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Photosynthesis May Rely On Quantum Effect
forgethistory sends us to PhysOrg for a summary of new research suggesting that the near instantaneous energy transfer achieved by photosynthesis may rely on quantum effects. From the article: "Through photosynthesis, green plants and cyanobacteria are able to transfer sunlight energy to molecular reaction centers for conversion into chemical energy with nearly 100-percent efficiency. Speed is the key — the transfer of the solar energy takes place almost instantaneously so little energy is wasted as heat. How photosynthesis achieves this near instantaneous energy transfer is a long-standing mystery that may have finally been solved."
I wonder if ferns ever look at us and laugh saying that non-quantum-sourced energy is so 3 billion years ago.
Knowing a possible mechanism is important, yes, but that's a long way from having a workable implementation of the method that is useful in a technological sense.
because I know I'm instantly up and going after I get my morning coffee!
The original generic sig.
I was thinking about this just the other night, strange coincidence. There are probably a lot of functions like photosynthesis that rely on quantum effects. One of them might be the idea of consciousness. Consciousness may not be so easily explained without taking into account quantum effects. If self awareness is enabled through some sort of quantum effect, imagine the philosophical implications.
I'm sorry, please clarify: did you actually say anthing in that post?
... it's also been discovered that *all* physical phenomena may also rely on Quantum Effect.
I don't know about consciousness, but in his novel Blue Mars (last book of the Mars trilogy), published a decade ago already, Kim Stanley Robinson made use of research that suggests that memory relies on a quantum effect.
I think science has finally managed to trip it's self up and is revealed in its true colours, maybe now scientists will turn back to God ?
I think it's pretty obvious that plants are not going to "evolve" quantum technology on their own, even with all the benefits The Lord has provided us with we are unable to manage anything close to a 100% energy source and we are thinking, feeling humans and not mere plants. Isn't it fitting that the Lord chooses something as beautiful as plants and glorious as the sun to finally reveal himself to scientists.
The Last Days can't be far off now brothers, Hallelujah ! Rejoice !
http://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Roger-Penr ose/dp/0140145346
Was there any specific quantum effect you had in mind or did your spell checker mysteriously substitute the phrase "quantum effects" for the word magic ?
I can't seem to find the link (Google is not friendly today), but does this perhaps justify the researcher who postulated that the sense of smell comes from something akin to detecting nuclear resonance, not a simple chemical interaction? I recall that one detractor said that his theory was as outlandish as saying that food was digested in the stomach via tiny nuclear reactors. But it explained many things that didn't make sense otherwise -- like why cyanide smells like almonds.
He's apparently gone on to success in the perfume industry.
Someone find the link... this is driving me nuts.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Would that mean that attempts to upload human minds to computers would fall foul of the no-cloning theorem? Such constraints on the duplication of quantum information would have interesting effects on philosophical problems of identity.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Maybe his spell checker uses quantum effects!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
The Emperor's New Mind by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose then.
I don't buy it, personally. I don't see why microtubules act as mini quantum computers, but hey.
None that weren't already stated in numerous terms thousands of years ago in virtually every culture.
In one of the various debunkings of What the *bleep* do we know they cover that the neuronal activity in your brain is way too big to be affected by the very small quantum strangenesses that come up. On average they have no effect on your thinking.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
(mindpiss, as they say on b3ta).
Okay, then. Also (vaguely related to quantum mechanics in biology:
Quantum Evolution by Johnjoe McFadden.
The Rainbow and the Worm by Mae-Wan Ho.
I don't think I really understand what that article is going on about. It seems to be saying that there is something which recieves the sunlight and something else which is the molecular energy. Between these two there are numerous ways of transferring the sunlight energy but some are better than others and that each route is simultaneously probed by both sides until the best one is found which is then used for the energy transferrance.
Is that even close to whats being described here ?
Getting off topic: You might be interested in reading the books by Roger Penrose, a well known physicist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose. His book 'The Emperor's New Mind' is about how Godel's incompleteness theorem (and the fact that we get around it) and other facts indicate a non-standard physics basis for the mind. His later books expand on the idea. Personally, I think that he's incorrect, and his work has had very little effect on the field of neuroscience, but it's a interesting read. (Why is he wrong? Because minds don't prove, they 'believe' and 'know' and are often wrong, so Godel does not apply).
Hey! Mine keeps doing that, too!
My blog
There was a TV show of that name..
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
When a photon strikes a chlorophyll, it adds its energy to an electron, allowing the electron to escape from its atom (previously known quantum mechanics). It was previously thought that the electron would then go bouncing around between chlorophyll molecules until it found a pheophytin molecule (slightly different chlorophyll). Once it hits that molecule, it activates an electron-transport chain (a similar process happens when burning glucose in a mitochondrion).
TFA suggests that the hopping uses quantum superposition to traverse the chlorophyll molecules more quickly. When the traversal reaches the pheophytin, the superposition collapses into that single state which found the pheophytin.
(IANAL)
It's quite possible given that think in terms of probability rather than absolutes even through our resulting probable answer borders on an absolute factual answer. Perhaps this is why we have such hard time processing mathematics in our head, yet not art or concepts.
