Yes, there are aspects of Plotinus which are problematic or unacceptable

Notwithstanding what we wrote previously, it is important to point out that there are aspects of Plotinus' philosophy that are not only inconsistent but profoundly mistaken and even potentially harmful.
Did Plotinus categorically condemn slavery? His socio-political connections (including a the Roman Emperor Gallienus) and Porphyry's account of the episode of the stolen necklace cast serious doubt that Plotinus (as disappointingly many other philosophers and the New Testament)  ever rejected the social institution of slavery. What is more serious is that  Plotinus appears to justify it based on his own metaphysics and theory of the soul. In III.2 we have perhaps the most disturbing and unacceptable passage in all the Enneads: It is not an accident that makes a man a slave; no one is a prisoner by chance; every bodily outrage has its due cause. The man once did what he now suffers. This passage can be construed as a profoundly spiritually, morally, sociologically, anthropologically and scientifically mistaken and unenlightened defense of caste systems and every form of political and socio-cultural injustice, cruelty, error, oppression and superstition. How could Plotinus explain the sublime philosophical and moral teachings of slave-born Epictetus in the 1st century CE (who ethically equals if not surpasses anything in neoplatonism or Christianity with the exception of Porphyry's defense of animal rights in De Abstinentia)

https://www.academia.edu/121293413/Philosophy_of_Epictetus

and on the other hand Roman Emperors such as Nero? There is perhaps not anything more injurious to morality, common humanity, reason and the facts of history and nature than the heinous opinion that being born into wealth and power has some relationship to spiritual merit in a past life. Clearly if a circumstance of birth were designed to be optimal for spiritual, intellectual and moral development then such a circumstance can only be one of modest means which avoids the extremes of wealth (and power) and poverty (and oppression) - "the middle station in life" according to Defoe (cf. also the introduction of Augustine's Contra Academicos).

And an analysis of the texts of Marcus Aurelius (2nd century CE) and Epictetus should lead us to question the official narratives concerning "Stoicism". No amount of sophistry or verbal gymnastics could make such "Stoics" into "materialists" or "empiricists" in the contemporary and vague sense of such terms. And this leads us to question if Plotinus was not unjust to the Stoics and misrepresented their positions.  We note that the wonderful thing about the Middle Academia was precisely the philosophical engagement between different schools. In the Enneads the Stoics are not given a chance to defend themselves.

The dismal defense of social injustice in Plotinus also reflects a fundamental inconsistency and uncertainty - the conflict between a pessimistic and optimistic outlook regarding the physical world - and this appears to have be a genuine concern for Plotinus (cf. his rather strange, not altogether fair and long-winded polemic treatise against the "gnostics"). Plotinus protests too much about the goodness and ultimate justice and harmony of the physical world (in particular with regard to the descent and ascent of souls and its providence and justice) and yet according to his biographer Porphyry he personally engaged in at type of asceticism (i.e. regarding hygiene or his attitude, according to Porphyry, of being ashamed to be in a body) which would have been condemned by the Buddhists. Also it is strange and inconsistent in this light that Plotinus refused to have his portrait taken or to say anything about his family. 

There are also problems with Plotinus' theory of consciousness and self-awareness (parakolouthêsis) regarding the soul's re-ascent into the intelligible realm.  It is safe to say that higher level of spiritual attainment always involve a higher consciousness of this attainment itself - and this agrees with Plotinus' theory of the nous and the noes of the individual souls.  In higher spiritual states (such as that of the jivan-mukti in the Vedanta or the Bodhi-citta)  individual and universal consciousness can co-exist. The idea of an unconscious, non-reflective or trance-like attainment of the intelligible realm is self-contradictory and absurd. In Pāli Buddhism, a person who is fully liberated (Pali: vimutta) explicitly knows and sees that their mind is liberated.The Pāli Canon frequently uses the phrase vimutti-ñāṇa-dassana (the knowledge and vision of liberation) to describe the final stage of awakening. We should examine critically the book  Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism by Kuzminski (2008).

The problem of human existence is to convert the suffering deluded ordinary individualized somatic consciousness into transcendent universal super-individual luminous blissful super-consciousness. Such a super-consciousness does not need to cancel individual consciousness, it only renders it transparent (one could say, "child-like") and reconnected to its source.  And to obtain this goal one can use analytic dialectics and analytic phenomenology - which we argue are found developed in the Enneads. As recognized by Schopenhauer, a fundamental principle and insight allowing the reintegration of individual consciousness into super-consciousness is provided by the foundation of morality - compassion - which is transcendent knowledge regarding the oneness, value and interconnection of all living sentient beings. 

