Bernhard Riemann, the ear, and an atom of consciousness
File(s)
Published version
OA Location
Author(s)
Bell, Andrew
Davies, Bryn
Ammari, Habib
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Why did Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), arguably the most original mathematician of his generation, spend the last year of life investigating the mechanism of hearing? Fighting tuberculosis and the hostility of eminent scientists such as Hermann Helmholtz, he appeared to forsake mathematics to prosecute a case close to his heart. Only sketchy pages from his last paper remain, but here we assemble some significant clues and triangulate from them to build a broad picture of what he might have been driving at. Our interpretation is that Riemann was a committed idealist and from this philosophical standpoint saw that the scientific enterprise was lame without the “poetry of hypothesis”. He believed that human thought was fundamentally the dynamics of “mind-masses” and that the human mind interpenetrated, and became part of, the microscopic physical domain of the cochlea. Therefore, a full description of hearing must necessarily include the perceptual dimensions of what he saw as a single manifold. The manifold contains all the psychophysical aspects of hearing, including the logarithmic transformations that arise from Fechner’s law, faithfully preserving all the subtle perceptual qualities of sound. For Riemann, hearing was a unitary physical and mental event, and parallels with modern ideas about consciousness and quantum biology are made. A unifying quantum mechanical model for an atom of consciousness—drawing on Riemann’s mind-masses and the similar “psychons” proposed by Eccles—is put forward.
Date Issued
2022-09-01
Date Acceptance
2021-07-09
Citation
Foundations of Science, 2022, 27, pp.855-873
ISSN
1233-1821
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Start Page
855
End Page
873
Journal / Book Title
Foundations of Science
Volume
27
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Identifier
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10699-021-09813-1
Subjects
Arts & Humanities
History & Philosophy Of Science
History & Philosophy of Science
Bernhard Riemann
Hearing
Manifold
Mind-mass
Psychon
Consciousness
Quantum mechanics
ACOUSTIC EMISSIONS
QUANTUM-NOISE
HERBART
LIMITS
WAVES
Science Studies
2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2021-07-29