Five Unexplained Mysteries Not Explained by Quantum Field Theory

Five Unexplained Mysteries Not Explained by Quantum Field Theory

Despite the many successes of Quantum Field Theory, there are five unexplained mysteries or “gaps” that may someday be filled: 

  • Renormalization is necessary because Quantum Field Theory does not describe how an electron (or other charged quantum) is affected by its self-generated EM field.
  • Field collapse is of two types: spatial collapse, when a spread-out quantum suddenly is absorbed or becomes localized, and internal collapse, when the spin or other internal property of a quantum suddenly changes. Collapse can also occur with two or more entangled quanta. Quantum Field Theory does not describe how and when this occurs, although it can predict probabilities.
  • Whys and wherefores. Quantum Field Theory does not provide an explanation for why the masses and interaction strengths of the various fields are what they are.
  • Dark matter and dark energy are believed to exist in outer space because of astronomical evidence. They also are not explained by the known fields of Quantum Field Theory.
  • Consciousness is something that happens behind our very noses, but is not explained by Quantum Field Theory.

…How dare physicists talk about “theories of everything” when they can’t explain what goes on behind their very noses! But please understand, by consciousness I don’t mean simple information processing, such as can be done by any computer. I mean the sense of awareness, the sensations, the feelings that human and other minds experience every day – from the color red to the beauty of a Mozart sonata or the pain of a toothache. Such sensations are known as qualia. Most physicists don’t want to be bothered with the question, and it is left to philosophers like Charlie Chaplin to worry about it:

Charlie Chaplin

Billions of years it’s taken to evolve human consciousness… The miracle of all existence… More important than anything in the whole universe. What can the stars do? Nothing but sit on their axis! And the sun, shoot­ing flames 280,000 miles high. So what? Wasting all its natural resources. Can the sun think? Is it conscious? – C. Chaplin (film “Limelight”)

I see consciousness as a more urgent problem than the question of why the field constants have the values they do, and I would trade a hundred field collapses for an explanation of why we see colors. Among those physicists who are willing to consider the problem, most believe that consciousness results from the complexity of the brain – that our brains do nothing more than an extremely complex computer or robot could do. (A physicist has been defined as “the atom’s way of thinking about atoms.”) This is known as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) explanation.  However there are a few physicists who believe that the phenomenon of consciousness goes beyond our present knowledge:

steven weinberg

Of all the areas of experience that we try to link to the principles of physics by arrows of explanation, it is consciousness that presents us with the greatest difficulty. We know about our own conscious thoughts directly, without the intervention of the senses, so how can consciousness ever be brought into the ambit of physics and chemistry? The physicist Brian Pippard… has put it thus: “What is surely impossible is that a theoretical physicist, given unlimited computing power, should deduce from the laws of physics that a certain complex structure is aware of its own existence.”  I have to confess that I find this issue terribly difficult. – S. Weinberg

To me it is perfectly obvious that consciousness consists of more than electric or electro-chemical signals, as in a computer or robot. Why do I believe this? For the same reason I believe that it is impossible to make a television set out of wood. If I took the most skilled carpenters in the world, gave them an unlimited supply of wood and said, “Take this wood and make a television set, but don’t use anything except wood”, I know they couldn’t do it. Wood doesn’t have within itself the capability to do the things that a TV set does. Similarly, electrical signals and computer memories don’t have it within themselves the capability to experience the color blue or the sensation of pain. We can’t even define these sensations, much less know how to create them from computer parts.

Some scientists justify their belief in the AI explanation by asking “what else? If it’s not electro-chemical signals (which we understand), then what else is there?” My answer is, I don’t know, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something else going on. If you the reader have learned nothing else from this book, you have learned that the entire history of physics involved the recognition that there is “something else” going on. Why is this so difficult to believe in regard to consciousness?

Will we ever find an explanation?  Ambrose Bierce didn’t think so:

ambrose-bierce

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with. – A. Bierce (“The Devil’s Dictionary”)

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