Life is not for the lazy.
This explains why the hedge in my yard wasn't doing so well until it was temporarily taken over by the spirit of a wise and charming fern from the future, which corected everything that was wrong in the hedge's life before moving on to my neighbor's lawn ten years ago.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
The summary is slightly misleading, but this disconnect has big implications for the reader's understanding (imho)...
j ablonski.gif Unfortunately, this scheme doesn't show photofragmentation or energy transfer to another molecule, but I'm in a rush so it'll do.
I can name plenty of chemical reactions that are complete on the femtosecond scale, and while speed helps, that's certainly not the whole picture. What matters is how mismatched the energy levels between the reactant and the product are. When transitioning between energy levels, either energy is transferred out of the system by nonradiative release (heat), luminescence, photofragmentation, or transfer to a chemical partner - this last case is what the article is referring to. Getting to an energy level which can react is going to result in a heat deposition for at least some photons because any photon of a higher energy than the reacting state must deposit some of that energy just to be able to react at all.
http://www.monos.leidenuniv.nl/smo/basics/images/
The squiggly lines show possible heat depositions - the molecule starts in the ground state, absorbs a photon (the yellow up arrow), then relaxes to the excited state. This excited state then does whatever it's going to do. If 100% of the time under a set of conditions (i.e. a quantum yield of 1.00), the excited molecule follows a particular pathway we call that perfectly efficient. In the specific example of photosynthesis, this means that all of the absorbing chlorophylls transfer the energy along the photosynthetic pathway (I'm lumping all the subsequent processes together here). It does not mean that 100% of the energy got transferred along the way - there will always be some photon that deposits more energy than the reacting state has, meaning some energy will be converted to heat.
In short form (if you didn't feel like reading all this): efficiency in this case refers primarily to how often the molecule dumps its energy into photosynthesis instead of all to heat, luminescence, etc. It's not referring to the energy throughput, as some photons will always be an imperfect energy match, and the extra energy will end up as heat.
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
Once we understand the fundamentals of photosynthesis we could learn to engineer near 100% efficient organic solar cells, current silicon solar cells are expensive and are c. 16% efficient at best. For example, primitive photosynthetic pathways found in bacterial could be copied the man made organic solar cells that could be used to generate hydrogen as a by-product of photosynthesis. I suspect this is the aim of the researchers, they may have an eye on patents and are keeping quite. http://www.afrlhorizons.com/Briefs/Jun03/ML0227.ht ml
Why do you need to invoke one mystery to "explain" another? I can't see why consciousness "may not be so easily explained without taking into account quantum effects". What particular things about consciousness seem to indicate quantum effects to you?
Other people have proposed this before, but present a theory of why quantum effects may be necessary. Roger Penrose makes the argument that we can compute things that a Turing-style computer could not compute, so something else must be going on. His proof that some things we do cannot be done by a Turing style computer isn't exactly accepted though, and no-one seriously believes that the brain works in this way in any case.
Also, consciousness is not the same thing as "self-awareness". Is a dog conscious? Is it self-aware? What about a rabbit? When I dream, I'm not usually self-aware, but there's some sort of consciousness there. What about phenomena like blind-sight, where a person is self-aware, but unconscious of visual information, even though they can access that information by guessing remarkably accurately, just without any direct consciousness of it. Does this mean that these supposed quantum-consciousness effects have broken down only for information originating in visual centers, but keeps working on all other information?
Of course, coming from quantum theory, there is the Copenhagen Interpretation which places a special status on the 'observer' - but no-one has managed to define what an observer is, or whether they must be conscious or not.
Actually, there's lots of good reasons to think that we don't need any sort of physical explanation for consciousness at all, philosophically. It wouldn't be very philosophically interesting if we could reduce the philosophy of mind to quantum physics, because it wouldn't be philosophical, capisce?
IAALS.
Let me be the first to welcome this new research as more than a wacky discovery concerning quantum effects. If we can figure this out, which seems to be the case, imagine the efficiency of future solar cells.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Yeah, sure the energy transfer efficiency is 100% for every photon that participates in the reaction. But of all the photons falling on the leaf, hardly 2% of them participate in reactions. Some gets reflected, some gets absorbed without any reaction. Even solar cells have better energy conversion efficiency than plants. Really. As for quantum effects, almost all the photo reactions are quantum mechanics. They have to be. The film camera emulsion has greater percentage of photons participating in reaction than chlorophyll.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Red Mars was good, but by Blue Mars, I gave up partway through thinking I really don't care about these people or their dumb politics.
I have heard the "we don't have free will because we're just a big pile of chemicals whose interactions are destined to run down in a specific manner" often from scientific types as a reason to *ignore* all philosophy, and/or as proof that we are no more entitled to a soul than a can of soda.
Placing an unexplained/unpredictable phenomena back into the equation reinstates the validity, for many people, of thinking about thought.
I believe he said, "I'm high."
