Kooky history of the quantum mind: reviving realism

One of my hobbies in undergrad was to spend time reading and editing Wikipedia. Towards the end of my studies, I started to specialize in going through Wikipedia’s fat-tail, removing articles to non-notable individuals, and trying to counter pseudoscientists, kooks, and cranks. Trying to understand why people subscribe to pseudoscience; how to demarcate real and pseudo- science; and confronting, correcting, or trolling hokum masquerading as science has occupied an unhealthly portion of my time on the internet ever since.

I had a particularly difficult struggle with the quantum mystics of Wikipedia. Some of their proponents have long been active on the internet, and combined with the general confusion around both quantum mechanics and consciousness, they were a very difficult community to expose. An exceptionally hostile member was the usenet celebrity Jack Sarfatti, a proponent of quantum mechanics as a unifying force between science and art and explanation of consciousness.