Don't Fear the Label

I am a crackpot. 

In 7^th grade, at the first county-wide math competition I’d ever attended, I surprised myself and my teacher by winning first place.  I’d certainly been called a nerd before then, but that event precipitated a level of academic and intellectual distinction that could ultimately have been a source of debilitating bullying.  So I simply owned it.  I replaced my backpack with a briefcase and crowned myself Illustrious Nerd of newly-formed Nerds of America, an exclusive club whose only other member was my best friend, Marcus.  I swear I am not making this up.  Somehow I figured out that reappropriating an epithet robbed it of its sting and – even more importantly – its ability to control and manipulate.  And it worked.  

On a seemingly unrelated note: in this post, written in preparation of starting a physics graduate program at NYU, I discussed a couple of issues:

A) Feeling gaslit/crazy-made by journal referees who couldn’t seem to understand the fundamental argument in my first paper (current version here); and

B) Trying to get heard by the physics and philosophy academies – that is, convincing them that I’m a competent maverick, not a crackpot.

Regarding A), I celebrated in my most recent post that I’d finally gotten a very positive response from a reputable journal.  For the first time, a referee fully understood my argument and, in recommending publication after various (reasonable) revisions, paid me perhaps the highest compliment I have so far received: “[T]his paper crystallized the issue for me in a way that I found helpful and thought-provoking.”  After nearly two weeks’ effort, I submitted a revised version on Nov. 30. 

Today I received a new “revise and resubmit” response from the journal.  The good news is that the original referee was happy with the changes: “This paper now looks ready to publish!”  The bad news is that the journal included a response from a new referee, detailing four pages worth of random and irrelevant but significant changes.  The problem isn’t so much the length of the response... minor corrections or clarifications would certainly be fine.  But it’s clear from the response that the referee – like nearly all prior referees – simply didn’t understand the fundamental argument in the paper.  There simply is no way to respond in a way that will satisfy the new referee.  The only reasonable response at this point is either to ask the journal for a new referee (a strategy that worked in this article published in Foundations of Physics, as I describe in this post), to submit elsewhere, or just stop trying to get it published.

And that brings me to B)... trying to get heard.  Here’s my question: why should I be trying so damn hard to get published?  Why should I be spending so much time, energy, and effort to convince people?  Why does it matter whether I am seen as a brilliant renegade or instead as a crackpot (if I am even seen at all)?

There clearly are benefits to my being heard.  Not as many, of course, as to professional academics who need publication to further their careers, but there are still some.  However, there are also costs, and at some point a line is crossed in which the costs outweigh the benefits. 

Let me use as an example the subject of the article in question, in which I show that Special Relativity prevents the existence of multiple physical copies of a conscious state.  Here’s the thing... I had that insight in March 2018, almost three years ago!  I wrote and submitted a paper on that topic to a journal in July 2018.  Since then, I have spent countless hours revising, rewriting, and resubmitting that paper to a total of eight journals, as well as presenting it at two conferences and producing related YouTube videos.  While the revisions have certainly improved the paper to some degree, I should emphasize that the fundamental argument of the paper has never changed; it has always reflected my original insight of March 2018.  In other words, all I seem to have accomplished from the many hundreds of hours spent on this paper is clarifying and tightening the argument for the benefit of others.  I have learned little or nothing new in the process, and the time and energy I spent, which came at the expense of other fundamental insights and discoveries that I could have made, had the additional detriment of discouraging, confusing, and emotionally draining me.  Why should I keep trying to get heard? 

I am reminded of a particularly poignant passage (p. 328) in Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics, in which he discusses people whom he calls “seers,” scientists who are “creative rebels with [the] rare talent” of recognizing wrong assumptions and asking new questions: “It is a cliché to ask whether a young Einstein would now be hired by a university.  The answer is obviously no; he wasn’t even hired then... If we have the contributions of [seers], it is because of their generosity – or maybe their stubbornness – in continuing to work without the support the academic world normally gives to scientists.”

I don’t know for certain that I am contributing, but if I am, it is absolutely without the support of the academic world – or any support other than that of my wife, friends, and family.  Consequently, to the extent that I have discovered new facts about consciousness and the universe, I disclaim any responsibility to convince anyone of them.  Of course, maybe I haven’t discovered any new facts – either because I’m wrong or because they’re not new.  And that was in large part my motivation for getting heard/published: to find collaborators, to get help, to share, to contribute, to discover which paths are promising and which are dead ends.  But after almost three years’ worth of effort, I have found this mission to be essentially fruitless. 

