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.  

Macroscopic Quantum Superpositions Cannot Be Measured, Even in Principle

In this post, I pointed out that even though the phrase "copy the brain" occurs all over the Internet, my post might be the first in history to state that it is "impossible to copy the brain," an illuminating observation about the pervasive assumption that brains can be copied.

The same is true of these phrases, of which a Google search yields only my own works:

"Schrodinger's Cat is impossible"

"Schrodinger's Cat is not possible"
"Wigner's Friend is impossible"

"Wigner's Friend is not possible"
"Macroscopic quantum superpositions are impossible"

"Macroscopic quantum superpositions are not possible"

"Macroscopic superpositions are impossible"

"Macroscopic superpositions are not possible"

Obviously, I’m not the first person to doubt that they are possible, but the fact that the above phrases yield nothing (until you remove "not possible" or "impossible," yielding thousands of results) should tell us something.  It is practically established doctrine in the philosophy and foundations of physics that the Schrodinger’s Cat and Wigner’s Friend thought experiments, along with the ability to measure a macroscopic system in quantum superposition, are possible in principle.

The thing is – they’re not.

Here is my newest YouTube video, entitled “Why Macroscopic Quantum Superpositions are Impossible in Principle.”  The concepts are elaborated in preprints here and here, with a more comprehensive explanation of (my current understanding of) quantum mechanics in this blog post.

A brief (13-minute) version of the above video can be found here:

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.