QUANTUM BRAIN THEORY AND THE APPEARING OF WORLD Gordon Globus M.D. Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Philosophy University of California Irvine
[email protected] Abstract The appearing of world is approached via the dream world which has generally been thought to be merely derivative: a “composition” of memory traces from waking life, which are merged and fused into a dream world that in some instances can be indiscernable from the world of waking life. Two dreams are presented which challenge the composition theory of dream formation. An alternative unified theory of world appearance in both waking and dreaming is proposed, which makes use of developments in quantum brain dynamics. For this “monadological” proposal the wake world and the dream world are ontologically at parity. This surprising conclusion extends the quantum revolution to our very Existenz.
Key words: dream world, compositional theory of dreams, monadology, quantum brain theory, deconstruction
QUANTUM BRAIN THEORY AND THE APPEARING OF WORLD
Prolegomena The possibility that our brains’ splendid capabilities are based in quantum degrees of freedom has inspired much revolutionary investigation which continues in the present publication. What has been neglected in this work, however, is quotidian phenomenology: the very world that consciousness is conscious of. To radically deconstruct conventional brain theory in pursuing quantum explanations, while leaving the phenomenological explicandum to convention, remains a lacuna in such investigations. The incision here will be to the neglected and often bizarre world as it is manifested in dreaming. This move leads to a deep deconstruction of the seemingly transcendent undoubted world and a rapprochement with quantum brain dynamics. Introduction There can be dream worlds so vivid—so authentic—that they are indeed indiscernable from the quotidian world of waking life. We awaken from some lurid dream life and have to carefully reason out: Whew! It must have been only a dream! Adept lucid dreamers even are able to decide the authentic world in which they will find themselves thrown (LaBerge 1986). We are so used to the sometimes indistinguishability of the world in dreams from the world in waking life that we do not marvel at it. But how could an authentic world thrownness be generated when sensory input is reduced to a few left-over “day residues” (as Freud (1900) called them in his The interpretation of dreams)? That puzzle, and how quantum brain dynamics offers an answer, will be the present focus. Freud explained in great detail in his epic work on dreaming that the dream is “a mass of composite structures” (p. 324), a composition of memory traces. The classic paper on dreaming by Hobson and McCarley (1977) also proposes a compositional theory of dream formation in which memory traces are synthesized into dream images (though they saw this as a quasi-random mechanical process rather than driven by unconscious wishes). A thoughtful and highly informed Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article on dream formation by Llewellyn (2013) essentially continues the compositional theory of dream formation. Via hippocampal association mechanisms, episodic memories are related, bound and integrated into “a mnemonic compositional whole” (p. 589). Again, “memory elements are merged and fused to construct visual scenes” (p. 589). But how such a seamless “merging” and “fusing” and “integrating” of elements disparate in time, place and perspective might be fashioned into a dramatically authentic unified dream life is left quite unexplained. Even a carefully constructed argument by Loorits (2017 106) that “a future brain-bound account of dreams entails also an illuminating brain-bound account of perceptual experiences” does not question the transcendence of world.
The predominant compositional theory of dream formation will be challenged here and an alternative constructed whose foundation lies in contemporary quantum brain theory. But more than altering received views of dream world construction, this proposal serves to deconstruct our quotidian beliefs about the seemingly transcendent world of waking life. Here the dream serves as via regia not to the unconscious, as Freud proclaimed, but to deconstruction of the world as such. Llewellyn’s Quicksand Dream To illustrate the compositional theory of dream world formation, I shall focus on Scene 3 of Llewellyn’s Quicksand dream (sect. 4.1). Suddenly the scene ahead has changed – now I am approaching a beach rather than a river. The view ahead is very enticing. The tide is in. The sun is sparkling on the water. Lots of happy children are playing on the beach, but no adults. Suddenly a bad thing happens. A grown-up appears in the foreground and throws a child out across the sand. The child (now a small white bundle – a baby?) lands on his or her ear and rapidly disappears. Then another child/baby is thrown. I realize that this child/baby, too, may be swallowed up by the sand. The dream ends as I wake up, terrified. (p. 597) Llewellyn relates a remote memory connected to this scene of her dream. When I was a small child ... my mother warned me against wandering off across beaches. She said children can die if they stray. “Quicksand” can suddenly swallow them up. In my childish imagination, I saw this “quick”-sand as very fine, soft, and sparkly—attractive but so fine that children (especially small ones) could quickly slip through and be engulfed. I loved being by the sea and playing on the beach. That something as delightful as a bright, sandy seashore should harbour a dreadful quicksand death trap seemed unbelievable, but my mother said it was true. (p. 606) Certainly there is a striking connection between Llewellyn’s childhood memory and the dream scene. But the present question is differently focused: How could an authentic world be constituted from such memories. After all, although Llewellyn has memories of children playing on a beautiful beach, she never actually saw a world in which a grown-up throws children across the sand, who land on their ears and are swallowed up by the sand! Such an experience was not party to her mother’s admonition. There are no memory traces of such events, so how could an authentic world composed of memory traces be achieved? And how would the composition process even work? Indeed, in general, how could memory traces from different times and places and conditions be “composited” into a seamless dream world indiscernable from the world of waking life? An extraordinary unexplained power to
