Spin doctors
[Update 2006: the abstracts have disappeared from the website...]
Searching for updates on the microtubule issue, I came across a page of abstracts from a meeting at the University of Arizona last spring.:
The resulting scalar field of self-alienated surplus labor value bounded by utility emerges as self-commodified consciousness, cast in semiotic terms that reflect Foucault’s transformation of the Marxist “mode of production” into a QFT-Weberian “mode of information.”
You (search for Quantum Field Theory and the Critical Semiotics of Digital Mind) are Alan Sokal and I claim my five pounds.
You know that old gag where everyone in the room of criminals turns out to be an undercover police officer? Maybe the whole meeting will out itself. (It would be a great reversal of the tedious academic race for priority: everyone would be trying to publish their own confession of parody writing last, so that all the preceding authors would be seen to have been taken in. Although it would be rather tense for the authors, like a game of Reversi).
This meeting is a serious one, with a talk from the highly respected Roger Penrose and other serious researchers. As I wrote elsewhere, I din't try very hard to understand Roger Penrose's book on quantum mechanics and consciousness after I found it misleading in the one area I knew a little about. Some of the authors on this page are clearly trying to grapple with serious problems about consciousness and mind and reality in a quantum world. When they figure out the answers, they can tell me. But judging by the state of the field they have a way to go (all taken from that page):
A novel theory of consciousness is proposed. We postulate that consciousness is connected to quantum mechanical spin since said spin is embedded in the microscopic structure of spacetime and may be more fundamental than spacetime itself. (Mount Sinai Medical Center)
If consciousness is the foundational substratum of the universe, principles developed in perennial philosophical systems should be even more universally applicable and cut across all levels of the cosmos, "internal" (e.g. individual mental and psychic, etc.) as well as "external" (e.g. collective unconscious, physical, etc). We sketch here a possible new prescription for a unified "science" that will encompass ordinary natural science and extend it to realms where it has not been extended up to now. (George Mason University)
If consciousness is a quantum rather than classical mechanical phenomenon, then these basic parameters of contemporary social scientific discourse and debate will be called into question, and radically new models of human agency, social structure, and the epistemology of social inquiry will need to be developed. (University of Chicage: possibly Sokalian?)
There are some rather more patently crackpot targets in the page too, but I chose these quotes from abstracts where the authors give academic affiliations. Posted by Jonathan at September 25, 2003 11:10 AM
