The concepts of complementarity and entanglement are considered with respect to their significance in and beyond physics. A formally generalized, weak version of quantum theory, more general than ordinary quantum theory of physical systems, is outlined and tentatively applied to two examples.

This English translation of Gebser’s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking world for the recognition it deserves. “The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the world is, briefly, as follows. In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the “dead end” of (...) nature. Freud had redefined culture as illness—a result of drive sublimation; Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the “adversary of the soul,” propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the “Demise of the West” during the years following World War I. The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its foundations had been superseded. It was with these foundations—the natural sciences—that Gebser began. As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration.… Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest “urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms.” Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality. He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics and sociology) as well as the arts in a discussion along similar lines. This was the point of departure of The Ever-Present Origin. From In memoriam Jean Gebser by Jean Keckeis. (shrink)

The idea of complementarity already appears in William James’ (1890a, p. 206) Principles of Psychology in the chapter on “the relations of minds to other things”. Later, in 1927, Niels Bohr introduced complementarity as a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics. It refers to properties (observables) that a system cannot have simultaneously, and which cannot be simultaneously measured with arbitrarily high accuracy. Yet, in the context of classical physics they would both be needed for an exhaustive description of the system.

We present results from numerical studies of supervised learning operations in recurrent networks considered as graphs, leading from a given set of input conditions to predetermined outputs. Graphs that have optimized their output for particular inputs with respect to predetermined outputs are asymptotically stable and can be characterized by attractors which form a representation space for an associative multiplicative structure of input operations. As the mapping from a series of inputs onto a series of such attractors generally depends on the (...) sequence of inputs, this structure is generally noncommutative. Moreover, the size of the set of attractors, indicating the complexity of learning, is found to behave non-monotonically as learning proceeds. A tentative relation between this complexity and the notion of pragmatic information is indicated. (shrink)

We propose a distinction between precategorial, acategorial and categorial states within a scientifically oriented understanding of mental processes. This distinction can be specified by approaches developed in cognitive neuroscience and the analytical philosophy of mind. On the basis of a representational theory of mental processes, acategoriality refers to a form of knowledge that presumes fully developed categorial mental representations, yet refers to nonconceptual experiences in mental states beyond categorial states. It relies on a simultaneous experience of potential individual representations and (...) their actual “representational ground”, an undifferentiated precategorial state. This simultaneity is possible if the mental state does not reside in a representation but in between representations. Acategoriality can be formally modeled as an unstable state of a dynamical mental system that is subject to particular stability criteria. (shrink)

1 – Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, Wilhelmstr. 3a, 79098 Freiburg, Germany 2 – Parmenides Center, Via Mellini 26-28, 57031 Capoliveri, Italy 3 – Department of Ophtalmology, University of Freiburg, Killianstr. 5, 79106 Freiburg, Germany 4 – Institute of Physics, University of Freiburg, Hermann- Herder -Str. 3, 79104 Freiburg, GermanyThe “Necker-Zeno model”, a model for bistable perception inspired by the quantum Zeno effect, was previously used to relate three basic time scales of cognitive relevance to one (...) another in a quantitative manner. In this paper, the model predictions are compared with experimental results obtained under discontinuous presentation of an ambiguous stimulus. In addition to earlier results for long inter-stimulus intervals, we show that the reversal dynamics according to the Necker-Zeno model is also in agreement with new results for short inter-stimulus intervals. Moreover, we refine the model in such a way that it accounts for the distribution of “dwell times”. Finally, we indicate applications concerning the modification of cognitive time scales under conditions of psychopathological impairments and meditationinduced modes of awareness. ∗Address correspondence to this author at the Theory Division of the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology, Wilhelmstr. 3a, D–79098 Freiburg, Germany; E-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)