordinary folks, and re-traces have built up over time that skew toward personal integrity as it is defined by the community of sorcerers. Under condusive conditions, the sorceric adept will find himself or herself already amidst a sorceric world alternative to the one of quotidian consensus. Human beings that are monads in parallel do not discover their true condition because social consensus makes synchronous the worlds unfolded across monads. The assumption that there is an external world-in-common appears fully justified on pragmatic and scientific grounds, which makes belief in world compelling. Sorceric initiates, however, have within the consensus of their party of fellows a nonordinary world-in-common in which they “believe” (as a matter of “personal predilection”) “without believing” (as persons of “knowledge”). Shifting to the present framework it is proposed that sorceric adepts exploit the belonging-together of the between-two so that under certain conditions they can become sorceric-world-thrown. Once the monadic condition has been appreciated, it is no longer possible to believe in the quotidian world. Other humans become mere “apparitions” (Castaneda 1972) and initiates can no longer find themselves at home with others. (This is the meaning of don Genaro’s poignant never-ending attempt to return to his birthplace, his “journey to Ixtlan” (Castaneda 1972).) Sorcerers, then, if there would be such, are the ultimate connoisseurs of the between-two. 5.15 Monads in parallel In claiming that world-thrownness is the state of the between-two upheld by our living dissipative brains, Dasein’s Existenz is appreciated as states between-two in parallel across Daseins. World is dis-closed in singular bubbles of perception.



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

This view has partial overlap with Leibniz’s monadology. But Leibniz still conceives a transcendent world (including the body) as well, external to the monads. The actual transcendent world is consistent enough with the parallel worlds immanent to monads. This transcendent world operates lawfully under the mechanical principles of efficient causality. ... bodily changes and external phenomena arise from each other according to the

laws of efficient causality, that is, of motions. (LM, p. 79 [PNG, sec. 3])

Monadic souls, in contrast, act freely and finally. There is an infinity of shapes and motions, present and past, that enter into the efficient cause of my present writing, and there is an infinity of minute inclinations and dispositions of my soul, present and past, that enter into its final cause. (LM, p. 128, sect. 36)

Transcendent world, including the body, and immanent monadic perceptions are nonetheless in complete accord. Their perfect fit is due to God, who does not bring the accord about in each and every sequence of actions — that would be Malebranche’s “occasionalism” (Nadler 2000) — but by a “pre-established harmony,” pre-established from the very beginning by God. Thus there is a perfect harmony between the perceptions of the monad and the motions of the body pre-established from the beginning between the system of efficient causes and that of final causes. It is in this that the accord and the physical union of soul and body consist, without either one being able to change the laws of the other. (LM, p. 255 [PNG, sec 3])

To aid intuiting the meaning of “pre-established harmony” Leibniz asks us to imagine two clocks which are in perfect agreement. There are three ways, he says, of enforcing the perfect agreement. An external clockmaster for the clocks could enforce the optimization. (This would be tantamount to the metaphysics of subjectivity.) Or the clocks could be mutually entraining, as in Hugyen’s experiment where two out-of-phase pendulums swinging from the same piece of wood will naturally come into phase over time. Or the two clocks could be constructed from the beginning with such reliability that once set to the same time they will always remain in synchrony despite a lack of any interaction: this is what Leibniz means by “pre-established harmony.” Leibniz’s views are overall comforting. We may be windowless monads hoisting parallel worlds within by our own appetites but still in virtue of God’s will there is a transcendent world with which our parallel worlds thankfully fit. So not to worry about being windowless monads. It has been argued here instead that there is no transcendent world, only unworldlike macroscopic quantum objects

 The Transparent Becoming of World

continually explicated from the holomovement and immanent worlds gifted to privileged parallel monads in the belonging-together of their between-twos. The privilege is the capability for dimensionalizing and situating. The result of such privilege is parallel bubbles of world-disclosure. Overlaps between Leibniz and Bohm are noteworthy. For Leibniz God is prior to Being and time and so is the holomovement. And without God, not only would there be nothing existent, but there would be nothing possible. (LM, p. 152 [TH, sect. 189])

God is the radix possibilitatis, “the root source of possibility” (LM 152, sect. 44), as is the implicate order of the holomovement. God’s will in establishing worlds does the same work as Bohm’s law of overall necessity (3.2.1). God in effect explicates from implicate order: “God produces substances from nothing ... ” (LM 163 [TH, sect. 395]). Leibniz conceives the process of explication as a “fulguration.” (The word is the same in English and the French in which Leibniz writes; the etymology relates to flashes of lightning and implies powerful interventions from above.) The intramonadic disclosure is limited by the monad’s appetition.14 There are continual fulgurations of the divinity from moment to moment, limited by the receptivity of the created being, to which it is essential to be limited. (LM, p. 162, sect. 47])

Here the continuous nature of explication in Bohm is well captured by Leibniz. The monadic state of being amidst a world “depends continually upon divine operation” and “would not continue to exist if God did not continue to act” (TH, sect. 385). Unfoldments15 are transitory; the holomovement persists. “ ... the privilege of enduring more than a moment by its nature belong to the necessary being [God] alone” (TH, sect. 384). Leibniz and Bohm are close. Now, there is an optimization principle which Leibniz puts to work: the implacable tendency toward the best of all possible worlds. God always chooses to actualize a world that is as near perfect as possible. The sufficient reason for God’s choice is that the world actualized maximizes perfection. God’s aesthetic amounts to today’s goodness function of greatest sychrony.

14. If monad’s were not appetitive, God would be responsible for evil, which Leibniz would not tolerate. 15. To remind, Bohm uses “unfoldment” and “explication” interchangeably, whereas the present usage distinguishes them sharply. Macroscopic quantum objects are unfolded in dual modes, whereas explicate Being is between-two.



