Husserl’s Theory of Perception, based on the symmetries of the transformation group among the profiles of the percept, is here extended to cover measurement. Thus, phenomenologically, experimental data are profiles of stable perceptual invariants within the experience of scientific phenomena (instances of ‘theoretical entities’). The identity of the noetic (or conscious) structure and the noematic (or objective) structure follows from the identity between a transformation group and its inverse. For space-time profiles in experimental neuroscience, the appropriate transformation group is the Galilean space-time group. In a phenomenological analysis, subject and object are both grasped as objective and distinct but mutually entangled poles of a common intentionality-structure.Each informs the other, one in the medium of practical consciousness, the other in the medium of the objective world as experienced and, following Heidegger, they are existentially inseparable. Entanglement suggests that the brain is a quantum-like system, where brain states are described by wave functions, where space-time locality and causality break down on the stage of the perceived and measured world; perception and imagination would be explained respectively as external and internal forms of measurement. This suggestion would predict the entangled co-existence of the public phenomenon in an observer’s consciousness and the quantum-like state of this observer’s brain. The conclusion is limited to perceptual phenomena. However, a better philosophical understanding of quantum physics is needed, especially of the terms ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ within the quantum-like context of the ‘nature’ within which we and the perceptual world co-exist.
Key words: phenomenology, measurement, quantum entanglement
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