Mind-Body Entanglement

Abstract

AbstractThe philosophy of neutral monism that has been presented in Chap. 2 with its different interpretations and reformulations seems to constitute an appropriate metaphysical framework wherein the question of the mind-body connection could be coherently and fruitfully explored. However, these developments are not very precise regarding the individual features of the human being and their specific correlations. Either they deal with the mind-matter relationship, like in Spinoza’s psychophysical parallelism, or, when human experience is mentioned, they deal very generally with it. They deal with the general relationship between experienced sensation and intensity of stimulus (Fechner 1860), its “modality” (Mach 1886) or its “internal and external points of view” (Russell 1921), but without precise references to the content of individual experience. This is also the case of Jung’s and Pauli’s approach, which is grounded on collective human experience (Jung 1963). As to the quantum-like reformulations of neutral monism, if they introduce a very fruitful framework wherein the non-classical concepts of complementarity and entanglement characterizing the mind-body connection can be reliably expressed, they only provide very few references to the specific connection between a person’s mental life and bodily processes (Bohm and Hiley 1993; Atmanspacher 2003; Primas 2003). This general framework is now made more precise by focusing on this specific interdependence that characterizes the notion of psychosomatic unity.