Chapter 5.  The between-two 

It follows from the supreme perfection of God that he has chosen the best possible plan in producing the universe, a plan which combines the greatest variety together with the greatest order; with situation, place and time arranged in the best way possible, with the greatest effect produced by the simplest means, with the most power, the most knowledge, the greatest happiness and goodness in created things which the universe could allow. For as all possible things have a claim to existence in God’s understanding in proportion to their perfections, the result of all these claims must be the most perfect actual world which is possible. Without this it would be impossible to give a reason why things have gone as they have rather than otherwise. (LM, p. 205 [PNG, sect. 10])

The kernel of this diffuse optimization rule amounts to this: Maximize complexity of harmonious ordering (LM sect. 58). What has been added here is extending panharmonious “perfection” to include belonging-together in the between-two. It should be clear that the present Section is not an exposition of what Leibniz meant or “should have” meant. In his time and place deconstruction of world was inconceivable. Leibniz believed fully in an external world that was given by God. The appetitive monads each hoist their own version of it in parallel. The present idea is that there is no transcendent external world to have a version of, instead an abground, macroscopic quantum objects, and parallel disclosures of worldthrownness for Daseins. 5.16 Summary The theory of the between-two can be intuited in contemplation of the ancient Tao symbol (5.2). In this symbol there can be seen a dynamical balance of the whole whose dual modes compensate for each other’s unilaterality, compensate in virtue of belonging-together in the between-two. Creation operations in one mode are balanced by annihilation operations in the other, maintaining the whole inviolate. The Tao symbol’s dynamical composure is monadological in dual modes. Different emergent symmetries in different brain regions have different qualities. Constraints on the belonging-together of the between-two derive from extrinsic sensory input, intrinsic intentional input and re-traces of recognitions. Intentional inputs attune tilde-mode re-traces for belonging-to sensory input. I am I~­­­ , situating for the match and dimensionalizing it in time-space, transcendental to Existenz as world-thrownness. This conception “tildes the soul,” saving it within science. There is no transcendent world we each take in our acculturated way, only parallel monadological dis-closures from Abground by the quantum thermofield theoretical brains of acculturated Daseins. Given similar inputs and given similar attunement (by social consensus in local communities), similar worlds are unfolded

 The Transparent Becoming of World

in parallel and easily mistaken for one world-in-common-differently-interpretedacross-locales. In the transparency of quantum brain functioning the Goddess Māyā casually reigns.

chapter 6

Epilogue Of monads and tilded spirits

I was assaulted by the notion, arriving in the form of a terrifying stroke of consciousness, that substance — everything of so-called concreteness — was indistinct from its unnameable opposite. (Joseph O’Neill, Netherland)

The utter transparency of generating world-thrownness has been the incision into discussion. The dissection has proceded along the fissura of process thought that break thought’s symmetry. To our surprise, quantum neurophysics has turned out Heideggerian. The transcendental condition for how we always already find ourselves is a see-through dynamics, a transparent condition for the very possibility of finding ourselves thrown in some way or another, transparent condition for having any world at all to be amidst. Transparency implies something that can never come into view, and not because world is really there but hiding. This is a pre-phenomenal always-withdrawing dynamical imperative that continually gifts world-thrownness in waking and dreaming alike. The “always-withdrawing” is Heidegger’s (CP) version of the transcendentality of the source. There is an erupting dynamical Ursprung that in every moment gifts something fascinating (Berückung), a beckoning world having all the allure of the Goddess Māyā. World-thrownness is especially highlighted in dreams, when the world-scene may disjointedly shift, and we say in recounting the dream, “And the next thing I knew I was in a completely different place.” The cracks in the dream world are a clue to worldness as such. Situated Existenz is disjointed in the dream scene shift and this catches our attention. The dreaming disjoint betrays the hidden creation at the bottom of worldness, prone to suddenly changing its mind. But this requires no hidden metaphysical Wizard of Oz to run the show, just the play of a spontaneous dynamical process no longer burdened by the press of sensory input, a riff on nonspecifically activated memory traces when pontine centers get going every so often while sleeping (roughly every 90 minutes). The “gift” is that we find ourselves, indeed always find ourselves (whenever we take notice) and already find ourselves (by the time we reflectively consider it) amidst a beckoning and affording world of some kind or other. A condition on this gift is

 The Transparent Becoming of World

“being-in-the-world,” in-der-Welt-sein, a global situatedness, attuned in one way or another for the gift. This condition is a quantum version of Spiritus, a tilded spirit. Heideggerian dynamics as Temporalität stretches space-time dimensions too, and surely this is a gift on which Dasein’s very Existenz hangs. How might we grasp such a profoundly dimensionalizing and situating dynamics responsible for worldthrownness when we see right through it? Quantum thermofield theory offers a framework for thinking about such an Existenz. In the crossing with Heidegger the ontology of thermofield physics in return becomes illumined too. In ontology and hermeneutics both, illumination is belonging-together. Such a crossing of science and Heidegger is unexpected given the intensity of Heidegger’s critique of science. With the growing consolidation of the machinational-technical essence of all sciences, the human sciences will recede more and more. Natural sciences will become a part of machine technology and its operations; human sciences will unfold as a comprehensive and gigantic newspaper science, in which the present “lived experience” will continually be interpreted historically [historisch] and in which its publicness will be conveyed to everyone by this interpretation, as quickly and as accessibly as possible. (CP, p. 107)

What Heidegger calls here the “epoch of unrestrained ‘technicism’” might come to an end with the quantum science of brain functioning (but not if conceived merely as a quantum improvement on computation). The Gestell of technoscience shifts with eruptive dual mode dynamics. Thermofield systems do not merely perform abstract computations but generate Existenz. Thinking of the brain as wet computer is just more quotidian fallenness. Dasein’s quantum brain is worthy of Existenz! The computer is fed some order to grind on. The brain computer encased in flesh would go out and find the order, and filter it, even generate order on its own, but this is all still grinding away on order. In the frame developed here what is given is symmetry unchanging on transformation, a plenum that is a superposition, an undifferentiated indifferent fullness, and so an unlimited source that is pre-space, pre-time, pre-thing. Dasein’s brain does more than compute; it is highly adept at taking advantage of the symmetry resource. The opportunity to break out of the profound indifference of symmetry — the profound disregard of the Godhead — is provided by certain types of vacuum state. In quantum theory the ground or vacuum state abides as an incessant ultrafine evanescent foaming of extremely low energy quanta. This bubbling ground has dual dynamical modes, which leaves the vacuum state always already “between-two.” Symmetry has dual modes where their between-two is primary. The duals do not exist without the between; their relationship is “intrinsic” rather than the extrinsic relationship of tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee points on a grid. Here