In the last few years, I’ve had other interesting and important insights.  I discuss in this paper how conscious correlations to quantum events in underlying physical states ensure that consciousness cannot be algorithmic or uploaded to a computer.  I discuss in this paper what seems to be a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, which ultimately led me to realize that macroscopic quantum superpositions (notably Schrodinger’s Cat and Wigner’s Friend) can never be experimentally verified, which I discuss in this paper and this paper.  (Most of these are also discussed in previous blog posts and YouTube videos, such as this.)  These insights have fascinating implications, including solving the measurement problem and falsifying the consciousness-causes-collapse hypothesis, among others.

I could certainly be wrong about any of these ideas and am quite open to that possibility.  Here’s a post in which I readily admit that I’d been going down the wrong path.  I have no agenda other than the search for truth.  However, despite my efforts to collaborate, publish, or just get useful feedback on my arguments, very few of my interactions with others (with a couple of notable exceptions) have been especially helpful in figuring out whether any of these ideas are fundamentally correct.  In sharp contrast, most interactions have had the exclusive effect of confusing and discouraging me.  As a result of these sunk costs, I haven’t spent much time doing the fun, interesting, and important stuff like thinking about the logical implications of my various insights.  Trying to get heard frankly seems like a bad investment at this point.

I understand this post may sound arrogant.  How can I claim to be smarter or more insightful than the thousands of brilliant scientists who have been studying these foundational issues for the past century?  I don’t.  What I claim is this: more than 95% of people with whom I’ve corresponded over the past three years (including referees of academic journals) have been either intellectually incapable or, more likely, simply unwilling to try to understand the arguments I’ve made in these various papers.  I can’t tell you how many people have bluntly told me I’m wrong after reading the abstract or quickly glancing at a figure or equation in one of my papers.   That’s arrogance.  My insights may very well be incorrect but I’m sophisticated enough now to know that the errors won’t be quickly spotted, especially by physicists whom I’ve found to be particularly bad at logic (e.g., papers here and here).  Significantly, my insights have led me independently to conclusions that seem to be near the cutting edge of foundational physics, so it's especially jarring to be so quickly and summarily dismissed.

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.  I can’t seem to get the help and mentorship I need because I am unknown and (essentially) unpublished and many of my ideas are unorthodox.  If I had well-cited publications on unorthodox ideas, then I could get help and mentorship – but by then I wouldn’t need it. 

I have put in significant time and effort trying – and getting very, very close! – to publish on important new ideas, but at this point it’s clear that the costs of trying to get heard have significantly outweighed any potential advantages.  I will continue to post on this blog (and potentially on preprint servers), but will stop trying, at least for now, to publish, speak at conferences, or connect or collaborate with others.

More to the point: I am going to try to figure out the answers to the hard foundational questions in physics and philosophy without trying to convince anyone that I’m right, that I’m credible, or that I deserve to be heard.  Others have the right to listen or ignore, to praise me as a creative rebel or to disparage me as a crackpot.  But I will no longer be controlled or manipulated by labels.  I will no longer fear the epithet.

I am a seer.  I am a creative rebel.  I am a self-made maverick. 

I am a crackpot.

 

Preparing for a Second Publication

The impossible has happened.

In early 2018, I realized that special relativity would cause problems for copying or repeating conscious states, so in July, 2018, I wrote and submitted a paper to a journal.  (Its current iteration is in this preprint.)  Since then, it has been rejected by seven journals (or I’ve been asked to “revise and resubmit” in a way that was either incompatible with or irrelevant to the paper’s argument), ultimately because not a single reviewer understood the logic of my argument.  A rehash of the crazymaking rejections I've experienced is in this blog post.

Today, over two years after writing the paper, I received a “Revise and resubmit” response from the 8^th journal to which I submitted it, a very highly ranked journal that should have been my first or second submission.  There were two reviewers.  The first one rejected the paper for the typical reasons about identity – i.e., s/he didn’t understand my argument.  But the second one not only understood it, but called the logic "sound," and both complimented the paper and recommended it for publication.  I suspect the second reviewer is someone influential in the field, as the Editor invited me to revise and resubmit despite the first reviewer.  (The reviewer’s suggestions for revision are completely reasonable, even helpful, and will certainly improve the paper.)

So while this is no guarantee that this paper will ultimately be published, today I am celebrating that I’ve been heard, understood, and validated.  My arguments are original, sound, and – most of all – not crazy!

