View source for Exercises in Natural Philosophy: The Physical Origin of Consciousness

{{Infobox paper
| title = Exercises in Natural Philosophy: The Physical Origin of Consciousness
| url = [http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_5842.pdf Link to paper]
| author = [[Richard Oldani]]
| keywords = [[natural philosophy]]
| published = 2011
| journal = [[Proceedings of the NPA]]
| volume = 8
| num_pages = 13
| pages = 424-436
}}

'''Read the full paper''' [http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_5842.pdf here]

==Abstract==

Scientific method requires the use of empirically tested observations to arrive at verifiable results.  Evidence obtained from introspection or personal experience is not normally admitted to a scientific theory except historically in the case of natural philosophers such as Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant.  However, in these exercises I will revive practices from the past by reinstating the philosophical principle of dualism.  Dualism is the idea that there is an external world of appearances that is the subject of science and an internal world independent of experience that is outside the possibility of experiment.  Because dualism is a universal principle it can be used to comment on problems from quantum mechanics to cosmology.  Specific topics of discussion will include evolution, human consciousness, and galactic structure.

==Overview==

Richard Oldani's paper, presented at the 2011 [[Proceedings of the NPA|NPA]] meeting in College Park, is an unusual document even by the standards of a dissident physics conference: it mixes a history of philosophical dualism, two extended autobiographical narratives Oldani calls "consciousness experiments", a wave-mechanical model of the brain, and a proposal that the flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies are caused by a hitherto-unrecognised [[Neutrino|neutrino]] field. The thread that ties them together is a single methodological claim: that science has, since Boyle and Bacon, progressively discarded one half of nature. Oldani wants to reinstate that half.

His hypothesis is stated at the outset — that the notorious controversies of [[Quantum mechanics|quantum mechanics]], evolutionary biology and cosmology "originate not in the theories themselves, but in a characteristic of human nature that was recognized by philosophers over 2,000 years ago." That characteristic is the refusal to admit unobservables. Where the mainstream treats the empirical criterion as the guarantor of scientific status, Oldani treats it as a self-imposed blindness, and argues that the theories which most flagrantly violate dualism — the probabilistic ontology of quantum theory, [[Dark Matter|dark matter]], and Darwinian natural selection — are precisely the ones in trouble.

==The argument==

===Dualism as a historical consensus===

Oldani opens with a survey intended to show that natural philosophy, unlike modern science, has actually converged. Socrates and Plato separated the changing world of appearances from a permanent world of ideas; Aristotle called the two aspects matter and form; Zou Yan expressed the same split temporally as Yin and Yang; Avicenna's "floating man" thought experiment established consciousness as a primary concept independent of sensation; Descartes gave the mind-body distinction its modern form; Spinoza used "thought" and "extension"; Kant distinguished appearances from the unknowable Thing in Itself; Schopenhauer identified the Thing in Itself with the will, known to us from the inside through our own bodies; Herbert Spencer called it simply "the Unknowable."

Oldani's reading of Kant supplies his working definition: "Science applies to appearances, which are described in space and time by mathematics, but ultimate reality is with the Thing in Itself which is unknowable and cannot be described by mathematics." From this he draws his charge against quantum theory — that it "overestimates the importance of appearances by assigning reality to mathematically defined observables and creating from them hypothetical structures such as parallel worlds." He enlists Pierre Duhem, whose exclusion from university positions he treats as symptomatic, and who criticised Maxwell's displacement current as a mechanical fiction that "gives the false impression that we understand what is 'really' occurring."

===The consciousness experiments===

Rather than design an experiment (which, he argues, would prejudice the result), Oldani reviews his own past experiences. The first is an extended account of a 1973 journey through Patagonia, in Contao and the logged-off alerce forests of southern Chile, undertaken to look for homestead land. What he claims to extract from it is a description, by introspection, of an internal state that is "part physiological and part psychological, but which cannot be detected by instruments" — Schopenhauer's will. Left inactive, he reports, the sensation strengthens, judgment degrades and action becomes hasty; satisfied by activity, judgment improves. His point is methodological: he says he inferred intuitively, and quickly, what "medical science required decades of research to confirm by experiment" about holistic lifestyles.