Chapter 6.  Epilogue 

the stalk of quantum thermofield theory unexpectedly crosses Heidegger’s das Zwischen (3.4.8) in the sheaf of discourse. Certain regions of the ground state are of the symmetry breaking type. A certain vacuum state transformation — of present emphasis, dipole rotation — no longer leaves things unchanged, because the quanta are correlated. Slightly rotate one dipole’s vector and the change propagates through them all. The lost indifference is preserved, according to the Nambu-Goldstone theorem, by boson condensates with near-zero energy. Oscillating electric dipoles (both water and biological molecules) become aligned in the vacuum, whereas in higher energy states these dipoles are uncorrelated, incoherent, indifferent. Dynamical order here is deviation from indifference — not transformation of difference. Umezawa recognized that quantum field theory is only superficially thermodynamical in its reliance on statistical mechanics and assumption of thermal equilibrium, providing only approximations. The atomic ingredients of living systems, however, have strong mutual correlation and are far from equilibrium, so statistical mechanics is inappropriate. Life can decrease entropy even when its energy supply comes in a form that is completedly disordered, fully “thermalized.” So statistical mechanics does not strictly apply to the life situation. It offers only an approximation. A new paradigm would be needed for quantum field theory to apply to living dissipative systems. Umezawa (1993) proposed that the dual dynamical modes of the ground comprise a thermodynamically closed system. The physical law that governs the relationships between the dual modes as closed system insures that the total number of quanta across both modes of vacuum is constant. In the frame of quantum thermofield theory, if creation operators act on one side of the duality, this must be balanced by annihilation operators on the other side, and vice versa, so that the total number of quanta remains unchanged. The dual modes reciprocate in the whole. Vitiello (2001) brought into sharp focus the doubling opened in the work of Umezawa (1993) and his collaborators. For Vitiello the doubling of modes is between system mode and heat bath mode, between subject and object, between brain-self and its environment-other (where “environment” is properly understood as the rest of the universe). Vitiello’s wedding of revolutionary physics and traditional subject/object philosophy might only be of the shotgun type. A union between quantum thermofield brain dynamics and process philosophy would be more auspicious. Here it is not consciousness that is between-two but world-thrownness. The system and heat bath are superposed in the quantum vacuum state. In living dissipative systems like the brain this between-two comes under exquisite control by sensory input, intentional input and memory re-trace. Belonging-together in the brain’s between-two achieves Existenz. “World-thrownness” is a

 The Transparent Becoming of World

“creative advance” in “Moments” of “explication.” (This statement brings into proximity Heidegger, Whitehead, Hiley and Bohm.) It is fundamental to thermofield brain theory that the dual modes come in pairs, labeled ‘~’ and ‘non~’. Thermofield logic is a logic of ~/non~ pairings. The “individuals” paired are not autonomous individuals, having no existence apart from the relationship.  There are various types of pairings between non~ and ~modes permitted under thermofield principles: particle-particle, particle-hole and hole-particle. The rules of thermofield logic apply to such pairings. Thermofield logic is holonomic: the quantum thermofield theoretical brain functions under the law of the whole. The vacuum state is a superposition of dual modes, which on achieving belonging-together explicates order. The match breaks the implicate symmetry. The state of match is explicate world-thrownness. There are three prime influences on the achievement of belonging-together in the dissipative brain’s between-two. One influence is the exogenously generated flux of sensory input to the brain. A second influence is the brain’s endogenously generated flux of intentional input, both genetically controlled and learned. (The archecortical “limbic system” has a crucial integrative capability here (Freeman 2000).) The third influence is memory. Our living dissipative brains remember everything, a “total memory” (Jibu and Yasue 1995, 2004) which includes traces of recognitions. The capacity for re-trace is a monumental achievement, for only then might belonging-together become a system degree of freedom. The dual modes of a non-dissipative quantum macroscopic system also belong-together but lacking re-traces, no such degree of freedom obtains. In sum, the three flowing influences on the entanglements of the between-two are: sensory input, intentional input, and re-trace. The Moments of belonging-together achieved unfold Existenz. Subjectivity here is tilde-mode, a tilded spirit, whereas Being is between-two. I am I~. I~ is pre-objectifying, transcendental to objectification in time-space. The between-two of the quantum brain — Dasein’s brain — is autopoietic (spontaneously self-forming and self-maintaining), autorhoetic (spontaneously dynamical) and autotonoetic (spontaneously self-tuning). World-thrownness is fruit of an autopoietic, autorhoetic and autotonoetic dual mode process. Intentionality tunes the between-two for the interpenetration with the flow of sensory input, a soft rain that attunes for certain matches by setting up resonances. Here the brain generates its own inputs to the vacuum state which attune it for coherence with sensory input. So there are two flows of order raining on the vacuum state — extrinsic and intrinsic — where they convolve with the total memory re-traces of the θ-vacuum state. Then the best match is quickly found by least action. A world concretion is explicated in the successive achievements of belonging-together of sensory and intentional flux with re-traces. The explication is



Chapter 6.  Epilogue 

continuous across Moments of concretion in virtue of the quantum Zeno effect (4.1) which overrides the underlying segmentation. An important conclusion of the discussion has been that trace is prior to Being; trace is originary to world. God’s “consequent nature,” as Whitehead (PR) puts it, is prior to Existenz as world-thrownness. Being-in-the-world is prior to Existenz too, both as a dimensionalizing process in which space-time in the “gestalt bubble” of perception (Lehar 2003, 2004) is stretched, and as an attuning process in which the between-two is intentionally primed for matchings. The achievement of matchings transparently throws us amidst worlds in parallel, leaves us monads, with no divine provision for an external world to vouchsafe our monadic enrapturedness. World-thrownnesses are fascinated bubbles of dis-closure in virtue of dual mode belonging-together. As for the rest, even nothing is nihilated “there.” Monads are social creatures who communicate by means of signs, which stand for disclosures and attunements. Language would work just as well if there were actually a world-in-common out there. It makes no difference for language if we are deluded by the goddess Māyā. When worlds disclosed in parallel are congruent they are tantamount to one world-in-common. This leaves existence as world-thrownness precarious indeed. There is no transcendent external world basis out there that we might re-present, no world-incommon to anchor our various takings of it. All world-thrownnesses are generated between-two and in parallel. Worlds are disclosed in belonging-together, for each of us, and there is no world aside from them. There is only a dynamical Abground with dual modes, and its continual explication of macroscopic quantum objects. It is such stable objectsq that insure pragmatic success. World lights up through match in parallel disclosures, under the influence of sensory orders, intentions and re-traces (traces of recognitions). We are thrown as the state of the betweentwo of the quantum thermofield theoretical brain. World-thrownness continually lights up in the dual mode dynamics of belonging-together. Duality as betweentwo, in the logical form envisioned by quantum thermofield theory, is prerequisite for all phenomenality. With such conclusions human prospects plunge to the autistic. Sovereign aloneness not confined to dreaming? ... the bone turns. World-thrown are we in the parallel belonging-together of dual modes, as sensory and intentional signals make a match with re-traces. Still world-thrown in the utter cortical blindness of Anton’s tragic syndrome (5.13), blindly bumping into things ... after a year an Anton’s patient exclaimed her inferential discovery that she is “in fact” blind, cried out in anguished isolation that her bubble of perception is out of synch with everyone else’s, however worldly and quotidian and common it had seemed to her for an entire year. We are akin to Borges’ dreamers in the circular ruins (2.4.1), dreaming