In the meantime, I am also working on a sort of semi-comprehensive treatise on the problems of Schrodinger's Cat, Wigner's Friend, macroscopic quantum superpositions, and the (assumed) universality of quantum mechanics.  I'm not sure if that will turn into one cohesive document, or several blog posts, or several (attempted) journal article publications.  But what is obvious to me at this point is that I have new ideas about the foundations of quantum mechanics that derive from both creativity as well as application of logic to various assumptions, and they may as well be articulated in the Internet.  (As it turns out, most of my contributions in consciousness and the foundations of physics so far derive from the identification of intrinsic contradictions/inconsistencies.)

Updates

Further to my blog post about finally getting published, my first physics publication posted a couple of days ago in the Foundations of Physics regarding a common misperception in quantum mechanics.

Also, I made the following presentation ("Refuting Algorithmic Consciousness: Why Mind Uploading and Conscious Computers are Impossible") in a concurrent session at the 2020 Science of Consciousness conference on Tuesday.  

Acknowledged!

In a constant uphill battle in which I struggle to be published, understood, or even heard, any acknowledgement feels good.

Today I discovered the first published paper (to my knowledge) that specifically acknowledges me.  Paul Tappenden, himself a bit of a renegade who seems to be searching for the truth without trying so hard to climb the academic ladder, thanked me (alongside several biggies in this field like David Deutsch, Simon Saunders, and David Wallace) in a recent article in Synthese, a very respected journal on the philosophy of science. 

Join Me or Don't -- But You Won't Beat Me

In my most recent post, I describe my current understanding of quantum mechanics, which makes use of a couple of ideas that I derived independently such as the notion of information about events being manifested in the correlations between entangled objects.  I also discuss how correlating facts between systems must be transitive, so that facts relating systems A and B, along with facts relating systems B and C, would relate systems A and C.  This notion logically implies the “relativity of quantum superpositions,” which I also derived separately from an exciting insight described in this post. 

Well, as it turns out, I am almost certainly correct, and the reason I hadn’t previously learned about it (or been taught about it) is that it is apparently cutting edge.  Here are three articles (here, here, and here), the earliest of which was published in 2017, that are among the first to describe quantum superpositions as relative to each other, so that neither is a preferred reference frame.  (This contrasts with other “relational” concepts, including Rovelli’s Relational Interpretation.)  In fact, Fig. 3 from “Quantum Mechanics and the Covariance of Physical Laws in Quantum Reference Frames,” published in Nature, is so fantastically clear that it’s worth reprinting here:

 

This excites me because:

·         It underscores that I am going down the right path despite being generally ignored and/or discouraged.

·         I am clearly learning and understanding the foundations of physics almost entirely through independent analysis, logic, and reason.

·         Not only have I independently figured out features of the physical world that lots of other physicists don’t know, I may actually be at or near the state-of-the-art, which means it’s just a matter of time before I contribute new concepts to the field (if I haven’t already here, here, here, and here).

However, this also scares me because in May I had a long and very encouraging phone conversation with Igor Pikovsky, who has worked closely with several of the authors of the above papers (particularly Caslav Brukner), regarding the effects of gravitational decoherence on Schrodinger’s Cat.  He invited me to join his discussion group when he returned to his faculty post at Stevens Institute of Technology, not far from where I will be studying at NYU.  However, I’ve attempted to follow up with him several times; either my emails have hit his spam box or he has ghosted me.  Sadly, I think the latter is much more likely.  Further, I emailed Brukner himself in June and received a very dismissive email.

I think that at many times in human history, people have been genuinely curious about the world and interested in collaborating for the purpose of deeper understanding.  This might surprise you, but Einstein’s “miracle year,” in which he published several groundbreaking papers (including Special Relativity and the photoelectric effect, on which he eventually won the Nobel Prize), happened at a time in history (1905) in which there was so little competition for prizes or publications that he was able to get these papers published with essentially zero peer review.  (Can you even imagine the arrogance of a referee who would claim to be Einstein’s intellectual “peer”?!)  In other words, he and other scientists published research more-or-less for the love of knowledge and the hope of collaboration and scientific advancement, not accolades.  In sharp contrast, today all that matters in the academy is publish-, win-grants-, and get-tenure-or-perish.  No matter what I do, I am constantly (and involuntarily) in competition with thousands of physicists who don’t give two shits about knowledge or understanding but do give several shits about getting another notch on their publication belt.  (If you are yet another physicist who doesn’t understand logic and thus took offense to the last statement, I did not say that no physicists care about knowledge or understanding, but rather that I am competing against a massive population who don’t.)