In the future we plan to develop the interesting insight found in Shapshay's book : Reconstructing Schopenhauer Ethics. Shapshay argues that Schopenhauer's work The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics offers a self-contained strictly phenomenological system of ethics which is logically independent from Schopenhauer's particular form of Kantian-inspired transcendental idealism.

And supremely important is the clarification of Pyrrhonist ethics afforded by Nâgârjuna. In the Madhyamaka Pure dialectics lead directly to the ethics of compassion and the Bodhisattva ideal.

Spiritual consciousness and knowledge (such as attested in the Pali scriptures) must lead to the complete rejection and condemnation of slavery and all caste-systems based on birth and wealth. We also note the echo in the Platonic Socrates' best discourses in the Theaetetus. 

Now in the Hellenistic world and in Alexandria and the early Neoplatonic school in particular there was a substantial cosmopolitanism and culture exchange - including with India. Even if Plotinus's historical-cultural outlook is explicitly strictly Greek (with some passing reference to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics) it was recorded that he wished to enter into contact with certain philosophical-spiritual schools in Persia and India. With Porphyry and Iamblichus the awareness and connection to other cultures becomes much stronger. This was also the case for ancient Greece and we can ask why the philosophical and spiritual sources and influences of Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria, Chaldea, Persia and India (cf. Pyrrho) as well as other places in south-eastern Europe, were systematically erased and downplayed. If we can prove that Vedantic, Mahayana and Theravâda schools were well-established in Alexandria and other places during the Hellenistic Era, then much of the above problems regarding Plotinus could be solved: the teachings and spiritual practices of Ammonius Saccas (we reject the fantastical claim that Ammonius Saccas was just a pun on Pali Sakya-muni, even if the clan's namesake god Sakya, i.e. Indra, could well correspond to the Egyptian Amun) and his student Plotinus were Hellenic adaptations of only-partially understood (or which became compromised with the Roman Empire) Vedantic and Buddhist spiritual-philosophical teachings and practices (just as Aristotle derived his Categories and Syllogistic from the Nyâya and Pyrrho his philosophy from a prototype of the Madhyamaka).

The Megarian and Skeptic orientation of the later Academy could well corroborate Cicero's thesis to a certain extent. The Madhyamaka and Nyâya elements were deployed in the same spirit as they were in Mahayana Buddhism and the Vedanta. As we argued before, this is another fundamental weakness of Neoplatonism: the disregard for the sophisticated formal logic of antiquity and the practice of the (proto-Madhyamaka) dialectic of the later Academy and Pyrrhonism, and the possibility of a more thorough development of proto-phenomenology (proto-yogâcâra) - a possibility attested in Augustine. Note that Plotinus' dialectic can be construed as the inverse of Hegel's logic in that the most exterior categories are derived (proceed) from the higher interior ones in the intelligible realm - even if the inverse anagogic process also plays a certain role.  Hegel's logic also maintains a strong connection to Madhyamaka, Pyrrhonism and to the Megarianism and dialectics of the later Academy. Plotinus has no interest in formal logic or the critique and deconstruction of concepts as such.

Critique of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory

Here we will present some short logical and philosophical critiques and questions concerning quantum mechanics and quantum field theory with the ultimate goal of going beyond these theories and constructing more satisfactory ones. We will also attempt to bridge the gap between some of our previous speculations and the actual mathematical structure of quantum theory.

We focus on the collapse of the wave-function. But the root of the problem can already be found in the singular situation of observables corresponding to Hermitian operators while the temporal evolution of the state of a system corresponds to unitary operators. The collapse is essentially a projection onto an eigenvector. In classical physics measurement and observations are external to the system. In quantum mechanics they become internalized. The observation process, the applications of hermitian operators, suggest a highly sensitive non-linear response of a system whose nature is still not understood.

What if we viewed space as discrete (like the lattice structures used to explain free fields in QFT)? Then the wave function becomes just a finite vector, the space points mere indexes - just like time is a mere index. We loose the topology.  It is curious that  position can be promoted to an operator but time cannot. A time operator in quantum theory seems to be a notion derived from momentum and as such recalls the classical Aristotelian notion of time being a "measure of change".  

Understanding what the vacuum state $|0\rangle$ is in QFT is not easy - and many different accounts are given in the textbook of why the Green function takes on a particular interpretation of a particle being created at point $x$ and destroyed a point $y$.  Understanding what the spatial-temporally indexed operators are - and what measurements they correspond to - is also not easy. The creation and annihilation operators are not Hermitian and do not correspond to observations and measurements and yet Hermitian operators (or operator-valued distributions) can be written in terms of them.  These supposedly correspond to measurements.  We must first of all understand the Vacuum Expectancy Value, what $\langle 0 | \phi(y) \phi(x) | 0 \rangle$ means (which is obviously similar to the expected value in quantum mechanics $\langle \phi | A | \phi \rangle$). And understand it experimentally. The first $\phi(x)$ corresponds to the high-energy localized injection of a particle (perhaps the product of decay) while the second $\phi(y)$ could correspond to collision with a detector (which thus destroys the particle).

