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COLLOQUIA & CONFERENCES
EMBODIED CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE QUANTUM MIND
Patrick Heelan
William A. Gaston Professor of Philosophy
Georgetown University
April 14, 2006
Friday, 4:00pm-6:00pm
Nursing, Room 127
"My chief scientific interest in the last 20 years has been to somehow
extend theoretical physics into the realm of consciousness -- consciousness
is beautifully complex. It has never been properly described, certainly not
by physics or mathematics." Eugene Wigner1
I take 'embodied consciousness' to be a code word for the study of
consciousness in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and
Heidegger.2
After studying phenomenology at the Husserl Archives in Leuven, I came to
believe that what appeared strange about quantum physics was strange only
because of a common bias against the evidence of self-awareness.
Phenomenological philosophy has the capacity of uniting intelligibly under
one tent not just scientific data with theory, visual/pictorial with
scientific space, scientific theories with history, and consciousness with
neuroscience, but also other contemporary philosophies of Mind. This
unified philosophical tent turns out to have the structure of quantum
physics; hence the title 'Embodied Consciousness and the Quantum Mind.'
The characteristic of the phenomenological tradition are the following:
- Its starting-point is phenomenological first-person
self-awareness, namely, the 'givenness' of socio-historical human
consciousness to the philosophical subject -- a notion carried by
Husserl's 'die Sache selbst,' and Heidegger's 'Dasein'
('Being-in-the-World').
- It employs that (Heideggerian) 'hermeneutical circle' (HC) as a
universal transcendental method by which 'Being-in-the-World' is
historically and socially constituted as meaningful. The HC comprises
an ordered sequence of four functions or operators in consciousness: (a)
presenting the 'given' to human consciousness; (b) symmetry-making (of
concepts, theories) within the 'given' through 'entanglement'; (c)
symmetry-breaking in the 'given' (by assessing 'truth' in sensory
fulfillments) with possible changes both in the 'embodied (memory)
structure' of 'being-in-the-world' and in what is 'given' in the
world; (d) decision-making (by adaptation to ranking human interests of
'being-in-the-world').
- It denies absolute objectivity, replacing it with subject/object
'entanglement' -- a notion carried by Heidegger's 'Zuhanden'
('ready-to-hand') in contrast with his 'Vorhanden' ('present-at-hand');
'entanglement' is a characteristic of the 'embodied' self-awareness of
the world.
- In 'truth-making' (or 'truth-uncovering', 'alethia'), there is a
quantum-like dependence of 'embodied consciousness' on 'contextuality,'
'uncertainty,' and 'entanglement' that converges with third-party
evidence from the variety of ways in which the role of the human body
is studied by the sciences, especially by the neurosciences (Pribram,
Schulkin, Jacob, Jeannerod, Marcus, Prinz, et al.), child development
(Piaget, Tomasello, Vygotskii, et al.), linguistics (Byrnes,
Fauconnier, Halliday, Lakoff, et al.), and the history of science
(Crombie, Nichols, Bono, et al.).
1
Szanton, Andrew. Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner (New York: Plenum
Press, 1992), p. 309.
2
Among the physicists under whom I studied, Eugene Wigner, Werner
Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger in his Vedic period were influenced by
phenomenology. In the 1960's during my post-doc at Princeton, I was
fortunate in spending much time with Wigner in studying measurement theory,
and with Heisenberg in speaking with him about philosophy. Wigner, and for
part of his life, Heisenberg too believed that the quantum theory
implicated human consciousness in the measurement process. After studying
phenomenology at Leuven, I came to believe that what appeared strange about
it was due to a bias in Western philosophy and science.
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