 The Transparent Becoming of World

worlds, dreaming sons into them hair by hair ... except there is no meta-physical subjectivity involved. The brain is autotonoetic, a self-tuning intentional system, spontaneously generating patterns that fall into the vacuum state and participate in constraining what might belong-together. Autotonoesis constrains our world-thrownnesses. We are left monadic bubbles of Existenz, clearings that light up in an eruptive dynamical process of dual mode matching, a becoming both waking and dreaming. This dynamical process is transparent, always withdrawing, indeed already withdrawn as abground in the very moment of “exfoliation of the real” (Rescher 2000 22). World-thrownness is not computed but transparently disclosed, in parallel, stretched in space and time within centerless situated monadic plena of symmetry. “I” play a role in world-thrownness, participating as I~ in the process of belonging-together with macroscopic quantum reality. Intersubjectivity amounts to common inputs and consonant socialized attunements yielding closely compatible worlds easily mistaken for one world in common. The indifferent God is symmetry, always preserved under Noether’s theorem, a symmetry which the fall to difference breaks. A trace of the symmetry lost is retained, which opens the possibility of subsequent belonging-together. The monotonous interferences of abground are brightly relieved in monadological clearings sustained by autopoietic dissipative brain systems. “I” am alter: a tilded spirit caged to a monad. The becoming of world, alas, is always and only between-two.

Abbreviations BP BT BZP CP FCM LM PHK PNG

PR TB TD TH

ZS

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Name index A Albertazzi, C.  13, 157 Anton, G.  140, 141, 153, 157 Aristotle  1, 59 B Baars, B.  139, 157 Bell, J.  55, 157 Bergson, H.  2, 59 Berkeley, G.  1, 8, 12, 41, 43–47, 53, 58, 64, 81, 117, 155, 158 Bongard, J.  19, 157 Borges, J.L.   41, 81, 117 Boring, E.G.   13, 47 Born, M.   130 Brentano, F.   12 C Celeghini, E.  107, 157 Chakraborty, S.  134, 158 Churchland, P.   4 D Damasio, A.   26, 40 Davydov, A.  105, 158 Derrida, J.  7, 11, 50, 129, 158, 159 Descartes, R.   15 Desmond, W.   123 E Eastman, T.  3, 158 Einstein, A.  49, 59, 62, 92, 96, 101, 162 F Feigl, H.   34, 128 Freeman, W.   12, 112 Freud, S.   26, 138 Fröhlich, H.   4, 95 G Ghiradi, G.  158, 159 Gibson, J.   13 Globus, G.   25, 83, 93, 125, 137 Goldstone, J.  101–104, 107, 109, 125, 126, 151 Greenfield, S.  85, 134, 158, 160

H Hameroff, S.   3, 9, 84, 94, 95, 159 Hegel, G.  2 Heisenberg, W.   49 Henry, J.  85, 160 Heraclitus  2, 122, 160 Hiley, B.   84, 131 Honderich, T.   21 Hubel, D.  160 Hume, D.  43, 59 Husserl, E.   12 J James, Wm.  2, 36, 59, 85, 90 Jibu, M.  2, 4, 5, 9, 84, 95, 100, 102–104, 106, 108, 109, 111, 125, 128, 137, 152, 160 K Kant, I.  33, 37, 59 L Langton, R.   37 Lehar, S.   38, 39 Leibniz, G.  2, 6, 53, 55, 59–61, 63, 65, 73, 78, 119, 145–147, 155, 162 Locke, J.  15, 59 M McGinn, C.  5, 21, 22, 24, 160, 162 Melzack, R.  141, 160 Mender, D.  83, 92, 161 Metzinger, T.  11, 28, 29, 31, 39, 40, 81, 98, 113, 136, 138, 140, 161 Misner, C.  52, 161 Misra, B.  84, 161 Moore, G.E.  32, 161 N Nadler, S.  44, 145, 161 Nagel, T.  161 Nambu, Y.  101, 104, 109, 151 Nunn, C.  136, 161 O O’Regan, J.  15–19, 161

P Patterson, W.  142, 161 Pearle, P.  161 Penrose, R.  4, 9, 83, 92–94, 96–98, 104, 116, 159, 161 Peters, F.E.  161 Pickover, C.  161 Pietersma, H.  9, 74, 161 Plato  59, 126, 157, 158, 163 Plotinus  122 Plotnitsky, A.  161 Plutarch  122 Pribram, K.  37, 39, 56, 57, 159–161, 163 Pylkkänen  53–57, 80, 92, 160, 161 Pylkkő, P.  161 R Rescher, N.  2, 3, 9, 33, 34, 49, 154, 155, 161 Revonsuo, A.  29–33, 38–40, 56, 98, 113, 161 Ricciardi, L.  4, 83, 162 Rorty, R.  15, 162 Rosen, J.  99, 162 Ross, A.  22, 158, 162 Russell, B.  33, 37, 139, 162 Rutherford, D.  162 S Sartre, J.-P.   17, 138, 139 Schlick, M.  33, 162 Schmidt, D.  67, 162 Schoenbohm, S.  77, 158, 162, 163 Schopenhauer, A.  41 Searle, J.R.  36, 162 Sellars, W.  17, 69, 162 Skrbina, D.  125, 159, 162 Smith, D.  12, 137, 161, 162 Smolin, L.  162 Smythies, J.  25, 162 Snowdon, P.  23, 24, 162 Sperry, R.  17, 134, 140, 162 Spinoza, B.  50, 59, 89, 122