constitute authentic worlds has been granted to the composition process in the line of explanation from Freud, through Hobson and McCarley to Llewellyn. The next section considers in more detail a vivid dream of my own which more precisely challenges the compositional theory of dream world formation. A Dream of Operating Medical Equipment I am operating a bizarre machine which seems to be some kind of medical equipment. There are six metal arms projecting out from the front of the machine and two more on the left side. The ends of the metal arms are covered with a stuffed brown leather pad. I operate the machine by hitting down on the pads with the underside of my left fist [as one might emphatically pound the table]. (For purposes of exposition I will number the metal arms from right to left: one through six in front and seven, eight on the left side of the machine.) The sequence of hitting down on the pads in operating the medical equipment goes from right to left (with the semi-colon signifying a slight pause): 1,2,1,2; 3,4,5,6; and then reaching around the left corner: 7,8,7,8. I keep repeating this sequence, trying to master the rhythm of operating this medical equipment, but can’t seem to get it right. I awaken uneasy and frustrated. Three Memories Relating to the Dream A piece of medical equipment had in fact played a dramatic role in my life two days preceding the dream. My young wife was pregnant and we had gone to the hospital for a sonogram of the fetus. I watched intently, fascinated, completely open, as the technician operated the sonogram machine, her hands flying over the dials. A tiny beating heart came into focus on the screen, and then, completely unexpected, a second beating heart. Twins! Now I was barely reconciled to one baby, given my advanced age and university responsibilities, but twins were a dramatic shock! I expressed none of this—I did not pound my fist on the table, though I felt like it!—and phonily acted out the smiling conventional role of the delighted father-to-be of twins. Afterwards, quite shaken, I went to the university and sought out colleagues to get some emotional support but everyone treated the situation as a great joke and made ribald comments about my masculine sexual potency to have produced twins at my age. My feelings about “the two” were left unresolved. There is another memory directly related to this dream, which calls for a little background to appreciate. At home the bed mattress was directly on the floor and just to my left there was always a box of tissues on the floor next to the mattress. But on the night of the dream, two days after the sonogram, I was sleeping on a mattress on the
floor of a primitive cabin in the woods. I felt a cold coming on so at bedtime I thoughtfully placed a box of tissues on top of a cinder block a long reach from the mattress. Sure enough, in the middle of the night I had a colossal sneezing attack and still half asleep reached out with my left hand to where the box of tissues would usually be at home but the side of my hand just hit the floor. I tried to reach the box again a little to the left, but again my hand hit the floor. I tried twice more further left and each time my hand hit the floor. Then, beginning to wake up, I groggily remembered where I was and reached way out into the darkness and on the second try grabbed the box of tissues. There was a total of six tries, segmented into twos. One final memory related to this dream, something I had never thought of for almost forty years. In the summer the carnival would come to my small town, within walking distance of my home. In early adolescence I would nightly roam about the carnival. One of the attractions at the carnival was a test of manly strength as measured by a machine. A metal arm came out from the machine, the end covered with a stuffed brown leather pad (just like in the dream). You were supposed to wind up your arm and pound the pad with the bottom side of your fist with all your might. And then there was a prominent tall gauge with a pointer attached to the machine. The stronger you pounded the pad, the higher the pointer would rise. If you were powerful enough you could make the pointer hit the top of the gauge, a bell would ring and the spectators would cheer. If you were weak and the pointer rose only part way, everyone would jeer. It was a public test of masculinity. Is the Dream of Operating Medical Equipment a Composition of Memory Traces? I have shown three memories vitally related to a dream world. The dream machine had some resemblance to the sonography apparatus. The padded arms of the dream machine also resembled the padded arm of the carnival apparatus. The traumatic waking experience of an unexpected duo—of twin beating hearts—comes out in the pairs of hits while operating the dream machine. The movements were literally twinned! My groggy groping for the box of tissues in the middle of the night has a family resemblance to the concentrated rhythmic movements in trying to operate the dream machine correctly. My colleagues jesting about my masculinity is clearly associated to the long forgotten carnival scene. But it seems impossible to conceive how such disparate memory traces might be “composited” into an authentic dream life lived in an authentic seamless dream world. How could the three totally disparate memories of the sonogram procedure, the trying to find the box of tissues while violently sneezing, and the carnival tableaux from early adolescence, be “merged and fused” into a composition that is the authentic lived world of the dream? We see the three participating memories and their connection to the dream clearly but the feat of authentic seamless composition is left unexplained. Discussion
