Bias Impedes Progress in Physical Biology, Consciousness Studies & Quantum Gravity

Abstract

If scientists hope to make progress in consciousness studies they needs to accept that biased judgments have a major influence on the sciences, how we divide them up, how they are funded and this, in turn, has a profound impact on progress. The imbalance in funding, resulting from bias, in favour of the life and health sciences needs to be addressed as does why perversely little of this funding is devoted to a physics explanation of self-organisation and life on the mesoscopic scale?  While life (the cell) is an outstanding example of self-organisation on the mesoscopic scale we need to be aware that self-organisation on this scale is ubiquitous in both animate and inanimate matter. The lack of effort, due to bias, to understand self-organisation on the mesoscopic scale is holding up progress in all biology related fields. We come face to face with our biases whenever theory predicts something unexpected such as the link between the biological cell, the electron neutrino, and the weak force. New results from KATRIN continue to support this link and has finally pushed the upper limit of the neutrino mass into the range predicted in the 1980’s. Following on from this success nature also organises itself on the galactic scale. The implications for Astronomy are examined together with how our biases may be preventing an understanding of the role of quantum mechanics in nature. Extending the mass sequence, that predicted the neutrino mass, suggests a new mass associated with gravity and a way to resolve the, discrete versus continuous, conflict between quantum mechanics and relativity and incorporate dark matter and dark energy naturally into a more comprehensive model of the natural world where all sciences with associated structure are physical.