This is a very long way of saying that while I sincerely hope that neither Brukner nor Pikovsky intended to exclude me because I might be trespassing on their turf of potential grants, publications, maybe even (in their minds) a Nobel Prize... it would not surprise me if they did.  I will reach out to them again in the next week.  I really hope that they (and others) will recognize that I am genuinely interested in learning and collaborating so we can, as a human species, figure out the nature of the physical world.  Nevertheless, I won’t be surprised if I have to proceed, as I have for over two years now, almost entirely on my own.  But if I have to, I will.  It took me only two years to independently understand quantum mechanics at the cutting edge.  It is just a matter of time, if I haven’t already, before I learn and explain facts about physics and consciousness that no one else has.

To those who would ignore, dismiss, discourage, or patronize me: You can collaborate with me or not.  Collaboration will accelerate our progress.  But if you don’t – perhaps because you are being a petty, recognition-obsessed turd – I will still beat you in the long run.  Do not underestimate the power of an intelligent, curious, innovative, hardworking, highly educated, financially independent maverick. 

I will figure out the nature of the physical world.  Join me or don’t.

Finally Published!

The physics academy is a tough egg to crack.  I offered several reasons in this post why my entrance into the field has been and will continue to be an uphill battle, but it’s truly astounding how much resistance I’ve experienced in getting published.  Rejection after rejection, my confidence continued to drop, until eventually I realized that those who had reviewed my papers weren’t really understanding my points.  Perhaps I wasn’t wrong after all.

In this post, I addressed a fundamental and important error in an article that had been cited far too many times.  Like all my other papers, it was rejected.  But this time I decided to fight back.  I knew that I was right.  I appealed the rejection and made a very clear case to the editor, who eventually took my appeal to the Editor-in-Chief: a badass in the field named Carlo Rovelli, whom I referenced in this post.  Two days ago the editor let me know that Rovelli had overruled the referees and decided to publish my article.  Finally, some good news.  Finally, some validation.  Finally, some confirmation that I actually understand something about the foundations of physics.

Onward and upward.  In this post, I explained why macroscopic quantum superpositions are simply not possible.  Today I finished and posted a formal article elaborating on this and, I hope, ultimately proving that Schrodinger’s Cat and Wigner’s Friend are absolutely, completely, totally impossible, even in principle.  I’ll soon submit it to a journal. 

But this time, I’m not going to take rejection sitting down.

COVID Madness: How Onerous Requirements Incentivize Lying

NYU is requiring essentially all non-New York students to: quarantine for 14 days; take a COVID-19 test before travel; take a test upon arrival; and take a THIRD test a week after arrival. (This is on top of requirements to wear face masks, socially distance, and fill out a form every day on campus attesting that you don't have any symptoms, haven't been in contact with anyone "suspected" of having the virus, etc., etc.) This defies common sense. The problem with catering to the most fearful is that eventually the people who engage in the riskiest behaviors will just lie. "Yeah, I've been tested." "Yeah, I quarantined." Here is my letter to NYU's VP for Student Affairs:

I am an incoming physics graduate student. My wife, a physician, will be joining the faculty at Columbia's Allen hospital. She and I both moved up here from North Carolina in mid-July. I have serious concerns about this email and the requirements of NYU.

NYU is requiring "out-of-tristate" students to quarantine for 14 days and get TWO tests and "strongly recommends" another test prior to travel. These mandates exceed legal requirements and defy both scientific recommendations and common sense, particularly given that everyone in NYU buildings will be required to: wear face masks; socially distance; and complete a daily COVID-19 "screener." These onerous requirements are obviously the result of fear, CYA culture, and litigation prevention, instead of rational thinking.

The main problem with overuse of caution is not the inconvenience and cost (in time and money) to everyone involved. That certainly is a problem, whether or not it is socially acceptable or politically correct to say so. The main problem is that there are many people who strongly disagree with the extremes to which authorities are willing to curtail personal freedoms to address COVID-19, and at some point these people may feel a line has been crossed and are no longer willing to cooperate.

The biggest red flag in your email is the statement that those who do not quarantine on campus "will be required to attest to having quarantined." Those who care about not spreading the virus to others are already acting responsibly. However, those who are more reckless in their interactions with others, faced with requirements to quarantine for 14 days (in a very expensive city) and get tested multiple times, will simply be more incentivized to lie and falsely "attest to having quarantined" or been tested multiple times. At some point, your requirements, and those of the city, state, and federal government, may become so onerous that people will simply "check the box" and say whatever they need to say to get through their day (which may include going to class, going to and getting paid for their employment, etc.).

