There are people who are well educated in one field of knowledge who then mistakenly believe they are qualified to come up with ideas in other fields of knowledge where they do not know the basics.
Fred Hoyle, Linus Pauling, and William Shockley are examples.
‘Expert overreach’ as we have noted before.
Schroedinger speculated too, but he didn’t seem so didactive. I would have loved to have a dinner party discussion with him and Fermi !
Oh, sure, it’s something that can be studied in psychology, or neurology. At least, if you can define just what it is you’re even talking about. A physical field, though, it’s not.
There are so many journals out there under so many reasonable-looking umbrella organizations that it’s hard to know what’s what.
In this case, the journal says right on the tin that it’s not saying “no” very often. “The journal prides itself on the belief that all good science is important and relevant. Our inclusive scope and publication standards make it an essential outlet for scientists in the physical sciences.” And, “Our Editors, assisted by peer review, determine whether a manuscript is technically correct and original. After publication, the readership evaluates whether a manuscript is timely, relevant, or significant.” (All bolding mine.)
So, if you dot your i’s and cross your t’s – and pay about $2000 – you’re in. Looking through articles there, I’m not surprised that this one made it. Authors in the journal seem largely to be (in decreasing order of frequency) (1) non-US groups possibly hoping to get US-based journals on their records with minimal hurdles, (2) US groups looking to publish low-impact work that wouldn’t cross a threshold of relevance in a higher-impact journal, and (3) the “out there” cases.
The paper at hand has the benefit of saying nothing, and thus there’s nothing to point a finger at, so the journal was apparently happy to leave it up to the readership, as they say, to judge relevance or significance. They can laud themselves on being an outlet for all voices, but such a strategy does mean there is the potential for lots of chaff mixed in with whatever grain might be in the journal’s virtual pages.
As a calibration, this feels about average on work committed, at least for crackpot work that an author bothers to distribute. Putting in lots of work (even if it just means bloviating and using fancy formatting) is an easy way to seemingly elevate the ideas. Since this author seems to have an academic background, she could bang out that text and formatting in no time.
In the most extreme cases, crackpot bloviation and production values can stretch to full-color glossy 100-plus-page hardback books with literally no meaningful content. But that’s rare (and fascinating to flip through).
I didn’t closely read the entire article but want to point out that the general issues and concepts presented are widely discussed in the field of consciousness theory. So to call the author a crackpot based on the subject matter alone really isn’t fair. But I’m not qualified to judge. Anyhow, for more info on consciousness, see Wiki - Models of consciousness and especially Wiki - Orchestrated objective reduction.
Brilliant!
Orch-OR is a theory that I’d definitely consider fringe, in the sense that there’s a minority of researchers working on it (mainly its two originators, Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff), but not immediately dismissible. (Although I’ve never been able to see how it’s supposed to make any progress on the central question of why being conscious feels like anything.) It layers a speculative extension of quantum mechanics (gravitational reduction, where a measurement-collapse occurs once the gravitational fields of possible outcome-configurations differ by a certain amount) with a controversial thesis on the capabilities of the mind (that it must be able to implement non-computable processes to allow for a kind of mathematical ‘insight’ that goes beyond what formal models can achieve1) onto a speculative neurological notion (that the information processing in neurons ultimately occurs in so-called microtubuli, which a traditional understanding considers rather part of the ‘scaffolding’ of the cell). All of this is very arguable, but that’s what distinguishes it from the paper linked in the OP—which doesn’t manage to even present a thesis coherent enough to be argued.
1I always rather thought that Penrose maybe takes his own mental powers for more representative of general human capabilities than they are.
I mean, even that basically just amounts to “humans are magic”.
Something that has always puzzled me, and I think might be related to this, is how I experience physics in my dreams. I don’t know anything about physics, but somehow when I dream about doing things that are physically impossible, the strongest aspects of those dreams come out in physical interpretations of the experience. For example, accelerating to near or beyond light speeds. I turn into something resembling a string of maybe protons longer than the solar system, I am pulled into that shape by speed and acceleration. When I get where I am going, they reassemble, weird things like that. I can’t even imagine things like that when I am awake.
So you try to come up with scenarios that seem plausible to you, and because you don’t know much physics, what seems plausible to you bears no resemblance to actual physics. I don’t see what’s mysterious about that.
We all learn plenty of data about physical laws while growing up and experiencing the world. If we can walk, throw a ball, catch a ball, juggle, dance, drive a car, ride a bike, we have acquired plenty of practical knowledge about acceleration due to gravity and acceleration in general without ever consciously learning F=ma.
Dreams about flying might seem contra-physical, but they might be inspired by memories of swimming, or skiing, or sliding on ice, or just jumping off high walls, Maybe also inspired by watching the flight of birds, kites or paper airplanes, or being carried as a child.
I think that a big chunk of my “flying dreams” come from riding a bike.