PHILOSOPY OF MEDICINE AND MAN

It is quite a strange thing how this work came about: In the beginning many years ago, I was on a holiday at the North Sea. I spent some beautiful sunny days at a well-known tourist spot on the North Sea. At the end of this holiday, I wanted to take the train back home. Since I still had some time, I have browsed the station library. Then I came across a book by David Peat, in which he wrote in a very understandable way about the secrets of quantum physics. This popular scientific book electrified me, and I read it in one go on the train home. As a physician, I had not the faintest idea of this mysterious physical world, which was supposed to be the basis of our modern understanding of the world. In this book, David Peat described the irregular, even the fundamental paradox in natural processes, which nevertheless merged into a harmonious whole.

It became immediately clear to me that these processes must also be of great importance for modern medicine. In the following years, I have read many popular science books and specialist journals on this subject and I have browsed the university libraries. It was only natural that I have increasingly tried to look at the often strange, abrupt and unforeseen disease processes that I encountered day after day at the sickbed from a more in-depth perspective. Thus, the concept of the first book emerged on the horizon of my thinking – initially in indistinct contours. The theme running through this book is the consideration of disease processes on a general, i.e. abstract or system-theoretical level. This inevitably led me to come across the concepts of self-organization, non-linearity and, last but not least, the concept of information as a fundamental dynamic „quantum“ of natural processes. These concepts underlie all natural processes and thus also the processes of health and illness. This is what the first book is about.

This was followed by the question of how and in what way disease processes in the body‘s periphery are represented in the brain‘s neuronal networks and how and in what way these could impact on the disease processes. I was suddenly confronted with a problem that had remained unsolved for thousands of years, namely the problem of the interaction between neuronal and mental activity, or the mind-matter problem. Looking back, I see this time as a cautious tentative search for a fixed horizon in a seemingly limitless no-man‘s land. Therefore, the consideration and investigation of this enormous problem takes up a large part of this second book.
I have tried to approach this problem, and in particular the problem of consciousness, from a perspective that is as empirically and scientifically sound as possible, i.e. from a physical and system-theoretical perspective. With all due modesty, I believe that I have subsequently recognized that the concepts of consciousness and mind play a central role in both the natural sciences and the humanities. Mind must be seen as a central moment in all processes in the world and thus in the evolution of the universe as a whole. In my opinion, human consciousness and the human mind are to be understood as central actors in world events as a whole. From this – at least that is my deep conviction – we can understand the fundamental, meaning-assigning and inexpressibly creative, role of humans in the processes of the world. This is what the third book is about. In these three books, I have repeatedly used the concept of self-organization as a central tool, and it is with great astonishment that I now realize that the intellectual structure and development history of the entire work presented also exhibit self-organizing characteristics. It was no small effort for me to translate the entire work into understandable English language. I am aware that I was not able to present this translation without errors, and I apologize to the readers in advance. I would be grateful for any criticism and information about errors in the translation.

Würzburg, Germany, 2024
Michael Imhof