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I must take issue with the 100% efficiency. Efficiency, as I know it, is a ability to convert stored energy into useful work. I know of no engine, artificial or natural, that can do this with 100%, which is of course prohibited by the known laws of thermodynamics. In particular, I have seen photosynthesis calculation that set the efficiency of photosynthesis as low at 3%. Even in the simplistic case, it appears that 50-70% of the energy in the process of photosynthesis.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
We process mathematics seamlessly in our head. How else do you thing you are capable of running to catch a moving ball? The trouble is that is is too seamless. It's not accessible to our higher functions as a set of subroutines with a well documented API.
Yeah, I know. If you could, you'd have about 6 Nobel Prizes...
Gee, I wonder where coffee comes from? Hmmmm, I don't know, maybe a plant? Where does that plant get energy from?
Enjoy your cup of sunshine!
Exactly what I thought. He's too human for me.. :) I'll take Rendevouz with Rama over Robinson any day.
Did that erase me :)?
The Raven
Consider the findings of that (sorry forget the name) scientist who was working on biologically evolved electronic circuits. He discovered the bizarre circuits that resulted were sometimes more efficient than human-designed onces, but very hard to figure out. In particular he discovered the circuits sometimes made use of electromagnetic coupling to other parts of the circuit that didn't seem to do anything, and also found they sometimes only worked in narrow temperature ranges.
Considering the amount of time evolution has had, it would be amazing if quantum effects were not in fact part of efficient biological circuits.
Possibly things that for which their purpose is not currently known will in fact prove to have some kind of quantum, electromagnetic or other type of effect that is not immediately apparent but critical to operation.
It is interesting that this was shown at 50 kelvin. Perhaps photosynthesis does not require moving parts and this is why photosynthesis was the first process shown to require quantum effects for its efficiency. We now need ways (if there can be any) to study systems at the temperatures of life, at least low temperature life. For example there is that mold that was found growing outside of the Russian space station IIRC.
One question I have, which just shows how little I understand physics, is about how this "searchig for the most efficient path" actually works. Presumably it is also the basis of quantum computing. That is, if we were in a many worlds continuum then most worlds would pick the inefficient paths, so presumably the naming "many worlds" doesn't really reflect the theory, plus there is a mechanism involved that seeks a most stable ground state (which in plants somehow comes about from picking the most efficient energy absorption path). Since this is important to the life of the organism it suggests and anti-entropic bias..? If someone can explain what different paths exist and how the most efficient one is selected works I'd appreciate it. Very cool stuff!
I hope so. Uploading a brain etc or living in a machine scares the sh*t out of me.
Maybe the EU could help with that...
"God, we are fining you 3 million Euros a day until you provide fully documented APIs for all neural functions"
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
Unless you're a savant that is.
I gave up partway through thinking I really don't care about these people or their dumb politics.
That's about the way I felt about Red Mars, and I wasn't even reading it but listening to the book on tape while commuting. Actually more the soap operas than the politics. Maybe if I'd been reading it I could have just skipped those bits.
(That's what I did with the Chronicles of Covenant that somebody once gave me. Read the beginning and ending bits where he's in the real world, and skipped over the stupid swords'n'sorcery stuff where his character is so revolting. These days I'm a lot more ready to just toss the whole thing; life's too short.)
-- Alastair
So lets see, photons ( quantum mechanics, or QM for short ) is absorbed into chlorophyl molecules, exciting them in the process (QM). The excited energy is then somehow transformmed to break the chemical bonds (QM) of CO2 and water molecules creating sugar molecules with a different quantum mechanical binding energy. Now who would have thought that this process could involve quantum mechanics? Yes, the article is interesting otherwise, but is there really a need to highlight the "amazing" fact that quantum mechanics is involved? Quantum mechanics isn't new, especially not the idea that it is crucial to epxlaining light ( Einstein showed that it 1905 ) so there really isn't any need to mention it in every article title that deals with molecular scale phenomena. If it is small enough it will involve QM.
You might want to go to Salzburg this summer to attend the Quantum Mind conference. You'll find a number of top physicists, a few philosophers, some famous mathematicians, and at least one anaesthesiologist (hey, you don't know what you've got till it's gone).
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
That's not such a crazy idea. Roger Penrose discusses it in his book The Large, the Small and the Human Mind. It's a fascinating read. (At least I thought so.)
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Other biochemical systems have been shown to rely on QM effects. See, for example,
0 06/128/i24/abs/ja061585l.html
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jacsat/2
There is even some debate that enzymes may have evolved to take advantage of QM tunneling and the like. This is interesting, but not "news for nerds"
Seriously, if you want to make science 'interesting', just stick the words nano and quantum in front and everyone will listen.
echo $SIGNATURE
I think I see what you mean? That consciousness is a phenomenon that does not inhere in chemical or physical processes other than quantum effects? But it is much more likely that consciousness does not inhere in ANY physical process we understand or can measure (by definition, or we could measure something distinctive about conscious vs. non-conscious entities). Honestly, though, this speculation is pretty far out.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Contrary to popular belief, consciousness is not all that mysterious. We can with our knowledge today say with pretty good certainty that it's a post processing effect. After other mechanisms in the brain have done their processing and made a decision, consciousness kicks in in order to map the responses of the various parts of the brain into a coherent symbolic higher-level structure. Basically consciousness tries to explain on what grounds a decision is made in order to facilitate deductive reasoning.