===Energy as the unobservable===

The paper's pivot is a section on energy. Oldani argues that energy is "a much used but poorly understood concept" whose many forms cannot be compared with one another because the material systems supporting them differ. Even in the most precise theory available — the path-integral calculation of the electron magnetic moment, accurate, he notes, to the breadth of a human hair over the distance from Los Angeles to New York — the calculation "leads to infinities that have yet to be satisfactorily resolved" and does not translate into an understanding of what energy is.

In biology the same failure appears as reductionism. His illustration is a person raised without technology who finds a preserved gasoline engine, dismantles it, and learns everything about its observable parts — but never sees it run, and so concludes that its purpose is to draw air in at the carburettor and expel it from the exhaust. The energy of combustion, being unobservable, is missed, and with it the whole point of the machine. Applied to life: at the moment of death, blood flow and brain function stop while cells continue to metabolise and the body stays warm for hours. What has been lost is not any cellular process but the link between cellular and organismic energy — the "life force" we observe in others as behaviour and experience in ourselves as consciousness.

===A wave-mechanical model of the brain===

Oldani then proposes that consciousness is a standing [[Electron|electron]] wave in the cortex. The argument begins with hyperacuity: some 125 million retinal photoreceptors are compressed into roughly 1.2 million ganglion cells and nerve fibres, and the high resolution is nonetheless restored in the visual cortex. Neither the hundredfold compression nor its recovery, he says, is explained by known physiological processes; an analog wave format would both preserve the information and be more energy-efficient than a digital one.

He estimates a signal speed from the visual threshold — the ~70 ms minimum needed to distinguish one image from another — over the ~14 cm from retina to primary visual cortex, giving roughly 2 m/s, and applies the de Broglie relation &lambda; = ''h''/''mv'' with ''h'' = 6.6&times;10<sup>-27</sup> erg-sec and ''m'' = 9.1&times;10<sup>-28</sup> gm to obtain &lambda; &asymp; 0.36 mm. He then matches this figure to anatomy: the foveola is 0.35 mm across, layer IV of the primary visual cortex has about that thickness, and the ocular dominance columns have about that diameter. Further supporting observations he offers include the layered cortex acting as a three-dimensional wave guide, the optic nerve widening from 1.6 to 4.5 mm like a dispersing guide, the merging of left and right optical signals in alternating layers of the lateral geniculate nucleus, the low conduction velocity (2.4 m/s) of "rather stout" claustral axons, orientation columns read as standing-wave phase, and gradual postnatal myelination read as an electron cloud gaining energy as the brain matures. Functionally he cites EEG synchrony of locally random events, spatially distributed decision-making in the superior colliculus, and the fine timing required to merge visual, auditory and somatosensory input — timing he regards as improbable for independent nerve discharges "like so many tiny gears."

Two physical analogies do different jobs. "Frozen light" — light slowed, stopped and stored in super-cooled atomic vapour, imprinted with information and read out later — models memory. The [[Quantum mechanics|quantum-mechanical]] treatment of the hydrogen atom as a conservative system, where the electron is not constrained to a definite path but has positions given by a probability function, models free will: cortical electron waves likewise "may circulate throughout the cortex... just as our thoughts also wander."

===Galactic structure===

The final technical section applies the same principle to cosmology. Galactic rotation curves stay flat to large radii, implying mass where no light is seen; Oldani rejects [[Dark Matter|dark matter]] because an unobservable field ''source'' would violate dualism as he has defined it. He notes that bigger central [[Black Hole|black holes]] correlate with faster arm rotation and tighter winding, citing a 2008 survey of 37 spiral galaxies in which the smallest black holes have arms at pitch angles up to 43&deg; and the largest as little as 7&deg;. His proposal is that the neutrino — the one particle to which elementary particle theory assigns no field of its own — must, for symmetry, be given an infinite field with a spiral geometry consistent with its [[Spin|spin]]. Summed over the matter localised by a black hole, baryonic fields fall off as the inverse square and build the galactic bulge, while the weaker neutrino field does not diminish with distance and accelerates matter tangentially, forming the spiral arms. Sustained over billions of years, he suggests, the same tangential acceleration could account for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

The conclusion names the theories judged to be in violation: quantum theory's probabilistic matter ("the most egregious"), cosmological dark matter, and Darwinian evolution, which he says lets an observable process act on an observable property to produce a life form with unobservable characteristics — "physically untenable" given his view of energy.

