Here is a book [pub. 2009] that we might well read at this point in our discussion, though it is extremely and unnecessarily expensive we might all want to find copies in our libraries or through interlibrary loan. In a next post I'll also link a paper by the Gordon Globus published last year in a journal titled
NeuroQuantology …..
The Transparent Becoming of World: A crossing between process philosophy and quantum neurophilosophy (Advances in Consciousness Research)
by
Gordon G. Globus
Amazon's book description: "
The Transparent Becoming of World undertakes a penetrating inquiry into the quotidian world we take for granted and the brain that silently hoists our bubbles of world-thrownness. After critiquing the traditional views of direct realism, indirect realism and idealism, the continual becoming of world is explained by a novel integration of process dynamics, as formulated by Whitehead, Heidegger and Bohm, with the burgeoning field of quantum neurophilosophy. A rich ontological duality newly opened by quantum brain theory is exploited: the “between-two” of dual quantum modes. Existence as world-thrownness is between-two in waking and dreaming alike. This highly original interdisciplinary book may be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, consciousness researchers, indeed anyone attracted to the enigma of their own lived existence. (Series A)"
I doubt that the following review of this book posted at amazon actually comprehends what Globus is arguing, but it can serve as an overview of how Globus proceeds in his thinking:
"
On the Borderline of Being and Time: Between Two
By
Gregory Nixon on February 19, 2012
Format: Hardcover
The purpose of this review is to attempt to come to grips with the elusive vision of Gordon Globus, especially as revealed in this, his latest book. However, one can only grip that which is tangible and solid and Globus's marriage of Heideggerian anti-concepts and 'quantum neurophilosophy' seems purposefully to evade solidity or grasp. This slippery anti-metaphysics is sometimes a curse for the reader seeking imagistic or conceptual clarity, but, on the other hand, it is also the blessing that allows Globus to go far beyond (or deep within) the usual narrative explanations at the frontiers of physics, even that of the quantum variety.
'For the sorcerer it is always dawn' (Durand, 1976, p. 102)
Gordon Globus MD is a practicing psychiatrist and a Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Philosophy from the University of California Irvine. His work with human minds drew him into consciousness studies before the discipline became recognized as a discipline. As early as 1976 with *Consciousness and the Brain: A scientific and philosophical inquiry*, Globus attempted to bestride the seemingly incompatible worlds of philosophy and science. His early acquaintance with the famed (and sometimes maligned) Carlos Castañeda indicates he already had an interest in transformative experience and the mingling of dream reality with daytime reality. Dreaming, with the central perspective of the dreamer amidst a continually shifting ground of place and time and dramatis personae, may have led Globus to his notion that our life-narratives or lived realities in linear time disguise the fact that reality is similar to dreaming; our situation in an objective, unchanging world is a transparent illusion over the basic fact of being situated at all. This is to say, we always find ourselves, in both dreams and reality, situated in a particular place and time and with various dramatis personae and, as we act in this situation, particular pasts and futures emerge (see Globus, 1986). It seems likely his understanding of visions, dreams, and the aberrant situations of some of his patients led to him to feel a unique kinship with Heidegger's concept of thrownness, of finding ourselves thrown into being and subsequently developing a consciousness of direction in time and space as we dealt with it. So when he declares in *Transparent Becoming* (2009), 'To our surprise, quantum neurophysics has turned out Heideggerian' (p. 149), that surprise must have long duration since Globus attempted to merge neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and Heidegger as early as 1995 when he wrote *The Postmodern Brain* (to the perplexity of many).
*The Transparent Becoming of the World* is a short book at 154 pages of text, but it is long read. At first reading, I confess I found it numbingly frustrating because the use of Heidegger's invented terminology shaken and stirred in with the already ambiguous terminology of quantum neurophilosophy (itself an intermingling of quantum physics, neuroscience and free speculation) simply did not compute. Trying to grasp what Globus is getting at often seemed like the proverbial attempt to hold a rushing stream in one's hand. I confess I had to put the book aside for a time. However, when I realized that Globus seemed to be relying on spatial metaphors when what he was really referencing was time, the second reading bore more fruit (even if it was a strange fruit indeed).
By now, the meaning of the title should be, well, transparent. We cannot perceive how the world 'becomes' because the actual process of becoming is invisible: we see right through it. We generally just accept the world as given, at least as it is given to us in our sane, daylight hours. The world seems real; therefore, it must be real. Of course, we have learned that our senses interpret this reality in particular ways and our culturally-given concepts frame those sensory interpretations, so what we perceive is a re-presentation of reality, apparently existing in our brains. This is indirect realism, the commonly accepted paradigm of science. It is still within the umbrella monism of materialism or physicalism (as opposed to, say, the previous favourite dualism, as evident in Cartesianism, or the other monism of idealism, in which only the mind is real, or the now popular twist dual-aspect monism). How does the world really come into being? According to Globus, the best answer is found in the unlikely crossroads of quantum field thermodynamics (what he calls quantum neurophilosophy, a mysterious subject in its own right), process cosmology (in which dynamic becoming is ultimate, not physical stuff), and, unmentioned in the title, Martin Heidegger's abstruse anti-ontology.
Globus has always been a maverick voice in consciousness studies, taking a perspective that is uniquely his own by embracing positions that one would assume are contrary (such as quantum physics and so-called postmodern philosophy). These positions are often non-positions that can only be (somewhat) understood in their trajectories. In the same way Heisenberg's uncertainty principle allows us to know only position or momentum but never both at once, Globus employs abstract conceptions that often seem to resist imagery, so uncertainty is as central to his writing as it is to quantum physics. He resists choosing between logical alternatives in the 'either/or' sense, even while he complexifies 'both/and' approaches that would blandly unify such alternatives. Instead of differentiation or unification he insists on a between-two dynamic in which neither of the 'two' pre-exist the dynamic of their betweenness yet the betweenness is not an entity or monad that can exist without the two it is between. If this seems obscure, and it should, my summary of his book below will attempt further elucidation, but, be warned, some of Globus's concepts -- especially those whose source is in Heidegger's invented terminology -- simply resist elucidation.
