Revolution, 6: An Alignment of Spheres
In questions of science the authority of a thousand is
not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
~Galileo
I recently shared #5 in this series with some peeps on G+, in light of the remarkable news in play. Some professional malcontent promptly jumped on me with all fours because, among other things, Wilczek has a Nobel, whereas I do not — and it therefore followed, as the night the day, that I could not possibly have scooped him.
Except I did, by many years. You can find an illustrated overview of all that at my site on Quanta & Consciousness.
Here’s an embryonic version of that effort, in a more traditional format, dating back to 1985.
This report arrived a few years later, at a symposium in Cambridge, MA. After my talk, a bright young PhD from Stanford said, “Yeah, you could tell, at first everyone was wondering what planet you were from — then they were all really interested.” I intend to have those words etched into my tomb.
Around this time, I got an encouraging letter from JS Bell, a household name in physics, whose work is behind all the recent excitement centering on quantum nonlocality. I deposited that note with the U of Iowa’s Special Collections section of their Main Library, where it’s listed as:
Letter to Brian John Flanagan. Geneva, Switzerland. 1989 Jan. 11. John Bell, 1989.
Here’s one of a handful of dialogues I had with Henry Stapp, back in the late 90s, when I co-moderated Stuart Hameroff’s Quantum Mind forum. Henry made a prescient remark, many years ago, saying that Bell’s theorem is the most profound discovery in science.
It was around this time that I was hashing out my ideas with all sorts of more-or-less learned folks on the internet. At one point, I was explaining my thoughts on hidden variables (HVs), sense data, and mind/brain identity theory. I seem to have been the first to argue that Einstein’s missing “elements of reality” are one and the same as the secondary qualities disclosed by perception. That is, I identified these “two” sets of things.
I also exchanged letters with Lockwood of Oxford on this issue, who had independently arrived at many of the same conclusions:
Take some range of phenomenal qualities. Assume that these qualities can be arranged according to some abstract n-dimensional space, in a way that is faithful to their perceived similarities and degrees of similarity — just as, according to Land, it is possible to arrange the phenomenal colors in his three-dimensional color solid. Then my Russellian proposal is that there exists, within the brain, some physical system, the states of which can be arranged in some n-dimensional state space […] And the two states are to be equated with each other: the phenomenal qualities are identical with the states of the corresponding physical system.
Lockwood generously acknowledged that I’d gone a tad further in making the ID with hidden variables. Yes, I know HVs have been considered out of bounds. I know all about it, thank you very much, including this recent piece of news. And then there’s Lee Smolin’s work on “Matrix models as non-local hidden variables theories.” And Aharonov’s many fascinating papers. And Ian Stewart’s work on deterministic chaos. And Peter Holland’s learned critique of the whole mess. And then we have these comments, from three towering figures in physics:
It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form […] I think it very likely, or at any rate quite possible, that in the long run Einstein will turn out to be correct.
~Dirac
Can it really be true that Einstein, in any significant sense, was a profoundly “wrong” as the followers of Bohr maintain? I do not believe so. I would, myself, side strongly with Einstein in his belief in a submiscroscopic reality, and with his conviction that present-day quantum mechanics is fundamentally incomplete.
~Penrose
A theory that yields “maybe” as an answer should be recognized as an inaccurate theory.
~’t Hooft
Now, bugger off.
One day I was talking about mind/brain ID theory by way of a well-known philosophical issue involving the planet Venus, and how it’s the same thing as both the Morning star and the Evening star.
And yes, I am a lot of fun at parties.
Some fatuous twit got on my case, taking me to task for trying, as he thought, to anthropomorphise the planet Venus(!) Leaving me somewhat nonplussed. Fortunately, a far more learned gent came to my rescue, a man who turned out to be a former president of the Hawaiian chapter of MENSA. He wrote in this wise:
Here’s a quick, crude (perhaps irrelevant) diagram:
Now, back to the reason for considering the “Venus identity.”
I can think of another analogy that I think could prove useful, and I suspect that Mr. Flanagan may also have thought of, but is too modest [!] (as seems to be consistent with his apparently good character) to discuss in a public forum. Consider the following quick, crude diagram that illustrates another significant identity:
Well, so much for my good character, I guess, but… The thing is, he was right and…
What brought me to this pass? It wasn’t for some big monetary payoff. I’ve been working on this little science project since I was 16 and haven’t made a dime on the whole deal. But it’s been quite an adventure, and I do love a good mystery. So, no big complaints, but… There’s never been any money.