 The Transparent Becoming of World Stapp, H.  3, 4, 9, 84–98, 115, 116, 162 Strawson, G.  125, 163 Stuart, C.  92, 110, 111, 162 Stubenberg, L.  34, 163

U Umezawa, H.  2, 4, 6, 9, 83, 98, 99, 102, 107, 110, 111, 113, 114, 120, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 134, 151, 160, 162, 163

T Takahashi, Y.  107, 110, 111, 162, 163 Tegmark, M.  83, 163 Teilhard de Chardin, P.  2 Torrance, S.  136, 163 Tsien, J.  163 Tuszynski, J.  4, 159, 163 Tye, M.  17, 18, 36, 133, 134, 163

V Vallega, A.   75 Varela, F.  137, 160 Velmans, M.  34–38, 40, 163 Vimal, R.  136, 163 Vitiello, G.  2, 9, 84, 99, 100, 104, 106–116, 125–127, 138, 151, 157, 158, 163 Von Neumann, J.  9, 85–88, 90, 92–94, 97, 98, 115

W Weimer, W.  126, 163 Werner J.  13, 163 Whitehead, A.N.  2–4, 8, 9, 11, 47, 49–52, 55, 58–68, 75, 77, 80, 81, 89–91, 93, 95, 104, 117, 120–122, 124, 126, 152, 153, 155, 158, 159, 163 Woolf, N.  163 Y Yasue, K.  2, 4, 5, 9, 84, 100, 102–104, 106, 108, 109, 111, 125, 128, 137, 152, 160 Z Zee, A.  99, 163

Subject index Symbols ~mode  114, 121, 127, 137, 138 θ-vacua  102, 103, 108, 109 ψ/ϕ  53, 54, 85, 120 A annihilation operator  121, 125 Anton’s syndrome  140, 141 autopoiesis  160 autotonoesis  137, 144, 154 B becoming  2, 9, 52, 59, 61–63, 91, 119, 125–127, 142, 154 belonging-together  4, 6, 7, 9, 78, 80, 104, 114, 117, 119–122, 124, 127, 129–132, 135, 137–140, 144, 146, 147, 150–154 between-two  6, 7, 9, 21, 78, 80, 81, 108, 112–115, 117, 119–122, 124, 125, 127, 129–144, 146, 147, 150–154 Bogoliubov transformation  103, 108, 127 Bose-Einstein condensation  101 brain science  4, 5, 24, 28, 83, 84, 100, 116 broken symmetry  99, 102, 104, 125, 126 C Cartesianism  6, 139 causality  9, 44, 55–58, 92, 145, 157 chance  32, 60, 86, 92, 94, 97, 115, 128, 157 classical physics  4, 13, 34, 56, 83, 84, 86, 103, 115, 128 closed system  121, 151 cognitive science  5, 28 computation  3, 6, 27, 28, 39, 83, 96, 150, 159 concretion  9, 60, 64, 66, 92, 117, 152, 153 condensate  39, 99, 101, 102, 109, 111, 125, 126, 128

condensed matter theory  127 Copenhagen interpretation  49, 85, 86, 88, 91, 96, 115 corticon  100, 111 creation operator  121, 125, 126 creative advance  4, 6, 50, 52, 55, 58, 60, 62–65, 67, 77, 80, 81, 91, 111, 117, 121, 122, 124, 132, 143, 152 D Dasein’s brain  49, 68, 70, 85, 137, 150, 152 Dasein  9, 49, 68–70, 72–74, 76–80, 85, 88, 116, 117, 124, 137, 144, 150, 152 deconstruction  7, 8, 11, 17, 19, 22, 48, 81, 117, 129, 147 differance  129, 159 dimensionalization  71, 130 ding an sich  33 dipole moment vector  106 Dirac choice  86, 88, 92 direct perception  11–13, 15, 19, 41 discourse  7, 11, 20, 62, 63, 66, 104, 110, 120, 129, 141, 151 dissipation  105, 109, 110, 112, 157, 158, 163 dissipative systems  3, 106, 108, 132, 151 domains  99, 109, 125 Double  21, 34, 37, 50, 51, 54, 89, 99, 107, 108, 110, 111, 114, 119, 163 dreaming  9, 11, 19-21, 25, 26, 30, 31, 34, 42, 43, 77, 117, 119, 141, 143, 149, 153, 154, 158, 159, 161 dual quantum modes   9, 150, 151 E emergent symmetries  134, 135, 147 energy conservation law  121

enfolded  4, 9, 49–51, 54, 55, 64, 80, 102 entropy  106, 151 environment  12, 13, 20, 21, 30, 83, 84, 91, 96, 106–111, 113–116, 133, 138, 140, 151 epistemological  96, 97 existential   68, 117, 139 Existenz  35, 68, 69, 88, 108, 115, 144, 147, 149–154 explicate  2-4, 50–55 55–58, 6065, 70, 71, 75, 80, 81, 92, 115, 117, 120-122, 124, 129, 131, 132, 139, 146, 152, 153 F free choice  86, 90 Fröhlich waves  105 functionalism  14 G gap junctions  96, 105 gestalt bubble  8, 153, 160 global workspace  139 God  1, 4, 6, 8, 12, 42–47, 53, 55, 58–61, 63–66, 75, 76, 80, 81, 104, 108, 117, 119, 122–124, 126, 145–147, 153–155, 158 Goldstone bosons  101, 102, 125 Goldstone theorem  101, 151 ground  1, 6, 9, 13, 22, 40, 47, 54, 75–77, 94, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107–109, 119, 124, 128, 129, 132, 139, 150, 151 H Hamiltonian  106, 134 heat bath  106, 108, 113, 114, 151 Heisenberg action  86, 88, 89, 92, 94 Hermitean  114 hologram  49, 51, 57 holographic  39, 56, 57 holomovement  4, 50–53, 56, 58, 62, 64, 77, 80, 92, 120, 129–132, 140, 143, 146