Caring about the NYU community does not mean catering to the most fearful and litigious among them. At some point, the demands become so ridiculous that they become ineffective, ultimately resulting (ironically) in increased risk to the NYU community. Please don't let it get to that point.

How Science Brought Me To God

This post was inspired by my sister, who has been struggling recently with questions about God, purpose, meaning, and many other big philosophical questions.

Let me start by saying that I’m not a Christian (or a Buddhist or a Muslim or a Jew or a Rastafarian blah blah blah), and never will be.  Christianity is a set of very specific stories and beliefs, of which the belief in a Creator is a tiny subset.  Belief in God does not imply belief in Christianity or any other religion.  It is truly astonishing how many scientists (and physicists in particular) don’t seem to understand that last sentence.  It’s incredible how often physicists will say something like: “When I was in Sunday School, I learned about Jesus walking on water.  But as a scientist, I learned that walking on water violates the laws of physics.  Therefore god does not exist.”  The conclusion simply doesn’t follow from the premises.

In my own progress in physics, I am finding much of the academic literature infested with bad logic and unsound arguments.  One of my more recent posts points to a heavily cited article that claimed to empirically refute the consciousness-causes-consciousness hypothesis (“CCCH”).  The authors started by characterizing CCCH as an if-then statement in the form of AàB (read “A implies B” or “if A, then B”), which was essentially correct.  (The actual statements are irrelevant to the point I’m making in this post, but my actual paper can be found here.)  Then, without explanation, they re-characterized CCCH as AàC, but this would only be true if BàC.  Setting aside the fact that BàC blatantly contradicts quantum mechanics, the authors didn’t even seem to notice the unfounded logical jump they had made.  Simply having taken graduate-level philosophical logic has already provided me a surprising leg-up in the study and analysis of physics.

Why do I take such pains to explain that my belief in God does not imply belief in any particular religion or set of stories?  Because my search for a physical explanation of consciousness, and my pursuit of some of the hard foundational questions in physics, already puts me on potentially thin ice in the physics academy, and mentioning God (with a capital G) may very well put me over the edge into the realm of “crackpot.”  Luckily, I’m in the position of not needing to seek anyone’s approval; having said that, I would ultimately like to collaborate with and influence other like-minded physicists and don’t want to immediately turn them off with any suggestion that I’m a Christian.  I also don’t intend to turn off any Christian readers... my wife and one of my best friends are Christians.  My point is that Christianity includes a very specific set of concepts and stories that far exceed mere theism and may be understandably off-putting to physicists.

With all the caveats in place, here’s the meat of this blog post: Science has in fact brought me to God, in large part via the Goldilocks Enigma, better known as the “fine-tuning” problem in physics.

Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State, wrote a fascinating book called The Goldilocks Enigma.  Essentially, there are more than a dozen independent parameters, based in part on the Standard Model of particle physics, that had to be “fine-tuned” to within 1% or so in order to create a universe that could create life.  (The phrase “fine-tuned” itself suggests a Creator, but that’s not how Davies means it.)  One example might be the ratio of the gravitational force to the electromagnetic force.  A star produces energy via the fusion of positively charged nuclei, primarily hydrogen nuclei.  Electrostatic repulsion makes it difficult to bring two fusible nuclei sufficiently close, but gravity solves this problem if the object is really massive, like a star.  The core of a star then experiences the quasi-equilibrium condition of gravity squeezing lots of hydrogen nuclei together counterbalanced by the outward pressure of an extremely high-temperature gas, thus producing fusion energy at more-or-less constant rate.  This balance in our Sun gives it a lifetime of something like 10 billion years before its fuel will be mostly spent.

Here’s the problem: if the gravitational force had been 1% higher than it is, then the Sun would have burned up far too quickly for life to evolve, while if the force had been 1% less than it is, the Sun would have produced far too little radiation for life to evolve.  (It is generally thought that liquid water, which exists in the narrow range of 273-373K, is a requirement for life, although this is not necessary for the current argument.)  In other words, the ratio of gravity to electric repulsion had to be in the “Goldilocks” zone: not too big, not too small... just right.

The likelihood of that ratio being “just right” is very small.  And you might think this is just a coincidence.  That’s certainly what a lot of physicists will say.  But remember that there are at least 26 such free parameters in nature that happen to be “just right” in the same way, and (small probability)^26 = (really freaking unbelievably tiny probability).  The probability is so tiny as to be effectively zero.

