Max Cohen, Pi and Gustav Fencher

At the age of 33 Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) was appointed professor of physics at the University of Leipzig. During the study of after-images, which involved Fencher staring at the sun for extended periods, he developed severe eye damage. The loss of part of his senses caused Fencher immense grief, so much so that he resigned from the university and retreated into almost complete isolation. For the next three years Fencher spent most of his time with his thoughts.

Later Fencher's vision started to improve and, as a deeply religious man, he treated his recovery as a kind of miracle. This strange course of events lead Fencher to think of the relationship between mind and matter. At the time there were two theories: 1)dualism - the mind is separate from the matter (body) and 2)materialism - the mind is just the interaction between bits of matter. Fencher came up with a kind of middle ground called 'panpsychism', which is the idea that the mind is a property of matter, To put it another way, all matter has consciousness.

Fencher's religious side thought that this idea of panpsychism was a way of explaining the relation between the spiritual (mind) and the physical (matter) and his scientific side thought that this relation should be able to be explained using mathematics. His goal was to describe the relationship between sensation (mind) and the energy (matter) that caused the sensation. From this Fencher gave birth to the theory of psychophysics.


So what do you guys think?