The funny thing is that there is a quite long delay (average 500 ms) between when a decision is made in parts of the brain that you are not aware of to when you are aware of decision - and think that your consciousness is involved in making that decision. In reality the decision has been made a long time ago without the consciousness being involved.
The Orch-OR theory and similar ones are mainly a desperate attempt to explain away the data that rules out conscious thought as a first cause of decision. In reality though, consciousness is just another example of human exceptionalism that we have to abandon - just like we had to learn to live with the fact that earth is not at the center of the universe.
I found it difficult to believe the "near 100% efficient" comment. A simple google search found this...
C onversion/Photo-_synthesis/photo-_synthesis.htm
http://www.upei.ca/~physics/p261/Content/Sources_
Now, is this a legit website? I don't know, but intuitively it makes more sense to me than "near 100% efficiency"
Consciousness can be easily explained in three words: It's an illusion. Well, okay, one of those three words is a contraction.
OK. I'm going to ramble a bit here, but bear with me.
There will always exist a level of uncertainty. If, somehow, we could map a complete brain and know where every single neuron is and in what ways it is connected, we may be able to watch the chain of processes for a second or two. Then problems arise.
The brain gives preferential treatment to certain pathways for information flow. This is why the brain can remap itself in case of damage. furthermore, since our brains are organic, there is no reason to expect even the brains of twins to be connected in EXACTLY the same manner. Their slightly different viewpoints will diverge from the moment their brains begin to fire (one is inverted relative to the other in the womb for instance). One will emerge before the other, one will suckle before the other, etc.
It is my opinion, that free will is indeed a farce, but it's unpredictability stems from both the lack of knowledge of the initial state, and the sheer number of different ways that the brain can change over time in response to outside stimuli.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
What things can we compute that a Turing machine cannot?
Pedantic correction:
Caffeine is not energy, it is a stimulant.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Yes, this possibility has been considered. quantum consciousness The criticism is that the brain is not a very good place for quantum effects to happen. It's temperature is to high, and there is in general to much noise, all the interesting quantum effect get canceled out. This new research show that quantum effects can be found in biological systems, which may open the possibility for it to happen in the brain as well.
Since I have a degree in Theology, I am very interested in the philosophical and theological implications of quantum effects happening in the brain. Quantum mechanics would allow for the possibility of free will in the human brain, since in the quantum world things can happen without a prior cause. This would not prove the existence of free will. It could be that the brain is just being controlled by random effects. If the brain does turn out to be a quantum computer, this is where the philosophers will be arguing. Are these events with no prior cause really random or are they in a real sense free when combined in the brain. BTW, a lot of people try to make a distinction between the brain and the soul. I don't have a problem with this distinction ( I believe in the soul) but I don't think it helps matters if classical physics can completely describe the brain. There has to be some way for a free soul to connect with a deterministic brain and I don't see any way to do that which is consistent with the modern science of the brain.
As a slashdoter, I am very interested in free will, so that I can continue to use linux and hate microsoft.
It's not really happening?
What?
I can't remember his precise arguments (his book Shadows of the Mind goes into this).
It has something to do with Godel's proofs - something along the lines that you can't prove something to be true or false inside a particular system, but since we as humans can see that something is true/false nevertheless, so we must be doing something different.
I don't think the argument holds up very well myself (we can apply lots of different systems, for one thing, we aren't limited to only one), and I am sure I am somewhat misrepresenting his ideas here - it's been a while since I read it.
Just kidding. I will leave now.
The more I consider this, the more I come to the conclusion that the researchers are finding quantum effects with their "Designed to Detect QM Effects (TM)" experiment. Cool anything to tens of K and I could find novel QM in roadside rocks using their set-up. Using samples related to photosynthesis makes it all so very interesting. Future research will explore higher temperatures where I expect their long lived electronic states will decay much more rapidly. Photosynthesis happens at several hundred degrees higher than the experiment.
However, anything QM related is cool. Everything at QM scales involves QM. Light is on the QM scale - no doubt it involves QM. It's still new physics and a very interesting result.
Since chemical bonding, energy levels, etc. are all quantum mechanical.
The news is that the system appears to exhibit coherence.
Electrons do not just go bouncing around willy-nilly - that's what QM is about. Electrons have discrete quantized energy levels and states. When electrons are bumped from one energy level to another, say by a photon, there are rules that describe the behaviors the electron exhibit - for example, spin. Various different states can be achieved through decay processes. At any given instant, there are an infinite number of discrete possibilities for the electrons "next step", but they are not necessarily the same possible paths from the last step or the next step.
The intriguing results suggest that the quantum mechanical wavefunction (iow description of how the electrons and nuclei behave - again , all probabilities)of the molecule that will effectively accept the electron transfer that causes the desired effect guides the electron through the infinite pathways of varying probablities. Essentially, the receiver of the electron is signaling, "Hey, I'm over here and this is the best way to get here." Once the receiver has the energy from the electron, it goes into the chemical reaction pathways that ultimately create carbohydrates.
Insert Douglas Adams reference here.