If you have already dismissed any possibility of a Creator, then one way – perhaps the only way – to explain away such a fantastically tiny probability is to posit the existence of infinitely many universes and then invoke the so-called “Anthropic Principle” to conclude that such an unlikely event must be possible because, if it weren’t, we wouldn’t exist to notice!  After all, if everything that is possible actually exists somewhere, then extremely unlikely events, even events whose probability is actually zero, will occur.  In other words, (infinitesimal) * (infinity) = 1.  Said another way:  0 * ∞ = 1.

For the record, I made the same argument in a book I wrote at age 13, called Knight’s Null Algebra, which claimed to “disprove” algebra.  Just as anything logically follows from a contradiction (“If up is down, then my name is Bob” is a true statement), anything follows from infinity.  Infinity makes the impossible possible.  But this is philosophical nonsense.  Infinity doesn’t exist in nature.  Nevertheless, many physicists and cosmologists with (as far as I know) functioning cerebrums actually believe in the existence of infinitely many universes, although they give it a fancy name: the Multiverse.

Here are my problems with the Multiverse:

·         There is not a shred of empirical evidence that there is such a thing.

·         Because the Multiverse includes universes that are beyond our cosmological horizon and are forever inaccessible to us, no empirical evidence ever can exist to test the concept.

·         Any concept or hypothesis that cannot be tested is not in the realm of science.

·         Any scientist who endorses the Multiverse concept is not speaking scientifically or as a scientist (even though s/he may pretend to).

Setting aside all these problems with the Multiverse concept, it should be pointed out that anyone who dismisses any possibility of a Creator, and thus desperately embraces infinity to dismiss the Goldilocks enigma, is not being scientific anyway.  One can make arguments for or against the existence of God; one can lean toward theism or atheism; but anyone who states with certainty that God does or does not exist is not speaking scientifically.  And that’s OK.  There’s nothing wrong with a scientist having opinions one way or another or with making arguments one way or another, just as I’ve done in this post.  But it is a problem when scientists speak from the academic pulpit, intimidating people with their scientific degrees and credentials, to bully people into accepting their philosophical opinions as if they were scientific facts.  (Richard Dawkins should have lost his membership to the scientific academy long ago, now that he spews untestable pseudoscientific gibberish, but has in fact been celebrated instead of ostracized by the academy.)

My point is this: I believe that the Goldilocks Enigma is a very strong reason to believe in a Creator, while the Multiverse counterargument is an untestable and nonscientific theory usually uttered by people (scientists or otherwise) who are not speaking scientifically.

I am truly and utterly amazed and overwhelmed by the vastness, beauty, and unlikeliness of the Universe.  And the more I learn about physics, the more awed I become.  For instance, if the information in the universe is related to universal entanglement, then every object is entangled with essentially every other object in the universe in ways that correlate their positions and momenta to within quantum uncertainty.  That is absolutely, utterly, incomprehensively amazing.  The more I learn about physics, the closer I come to God.

Into the Lion's Den

Two years ago, I sold my businesses and “retired” so that I could focus full-time on learning about, addressing, and attempting to solve some of the fundamental questions in physics and philosophy of mind... things like the physical nature of consciousness, whether we have free will, the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, etc.  What gave me the audacity to think I might be able to tackle these problems where so many have failed before?  Well, first, tackling a problem only requires desire.  I find these big-picture questions fascinating and looked forward to learning, analyzing, and at least trying.  But I did think I had a reasonable shot at actually solving some of these mysteries.  Why?

While I don’t (yet) have a degree in physics or philosophy, I do have an undergraduate and master’s degree in nuclear engineering as well as a law degree (which is certainly applicable to philosophical reasoning), and have taken lots of physics and philosophy classes along the way.  As an example, I’ve taken graduate-level quantum mechanics, or a course closely related or heavily dependent on QM, at UF, MIT, Princeton, and ECU, and even a fascinating course called Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics.  In other words, I’m no expert – and I plan to continue graduate studies in physics – but I certainly have more than a superficial understanding of physics.