Having rejected the composition theory of the dream world, a positive account can be given for its appearance, employing quantum brain theory. (For a more technical presentation see Blasone et al 2011; Freeman et al 2012; Globus 2003, 2009, 2015; Jibu and Yasue 1995; Pessa and Vitiello Vitiello 1995, 2001, 2004, 2015.) I shall just sketch in general terms a unified non-compositional proposal for world disclosure in waking and dreaming. I hold that physical reality is quantum at all scales, from Planck scale to the cosmological, never worldly. Worldliness in waking and dreaming both is entirely a brain construction that takes place in the brain’s least energy vacuum state. The vacuum state is a “between” ... between dual quantum modes, as Vitiello’s thermofield brain dynamics shows. This dual mode vacuum state consisting mainly of water molecule dipoles is the central claim of Vitiello’s theory. Signals that dissipate their energy and fall into the vacuum state break the symmetry of the water dipole field and under energy conservation law the lost symmetry is conserved by formation of a condensate of bosons (NambuGoldstone bosons). The symmetry-conserving boson condensate serves as a memory trace of the symmetry-breaking signal. There are three influences on the between: 1) Sensory signals to the brain which dissipate their energy and fall into the vacuum state, breaking its symmetry. I call this “other tuning” of the between. 2) Memory traces of signal recognitions, called “past tuning” of the between. 3) Signals the brain itself generates which dissipate their energy and fall into the vacuum state, called “self-tuning” of the between (which plays a functional role similar to that which continental philosophers call “intentionality” or “situatedness”). Self-tuning is the vehicle for Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) “intentional arc” which “projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation” (136). There are also memory traces of self-tuning, so that “past tuning” has both sensory and intentional components. Existence as world thrownness is the state of the between where other-tuning, past-tuning and self-tuning make a match that is real (the match of complex conjugates). This match is world disclosure as existential thrownness. So the world of waking is monadological, dis-closed from the quantum domain in the real match obtaining in the brain’s other-tuned, past-tuned and self-tuned vacuum state between. In the case of dreaming, other-tuning is no longer the rich influential flux from the environment but mere “day residues.” The real state of the between during REM sleep is dominated by self-tuning and past-tuning, whose match discloses the dream world. The difference between the world of waking and the world of dreaming is that other-tuning no longer powerfully influences the state of the between in dreaming and also that there are no Bayesian feedback constraints on self-tuning. So dream world disclosure is primarily an expression of memory and unconstrained self-tuning. It is the naked revelation of selftuning which makes the dream of such clinical interest! Then the dream world is not a composition of memory traces. Dream worlds and wake worlds both are disclosures in the quantum thermofield brain’s vacuum state
between, in virtue of a matching process. In waking the match is a function of sensory other-tuning, intentional self-tuning and past memory-tuning of the between. In dreaming the other-tuning by and large drops out and self-tuning is freed from Bayesian feedback constraints. The world of waking and the world of dreaming are ontologically at parity, equally authentic qua worlds as dis-closures in the between. What distinguishes them is the participants in the matching process. Where does this leave us, we “Daseins,” as Heidegger (1927) calls us, we who are “there” (Da)? (The Da in Heidegger’s Dasein is not the spatial sense of a tree over “there” but the sense when we shake the sleepy-head awake and ask, “Are you ‘there’?”) We dis-close world in waking and dreaming both. Yet there is no “world out there” in either case. All worlds as such make their appearance in the vacuum state between of the thermofield brain, in parallel across brains, appear in a dual mode match that is real. This is none other than a quantum version of Leibnizean monadology, but with one crucial difference. Leibniz argued that even though we are windowless monads constructing worlds within, there really is a world out there (Rescher 1991). A loving compassionate God would not cruelly betray His beloved monadic subjects and so He thinks a world into existence, a world which each monad has a version of. I, to the contrary, maintain that beyond the monads is no transcendent world but only a physical reality that is quantum at all scales. Worlds are hoisted in parallel within monads by the mechanism I have described above, in waking and dreaming both. The difference between the world in waking and the world in dreaming is that other-tuning of the between is minimal in the latter so that self-tuning holds sway. (It is self-tuning which makes dreams so clinically revealing.) Freud called the dream the via regia, the “royal road” to the unconscious mind, whereas I take the dream to be the via regia to the monadologically world thrown Existenz implied by quantum brain dynamics. References Blasone, M., Jizba, P., Vitiello, G. (2011) Quantum field theory and its macroscopic manifestations. London: Imperial College Press. Freeman, W., Livi, R., Obanata, M., Vitiello, G. Cortical phase transitions, nonequilibirum thermodynamics, and the time-dependent Ginsburg-Landau equation. J. of Modern Physics B 26, 1250035, 2012. Freud, S. (1900) The interpretation of dreams. Standard Edition v.4-5. J. Strachey, trans. London: The Hogarth Press. Globus, G. (2003) Quantum closures and disclosures: Thinking-together postphenomenology and quantum brain dynamics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Globus, G. (2009) The transparent becoming of world. A crossing between process thought and quantum neurophilosophy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Globus, G. (2015) Heideggerian dynamics and the monadological role of the ‘between’: A crossing with quantum brain dynamics. Progress in biophysics and molecular
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