Main description:

This book suggests a radical departure in approaching the mind-body problem. Instead of trying to causally relate subjective experience to the functioning of the body, it begins with the notion of the psychosomatic unity of the individual and looks for its conditions of possibility. This text shows that what makes this unity possible is the generalized entanglement relation that connects a person's subjective experience with its body functioning in a specific way.In addition to providing a significant contribution to the long-standing philosophical debate about the nature of the mind-body connection, this change of perspective based on the concept of generalized entanglement allows for exploring a holistic approach to health. It can for example explain the existence of body memory and leads to a better understanding of the genesis and evolution of internal diseases, allowing for the development of mind-body therapies. This volume also provides new insights into mental disorders and sets the theoretical basis of self-healing methods appealing to students, researchers and professionals in the fields.

Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1. Mind-body connection and causation1.1. About psychophysical correlations 1.2. Which concept of "causation" are we referring to?1.3. Dualism and causal efficacy* Dualism of substances: elusive psychophysical "interactions"* Non-reductive physicalism: logical inconsistency of psychophysical causation1.4. The hopeless attempts to build a concept of mental causation* Woodward's interventionist account of causation and mental causation* The counterfactual account of causation and mental causation1.5. Reductionist Physicalism
Chapter 2. Exploring neutral monism philosophy 2.1. Spinoza's psychophysical parallelism 2.2. Neutral monism and individual experience2.3. Jung and Pauli: Unus Mundus and archetypes2.4. Quantum-like Neutral Monism* Bohm and Hiley: the implicate order theory* Atmanspacher and Primas: symmetry breaking and co-emergence of the psychic and physical aspects of the psychophysical unity* Time entanglement of mind and matter?
Chapter 3. Mind-body entanglement3.1. The psychosomatic unity of the individual3.2. Mind-Body interdependence: the case of emotions3.3. Specificity (or meaningfulness) of the psychophysical correlations3.4. Mind-body entanglement and psychosomatic unity* Which systemic approach for dealing with the mind-body interdependence? * Mind-body entanglement, condition of possibility of the psychosomatic unity
Chapter 4. A quantum-like representation of the psychosomatic unity4.1. Quantum-like representation of psychosomatic states4.2. Complementarity in quantum physics and beyond4.3. Quantum-like representation of mind-body entanglement4.4. An experimental test of mind-body entanglement
Chapter 5. Mind-body entanglement and healing5.1. From biomedicine to the holistic mind-body approach to illness5.2. Body memory, internal diseases and complementary medicines5.3. Self-healing technics: placebo "effect", biofeedback and mental imagery, meditation5.4. Psychiatric disorders5.5. Distant healing
Conclusion
Appendix 1: About the mathematical formalism of quantum theoryAppendix 2: Complementarity of anger and disgustAppendix 3: Complementarity of systolic pressure and stroke volumeAppendix 4: Joint measurement of emotional and cardiovascular observablesAppendix 5: A quantum-like model of bipolar disorder