Monday, July 6, 2009

Nuomenon Psychology: Quantum Mind

Nuomenon Psychology: Quantum Mind

In an earlier post, “Einstein’s Brain, Quantum Mind,” I explored a few ideas pertaining to ego and communication. Ego resides in space-time, mind does not. A few problems come to mind. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity establishes frame as relative. Each of us occupies our own frame and every frame is relative to every other frame. My frame contains an ego as does yours. This accounts for some phenomena—basically I’m attempting to establish a philosophical argument that an individual cannot help but be different from another individual, no matter how similar. “My” identical twin has a different frame so “we” are not identical at the 100% level.

Mind may be a horse of different color in that minds talk to each other irregardless of space-time. Intuitive apperception meets Einstein’s definition of “spooky action at a distance.” To account for these phenomena, Jung in concert with Wolfgang Pauli devised experiments testing the external validity of what Jung named synchronicity.

Quantum physics accounts for such spookiness through mathematical equations ascribing to instantaneous communication. Called entanglement, subatomic particles can become entangled and what effects one effects the other simultaneously at faster than light (FTL) or superluminous speed.

Now there can be a metaphor for synchronicity. Entanglement, however, cannot yet be more than a rule-out mechanism for synchronous events. An hypothesis must be proved scientifically—or rather, a null hypothesis must be disproved. Entanglement is the null hypothesis. If an experiment cannot disprove the null hypothesis, in this case, Ho = entanglement X (is in identity with) synchronicity, then you cannot say that entanglement is not X synchronicity. Or, in English: entanglement X synchronicity

First I want to review some literature about this. I would refer the reader to an extensive body of material regarding ego. Ego became part of psychological nomenclature at the beginning of the 20th c. as a result of Sigmund Freud’s epistemological and scientific expositions on “The Ego and the Id.” His ideas have mushroomed. They laid the foundation of modern psychology. Psychoanalytic techniques are referred to as “analysis” and most of our present-day understanding of ego has been experimentally substantiated using ego as a substrate. Not of all of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts are in vogue. There is plenty of room for both concrete experimentation and abstraction of original concepts.

Alongside Freud’s work coexists paranormal events, some of which were addressed by Freud himself. To include these requires a paradigm shift which some intuitive psychologists are exploring. Difficult as it may be to absolve some of these prepsychological or parapsychological concepts based on Eastern Religions and precursors of chemistry of the guilt that shadows all such endeavors to expose unconscious contents to the light, much of the progress to which I address my remarks may emerge from this primitive, preconscious substrata. In my doctoral dissertation (Intuition and Creativity) some mention of this occurs in the final discussion section. Now is the time to follow up on my speculation.

It occurs to me that for some of the following reasons, to borrow Kant’s suggestion that noumenon are the forms which cannot be perceived but which can be apprehended only through their effects upon phenomena that can be perceived, and in that sense are represented “intuitively in a non-sensible intuition ^ Critique of Pure Reason A256,B312,p273(NKS)”. This contrasts with the Platonic and scholastic debates over the differences between nuomena and phenomena for which Schopenhauer accuses Kant of missing the point (Wikipedia: Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy". Nuomena for Kant cannot be perceived, making it fit my definition of mind which corresponds with entanglement.

Nuomenon psychology catches the essence of mind in identity with entanglement, a quantum principle, specifically for the lack of precision and denial of determinacy. Nuomena are acausal and thereby fall under the rubric of synchronicity. Physics provides the metaphor of dark energy, an uncertain black hole of psychology in which unconsciousness rules. Ideas flash out the space-time continuum into a black hole of dark energy. Nuomena represent the next level, perhaps an archetypal level, which should properly contain unconscious mind. The question is whether we can rule out such an hypothesis through the mathematical precision of quantum mechanics.

Are nuomenal abstractions quantized mind, or do we resort to the use of nuomenal substrata as metaphor only? For the purposes of this discussion, I will leave it as metaphor for now, with the idea that there may be a mathematical, quantum proof of the identity in the future.