MM
Clearly no human wants to have their sole energy source be something that requires them to be stationary most of the time. On the other hand, I would totally go for the green skin if it meant that, sans other food, I could survive longer at 'low speed', or if I could add a boost of energy just by spending some time in the sun. You can certainly bet those croquet games would start to go on longer. Nevermind the fact that our society is becoming more and more lethargic and stationary; after all, how better to get your office workers to stay at their desks than if they need to because that's where the sunlight is let into the building, thus feeding them and not requiring them to leave for lunch?
[Ego]out
So where are you living now? Subspace? The human body is a machine!
Like, say, "Color" (or more accurately, radiative/absorbtive wavelength) in general, a completely quantum phenomenon.
TFA does a poor job of mentioning this, but the fact that plants use quantum effects doesn't exactly count as a "new" discovery. Only the level of detail of our understanding of the transfer lacks completeness.
To put the "newness" of this discovery another way (FTA):Or in other words, "water flows downhill by trying every direction at once and the most downhill-like one wins". We just need to figure out how to make water that tries every direction at once.
If self awareness is enabled through some sort of quantum effect, imagine the philosophical implications.
Yes, human consciousness might well involve some quantum phenomena... But that has no philosophical implications - It just makes us better computers than we thought.
I was thinking about this just the other night, strange coincidence. There are probably a lot of functions like photosynthesis that rely on quantum effects. One of them might be the idea of consciousness. Consciousness may not be so easily explained without taking into account quantum effects. If self awareness is enabled through some sort of quantum effect, imagine the philosophical implications.
The Answer is No. although the braind and it's compnents are all physical objects in this universe, that are there fore also subject to some quantum effects, thought and consciousness can be easily explained with standard physics/chemeistry. No further explanation is needed at this point. Most people who think like you just enjoy romantasism and mysticism.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I was going to reply to your post but decided not to as you would have expected that but that's when I got clever and decided to post anyway, ha! Didn't expect that did you? huh? you..? oh, right... STAY OUT OF MY THOUGHTS!
No trees were harmed in the posting of this message. However, a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
Ah, but what about the accuracy? We can keep making corrections to the position of our hand right up to impact. We've got good feedback systems, but the 'algorithm' itself need not be very precise at all. Perhaps, in your head, sin(x)=x all the time.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Contrary to popular belief, consciousness is not all that mysterious. We can with our knowledge today say with pretty good certainty that it's a post processing effect. After other mechanisms in the brain have done their processing and made a decision, consciousness kicks in in order to map the responses of the various parts of the brain into a coherent symbolic higher-level structure. Basically consciousness tries to explain on what grounds a decision is made in order to facilitate deductive reasoning.
... gestalt that's actually aware. By all means we should be robots, philosophical zombies that act in an efficient way like we do now but that are not actually aware.
Not all that mysterious?? Now, I'm far from a neuroscientist but consciousness is the one thing that has me completely baffled. While it's definetly logical that our minds evolved into an efficient decision making process, it makes no sense that this process somehow opens the way to a
Seriously, everything else in the universe I'll believe there to be an explanation for but consciousness is the one thing I can't comprehend.
"Consciousness may not be so easily explained without taking into account quantum effects."
t um+mind&btnG=Google+Search
On the one hand you are right, on the other you are wrong.
There have been many books that proposed the idea you are dwelling on. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Penrose+quan
One of them "The Emperor's New Mind", by Roger Penrose, looks into this closely and comes to the same conclusion. However I would be quite surprised if conciousness "actually" boils down to a single physical quantum interaction. The body is simply a machine. A quite complex machine for sure, but still a machine, much like a computer. It is made up of systems that interact to produce the full organism. Now, we can throw away much of the machine without getting rid of what does the sensing, thinking, and output because almost everything else is used for upkeep. So that leaves us with the nervous system(s) (I/O), and the brain. The brain is the thing that has three general functions. The brain takes in formation and stores it. The brain uses the new information to "reflect" on the differences between the new and the old. And the brain determines whether an output should occur after the "reflection" takes place. It is now thought that much of the "reflection" is done during sleep. We can say that sleep "reduces" the total load of information by compression and association.
The really big issue in brain research is "awareness", or what gives us our ability to know we exist in the world independent of our memories of who we are, or what we are here for. Humans seem to have the highest level of self-awareness while animals and lower life forms seem to have a more reactionary, or machine like response to stimulus. Awareness may be as simple as an active feedback loop with memory such that the sensory input is "nulled" (like in a negative feedback operational amplifier configuration) with memory. That nulling certainly would give us a single "quantum" of information vs. time that can be reacted to, but this is a macro quantum, not the real physical quantum that occurs at the level of photons. In this sense the conciousness that defines "me" is simply a single "nulling" waveform that changes over time. And that wave function must definitely be different for each of us because no two people can ever occupy the same space at the same time to have the same input stream. This is the "answer" for the question of what whould happen if you could replicate someone at an instant in time? (the Star Trek transporter hypothosis). Would the two people actually be different. The answer being, yes they would, since their respective wave functions must neccessarily diverge at the instant of replication, they would now both be experiencing the universe from two distinctly different locations.
Undoing bad mod.
