This interdisciplinary work discloses an unexpected coherence between recent concepts in brain science and postmodern thought. A nonlinear dynamical model of brain states is viewed as an autopoietic, autorhoetic, self-organizing, self-tuning eruption under multiple constraints and guided by an overarching optimization principle which insures conservation of invariances and enhancement of symmetries. The nonlinear dynamical brain as developed shows quantum nonlocality, undergoes chaotic regimes, and does not compute. Heidegger and Derrida are ‘appropriated’ as dynamical theorists who are concerned respectively with the movement of time and being (Ereignis) and text (Différance). The chasm between postmodern thought and the thoroughly metaphysical theory that the brain computes is breached, once the nonlinear dynamical framework is adopted. The book is written in a postmodern style, making playful, opportunistic use of marginalia and dreams, and presenting a nonserial surface of broken complexity. (Series A)
3. The Continental Tradition and Cognitive Science
4. Toward a Noncomputational Cognitive Science: The Self-Tuning Brain
5. Psychiatry and the New Dynamics (with Joseph Arpaia)
6. The Eruption of Other and Self
7. Postmodern and the Dream
8. Take-Off To quantum Brain Dynamics: The Excision From Discourse
Notes
Name Index
Subject Index
Cited by (27)
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Wilson, Elizabeth A.
1996. Projects for a Scientific Psychology: Freud, Derrida, and Connectionist Theories of Cognition. differences 8:3 ► pp. 21 ff.
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