Mind-Body Entanglement: Theory and Therapies

ISBN-13: 9783030901721 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 170 str.

Pierre Uzan

Opis

This book suggests a radical departure in approaching the mind-body problem. Instead of trying to causally relate subjective experience to the functioning of the body, it begins with the notion of the psychosomatic unity of the individual and looks for its conditions of possibility. This text shows that what makes this unity possible is the generalized entanglement relation that connects a person's subjective experience with its body functioning in a specific way.

In addition to providing a significant contribution to the long-standing philosophical debate about the nature of the mind-body connection, this change of perspective based on the concept of generalized entanglement allows for exploring a holistic approach to health. It can for example explain the existence of body memory and leads to a better understanding of the genesis and evolution of internal diseases, allowing for the development of mind-body therapies. This volume also provides new insights into mental disorders and sets the theoretical basis of self-healing methods appealing to students, researchers and professionals in the fields.

Spis treści

Introduction

Chapter 1. Mind-body connection and causation

1.1. About psychophysical correlations

1.2. Which concept of “causation” are we referring to?

1.3. Dualism and causal efficacy

• Dualism of substances: elusive psychophysical “interactions”

• Non-reductive physicalism: logical inconsistency of psychophysical causation

1.4. The hopeless attempts to build a concept of mental causation

• Woodward’s interventionist account of causation and mental causation

• The counterfactual account of causation and mental causation

1.5. Reductionist Physicalism

Chapter 2. Exploring neutral monism philosophy 

2.1. Spinoza’s psychophysical parallelism 

2.2. Neutral monism and individual experience

2.3. Jung and Pauli: Unus Mundus and archetypes

2.4. Quantum-like Neutral Monism

• Bohm and Hiley: the implicate order theory

• Atmanspacher and Primas: symmetry breaking and co-emergence of the psychic and physical aspects of the psychophysical unity

• Time entanglement of mind and matter? 

Chapter 3. Mind-body entanglement

3.1. The psychosomatic unity of the individual

3.2. Mind-Body interdependence: the case of emotions

3.3. Specificity (or meaningfulness) of the psychophysical correlations

3.4. Mind-body entanglement and psychosomatic unity

• Which systemic approach for dealing with the mind-body interdependence? 

• Mind-body entanglement, condition of possibility of the psychosomatic unity

Chapter 4. A quantum-like representation of the psychosomatic unity

4.1. Quantum-like representation of psychosomatic states

4.2. Complementarity in quantum physics and beyond

4.3. Quantum-like representation of mind-body entanglement

4.4. An experimental test of mind-body entanglement 

Chapter 5. Mind-body entanglement and healing

5.1. From biomedicine to the holistic mind-body approach to illness

5.2. Body memory, internal diseases and complementary medicines

5.3. Self-healing technics: placebo “effect”, biofeedback and mental imagery, meditation

5.4. Psychiatric disorders

5.5. Distant healing

Conclusion

Appendix 1: About the mathematical formalism of quantum theory

Appendix 2: Complementarity of anger and disgust

Appendix 3: Complementarity of systolic pressure and stroke volume

Appendix 4: Joint measurement of emotional and cardiovascular observables

Appendix 5: A quantum-like model of bipolar disorder

O autorze

Pierre Uzan is a professor of Physical Science at the French Student Health Foundation.  He teaches Philosophy of Science at the Catholic University of Paris and is an associated researcher at the Paris laboratory of Human and Artificial Cognition (CHArt). His research interests are in quantum theory, its generalizations and in their fields of application. He wrote the book Conscience et Physique Quantique, published by Vrin (Paris), and is currently working on the usage of the concepts of complementarity and entanglement to deal with the mind-body problem.