It takes more than education to solve problems; it also takes creativity and a willingness to say or try things that others won’t.  As the sole inventor of 17 U.S. patents on a wide variety of inventions, from rocket engines to software to pumps to consumer products, I’ve always felt confident in my ability to solve problems creatively.  As for independence – let’s just say I’ve always been a maverick.  As an example, while in law school I realized that a loophole in American patent law allowed for the patenting of fictional storylines, so I published an article to that effect.  Over the next couple years, at least six law review articles were published specifically to argue that I was full of shit: great evidence that I was actually on to something!  (Since then the courts closed the loophole.)  I’m not trying to list my CV – just to explain my state of mind when I started this process.  I had plenty of free time, an independent spirit, a history of creativity in solving problems, and a strong and relevant educational foundation.  This gave me confidence that I was in a better position than most to actually solve an important riddle.  I also figured, perhaps naively, that the field of physics was one place where novel approaches, critical thinking, and objective analysis would be rewarded.

I jumped right in.  After extraordinary amounts of research and independent thought, I soon realized that special relativity would cause problems for copying or repeating conscious states.  I wrote my first paper on the topic; the most recent iteration is here.  Not long after that, I realized that QM would also, independently of relativity, cause problems for copying or repeating conscious states, and wrote my second paper; the most recent iteration is here.  In July, 2018, I sent my first paper to the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science; it was summarily rejected without comments or review.  Fuck them.  Over the next year and a half, I submitted it to four more journals, and despite getting close to publication with one, the paper was ultimately rejected by all.  Over the same period, I submitted my second paper to three journals and, again, despite getting close to publication with one, the paper was ultimately rejected.  What had gone wrong?  Was I in over my head? 

Regarding the first paper, the same objection kept coming up over and over: that copying the physical state of a person does not necessarily copy that person’s identity.  Without getting too technical, my argument was that whether or not a person’s identity depends on their underlying physical state, special relativity implied the same conclusion.  But no matter how I replied, the conversation always felt like this:

Them: “How do you know that copying a person’s physical state would copy their identity?” 

Me: “I don’t.  But if it does, then copying that state violates special relativity.  If it doesn’t, then there is nothing to copy.  Either way, we can’t copy a person’s identity.”

Them: “But wait.  First you need to show that copying a person’s physical state would copy their identity.”

Me: “No, I don’t.  Consider statements A and B.  If AàB, and also ¬AàB, then B is true, and we don’t need to figure out if A is true.”

Them: “Hold on.  How can you be so sure that statement A is true?...”

Me: [Banging head against wall]

It’s literally crazymaking.  No one seemed to have a problem with the physics or the implications of special relativity.  Instead, their problem almost always boiled down to the concept of identity and its relationship to physical reality.  I suspect that what’s happening is that people find a conclusion they’re uncomfortable with – such as “mind uploading is impossible” or “consciousness is not algorithmic” – and then work backward to find something they can argue with... and that something always happens to be some variation on “How do you know that statement A is true?”  I don’t know if it’s a case of intentional gaslighting or unintentional cognitive dissonance, but either way it took me a long time to finally rebuild my confidence, realize I’m not crazy, completely rewrite the paper to address the identity issue head-on, and submit it to a new journal.

Regarding the second paper, the referee of the third journal brought up what I believed, at the time, was a correct and fatal objection.  But by then, I had experienced 18 continuous months of essentially nothing but rejection, criticism, or being ignored (which is sometimes worse).  Prior to that, I’d spent so much of my life feeling confident about my ability to think clearly and rationally, to solve problems creatively, to analyze arguments skeptically, and to eventually arrive at correct conclusions.  So by the time I received that final rejection, I threw the paper aside and basically forgot about it – until about two weeks ago.  Somehow the human spirit can reawaken.  I took a look at the paper with fresh eyes, fully expecting to confirm the fatal error, but found exactly the opposite.  I (and the journal referee) had been wrong about my being wrong.  In other words, the error that had been pointed out, as it turns out, was not an error.  That isn’t to say that my reasoning and conclusions in the paper are ultimately correct – there could still be other errors – but the referee had been wrong.  What I argued in my second paper is original and it just may be right.  If so, its implications are important and potentially groundbreaking.  The paper needs to be rewritten, the physics tightened, and the arguments cleaned up: a project for another day.