==Assessment==

What is genuinely valuable here is the diagnostic half. Oldani's complaint about energy is sharper than it first appears: physics defines energy operationally, through the quantities conserved in particular interactions, and then uses the same word across atmospheric, biological and nuclear domains as though it named one substance. His engine parable is a fair statement of the limit of a purely structural biology, and his historical section is unusually well-informed for a conference paper — the treatment of Duhem, and of Schopenhauer's argument that the body is the one object we know from the inside, are accurately rendered. The wave model of cortical processing also has a real target: hyperacuity, binding and the timing of multimodal integration are genuine open problems, not straw men.

The difficulties, however, are severe and mostly arithmetic. The central number, &lambda; &asymp; 0.36 mm, is obtained by feeding a whole-pathway conduction estimate of 2 m/s into the de Broglie relation for a free electron. But 2 m/s is the average rate at which a percept propagates through a chain of synaptic relays, not the velocity of any electron; conduction in an axon is ionic and saltatory, and the drift velocity of charge carriers in tissue is different again by orders of magnitude. Because &lambda; = ''h''/''mv'' is extremely sensitive to ''v'', the anatomical coincidences that follow — the 0.35 mm foveola, layer IV, the ocular dominance columns — are matches to a number whose input was chosen from the very anatomy it is supposed to explain. Nothing in the paper predicts a wavelength independently and then finds it. The model also asserts rather than derives its key step: no mechanism is given by which nerve impulse fields "superpose to produce a spatially coherent electron wave", and coherence of an electron wave over millimetres in warm, wet, ion-dense tissue is exactly what decoherence estimates in the physics of biological quantum proposals rule out. The frozen-light analogy is drawn from experiments performed in super-cooled atomic vapour at nanokelvin temperatures; transplanting it to a 310 K brain requires an argument the paper does not supply.

The galactic proposal is weaker still, and here the conflict with measurement is direct. Assigning the neutrino an "infinite field" that "does not diminish in intensity" is not a small amendment to particle physics: a force that does not fall off with distance would dominate every laboratory and solar-system test of gravity and of the weak interaction, and no such long-range coupling appears in the exquisitely constrained results of solar and reactor neutrino experiments or in torsion-balance limits on new long-range forces. The paper offers no field equation, no coupling constant and no numerical fit to any rotation curve, so it cannot be compared with the [[Dark Matter|dark matter]] halo models it means to replace — nor with the other evidence those models are built to accommodate, notably gravitational lensing masses and the acoustic peak structure of the cosmic microwave background. The black hole/pitch angle correlation Oldani cites is real, but the standard reading of it runs the other way: bulge mass and disc dynamics set both quantities, rather than the hole exerting a new central force.

There is finally a tension inside the argument itself. Oldani rejects dark matter on the grounds that "there cannot exist field sources that are unobservable" — yet his own programme rests on unobservable internal properties assigned to everything from electrons to human beings, and on a neutrino field that has never been detected. The dualist criterion is applied to the mainstream's posits but suspended for his own. Read as a philosophical essay on the costs of the empirical criterion, and on how much of what interests us about life falls outside it, the paper repays attention. Read as physics, its quantitative claims do not survive contact with the measurements they would have to displace.

==See also==

* [[Richard Oldani]]
* [[Quantum mechanics]]
* [[Dark Matter]]
* [[Neutrino]]
* [[Electron]]
* [[Black Hole]]
* [[Uncertainty Principle]]
* [[Energy]]

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