Inside Versus Outside - Springer Series in Synergetics Softcover Reprint of the Original 1st Ed. 1994 edition

Description for Sales People: This book discusses a fundamental problem of the natural sciences, namely the observation of physical and biological systems and the principles by which we gain information about these systems. The contributions to this book have been carefully written and edited so as to be understandable to readers from all branches of the natural sciences. Table of Contents: 1. General Aspects.- Objectification as an Endo-Exo Transition.- Action Principles and Teleology.- Internal Time and Temporality.- Biological Evolution as a Process Viewed Internally.- Internal and External Representations of Mental Processes.- What Can We Learn From Internal Observers?.- The Image and the Picture of Ecology.- 2. The Perspective of Theoretical Physics.- Endophysics Descartes Taken Seriously.- Endo- and Exo-Theories of Matter.- Temporal Bell Inequalities: A Journey to the Limits of Consistent Histories .- Entropy and Evolution.- General Remarks on Complexity.- Observing Complexity and the Complexity of Observation.- Extrinsic-Intrinsic Concept and Complementarity.- 3. The Perspective of Cognitive Science.- Time A Hidden Window to Dynamics.- Sensory Perceptions and the Endo-Exo Interface: Towards a Physics of Cognitive Processes.- Circular Causality and the Human Self-Organized Endo-Exo Interface.- Epistemological Considerations of Neural Representations of Languages.- Semantic Pressure, Hyper-Systems, and Feelings.- Wigner s Friend Revitalized?.- The Mental System A Mathematical/Physical Approach."Publisher Marketing: In our daily lives we conceive of our surroundings as an objectively given reality. The world is perceived through our senses, and hese provide us, so we believe, with a faithful image of the world. But occ ipnally we are forced to realize that our senses deceive us, e. g., by illusions. For a while it was believed that the sensation of color is directly r lated to the frequency of light waves, until E. Land (the inventor of the polaroid camera) showed in detailed experiments that our perception of, say, a colored spot depends on the colors of its surrounding. On the other hand, we may experience hallucinations or dreams as real. Quite evidently, the relationship between the "world" and our "brain" is intricate. Another strange problem is the way in which we perceive time or the "Now." Psychophysical experiments tell us that the psychological "Now" is an extended period of time in the sense of physics. The situation was made still more puzzling when, in the nineteen-twenties, Heisenberg and others realized that, by observing processes in the microscopic world of electrons and other elementary particles, we strongly interfere with that world. The outcome of experiments - at least in general - can only be predicted statistically. What is the nature ofthis strange relationship between "object" and "observer"? This is another crucial problem of the inside-outside or endo-exo dichotomy.

Contributor Bio:  Atmanspacher, Harald Dr Harald Atmanspacher is at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology at Freiburg, Germany. In addition he is a fellow at Collegium Helveticum (ETH Zurich) and a faculty member of the C. G. Jung Institute Zurich, Switzerland. Dr Christopher Fuchs is a member of the quantum foundations group at Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada. Based on Pauli's notion of a participating observer, he explores new ideas for understanding measurement in physics.