Globus begins with an introduction that outlines up his perspective so well it almost makes the rest of the book superfluous. The reader immediately feels himself thrown into a rapidly flowing stream of ideas with neither a solid image to grasp nor a conceptual ground to stand on anywhere in sight: 'There is no palpable ground of world-thrownness, only an ever-withdrawing and so concealed dynamics that transparently gifts it' (p. 1). Needs considerable unpacking, yes? However, like an abstract painter revealing his skill in photographic realism, in subsequent chapters he builds a case for his own undoing of metaphysics with bracingly clear summaries of other views that reveal his erudition, firm comprehension, and reader-friendly writing skills. Globus then proceeds to not only use these summaries as dynamic building blocks, but also to demonstrate their limitations and, in the process, the need for his deconstructive -- one might say surreal in its original sense -- insights.
Globus is better understood if one takes the time to delve deeply into almost any part of this little opus rather than attempting to get a swift overall impression. A short summary of the book's contents just would not do it justice. This should not be surprising, for Globus understands the visual universe, at least, as made manifest by the holographic principle, which means that a close study of any one of its parts will reveal the nature of the whole, and this is true of Globus's text, too. For example, by bringing 'revolutionary quantum theory to the brain,' Globus reveals that the brain is only computational, and, by implication, that consciousness cannot be a product of such computation: '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' (p. 3). Already we have Globus doing some symmetry-breaking of his own in this passage, bringing in diverse concepts, each from a field with its own symmetry or integrity and somewhat transforming each to make them fit into his boundary-breaking asymmetric complex system.
The plenum, philosophically speaking, is a concept probably originating in alchemy for the pregnant emptiness of nonbeing and used by mystics, visionaries and artists since. For a scientist, this pregnant emptiness most nearly infers to the quantum vacuum, as close to absolute nothingness as can be found in this universe, yet a nothingness 'pregnant' with the unthinkable potential energy of virtual particles. The plenum is suggested with slight variations by the implicate order of eccentric quantum physicist David Bohm (out of which enfolds the explicate order) or A.N. Whitehead's parallel ultimates of creativity and God in his primordial nature (out of which the occasions of experience, i.e., concretions, that are the world process emerge). Needless to say, Globus's 'explicate concretions' that differentiate the plenum into being combine Bohm and Whitehead, as well.
The key here, however, is the mention of memory trace, which I take to be a reference to be Derrida's (unconscious) trace of memory, which he later renamed the gift (probably to dissociate it from memory of the past). Globus anoints the power of first action to this notion of trace, for it is the blowtorch that breaks apart the quiescent symmetry of the plenum of nonbeing to throw each of us (individually but in parallel) into multifoliate being. This does not explain exactly how something emerges from nothing, but, at first sight, it seems to indicate that a cause-and-effect past lay behind the emergence of asymmetry, so it appears to fall into the logical error of eternal regression, for one must wonder what caused the asymmetry if a trace of that past cause is still present. However, anyone who is acquainted with Derrida knows the Derridean trace is of a past that has never been present; it is in fact much the same idea as the famous Derridean neologism différance, which implies a difference in space as well as an indefinite deferment of meaning in time.
This operation of difference that shadows presence is trace. All ideas and all objects of thought and perception bear the trace of other things, other moments, other presences. To bear the trace of other things is to be shadowed by alterity, which literally means 'otherness'. This notion of trace (or différance) further suggests the unexpected emergence of time and space awareness out of something absolutely other that may not, in itself, lack awareness in some unimaginable plenum-potential sense (say, awareness without content). The trace is not of the past, then, but of a undifferentiated origin that must remain unspeakable and unthinkable -- very much like the unexpected appearance of an asymmetry or singularity that leads to both space and time but is constituted within neither. At the same time (so to speak), a trace of the absolutely other of the plenum remains entangled within being, within spacetime (likely related to quantum superposition). Language is built in time; even using the word 'remains' indicates a holdover from the past, but this is not accurate. Instead, one might say in the postmodern sense, the trace is always already implicated in the here and now. What does this mean in everyday terms? It means being/asymmetry emerged or emerges spontaneously from the nonbeing/symmetry of the plenum -- and, moreover, is still doing so. The ongoing emergence of each existent requires that a place and a present (a space and a time, including a past and a future) come into being as well, creating a context for each existent. As I understand it, it is in this way that we find ourselves thrown into the particular contexts of being (dasein), which renew themselves during each moment of existence providing a sense of continuity to what is in actuality ongoing creation -- creation renewing itself each instant.
[Pardon me, Dr. Globus, if my interpretations are unrecognizable to you, but that's the nature of meaning in this universe of parallel independent minds: each reader creates the meaning of a text as much as or more than the author!]
This early mention of plenum is rarely repeated as Globus goes on, probably so the reader does not confuse this 'pregnant emptiness' with a metaphysical or transcendent background to the between-two out of which being arises. Instead any ultimate ground or background, Globus refers to the 'abground,' which literally means 'away from ground,' a term he has loosely taken from Heidegger. This does help the reader to sense this ground is not anything; it is in fact emptiness (as indicated), but it is pregnant with tension -- with the vast potential energy that is constantly produced at the dynamic point of creation between-two, but which is held in the state of potency by being reabsorbed into this abground (formerly known as the plenum)."
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The Transparent Becoming of World: A crossing between process philosophy and quantum neurophilosophy (Advances in Consciousness Research)
