Thomas Filk

Harald Atmanspacher

Emmanuel Pothos

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Quantum Interaction, QI 2015, held in Filzbach, Switzerland, in July 2015. The 20 papers together with 2 invited keynotes presented in this book were carefully selected from 27 submissions. Quantum Interaction has developed into an emerging interdisciplinary area of science combining research topics in mathematics, physics, psychology, economics, cognitive science, and computer science.

9th International Conference, QI 2015, Filzbach, Switzerland, July 15-17, 2015, Revised Selected Papers

Quantum Interaction

Gerhard J. Dalenoort

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.

Endo- and Exo-Concepts of Observation and Knowledge in Physics, Philosophy and Cognitive Science

Inside Versus Outside

Hans Primas

1 2 Harald Atmanspacher and Hans Primas 1 Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology, Freiburg, Germany,haa@igpp.de 2 ETH Zurich, Switzerland,primas@phys.chem.ethz.ch Thenotionofrealityisofsupremesigni?canceforourunderstandingofnature, the world around us, and ourselves. As the history of philosophy shows, it has been under permanent discussion at all times. Traditional discourse about - ality covers the full range from basic metaphysical foundations to operational approaches concerning human kinds of gathering and utilizing knowledge, broadly speaking epistemic approaches. However, no period in time has ex- rienced a number of moves changing and, particularly, restraining traditional concepts of reality that is comparable to the 20th century. Early in the 20th century, quite an in?uential move of such a kind was due to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, laid out essentially by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli in the mid 1920s. Bohr’s dictum, quoted by Petersen (1963, p.12), was that “it is wrong to think that the task of physics is to ?nd out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.” Although this standpoint was not left unopposed – Einstein, Schr ̈ odinger, and others were convinced that it is the task of science to ?nd out about nature itself – epistemic, operational attitudes have set the fashion for many discussions in the philosophy of physics (and of science in general) until today.

Harald Atmanspacher

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