 The Transparent Becoming of World holoworld  7, 39, 70, 132, 143 I idealism  6, 8, 12, 22, 32, 34, 37, 38, 41–43, 47, 48, 57, 73, 74, 81, 117, 119, 158 illusion  17, 27–29, 31, 43, 45, 47, 50, 116, 117, 141 implicate  2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 34, 40, 50–53, 55–58, 60–65, 68, 70, 71, 80, 117, 122, 124, 129, 131, 132, 143, 146, 152, 157, 161 indirect realism  12, 17, 24–28, 31–34, 37–40, 47, 57, 66, 67, 91, 97, 113, 120 indirect realist  38, 58, 98, 113, 134 information pick-up  12, 13, 25 information processing  6, 96, 106, 138, 158 intentionality  5, 12, 39, 71, 72, 94, 96, 112, 137, 139, 143, 144, 152, 158, 162 intrinsic relationship  6 I~  138, 139, 147, 152, 154

N Nambu-Goldstone bosons  101 nanolevel filamentous web  105 negentropy  106 neurophilosophy  2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 28, 41, 83, 141, 158 neutral monism  34, 37, 54, 89, 139, 163 Noether’s theorem  101, 154 nonlocality  125 non~ mode  114, 125, 126 non-tilde mode  126, 139 now  16, 20, 22, 25, 28, 29, 42, 70, 71, 77, 81, 86–88, 100–102, 111, 113, 117, 120, 126, 127, 129, 134, 137, 139, 146

L law of prägnanz  39, 138 least action  113, 138, 152 limbic system  12, 152

O Objectsp  127, 130 Objectsq  127, 128, 130, 153 observable  36, 51, 86, 91, 114, 115 observer  30, 86–88, 102, 105, 115, 130, 142, 162 occasionalism  44, 145 ontology  4, 7, 9, 14, 16, 21, 33, 35, 49, 64, 65, 90, 132, 150, 159 open system  113 operators  56, 113, 114, 121, 151 orchestration  84, 93–96, 159 order parameter  102

M macroscopic quantum  84, 91, 96, 98, 99, 104, 105, 114, 119, 120, 127–131, 135, 145–147, 153, 154 matching  6, 80, 107, 127, 131, 154 Māyā  11, 28, 116, 148, 149, 153 measurement problem  34, 86, 99, 113, 130, 160 measuring  37, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 115 memory   99, 127 mental representations  28 metaphysics   58, 60, 63, 86, 115,123, 154 microtubules  95, 96, 98, 100–102, 105, 125, 159, 160, 163 mind   43, 45, 88, 160 mirror-image  107, 119 mixed state  104, 114 monad  6, 59, 61, 73, 74, 78, 145, 146, 154, 155

P panexperientialism  93 phantom limb  141 phase conjugate mirror  39 phenomenal world  32, 33, 35–37, 58, 112, 132, 140, 153 philosophy of mind  5, 21 physicalism  1, 163 physical reality  6, 34, 35, 119, 157 physical world  22, 32, 35, 46, 59, 87, 90, 97, 98, 158 Planck’s constant  34, 87, 99 Platonic values  64, 65, 94, 104 plenum  3, 6, 7, 39, 46, 47, 56, 57, 62, 99, 134, 150, 159, 163 potentialities  51, 55, 56, 114 pragmatism  33, 34, 44, 88 pre-established harmony  6, 145 pre-spatial  71 pre-temporal  71 primordial nature  4, 55, 64, 65, 80

process philosophy  1–4, 7–9, 11, 23, 33, 48-50, 58, 59, 61, 65, 67, 80, 84, 96, 116, 117, 122, 149, 151, 157, 158, 161 psychoanalysis  7 psychology  21, 28, 38, 102, 157, 159, 161, 163 pure state  104, 114 Q QED  106 QFT  98, 99, 101–103, 106 QM  98, 99, 106, 114, 158 qualia  5, 17–19, 90, 92–94, 97, 116, 133, 134, 163 quality  3, 15, 16, 18, 19, 35, 36, 40, 71, 90, 133-135, 142, 147 quantum brain theory  3, 9, 81, 83–85, 95, 98, 109, 113, 116 quantum computer  3 quantum electrodynamics  106 quantum field theory  2, 56, 98, 99, 106, 108, 109, 134, 151, 160, 163 quantum mechanics   98 quantum neurophysics  4–7, 68, 110, 149 quantum potential  4, 55, 132 quantum theory  3–5, 32, 34, 38, 49, 83, 85, 86, 88–91, 93, 104, 114–116, 120, 127, 150, 160, 161 quantum thermofield brain dynamics  2, 9, 11, 21, 84, 107, 108, 117, 151 quantum tunneling  103, 109, 125 quantum Zeno effect  84, 90, 91, 95, 100, 115, 117, 130, 153 R recognition  26, 38, 57, 111, 125, 126, 137, 138 REM sleep  25, 26 replication signal  111, 126 re-presentation  15, 25–29, 36, 47, 57, 116 res cogitans  6, 88, 115, 122, 139 res extensa  6, 88, 115, 122, 139 re-trace  126, 127, 137, 151, 152 S Schrödinger equation  55, 83, 86, 93 scientific realism  8, 22, 28, 36, 41, 59, 89, 92, 116, 117 self-tuning  135, 137, 138, 152, 154



Subject index  Seyn  3, 7, 69, 71, 74–81, 117, 124, 125 situatedness  1, 72, 75, 79, 80, 117, 131, 139, 146, 147, 150 skepticism  19, 32, 44 solipsism  32, 34, 41, 43, 119 solitons  105 sorcery  142, 143 space-time  24, 52, 62, 91, 93, 94, 96, 98, 116, 130, 135, 137, 150, 153, 159 spirit  5, 7, 8, 43–47, 49, 85, 92, 139, 150, 152, 154, 158 subject  23, 24, 26, 30, 33, 54, 62, 73, 74, 80, 86, 103, 109, 115–117, 119, 125, 138, 139, 142, 151, 161 subjectivity  5, 8, 23, 28, 42, 43, 47, 73, 81, 89, 92, 94, 110–112, 117, 138, 139, 145, 152, 154, 161 superposition  92, 93, 95, 104, 128, 137, 139, 150, 152 super-quantum potential  4, 55 supervenient  6 symmetron  102, 103, 113, 116, 125 symmetry-breaking  3, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 106–108, 125, 132, 157 symmetry  3, 46, 76, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 106–109, 112, 119, 125, 126, 130, 132, 134, 135, 149–152, 154, 157, 158, 162, 163