Old news, George Lucas figured this out 8 years ago.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I'm sorry, please clarify: did you actually say anything in that post?
um.. did any of you have time to get ass in high school? college??
let the man say his piece. i'm sure people thought magnetism was magic at some point. it then became a theory and one day someone was able to prove it. his statement is an idea.. and correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't that where it all starts?
Maybe. It destroyed after the first reader looked at the post.
The idea that consciousness might rely on quantum effects was (AFAIK) actually first proposed by one of the most brilliant minds of the last few hundred years, Robert Penrose, in his book "The Emperor's New Mind."
Ironically, he was roundly criticised at the time for even suggesting that quantum effects could be involved in macro-scale phenomena. The fact that this book was also a rather devastating analysis of why Artificial Intelligence is in a goal that can never be reached in any practical sense, has also been mostly ignored even though little evidence that contradicts this base assumption has ever been brought forward.
His overall theory of the origin of consciousness has some problems, but is full of interesting concepts that perhaps deserve a second look in light of developments like this.
Where did you get the idea that there are "no philosophical implications"? Did you pull this out your ass. Let me guess, you had to read Plato your first year of college and that makes you an expert in philosophy. The mind-body problem is a huge question in philosophy. Understanding where how consciousness relates to the brain will give us new incite into this philosophical problem. Denying this is simple ignorance of philosophy and what philosophers do.
I believe he said "I'm high."
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Sad but true. I even have a philosophy degree, and people talking about consciousness make me want to slap them. Meat needs stimulus/response; we react when stuff happens around us. Meat also needs fuel and replication, which requires a certain amount of introspection and planning...This is internal equivalent of stimulus/response. Our brains are chock full of stim/response, and the sum of them works out to be what we call "consciousness".
Nothing mystical about it. While I do believe that stuff on a quantum level affects us in many ways, putting consciousness in the realm of a pure quantum event serves no purpose but to try and salvage ideas like the immortal soul...The stuff going on in our heads isn't as sexy as most people think.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Instead of going into the flaws of such thinking, I'll point you to a great article by Neil deGrasse Tyson: The perimeter of ignorance. You'll see that you are not the first to invoke the "I don't understand it, so it must be special." plea.
Consciousness is one of the popular unnecessarily mystified topics. In reality, put bluntly, I can beat your consciousness with simple anesthesia. It's an emergent property of a set of biochemical reactions. It's one of many functions in the brain. Awareness is a complex feed-back loop. Advanced? Sure. Magic? No.
The well known side effects are:
Oh, now you've done it - you've gone and made someone's meat angry.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Infact I tried to make a joke about Organic Light Absorbing diodes yesterday in the LED thread and mangled it and got modded down as troll.
:-) But where else can we go ...
Gotta love Slashdot.
A similar site that was more technical and didn't down-mod on-topic technical posts even if they were critical or negative would be pretty nice, and more useful. But I don't know of one.
Quantum tanning sun beds being the new craze in tanning...
You misunderstand me. I don't fully understand the workings of, say, gravity either. But I can comprehend that there is an explanation for it, though one too complex for me to understand.
Consciousness on the other hand I can't even comprehend being explained. I don't see how it is possible that any amount of biochemical reactions produce something that is aware.
Of course the fact that I can't wrap my mind around it being explainable might very well be a limitation of me.
Oh, and I don't believe in magic or anything supernatural.
The only thing my quantum spell checker is doing is trying to kill my cat. =/
I may have seen a .sig about that somewhere.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
I know other people have been critical of the idea here that consciousness and quantum effects could be tied together, but I do think it is interesting to consider. When I read that comment, I immediately thought of artificial neural networks, and noise being introduced to produce learning within them.
I realize that you can create signal noise without having to explicitly deal with the quantum level and that there are neural networks that can work without introducing noise.
We would have to somehow determine that the processes inside the human brain work at or depend upon the lower, quantum level in a more direct and novel way than any other biological process that we know of.
lands space ship in anarctica and eats people.
Sound like the plot of a movie.
I don't care if I get modded a troll.
...Thus you posted as an AC?
Where did you get the idea that there are "no philosophical implications"?
Okay, let me rephrase that... "No philosophical implications without invoking some flakey new-agey pseudoscientific BS". I actually had (something like) that as as my original phrasing, but decided to give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't mean anything so fluffy. My apologies for overestimating your intended meaning.
The mind-body problem is a huge question in philosophy.
True, but not for reasons related to the mechanism by which our brains work. Hoffstadter made IMO the best illustration of this issue by pointing out that whether our minds work as an electrochemical neural net, a pheromone driven ant colony, or an arena of shiny yellow magnetic marbles, we'd observe the same high-level phenomena. And that forms the area of interest to philosophy, the high-level phenomena, not the gears or neurons or ants or photons.
Even from the epistemological POV, knowing whether we use quantum effects or not only rephrases the question, rather than providing any sort of functional answer. How do we know something at a conscious level - Because we translate quantum vacuum fluctuations into thoughts? Sorry, but greenness dissolves.
Did you pull this out your ass. Let me guess, you had to read Plato your first year of college and that makes you an expert in philosophy.
