Quantum Drummer

One of the few examples in science where we find the breaking of silos and collaboration has existed for a long time, even if this collaboration sometimes has not been openly discussed has been between psychology and physics.

For people that has been part of Academia, or has been close to it, it has been customary to see that each field of knowledge protects its turf and most times not only rejects collaboration, but also most times rejects the ideas of other fields, closely guarding the contents of their own dogmas. The possibility of collaborating and building upon each other’s ideas is not something that is pursued, unfortunately for the overall growth of human knowledge. Each specialty of science remains comfortable within its own paradigm and tools or methods that might be useful to be shared or jointly expanded are not only closely guarded, but if any member of the group has an idea of using a tool or a method in other áreas is quite often frown upon.

Every once in a while in the history of science, thankfully some rebels have appeared and have not paid too much attention to the dogmas, and have collaborated with members of other fields of science even if reminded to get back to their herds and behave normally.

Normally when these rebels expand their minds to learn and share knowledge with rebels of other fields the result has been of great benefit for both fields. Unfortunately the professional egos and the silos have continued throughout time. Every once in a while, when a problem is complicated, collaboration is achieved, and members of different fields get together to collaborate in their solution. Such is the case with the problem of understanding Human Consciousness, which is one of the most complicated issues that science has attemped to solve. Up until these days, even if many technological advances have allowed impressive details about how the brain functions and major discoveries occur very frequently. Nobody knows how Consciousness works or where is located. While there are many theories of Consciousness, many of them are still similar to the theories that were discussed in the late 1800’s by researchers like William James or Carl Jung. The main conclusion that has been achieved is that the brain has a key participation on the process of Consciousness, but no conclusion has been defined about how Consciousness Works.

The solution to the understanding of Consciousness so far, is expected to possibly need the collaboration of  at least Neuroscientists, Psychologists, Engineers, Physicists, Molecular Biologists, Computer Scientists and Philosophers.

In the past 150 years, there have been several examples of collaboration between psychology and physics, of which the most known case is the collaboration of the psychologist Carl Jung and the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, from the 1930’s until the death of Pauli in 1958. Even if Pauli maintained this collaboration hidden from his peers, given his prominent position in the field of physics. The details of this collaboration have been presented in great detail in the wonderful book The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser.

Prior to the collaboration of Jung and Pauli we have discussed the potential cross pollination of ideas between William James, the Harvard profesor and psychologist, and Niels Bohr, the main quantum physicist mainly on the concept of Complementarity which was used by Bohr to build the Quantum model of the atom and developed the theory known as the Copenhaguen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. This potential idea transference might have ocurred from James and the Harvard environment, to Bohr and his Copenhagen team through Bohr’s psychology professor Harald Høffding and his friend Edgar Rubin as well as the Harvard physicist Charles Slater. However, before this collaboration activity, there was another set of events that ocurred between psychology and physics, which involved William James.

William James was one of the rebels that did not care about dogmas or about keeping with the disciplines of any particular field. He focused on learning about human experience in a pragmatic way, he developed a method of radical empiricism that was against philosophical monism and materialism. He was able to walk between fields of knowledge and collaborate across the limits of dogma, and he, as a good rebel, never cared about what people thought of him, he was free to research any field and learn the phenomenology without considering artificial borderlines in the search for explanations. James studied the Human Consciousness phenomena and developed several theories, mainly his “Transmission Theory,” which will be described later; he also considered the effect of a compound of several consciousnesses which posulates the possibility for individual consciousnesses within a system of thoughts that knows the thoughts of other consciousnesses within the system, very similar to the concept of a collective consciousness which was brought up by other scientists later. With his metaphysical work, James came up with a naturalistic view of consciousness, a type of distributive model in which consciousness is a way of awareness that is continually interacting with the environment, and forms a system with the environment.

William James did some of his psychology studies in Berlin in the 1860’s under Wilhelm Wundt and von Helmholtz. While performing his studies in Germany he became familiar with the works of the physicist Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), who developed the concept of Psychophysics, a method of taking empirical measurements and correlate brain states with sensory experiences quantitatively. The influence of Fechner on James was not trivial, and became a key element in the way James approached his work on consciousness for the rest of his life. Some of the theories discussed by Fechner and James in the late 1800’s are still valid today in Neuroscience, and their ideas still are present in the works of some of the main current neuroscientists, such as David Chalmers, Evan Thompson, and the late Francisco Varela.