At least I have bragging rights, I consoled myself. Except I didn’t. Because to state a favorable comparison between my work and Newton’s… Well, it just isn’t done! How dare I?! Only a crackpot would say such a thing. (Apparently, it’s OK in some quarters to ridicule the most vulnerable among us.) In sum, then, an honor without profit.
What do I have to say for myself? When people have been telling you you’re a genius all your life, it does things to your head — aside from swelling it, I mean. (Happily, life has humbled me, as it is prone to do.) When others go on in this way about what a clever lad you are, you might come to compare yourself to the other poor bastards who have held that lofty distinction — and choose your goals in the light of their achievements. I chose the mind/body problem. And that’s about all there is to say about that.
Besides, for all his amazing achievements, Newton was quite mistaken about a fundamental point, one most people are still wrong about today. In his book on optics he wrote:
For the Rays (of light) to speak properly are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Color. […] in the Rays they are nothing but their Dispositions to propagate this or that Motion into the Sensorium, and in the Sensorium they are Sensations of those Motions under the form of Colors.
Ike seems to have been of two minds on the subject, though; in another place he wrote that the science of colors becomes a speculation as truly mathematical as any other part of physics.
Although Newton and Galileo overthrew Aristotle’s physics, they kept the notion, which traces back to the ancient atomists, that only atoms and the void really exist out there, in the real world. In the 20th century, Schrödinger revisited this dogma, and showed the way forward, but he was largely ignored. Getting back…
Here’s a big article about all this: “Are Perceptual Fields Quantum Fields?” dating to 2001. David Chalmers, who famously named the “hard problem” in mind/body research, thought well enough of this paper to list it on his site.
Dave explains a version of ID theory:
We can also find information embodied in conscious experience. The pattern of color patches in a visual field, for example, can be seen as analogous to that of pixels covering a display screen. Intriguingly, it turns out that we find the same information states embodied in conscious experience and in underlying physical processes in the brain. The three-dimensional encoding of color spaces, for example, suggests that the information state in a color experience correspond directly to an information state in the brain. We might even regard the two states as distinct aspects of a single information state, which is simultaneously embodied in both physical processing and conscious experience.
This is another big download, written for a general audience, which was honored in a journal series on Men Who Made a New Science.
So there.
If I could head off a knee-jerk reaction, I’m well aware that the foregoing publications are not in “big, important” journals. Please bear in mind, however, that those venues have historically played a more “conservative” role (by which I do not mean “culture-bound,” necessarily). Being so well-respected, they have more to lose by running stuff that’s considered radical, revolutionary, or, in the colloquial, Out there past Pluto, man.
That said, there’s more than one way to look foolish (and I know them all), and one such is to rely too much on consensus.
Thus, when I was in college, the neural winter held sway across the land. Learned heads reasoned that there was no future in neural nets, and used the neural nets in their noggins to arrive at that conclusion.
In another great leap forward, grad students at Ivy League schools were forbidden to use the word, “consciousness.” It was all about behavior, don’t you know.
And very nearly no one was looking at the foundations of quantum theory. David Bohm was a rare exception. Another prominent physicist, whom I will not embarrass further, said within my hearing that Bohm had wasted his life in that pursuit, though today that physicist is singing a different tune.
Aside from Stapp, almost no one was looking at a quantum basis for consciousness, at least, from a scientific perspective. That was all out beyond the lunatic fringe — or, as I like to say, my personal comfort zone. I still miss my years there, and wrote a sentimental little ditty about them.
Home, home on the fringe.
Where the deer and the antelope cringe.
Where seldom is heard
A more nervous herd,
And the shepherd’s off on a long binge.
The moral here is that the soi-disant big, important journals are not the final arbiters in these matters. Academia and its big organs do important work, but the record makes clear that their workers are subject to silly fads, like everyone else — whereas nature is not.
Having chomped off the hands that fed me, I hasten to add that it is also true that my work would have been impossible without theirs, and that I have been fortunate in my teachers. I will single out Harold Bechtoldt, who was a professor emeritus when I knew him, and who served on the editorial boards of three journals. When I handed in a term paper about this business for his course on perception, he told me that the chances of any of his grad students doing my level of work were “infinitesimal,” and that he knew that for a fact.
It is hard to overstate the impact of such a remark to a young student whose confidence was not always what might be wished. And so I honor him and all the other outstanding men and women who played no small part in whatever I have achieved.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
~TS Eliot
Originally published at www.linkedin.com.