Wow, great ad hominem. I guess that settles the issue, eh Aristotle? And you know me so well! Amazing. Do I have a stalker in you?
And puh-lease! By college I had already moved on to Husserl and Nietzsche with a bit of Jung thrown in for good measure.
Understanding where how consciousness relates to the brain will give us new incite into this philosophical problem.
No, it most certainly won't. Invoking spooky quantum mojo as an answer has all the credibility of saying "god did it" - And as I mentioned, I already covered Nietzsche.
Even if you had to duplicate quantum information to copy a human mind, it wouldn't prevent upload. We already do quantum teleportation (moving the quantum state of one system to another remote system).
It would prevent backups or duplicates, though.
sounds like fun.. god i would love to be able to just pipe my thoughts into a consol.. it would be so much better than damn keyboards.. faster and my hands wouldn't hurt
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Ignore the replys denouncing your post as blather - to the point, yes: There is evidence that consciousness and quantum mechanics are related.
I read an article while vacationing at my Dad's place - he used to teach psychology. It seems that a physicist and an anetheseologist were having lunch and the physicist mentioned some strange thing he had observed in his work. This struck the anetheseologist as meaningful in relation to his own work - shutting off the brain (consciousness) without killing it.
Some theorizing and tests later, it was found that the model of the brain being a computer was flawed. Each neuron is like a computer, operating on the quantum level, so the brain is more like a network or beowolf cluster of computers than it is like a single computer.
Neat stuff. Wish I could get a copy of the mag for reference.
I think you should get a voice recondition system, it would be as fast as you could think.
Don't believe me?.. then recite 5 paragraphs of text in your head in 5 seconds.
Not easy is it?.. No, your brain is just as fast when you speak vocally, you can't think faster than that, otherwise people would be speaking 600 times faster without any hassle.
It's only a "mystery" because we just don't understand quantum interactions well enough yet to describe them in detail.
I always find it interesting (not directed at you) that people assume it's some crazy wacko replacement for religion, etc... when someone suggests that our minds might actually be linked to something outside ourselves. Is this really so hard to believe? That in our becoming conscious perhaps something happens, behind the scenes, say some sort of entanglement across some tightly coiled dimensions we don't even know exist yet? Surely it sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, but then again so do most quantum effects when we related to them as we perceive the universe in our little sheltered corner with only four dimensions.
Hell, if you think about the complexities needed to even enable us to have this discussion it's all somewhat insane. Logically we shouldn't even exist, except we do and here we are trying to say that everything is black and white, cut and dry. We can observe it. We can record it. We can explain it. Quite a little arogant animal aren't we to assume that everything is so simple?
--- I do not moderate.
Indeed. This has been a particular fascination of mine. In essence, we're not the ones calling the shots, but are along for the ride. It's remarkable how often we experience or witness others doing things they didn't want to do, yet fail to appreciate what exactly that portends. For anyone else interested, this is a good book to start with.
You're drifting dangerously close to all that "The Secret" woo-woo. Or are you a believer, trying to slip it in under the radar? Either way, I call bullshit before you even start.
"Oh boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?"
Whether the mind is mediated through quantum effects or not is mostly irrelevant. All turing equivalent machines are fundamentally, well, equivalent. It doesn't matter what hardware they're on. Quantum consciousness would make no difference in the kind of algorithms the brain can run, it would only affect the mundane issues of implementation.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's true.
Reality is the original Rorschach.
All chemical processes involve QM at the atomic level. What is interesting is the technique these folks have developed for visualizing the actual process pathways. In the past, these could only be surmised based upon the probabilities derived from the (not always well developed) theories. Now, it appears that actual measurements are being made.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hm. An interesting argument.
While in this particular case, the religious poster is being silly, I'm not sure I agree with your analysis of ridicule.
I suppose that ridicule being, "Well aimed", as you suggest, is the key.
Unfortunately, virtually every group I've ever seen uses ridicule to discredit whatever opposing viewpoint they find threatening. Not all of them are right, but they all believe they are right. In the end, no real progress is made and people stay in their fortified camps.
In the end ridicule is just another form of attack and control. Even though I have an imperfect track record, I have always, always found it better to ask questions and engage people in discussion and to offer genuine respect, (as opposed to pretended respect), when trying to find the truth of a given matter. People are far lessing willing to budge if you try to hurt them. Ego prevents it. If, however, they feel you hold truth as the ultimate goal and are happy to grant others the dignity of simply being another searcher who is human and capable of mistakes, then there is a greater chance of actually getting somewhere. And who knows? You might even discover that the other side has a better grasp on truth than you. If you don't attack others for being wrong, then you are less likely to attack yourself for being wrong, and are therefore more open to growth.
-FL
He might not have said it, but there is the strong possibility *some* of our neurons use quantum-level behavior, which rather expands the traditional neurotransmitters + electrical signaling model for neural activity. In 1996 biophysicist Luca Turin suggested electron tunnelling as a solution for the mystery of olfactory receptors can interpret similar molecules differently, and very different molecules the same. No one had a useful explanation for this issue until Turin, and he was of course dismissed by most neuroscientists, who are educated and work in macro-, not quantum-, level models.