As for now, here’s the problem I face.  On one hand, answers to some of the deepest and most important questions plaguing humanity for millennia are finally starting to become accessible via science, particularly physics.  On the other hand, it has become, for whatever reason, out of vogue in the physics community to research or even discuss these issues, which is odd for many reasons.  First, many of the giants of physics, even in modern history, routinely debated them, including Einstein, Bohr, Wigner, and Feynman.  Second, physics has itself produced several of these hard questions (like the QM measurement problem and the inconsistency between QM and general relativity).  But because physicists rarely talk about these big-picture and foundational questions, and because there’s essentially no funding to research them, the conversations are typically left to: a) self-made or retired mavericks who don’t need funding (e.g., Roger Penrose); b) writers who profit on popular viewpoints (e.g., Sean Carroll and Deepak Chopra); c) academic philosophers who may or may not (but typically don’t) have any formal training in physics; and d) crackpots, nutjobs, and wackadoodles.  And there are a LOT of wackadoodles; category d) might dwarf the others by a factor of 100, and occasionally even includes members of the other categories.  The Internet is teeming with “amateur physicists” with their own solutions to quantum gravity, theories about “quantum consciousness” (whatever the hell that is), yada yada.

I am in category a), but I understand, if on statistics alone, why I’d be assumed to be in category d).  The thing is, maybe I am a little crazy.  But the solutions to the big problems in physics, cosmology, and philosophy of mind are not going to come from tweaking the same old shit we’ve been tweaking for the past century.  They are going to require truly revolutionary ideas, and those ideas, when first proposed, WILL seem crazy.  I want to be openminded, diligent, and creative enough to explore the crazy, revolutionary ideas that ultimately lead to the correct solutions.  Still, the hardest challenge of all will be maintaining my confidence throughout the process.  Not only will I be continually discouraged by incorrect solutions, but I suspect that my journey will be somewhat lonely.

Blogger and theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder points out that stagnation in physics is in large part due to a feedback mechanism in which those who pull the strings – journal editors, those who award grant funding, members of academic tenure committees, etc. – tend to reward what is most familiar to them and popular with their peers.  This has the effect of stifling innovation.  Her solution: “Stop rewarding scientists for working on what is popular with their colleagues.”  Lee Smolin made a similar point in his article, “Why No ‘New Einstein’?”  He says that the current system of academic promotion and publication has “the unintended side effect of putting people of unusual creativity and independence at a disadvantage.”   Despite the current publish-or-perish system that incentivizes scientists to do “superficial work that ignores hard problems,” the field of physics is actually “most often advanced by those who ignore established research programs to invent their own ideas and forge their own directions.”

In other words, even though I didn’t know it when I began this process two years ago, it was a foregone conclusion that my intention to independently and creatively attack some of the hard foundational problems in science would be met with contempt, condescension, and unresponsiveness.

I am planning to begin a master’s program in physics at NYU in the fall.  NYU has some of the world’s best (or at least most academically well regarded) faculty in the fields of cosmology, the foundations of physics, the philosophy of physics, and the philosophy of mind.  But I will be entering with eyes wide open: into the lion’s den.  I certainly hope some of the faculty will be legitimately interested in answering some of the big questions – and will be responsive to and encouraging of original approaches – but I won’t expect it.  Instead, I will enter with low expectations, understanding clearly that any progress I make in answering the big questions may be despite, not because of, the physics academy.  I will hope to remain guided by a burning curiosity, a passion to learn and understand, and a confidence in my abilities to think, analyze, and create.  Please wish me luck.

Can Physics Answer the Hardest Questions of the Universe?

At some point during an intro to philosophy class in college, I was first exposed to the classic "Brain in a vat" thought experiment: how do I know I'm not just a brain in a vat of goo with a bunch of wires and probes poking out, being measured and controlled by some mad scientist?  That was a few years before The Matrix came out, which asked essentially the same question.

So -- are you a brain in a vat?  And how could you know?

This is just the tip of the iceberg; once we start down this path, we come face-to-face with more difficult questions.  "What creates consciousness?"  "Can consciousness be simulated?"  "If I copy my brain, will it create another me, and what would that feel like?"  And once we've fallen down the rabbit hole, we see that there are a thousand other seemingly unanswerable questions... questions about free will, the arrow of time, the nature of reality, and so forth.

I think physics can help answer these questions, and in fact I think I have answered a couple of them to some degree.  For example, I don't know (yet) whether I'm in a simulation, but I think I do know whether or not I am a simulation.  Here is my first YouTube talk in which I explain why consciousness cannot be algorithmic, conscious states cannot be copied or repeated, and computers will never be conscious:

If you prefer a written explanation, here is a preprint of my article, "Refuting Strong AI: Why Consciousness Cannot Be Algorithmic."

I am also working on another proof of the same conclusions from a different angle.  Here is a preprint of my article, "Killing Science Fiction: Why Conscious States Cannot Be Copied or Repeated."  I'll post a link to a YouTube talk on this paper as soon as it's available.