Frédéric Lefrançois

The mechanisms underlying consciousness and its potential continuity beyond biological death remain pivotal challenges in neuroscience. This study integrates quantum biology, cognitive psychology, and thought experiments to propose a novel framework in which consciousness persists through hypothetical particles. Using three hypothetical scenarios—brain revival, molecular disassembly/reassembly, and synthetic brain reproduction—we explore whether consciousness arises solely from neural activities, from non-identified material components like certain microparticles, or from both. The results indicate that materialist models (e.g., the Orch-OR theory, Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT), or Information Integration Theory (IIT)) fail to explain the uniqueness of self-awareness amidst the ever-changing quality and quantity of the brain. This failure necessitates the introduction of two hypothetical particles. These particles, posited to operate beyond classical physics, may mediate consciousness continuity by bonding with nascent nervous systems at infinite velocities. By bridging meditative insights with quantum biology, this study offers testable hypotheses for interdisciplinary research and emphasizes neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. However, brain function might impact quantum genome evolution as a one-way action via the magnetic field of neurons in the brain. Therefore: (1) there are limits in finding direct empirical facts of genomic particles; (2) nevertheless, we discuss several indirect evidence; and (3) the control experiments suggest no alternative other than a consciousness continuum after death. These findings suggest that optimizing mental practices (e.g., meditation) may: (a) enhance the evolution of intelligence, (b) scan the mind virus, (c) optimize decision-making and global well-being, (d) minimize personal and social issues, and (e) evolve the quantum genome for a better afterlife.

This collective work consists of a dozen studies devoted to Trinité, the seminal work of Stan Musquer, a Guadeloupean painter originally from Nantes. This unique painting, with its marked cultural fusion, is firmly rooted in Caribbean transmodernity. While probing the soul of societies whose past and current dynamics it questions, Trinité ties in with the evolution of art from an eminently transhistorical perspective. Combining several different angles and approaches, a dozen researchers and art critics have examined this enigmatic and emblematic work of Stan's painting to reveal its originality and complexity. This transdisciplinary crossroads brings together art history and sociology, semiotics, and decolonial studies, all of which will enrich the reading of this highly dialogical opus.

This essay develops on the aesthetic dimensions of decolonial thought in the work of Rodolfo Kusch and Enrique Dussel, who both point us to non-objectifying modes of thinking and being. Beyond a strictly epistemological approach, decolonial critique ought to offer an account of bodies, spaces, and movements that are the very condition of thought—that is to say, the condition of a mode of thinking otherwise, beyond the dominant colonial paradigm. This account of aesthetics involves the spacing and temporalizing of bodies as they live and move through the world, or what Alejandro Vallega calls living-thinking. The spacing-temporalizing of life points us also to the rhythm of life—life as movement, flow, and spacing. Turning to resistant epistemologies alongside the work of Omar Rivera, I consider how these epistemologies go beyond disembodied and abstracted ways of knowing as they sidestep the subject/object divide and engage sensuous and embodied dimensions of thinking, aesthetic experiences, diverse geographies, and histories. In closing, I argue that decolonial aesthetics also points us to a critique of the coloniality of space. Moving beyond a cartographic grid that attempts to capture subjects and spaces in advance on its coordinate plane, decolonial aesthetics opens onto the richness of embodied and cosmic spaces.