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Contributions to Books:

G. Franck:
"Mental presence and the temporal present";
in: "Brain and Being. At the Boundary between Science, Philosophy, Language and Arts", G. Globus, K. Pribram, G. Vitiello (ed.); John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia, 2004, ISBN: 9027251940, 47 - 68.



English abstract:
This contribution ventures a look at quantum brain dynamics (QBD) through the glasses of phenomenology. In this view, QBD is about perception and recollection. Perception implies mental presence. Recollection makes sense only in a context in which present and past denote distinguished modes of existing. In physical theory, both mental presence and the temporal present are supposed to be conscious phenomena. QBD thus is confronted with the question of how the physical and the phenomenal are interrelated.

So far, the difference between the physical and the phenomenal aspect of the brain has been predominantly discussed in terms of the third-person and first-person perspective. In the following, an alternative approach is put forward. The perspective of the first person and the perspective of the third person share a common viewpoint: the temporal present. In the perspective of the first person, the temporal present is indistinguishable from mental presence. In the perspective of the third person, the present is the viewpoint in time shared by all persons. The paper asks how this communality can be made productive for mediating the ontological difference between phenomenal consciousness and the reality described by physics.


Online library catalogue of the TU Vienna:
http://aleph.ub.tuwien.ac.at/F?base=tuw01&func=find-c&ccl_term=AC04966695


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.