neuroquantology - or - here comes a new challenger

after our (as the people's physicists front) yarman triumph through wiki deletion and witnessing the unfolding of the anılır story it was time for a new target, a new challenge. and our wishes were fulfilled without further ado. behold:

NeuroQuantology

as my fellow physicist comrades point out the necessity of violent physical force against the bullshit users of the term "quantum" we are set out to find and ridicule relevant bullshit. like quantum leadership or quantum therapy. in between the penis size increase google ads, some kind of personal help book pops out of the white noise with some kind of scientific reference.

we of course know the fringes which relate consciousness with quantum processes which are even worse than the gravitation fringes which only are interested in the physics theories. the reason being, when the bullshit theories diffuse to the scientific area concerned with human issues, the applications of the relevant bullshit to real life situations become immense hence the possibility to infect and effect the society is considerable. but nothing would have prepared us for the horror of a journal in citation index.

first of all meet the person behind the scene, doctor sultan tarlacı. he is a medical doctor of neurology working in our lovely city of izmir, at a private hospital. he is a writer of many books and operator of a blog called quantum brain (kuantumbeyin) which is a "best of" assembly of bullshit buzzwords including but not only constrained to: quantum, psi, parapsychology, neurophilosophy. he also publicizes his books on brain, psychology and quantum physics and seems to have gathered some following due to his exotic assortment of topics.

there is nothing wrong up to this point. but when the jokes stop being a joke and the feyerabendian distopic scientific practice (=proliferation of the "truth value" of a topic through propaganda and public relations) starts to be applied for this pseudo scientific discourse then the line needs to be drawn. it turns out neuroquantology is not just a bullshit topic in a blog but a editor reviewed journal.

as good rationalist physicists we disseminated the bullshit and appropriately ridiculed it on friendfeed. but the funny thing is, apparently our dear doctor googles himself hence paid us a visit and even made us famous in his blog by answering our allegations and linking to our friendfeed topic!

the title is "the brain impaired are squeezing for fat in a fly," referring to a turkish proverb.

nevertheless he made us so happy that, rather than answering to him in friendfeed we decided to put our allegations here, also in english, to start up disillusioning the not only the current status of quantology but also the thompson-reuters which put the journal to the list.

anyhow; tarlacı's rebuttals of our allegations are irrelevant and amusing at best: ranging from his test scores as a medical student, to sadly not being able to make money from "his new paradigm." but the most disturbing ones are first, as formerly mentioned the isi indexing of neuroquantology which is a long topic that i will go into detail; and secondly the inclusion of nobel laureate brian david josephson in their editorial board. according to tarlaci's logic, josephson's existence in their journal should prove the scientific nature of it.

for the uninformed; josephson is won the nobel prize in physics (1973) for his work on condensed matter when he was 33 (24 according to tarlacı), and then later he moved onto more greener pastures, i.e. mind–matter unification project. this sudden shift to more speculative topics, led him to multiple ordeals like being banned from arXiv for a while to being the target of scientists for supporting pseudoscience in royal mail's nobel stamp series.

"Josephson believes that psychics and telepaths may be able to direct random energy at sub-atomic levels for their own purposes, and in the commemorative stamp booklet writes that developments in information and quantum theories 'may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science, such as telepathy'. It is not a suggestion that has gone down well with fellow Nobel laureates, however."

in this piece i don't want to condone any scientist of any stature; but i just want to point out that one should evaluate the scientific value of a proposal on the basis of the argument, not on the basis of who said it, what is the former accomplishments of the person. from this respect, the arguments and interests of josephson is not currently accepted by the rest of the scientific community. call it orthodoxy or not, unfortunately this is peer review. a concept that neuroquantology journal does not have.

having said all this, actually josephson himself also voiced concerns about the publication quality of the journal neuroquantology for the case of a paper which explained poltergeist activity as a quantum effect. his response to the new scientist was "this looks distinctly flaky to me."

so we decide to evaluate neuroquantology (which tarlaci refers to as "my journal"), on the basis of its contents, not based on whether thomson-reuters listed it in citation index or on your editors (who find the papers inside "distincly flaky" by the way), but evaluate them on their contents. and the final resolution is they are an intellectual pollution to the scientific commons, just ingullible accumulation of bullshit buzzwords, written with the style and sophistication of a first year engineering student taking a class on philosophy.

we will continue our quest to find and ridicule the NQ papers, to exemplify how bad it is to leave the decision of what science is and is not at the hands of cooperations like thomson-reuters.

here are some of my current favorites.

* A Game-Theoretic Approach to Metaphysical Reconciliation of Quantum Superposition
* A Neuroquantologic Approach to How Human Thought Might Affect the Universe
* A Robotic Program that Acquires Concepts and Begins Introspection