| Quantum theory predicts experimental results brilliantly but simultaneously raises difficult conceptual issues. Paradoxes such as Schrödinger’s cat, the EPR paradox, or the nonlocality demanded by Bell’s inequalities have hampered philosophers in their attempts to include quantum theory when discussing the relation between mind and matter. Pylkkänen proposes that Bohm’s alternative interpretation of quantum theory resolves these paradoxes and thus enables one to base new philosophical theories upon quantum physics. He uses Bohm’s concepts of "implicate order", "active information" and "soma-significance" as tools to tackle several well-known problems in the philosophy of mind. These include mental causation, the hard problem of consciousness, time consciousness, and virtual reality. Pylkkänen’s eclectic approach combines new physics-based insights with those of analytical philosophy, phenomenology, cognitive science and neuroscience and he proposes a view in which the mechanistic framework of classical physics and neuroscience is complemented by a more holistic underlying framework in which conscious experience finds its place more naturally.
This book deals with topics that have been variously neglected and even “forbidden” in academic circles during much of the 20th century. One such issue is conscious experience, the study of which was famously suppressed in behaviorist psychology and even in traditional cognitive science, and has only relatively recently become the focus of intense research in a number of fields |
