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    <title><![CDATA[Brain Centric]]></title>
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    <description><![CDATA[<p>Was wir Wirklichkeit nennen, ist keine Gegebenheit, sondern eine Übersetzung. Ronald Cicurel, ehemaliger Mitbegründer des ersten Projekts zur Simulation des gesamten Gehirns an der EPFL, legt mit diesem Buch eine radikale Neubestimmung dessen vor, was Erkenntnis überhaupt leisten kann.</p><p>Seine These: Das Gehirn ist keine Empfangsstation, die eine bereits vorhandene Realität abbildet. Es ist eine Membran – ein biologischer Konverter, der einen kontinuierlichen, ungeteilten Fluss in diskrete, benennbare Einheiten zerlegt. Aus dieser Übersetzungsleistung entsteht das, was wir für die Welt halten.</p><p>Cicurel unterscheidet zwei Sphären: die Ur-Welt, körperlich, analog, im Überleben verwurzelt – und die Welt des Wortes, symbolisch, abstrakt, fähig sich von unmittelbarer Erfahrung zu lösen. Zwischen beiden liegt die neuronale Membran, die trennt und verbindet, zerlegt und neu zusammensetzt.</p><p>Von diesem Ausgangspunkt aus entfaltet das Buch eine Lektüre der grossen Rätsel des modernen Wissens. Gödels Unvollständigkeitssatz, das Messproblem der Quantenmechanik, die unerklärliche Wirksamkeit der Mathematik: Cicurel liest sie nicht als Defekte der Welt, sondern als Signaturen jener Schwelle, an der Übersetzung sich selbst zu erkennen gibt. Ein eigenes Kapitel widmet sich dem, was er "liminale Artefakte" nennt – Begriffe wie Energie, Kraft oder Information, die ursprünglich ein einzelnes Merkmal aus einem reichen Bündel von Erfahrung herauslösten, deren Herkunft aber im Gebrauch in Vergessenheit geriet, sodass die Abstraktion für die Sache selbst gehalten wird.</p><p>Im letzten Teil weitet Cicurel den Blick auf die gesellschaftliche Dimension: Wie Aufmerksamkeitsökonomien und digitale Systeme die Bedingungen mitbestimmen, unter denen Wirklichkeit für ganze Gesellschaften Gestalt annimmt.</p><p>Das Buch verlangt, zwei Dinge gleichzeitig festzuhalten: die Welt, die wir bewohnen, und das Reale, das sie übersteigt. Es schliesst nicht mit einer neuen Metaphysik, sondern mit einer Haltung – der Aufforderung, die eigenen Denkkategorien als Schwellen zu erkennen, nicht als Weltgesetze.</p><p><strong>Über den Autor</strong></p><p>Ronald Cicurel war von 2004 bis 2011 an der EPFL am Aufbau des ersten Projekts zur Simulation des gesamten Gehirns auf einer IBM-Blue-Gene-Maschine beteiligt. 2015 veröffentlichte er gemeinsam mit dem Neurowissenschaftler Miguel Nicolelis (Duke University) <em>The Relativistic Brain</em>. <em>Was wir die Realität nennen</em> ist sein sechzehntes Buch und das dreizehnte, das sich – aus wechselnden Blickwinkeln – der Natur von Wirklichkeit, Erkenntnis und Intelligenz widmet.</p>]]></description>
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      <title><![CDATA[The Braincentric Dialogue: A Library of Eternal Minds]]></title>
      <itunes:title><![CDATA[The Braincentric Dialogue: A Library of Eternal Minds]]></itunes:title>
      <description><![CDATA[<p><em>Braincentric</em> explores the relationship between reality, perception, cognition and the systems humans use to understand the world. Its central thesis is that reality is never accessible from a completely neutral position. Every description is shaped by the observer, the conditions of observation and the cognitive structures that make perception possible. The brain is therefore not simply a barrier between us and reality; it is the medium through which reality becomes accessible. This access is necessarily selective, incomplete and accompanied by a loss of information.</p><p>Albert Einstein raises the question of whether physics can ever describe an independent reality. Scientific theories are always formulated from a particular perspective, and even the most elegant equations remain representations rather than reality itself. The brain does not separate humanity from the universe; it enables the universe to appear to us. Yet every act of understanding involves reduction: something becomes clearer while something else is left out.</p><p>Niels Bohr develops this idea through quantum physics, arguing that a phenomenon cannot be separated from the experimental conditions under which it appears. <em>Braincentric</em> presents the observer as an active participant in a process of transformation. Reality is not invented by the mind, but it does not manifest for us without interaction. Observation changes what can be known and how it can be known. At the same time, a model of the brain must never be confused with the living brain it attempts to describe.</p><p>Kurt Gödel reveals the limits of formal systems. Every system of explanation depends on principles that it cannot fully justify from within itself. Applied to cognition, this means that the brain is trying to understand an instrument that is itself part of the subject under investigation. Complete cognitive closure is therefore impossible—not because science is temporarily inadequate, but because this limitation is built into thought itself. No theory can fully capture the organism, language or consciousness that produces it.</p><p>John von Neumann demonstrates the power of mathematics, algorithms and machines. Computers can calculate and manipulate symbols with extraordinary precision, but computation is not the same as understanding. A machine may determine an answer, yet it cannot independently explain why a question matters or what significance its result has in human experience. Technology should therefore help us investigate not only what can be calculated, but also the boundaries of cognition and formal systems.</p><p>David Bohm criticizes the fragmentation of modern thought. Humans divide reality into objects, disciplines and categories, then forget that these boundaries are created by conceptual activity. Separate parts are treated as independent even when they may express a deeper continuity. For Bohm, reality is fundamentally an undivided order from which theories and perceptions create partial projections.</p><p>Together, these five perspectives present <em>Braincentric</em> as an inquiry into the conditions of knowledge rather than a final theory of the brain. Reality is neither a simple external object waiting to be copied nor a purely subjective invention. It emerges through interaction between world, observer, body, language, technology and culture. The brain enables knowledge while limiting it; mathematics clarifies reality while reducing it to formal structures; and machines extend cognition without generating meaning by themselves. <em>Braincentric</em> ultimately calls for methodological humility: our models can illuminate the world, but they must never be mistaken for the world itself.</p>]]></description>
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      <title><![CDATA[The Gödelian Hinge: A Brain-Centric Quantum Reality]]></title>
      <itunes:title><![CDATA[The Gödelian Hinge: A Brain-Centric Quantum Reality]]></itunes:title>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>The text presents a <strong>brain-centred interpretation of quantum physics</strong>, which rejects the classical concept of objectivity in favour of a model of the <strong>co-production of reality</strong>. It describes the measurement process not as the discovery of pre-existing facts, but as a <strong>transformative process</strong> in which a continuous order is translated into discrete information. Key physical concepts such as <strong>Born’s rule</strong> and <strong>Bell’s inequalities</strong> serve here as evidence of the structural superiority of nature over our limited models. The human brain functions as a kind of <strong>interface</strong>, creating a tangible but incomplete map of reality from a complex, indivisible world. Ultimately, <strong>quantum probability</strong> is defined as the mathematical expression of this inevitable loss of information that arises during the transition from the infinite to the measurable.</p>]]></description>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2026 18:14:07 GMT</pubDate>
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