Quantum Physics and I

My Theory of Consciousness, 1988, turned out to be un-publishable. It challenged too many dogmas.

For one thing, it challenged the then-understanding of the brain, which said the brain stopped growing upon maturity, and therefore changes in neuron structures stopped after maturity. I claimed the brain continued changing, and in fact learning involved changes in the brain. Fortunately, by now brain plasticity is widely accepted and used in medicine.

Another challenge was to orthodox Darwinism. Orthodox Darwinism already was weak on probability issues, my theory of the brain changed the probabilities into impossibilities. Probability theory led to the clear conclusion, in today’s language, that “DNA can see.” (I.e. sense the environment.) This was in clear contrast to orthodox Darwinism (captured in the Central Dogma of Biology) that effectively said “DNA is blind.” At this time, the field of Epigenetics confirms that DNA can sense the environment via enzymes. Simply put, DNA evolves also, and one of the things it evolves into, is a version of DNA that can see.

But the biggest challenge to my theory came from Quantum Physics. People at the time were convinced that consciousness was a Quantum phenomenon, yet I didn’t so much as mention Quantum Physics, therefore my theory must be wrong.

I had some physics background, so then I was forced to jump into Quantum Physics. It took me several years to understand the Quantum Misunderstanding, which had led Quantum Physicists to erroneously claim they had some kind of an insight into human consciousness.

The term “Quantum” itself comes from the discovery that electrons absorb and emit energy (when they shift orbits) in discrete quantum values. This is perfectly good physics, and doesn’t say anything about consciousness.

The consciousness issue came from an experiment called “Electron Diffraction”, and this experiment became overwhelming in Quantum Physics, eclipsing all the good works of Quantum Physics.

The experiment is simple — it involves shooting electrons from an electron gun at a detector screen. The screen can detect the position of the electrons that hit it.

The electron gun creates a Coulomb field, aka an electric field. This field is governed by an inverse square law — the farther from the source (the electron gun), the weaker the field.

The electron gun drops an electron in this field. The electron is electrically charged, therefore it disturbs the field. It’s like a clap, or like a pebble dropping in water. The disturbance propagates as a wave.

The electron then rides the wave it itself generated. Because the electron is electrically charged, it is constrained to ride the electric field, and if the electric field is waving, it will move along those waves.

If two electrons are generated by the electron gun at the same time, they will ride the same waveform. So they could be separated by 2C (where C is lightspeed, because outer edges of the waveform can separate from each other at 2C) and still show the properties of the same wavefront.

So anyway, the detector screen in the experiment captured wave phenomena.

This confused the scientists of the time. One scientist named Bohm thought waves were involved, but wasn’t able to understand or explain the source of the waves. Other scientists didn’t even understand that actual wave motion was involved.

If you don’t understand the science, mysticism often happens. That’s what happened. Very strange and mysterious theories abounded. One of this was the “observer created reality” theory. In this theory, the universe doesn’t exist until a human observes it. Which is rather unscientific, for it is accepted that humans resulted from evolution. Which clearly occurred for long periods of time without humans present to observe it.

Another mystical theory was multiple universes, where the universe splits into multiple universes to accommodate all possible positions where an electron could hit a detector screen.

Schrödinger’s cat is yet another mystical thought experiment that arrived from the misunderstanding. In this experiment and its theory, cats (and presumably other animals) don’t die unless a human has verified that they have died… This mystical theory doesn’t clarify if it’s only limited to cats and other animals, or does a human die if nobody is there to observe that he/she died!

These bizarre and highly unscientific theories became very popular, and led to the notion (encouraged by Quantum Physicists and popularizers) that Quantum Physics explained consciousness. Naturally, this was an onerous burden on those working on actual consciousness research, such as yours truly. I had to go out of my way to find out what Quantum Physics was saying.

So anyway, turned out, it was just a giant misunderstanding. Quantum Physicists failed to understand that an electron dropped in an electric field would generate waves and ride them. This simple misunderstanding led to multiple nonsense Quantum theories.

The real explanation is very obvious once explained. But it wasn’t obvious earlier.