synesthesia  27 T Tao symbol  120, 121, 147, 157, 159 TBD  98 Temporalität  71, 72, 80, 81, 130, 150 temporality  71, 72, 78, 117 thermodynamical  2, 98, 106, 114, 121, 125, 128, 151 thermofield logic  121, 152, 159 thermo-field  9, 160, 163 theta vacua  131 things-in-themselves  37, 130 tilde-conjugation rules  114 tilded spirit  150, 152, 154 tilde mode  125, 126, 137, 139 time-reversed  107, 111 total memory  103, 127, 137, 152 trace  3, 62, 65, 80, 81, 101–103, 109, 111, 121, 125–127, 135, 137, 139, 151–154 transcendental   74, 149 transcendence  1, 6, 8, 18, 42–44, 47, 59, 72–75, 78, 114, 117, 119, 123, 130, 133, 136, 137, 139, 145, 147, 153, 162 transparency  1, 2, 9, 33, 38, 43, 47, 67, 69, 71, 76, 78–80, 116, 117, 119, 121, 127, 133, 135, 139, 140, 148, 149, 154

truth  13, 31, 34, 40, 42, 44, 59, 61, 66, 68, 74, 76, 124, 140 U unfolded  2, 9, 50–52, 54, 56, 57, 61, 91, 92, 130, 143, 144, 146, 147 unitarily inequivalence  98, 102104 109, 125 V vacuum state  6, 9, 100–104, 106–108, 111–115, 121, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 137, 138, 150–152, 154 virtuality  29–31, 30, 33, 39, 41, 47, 56–58, 98, 113, 116, 161, 162 von Neumann choice  86, 92–94 W water dipole  98, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 125 wave function  83, 85–88, 91–93, 104, 113, 115, 128–131 world-in-common  9, 119, 120, 143, 144, 148, 153 world-thrownness  1, 2, 6, 9, 11, 23, 33, 40, 47, 67, 68, 78, 115–117, 119–121, 126, 127, 129, 130, 132, 136, 138–140, 144, 147, 149–154

Advances in Consciousness Research

A complete list of titles in this series can be found on the publishers’ website, www.benjamins.com 77 Globus, Gordon G.: The Transparent Becoming of World. A crossing between process philosophy and quantum neurophilosophy. 2009. xiii, 169 pp. 76 Bråten, Stein: The Intersubjective Mirror in Infant Learning and Evolution of Speech. 2009. xxii, 351 pp. 75 Skrbina, David (ed.): Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millennium. 2009. xiv, 401 pp. 74 Cañamero, Lola and Ruth Aylett (eds.): Animating Expressive Characters for Social Interaction. 2008. xxiii, 296 pp. 73 Hardcastle, Valerie Gray: Constructing the Self. 2008. xi, 186 pp. 72 Janzen, Greg: The Reflexive Nature of Consciousness. 2008. vii, 186 pp. 71 Krois, John Michael, Mats Rosengren, Angela Steidele and Dirk Westerkamp (eds.): Embodiment in Cognition and Culture. 2007. xxii, 304 pp. 70 Rakover, Sam S.: To Understand a Cat. Methodology and philosophy. 2007. xviii, 253 pp. 69 Kuczynski, John-Michael: Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind. A defense of content-internalism and semantic externalism. 2007. x, 524 pp. 68 Bråten, Stein (ed.): On Being Moved. From mirror neurons to empathy. 2007. x, 333 pp. 67 Albertazzi, Liliana (ed.): Visual Thought. The depictive space of perception. 2006. xii, 380 pp. 66 Vecchi, Tomaso and Gabriella Bottini (eds.): Imagery and Spatial Cognition. Methods, models and cognitive assessment. 2006. xiv, 436 pp. 65 Shaumyan, Sebastian: Signs, Mind, and Reality. A theory of language as the folk model of the world. 2006. xxvii, 315 pp. 64 Hurlburt, Russell T. and Christopher L. Heavey: Exploring Inner Experience. The descriptive experience sampling method. 2006. xii, 276 pp. 63 Bartsch, Renate: Memory and Understanding. Concept formation in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. 2005. x, 160 pp. 62 De Preester, Helena and Veroniek Knockaert (eds.): Body Image and Body Schema. Interdisciplinary perspectives on the body. 2005. x, 346 pp. 61 Ellis, Ralph D.: Curious Emotions. Roots of consciousness and personality in motivated action. 2005. viii, 240 pp. 60 Dietrich, Eric and Valerie Gray Hardcastle: Sisyphus’s Boulder. Consciousness and the limits of the knowable. 2005. xii, 136 pp. 59 Zahavi, Dan, Thor Grünbaum and Josef Parnas (eds.): The Structure and Development of SelfConsciousness. Interdisciplinary perspectives. 2004. xiv, 162 pp. 58 Globus, Gordon G., Karl H. Pribram and Giuseppe Vitiello (eds.): Brain and Being. At the boundary between science, philosophy, language and arts. 2004. xii, 350 pp. 57 Wildgen, Wolfgang: The Evolution of Human Language. Scenarios, principles, and cultural dynamics. 2004. xii, 240 pp. 56 Gennaro, Rocco J. (ed.): Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness. An Anthology. 2004. xii, 371 pp. 55 Peruzzi, Alberto (ed.): Mind and Causality. 2004. xiv, 235 pp. 54 Beauregard, Mario (ed.): Consciousness, Emotional Self-Regulation and the Brain. 2004. xii, 294 pp. 53 Hatwell, Yvette, Arlette Streri and Edouard Gentaz (eds.): Touching for Knowing. Cognitive psychology of haptic manual perception. 2003. x, 322 pp. 52 Northoff, Georg: Philosophy of the Brain. The brain problem. 2004. x, 433 pp. 51 Droege, Paula: Caging the Beast. A theory of sensory consciousness. 2003. x, 183 pp. 50 Globus, Gordon G.: Quantum Closures and Disclosures. Thinking-together postphenomenology and quantum brain dynamics. 2003. xxii, 200 pp. 49 Osaka, Naoyuki (ed.): Neural Basis of Consciousness. 2003. viii, 227 pp. 48 Jiménez, Luis (ed.): Attention and Implicit Learning. 2003. x, 385 pp. 47 Cook, Norman D.: Tone of Voice and Mind. The connections between intonation, emotion, cognition and consciousness. 2002. x, 293 pp. 46 Mateas, Michael and Phoebe Sengers (eds.): Narrative Intelligence. 2003. viii, 342 pp. 45 Dokic, Jérôme and Joëlle Proust (eds.): Simulation and Knowledge of Action. 2002. xxii, 271 pp. 44 Moore, Simon C. and Mike Oaksford (eds.): Emotional Cognition. From brain to behaviour. 2002. vi, 350 pp.

