Preparing for a Second Publication

The impossible has happened.

In early 2018, I realized that special relativity would cause problems for copying or repeating conscious states, so in July, 2018, I wrote and submitted a paper to a journal.  (Its current iteration is in this preprint.)  Since then, it has been rejected by seven journals (or I’ve been asked to “revise and resubmit” in a way that was either incompatible with or irrelevant to the paper’s argument), ultimately because not a single reviewer understood the logic of my argument.  A rehash of the crazymaking rejections I've experienced is in this blog post.

Today, over two years after writing the paper, I received a “Revise and resubmit” response from the 8^th journal to which I submitted it, a very highly ranked journal that should have been my first or second submission.  There were two reviewers.  The first one rejected the paper for the typical reasons about identity – i.e., s/he didn’t understand my argument.  But the second one not only understood it, but called the logic "sound," and both complimented the paper and recommended it for publication.  I suspect the second reviewer is someone influential in the field, as the Editor invited me to revise and resubmit despite the first reviewer.  (The reviewer’s suggestions for revision are completely reasonable, even helpful, and will certainly improve the paper.)

So while this is no guarantee that this paper will ultimately be published, today I am celebrating that I’ve been heard, understood, and validated.  My arguments are original, sound, and – most of all – not crazy!

In the meantime, I am also working on a sort of semi-comprehensive treatise on the problems of Schrodinger's Cat, Wigner's Friend, macroscopic quantum superpositions, and the (assumed) universality of quantum mechanics.  I'm not sure if that will turn into one cohesive document, or several blog posts, or several (attempted) journal article publications.  But what is obvious to me at this point is that I have new ideas about the foundations of quantum mechanics that derive from both creativity as well as application of logic to various assumptions, and they may as well be articulated in the Internet.  (As it turns out, most of my contributions in consciousness and the foundations of physics so far derive from the identification of intrinsic contradictions/inconsistencies.)