3. Derrida and the Quantum Brain

D. B. Saakyan

Dietrich Stauffer

As computers become bigger and faster they are able to tackle ever-more realistic problems. However, is it possible to discover new physics with computers? While this question is open to debate, it certainly seems as if computer simulations have helped theorists to find analytic solutions to problems that had previously resisted human brain power alone. A recent example is the exact solution of a one-dimensional particle coagulation model by Bernard Derrida, Vincent Hakim and Vincent Pasquier of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and the Service de Physique Theorique in Saclay (Phys. Rev. Lett. 1995 75 751). The effect studied by Derrida and co-workers had been discovered in computer simulations of that workhorse of statistical physics, the Ising model.

Jeremy Butterfield, Gordon N. Fleming

Gordon G. Globus

I “think together” quantum brain dynamics (QBD) and postmodernism (appropriated to include Heidegger). In particular, the world thrownness of Heidegger, the sovereignty of Bataille and the differance of Derrida can be talked about in terms of QBD. This effects a rapprochement between the QBD revolution against classical neural network brain theory and the postmodern revolution against modernity and the metaphysical tradition. Such a grand millenial rapprochement brings together science in the guise of quantum neurophysics and postmodernism against their respective wills. Discussion of the problem of “consciousness” and brain has been so stalemated and seemingly interminable that if progress is to be made, a great conceptual wrenching is only to be expected. My formulation relinquishes consciousness and the quotidian world-in-common in favor of existence and parallel world-thrownnesses.

Gordon G. Globus, Tere Vadén

Quantum Closures and Disclosures thinks together two seemingly irreconcilable discourses: An application of quantum field theory to brain functioning, called quantum brain dynamics, and the continental postphenomenological tradition, especially the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Underlying both developments is a new ontology of nonCartesian dual modes whose rich provenance is their World is disclosed in the lumen naturale of dual modes belonging-together in their between; all presencing is a function of a ~conjugate form of match in the between. This surprising rapprochement between a powerful tradition within continental philosophy and the 20th-century quantum revolution in science is fruitfully applied to crucial issues in philosophy, brain science, mathematics and psychiatry. Related Titles: Quantum Brain Dynamics and Consciousness: An introduction , edited by Mari Jibu and Kunio Yasue (1995), and My Double Unveiled: The dissipative quantum model of the brain , by Giuseppe Vitiello (2001)