We think that the statistical mechanics motivations of second quantization and QFT is particularly interesting. Our "wave function" gives a probabilistic distribution over occupation numbers $(N_1,...,N_n)$. The interpretation of the creation and annihilation operators in this context is subtle. How are we really to understand

$a_i \Phi (N_1,...,N_i,...,N_k,...) = \sqrt{N_i} \Phi(N_1,...,N_i -1,...,N_k,...)$?

Too often we see physical metaphors applied rather vaguely to mathematical constructs. To us these operators only really make sense in the context of the rigorous formulation of Fock spaces (tensor products, symmetric and anti-symmetric products of Hilbert space $H$). Given an orthonormal basis $\epsilon_i$ of $H$ then the operator $\Sigma_{i=1}^\infty a^\dagger(\epsilon_i)a (\epsilon_i)$ has very clear properties ($Sv = nv$ for $v$ in the $n$th component of the Fock space), far more illuminating than speaking of "particle number". But of course Fock space pertains only to the theory of free fields. The general case, the perturbative case, seems intimately connected to the general concept of formal deformation of an object by formal power series (cf. quantum groups or Hopf algebras in general), but there is no rigorous mathematical structure for perturbative QFT.

 A central flaw in the theoretical treatment of QFT is that it systematically ignores the central unspoken role of human agency, the experimenter and experimental setup, behind the mathematical formalism. Operators (operator valued distributions) are treated as independent active entities in their own right which somehow decide to "act" on fields. The glaring shortcoming is that there is no clear criteria of demarcation between the human observer the what is observed - nature.  Can the measurement process itself be considered a natural process when considered and observed externally by a third observer ? Are Hermitian operators really then descriptions of something objective happening to the system, the external observed observer "zapping" or collapsing the system? And should not this whole process itself be capable of superposition?

This most curious situation: observables must correspond to Hermitian operators - this can be deduced by the requirements of measurement in a probabilistic framework. Also, the unperturbed evolution of a system corresponds to unitary operators (or in the Heisenberg picture conjugation of observables by unitary operators). But what a coincidence that - for a finite discrete approximation - the lie algebra of the unitary group is the space of anti-hermitian operators - itself isomorphic (via multiplication by $i$) to that of hermitian operators. That is, every unitary matrix is can be written $e^J$ for $J$ anti-hermitian or $e^{iH}$ for $H$ hermitian. So measurements correspond to objects in the tangent space of the group of unitary operators - but they are also applied in their own right to the wave function.

Why could not the total energy of the vacuum be infinite? Why could not the total energy of the universe be infinite and yet there be still, in some sense, conservation of energy?  For instance we could have a countable infinite collection of non-communicating finite universes with finite energy and in which the conservation of energy held. Then the total set of universes would be a universe with infinite energy in which there was still conservation of energy in a meaningful sense.  We could even allow communication between the finite components satisfying a conservation law.

It is curious how the discreteness of the energy states is connected to the finitude of the system. 

The vacuum state in QFT is similar to consciousness (to alayavijñana) - and we can argue that classical field theory could never be an adequate representation.

We have discussed before the interest of considering material and energetic constraints in information - and this is precisely the idea behind linear logic (Girard's first papers explicitly mention chemistry), as well as partially already present in the memory management aspect of programming languages. QFT scattering is a lot like communication with material constraints.  The "answer" of the system has to be materially destroyed to be received.

This is certainly a bizarre idea, but could it be that the experiments with LHCs are not teaching us about nature but rather a kind of training process analogous to AI? Nature is changing her habits in conformity to what physicists want to observe? And finally consider how we attempted previously to characterize the massive datasets which allowed LLMs to be trained and perform as they do.  The qualities of the massive data sets in question could they not correspond to fundamental properties of the vacuum or quantum fields in general? Of course the analogy is limited because of the apparent inescapable indeterminism in QFT while LLMs are just deterministic automata.

Type theory / QTF analogy.   Type = Operator, Term inhabiting a type = Vector and application of operator to the vector,  Simply Typed Lambda-Calculus = Quantum Mechanics, Dependent Type Theory = Quantum Field Theory, operators depend on values. Loops, non-termination = infinities.