Quantum Activist — There’s a revolution going on in science

This happened in psychology in the Sixties and Seventies in the US, when Abraham Maslow confronted the dominance of B. F. Skinner's behaviorism — and won. Something similar is now apparently happening in physics, although the primacy of consciousness is hardly a new idea among physicists — Sir Arthur Eddington, for example.

The leading points which have seemed to me to deserve philosophic consideration may be summarised as follows: 

(1) The symbolic nature of the entities of physics is generally recognised; and the scheme of physics is now formulated in such a way as to make it almost self-evident that it is a partial aspect of something wider. 

(2) Strict causality is abandoned in the material world. Our ideas of the controlling laws are in process of reconstruction and it is not possible to predict what kind of form they will ultimately take; but all the indications are that strict causality has dropped out permanently. This relieves the former necessity of supposing that mind is subject to deterministic law or alternatively that it can suspend deterministic law in the material world. 

(3) Recognising that the physical world is entirely abstract and without "actuality" apart from its linkage to consciousness, we restore consciousness to the fundamental position instead of representing it as an inessential complication occasionally found in the midst of inorganic nature at a late stage of evolutionary history. 

(4) The sanction for correlating a "real" physical world to certain feelings of which we are conscious does not seem to differ in any essential respect from the sanction for correlating a spiritual domain to another side of our personality. It is not suggested that there is anything new in this philosophy. In particular the essence of the first point has been urged by many writers, and has no doubt won individual assent from many scientists before the recent revolutions of physical theory. But it places a somewhat different complexion on the matter when this is not merely a philosophic doctrine to which intellectual assent might be given, but has become part of the scientific attitude of the day, illustrated in detail in the current scheme of physics.

— Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928, archive.org)

The post is chiefly concerned with the treatment of Professor Amit Goswami, a self-described "quantum activist." You see, it's OK to talk about these things in the closet but not publicly. For example, in 1975 I remember reading a paper privately circulated and marked not for distribution" by a prominent psychologist, comparable to Paul Krugman in economics, agreeing with Maslow's humanistic and transpersonal position among select colleagues but desiring to keep it in the closet. I thought it strange at the time, given his position in the field. But I guess he knew something I didn't.

Some well-known economists have also held this view of reality. Abraham Maslow was a chief contributor to management science, for example, and economists Kenneth Boulding and E. F. Schumacher espoused it, too. Maslow, Boulding, and Schumacher are also considered philosophers who contributed to advancing thought beyond their fields.

Quantum Activist
There’s a revolution going on in science

Another interesting one.

The Raw Story

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