What'sNEW

Admittedly, it's not my area. I have never understood exactly what "the problem of consciousness" is. May I innocently suggest that human consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, ultimately, of our genetic programming. This allows us to place consciousness on a separate analytical plane from that of the human body, without denying strict materialism. For an analogy, the programming underlying Conway's Game of Life yields a rich taxonomy of scurrying and flying screen images, yet these would be he impossible to anticipate from even a complete understanding of the programming.

Actually, Nagel briefly considers this, yet he prefers a more radical view. Perhaps [conscious states] are emergent, relative to the properties of atoms or molecules. But if they are not, this view would imply that the fundamental constituents of the world, out of which everything is composed, are neither physical nor mental but something more basic. I'm too conservative for that. Still, Nagel is thought-provoking and knows his subject.

Both books acknowledge that QT is incomplete. Kay thinks the underlying philosophy is entirely nonsensical. Carroll recognizes that QT works in mysterious ways, but, as he amply demonstrates, it works! The theory of evolution has the opposite crisis. The underlying philosophy — neo-darwinian mutation and selection — is clear enough, but it doesn't work!

Kay advocates a speculative research avenue to restore clarity and logic to the subject. He starts by noticing another medium that also exhibits both wave and particle phenomena simultaneously, called hydrodynamic quantum analogues (HQA). It would be a return to the "pilot-wave" theory of DeBroglie and Bohm. I entrely support imaginative exploration of this sort, but I did not carefully follow his endorsement of this model. It reminded me of an analogy with gears and vortices of James Clak Maxwell's, when he was a student. For quantum theory, I suspect that the historical success of both wave and particle physics may have blinded us to an underlying reality that requires concepts and vocabulary that we do not currently have.

For history of quantum theory, Kay is excellent. He also digresses to other subjects where science went wrong, such as the phlogiston theory, where he writes, "Because fake problems are hard to solve, the way out is to drop them." I thought immedately of today's theory of evolution, where the hardest questions — how did this or that genetic program originate? — apparently have been dropped.