43 Depraz, Nathalie, Francisco J. Varela and Pierre Vermersch: On Becoming Aware. A pragmatics of experiencing. 2003. viii, 283 pp. 42 Stamenov, Maxim I. and Vittorio Gallese (eds.): Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language. 2002. viii, 392 pp. 41 Albertazzi, Liliana (ed.): Unfolding Perceptual Continua. 2002. vi, 296 pp. 40 Mandler, George: Consciousness Recovered. Psychological functions and origins of conscious thought. 2002. xii, 142 pp. 39 Bartsch, Renate: Consciousness Emerging. The dynamics of perception, imagination, action, memory, thought, and language. 2002. x, 258 pp. 38 Salzarulo, Piero and Gianluca Ficca (eds.): Awakening and Sleep–Wake Cycle Across Development. 2002. vi, 283 pp. 37 Pylkkänen, Paavo and Tere Vadén (eds.): Dimensions of Conscious Experience. 2001. xiv, 209 pp. 36 Perry, Elaine, Heather Ashton and Allan H. Young (eds.): Neurochemistry of Consciousness. Neurotransmitters in mind. With a foreword by Susan Greenfield. 2002. xii, 344 pp. 35 Mc Kevitt, Paul, Seán Ó Nualláin and Conn Mulvihill (eds.): Language, Vision and Music. Selected papers from the 8th International Workshop on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing, Galway, 1999. 2002. xii, 433 pp. 34 Fetzer, James H. (ed.): Consciousness Evolving. 2002. xx, 253 pp. 33 Yasue, Kunio, Mari Jibu and Tarcisio Della Senta (eds.): No Matter, Never Mind. Proceedings of Toward a Science of Consciousness: Fundamental approaches, Tokyo 1999. 2002. xvi, 391 pp. 32 Vitiello, Giuseppe: My Double Unveiled. The dissipative quantum model of brain. 2001. xvi, 163 pp. 31 Rakover, Sam S. and Baruch Cahlon: Face Recognition. Cognitive and computational processes. 2001. x, 306 pp. 30 Brook, Andrew and Richard C. DeVidi (eds.): Self-Reference and Self-Awareness. 2001. viii, 277 pp. 29 Van Loocke, Philip (ed.): The Physical Nature of Consciousness. 2001. viii, 321 pp. 28 Zachar, Peter: Psychological Concepts and Biological Psychiatry. A philosophical analysis. 2000. xx, 342 pp. 27 Gillett, Grant R. and John McMillan: Consciousness and Intentionality. 2001. x, 265 pp. 26 Ó Nualláin, Seán (ed.): Spatial Cognition. Foundations and applications. 2000. xvi, 366 pp. 25 Bachmann, Talis: Microgenetic Approach to the Conscious Mind. 2000. xiv, 300 pp. 24 Rovee-Collier, Carolyn, Harlene Hayne and Michael Colombo: The Development of Implicit and Explicit Memory. 2000. x, 324 pp. 23 Zahavi, Dan (ed.): Exploring the Self. Philosophical and psychopathological perspectives on selfexperience. 2000. viii, 301 pp. 22 Rossetti, Yves and Antti Revonsuo (eds.): Beyond Dissociation. Interaction between dissociated implicit and explicit processing. 2000. x, 372 pp. 21 Hutto, Daniel D.: Beyond Physicalism. 2000. xvi, 306 pp. 20 Kunzendorf, Robert G. and Benjamin Wallace (eds.): Individual Differences in Conscious Experience. 2000. xii, 412 pp. 19 Dautenhahn, Kerstin (ed.): Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology. 2000. xxiv, 448 pp. 18 Palmer, Gary B. and Debra J. Occhi (eds.): Languages of Sentiment. Cultural constructions of emotional substrates. 1999. vi, 272 pp. 17 Hutto, Daniel D.: The Presence of Mind. 1999. xiv, 252 pp. 16 Ellis, Ralph D. and Natika Newton (eds.): The Caldron of Consciousness. Motivation, affect and selforganization — An anthology. 2000. xxii, 276 pp. 15 Challis, Bradford H. and Boris M. Velichkovsky (eds.): Stratification in Cognition and Consciousness. 1999. viii, 293 pp. 14 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine: The Primacy of Movement. 1999. xxxiv, 583 pp. 13 Velmans, Max (ed.): Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness. New methodologies and maps. 2000. xii, 381 pp. 12 Stamenov, Maxim I. (ed.): Language Structure, Discourse and the Access to Consciousness. 1997. xii, 364 pp. 11 Pylkkö, Pauli: The Aconceptual Mind. Heideggerian themes in holistic naturalism. 1998. xxvi, 297 pp. 10 Newton, Natika: Foundations of Understanding. 1996. x, 211 pp.

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Ó Nualláin, Seán, Paul Mc Kevitt and Eoghan Mac Aogáin (eds.): Two Sciences of Mind. Readings in cognitive science and consciousness. 1997. xii, 490 pp. Grossenbacher, Peter G. (ed.): Finding Consciousness in the Brain. A neurocognitive approach. 2001. xvi, 326 pp. Mac Cormac, Earl and Maxim I. Stamenov (eds.): Fractals of Brain, Fractals of Mind. In search of a symmetry bond. 1996. x, 359 pp. Gennaro, Rocco J.: Consciousness and Self-Consciousness. A defense of the higher-order thought theory of consciousness. 1996. x, 220 pp. Stubenberg, Leopold: Consciousness and Qualia. 1998. x, 368 pp. Hardcastle, Valerie Gray: Locating Consciousness. 1995. xviii, 266 pp. Jibu, Mari and Kunio Yasue: Quantum Brain Dynamics and Consciousness. An introduction. 1995. xvi, 244 pp. Ellis, Ralph D.: Questioning Consciousness. The interplay of imagery, cognition, and emotion in the human brain. 1995. viii, 262 pp. Globus, Gordon G.: The Postmodern Brain. 1995. xii, 188 pp.