Élie During

Memory’s Black Box and Grins Without Cats

Ever since quantum theory first emerged through the work of Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, the peculiar nature of the quantum world has bewil-dered philosophers and confounded physicists alike. t challenged our most basic realist intuitions, particularly the notion that theories about microphysical phe-nomena should describe the state of things as they are in themselves, independent of observation. One had to abandon such intuitions to avoid becoming perma-nently trapped in paradox. Meanwhile, the imagination ran wild. The discov-ery that objects we observe and handle as particles could simultaneously behave as waves—creating interference patterns in setups like the famous “double-slit” experiment—was astonishing enough. Things become truly disorienting when confronting “non-local” correlations, where measurements on distant particles appear coordinated and synchronized as if forming a single system, somehow transcending spatial separation. These ways of speaking are evocative, but they might miss the crucial point, which concerns exactly what meaning we should assign, in this novel theoretical framework, to familiar terms like “object,” “sys-tem,” or “state.” It is precisely here that reflecting on the nature of memory can offer valuable insight.

Naturally, quantum oddities have found their way into science fiction and artistic creation, appearing as speculative extrapolations and, unfortunately more often, overly literal applications. A grotesque version pervades the visual imagery dom-inating popular science books and magazines: colored light beams, misty halos, iridescent particle clouds, layered crystalline patterns, interference fringes, wave patterns, density curves. While vaguely “wavelike,” the pompous style of these monotonous images—now mass-produced by AI systems—makes one nostal-gic for the simpler but more inventive approaches developed a century ago by Futurist painters when ideas about radioactivity and relativity were first circulat-ing. Can we move beyond a metaphorical, flatly illustrative approach to engage more attentively and sensitively with the sensory resonances of quantum phe-nomena—beyond the inevitable shock that arises when our immediate intuitions falter? This is the ambition of Quantum Sensation, an exhibition that seeks to evoke something of the experiential dimensions inherent in the practice of quantum physics itself, whose “phenomenotechnique” not only generates extraordinary states of matter but also renders them tangible—offering glimpses of new ways to feel and think.

To fully grasp what is at stake, we must paradoxically step back, ascending to a higher level of abstraction, by recalling what constituted the genuine philo-sophical novelty introduced by quantum concepts. This will help us understand why addressing the question through memory and remembrance—an approach that may not seem immediately intuitive—proves so insightful. The baroque title under which these remarks are gathered will thereby become clearer.

The first “black box” is the brain itself—or the psyche, depending on your view-point. Memory’s functioning offers a striking illustration: partial, fragmentary, constantly reconstructed, and reinforced through acts of recollection, its nature remains somewhat mysterious. Neuroscientists, sometimes doubling as psycholo-gists, propose sophisticated theories and models that essentially highlight the