Last year some other physicists released research in Nature that showed Turin may be right*, and olfactory neurons may indeed use electron tunnelling. Research is ongoing, but given the lack of alternative explanations, this may be an example of humans requiring a quantum mechanism for something very basic - scent.
* Free registration required for physicsweb.org access.
--
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. —Thomas Huxley
"How could we, humble servants as we are, ever hope to design anything as cunning and efficient as that which Our Lord has designed for us."
We're still puttering aroung in vehicles driven by controlled explosions. While most life works using a better system based upon oxidation.
I don't like the characterization that "Photosynthesis is because of quantum mechanics". The covalent bond is also a consequence of quantum mechanics. This study is a clarification of the nature of an energy transfer that is coherent on femtosecond scales, not that "kooky old quantum physics" is the surprise ingredient in photosynthesis. But the above headline will catch more eyeballs.
While it's hard to argue against you that we're all just meat popsicles, your description of consciousness does nothing to address the mystery of the "ghost in the machine". The existence of my consciousness seems hardly necessary if I am simply a stimulus/response machine. Why do I perceive colors? Couldn't my body just react to different wavelengths of light hitting my retina and sending signals to my brain without requiring the color "experience"? I would argue that we have absolutely no understanding of consciousness at this point in time, and coupled with an incomplete understanding of physics, I would not rule out the possibility that consciousness may involve new physics not covered in our standard model.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
I think the observer problem is relatively simple, but then I'm kind of crazy.
I accept certain premises in order to reach my understanding:
- An observation is exactly the same thing as a physical interaction
- On this level, a human observer is no different than a particle detector
An "observer" is a physical system that exists in parallel with myriad outside, unobserved physical systems.
It is valid to say: If a physical system X exists, and a physical system Y exists, but those systems have absolutely no measurable interaction, they are two entirely separate universes.
An observation is no more than a "change" in the observational physical system brought about by interaction with the event observed. Or, you could call it the unification of two "event systems." When any interaction occurs, both interacting systems fall into a state of historical consensus. In other words, present interactions create the past that explains them. This could be seen as the same thing as the creation of a new branch.
The only philosophical question I can see implicated by this feature of reality is, do the physical systems "exist" even when they don't interact?
My answer to this is: "Existence" is also the same thing as "interaction." This doesn't preclude other universes having their own internal consistencies. Nor does it imply that other physical systems in our universe don't "exist" because we never observe them. What it speaks to is the nature of "experience" itself.
So my answer to the question of whether an "observer" must be "conscious" or not, I would have to say: Yes and No. For, you see it's an artificial distinction. Our particular experience happens to involve a machine that processes information, and that information processing system is able to reflect on its experience. But all of that stuff, from the particle interaction to the self-reflection of the observer... it's all the same phenomena: interaction of systems.
Just to avoid confusion, we have to be very careful how we define the term "consciousness." Most people here on SlashDot use the word "consciousness" to mean a thinking thing. I am very careful not to draw the line there, but to be open to all conscious experience. When you really sit and look at your experience, and let it go forward on its own, and when we look at the features of our immediate experience, there are some striking features that cannot be explained simply as computational results.
This is why the question of "quantum phenomena" enters into the picture. The immediate experience of sight is the most striking example I can think of. When we experience visual phenomena, we experience the excitation state of millions of brain-cells simultaneously. This visual experience is taken by our awareness as a single event, yet there is no "single place where it all comes together" and you may note that it arrives and is gone faster than we can possibly integrate it all into a discursive thought.
I think it is clear from this example that in a sense all physical systems can be considered a "consciousness" in the sense that everything "experiences" the present moment's interactions, every interacting system is affected by those interactions, every system changes in reponse to those interactions, and every system forms a link in the chain of events that subsequently follow from that initial interaction. The only qualitative difference between the interactions a stone has with light, and those our eyeballs have with light is the informational coherence that emerges in its attached physical system.
I hope I don't come across as seeming to put anthropomorphic terms towards impersonal phenomena. My point is merely to illustrate a more holistic view of phenomena, one that makes fewer distinctions between ourselves and mud. It's also meant to be completely non-mystical, in a sense. I don't believe we "conscious" systems are "special" in terms of the quality of our constituent parts than any other physical phenomena. W
-- thinkyhead software and media
Hooray for Apathy! ...
:/
Ah, fuck it.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
is a quantum computers..?
-pyrrho
Any theory that sufficiently explains consciousness through purely physical processes does not require consciousness itself - just the proper empirical outputs - and therefore explains nothing about consciousness. You've just explained a more complicated machine, and depending on your temperament, either placed a ghost back inside it, or denied the existence of consciousness altogether.
That being said, yes, it would actually be shocking if some of the more mysterious aspects of the brain, such as memory, were not in fact based deeply in quantum principles.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Postulate fancy physics, and you're heading toward spiritualism. Now I don't dispute for an instant that we've probably got a lot of quantum crap going on in our bodies; that many reactions, with electrons transferring everywhere, it's a given.
But there is no magic thinking "you" hanging around out there in the quantum flux. Sub atomic particles rattling around aren't carrying with them the experience of the color blue (almost sounds like you're arguing phenomenal qualia there...Classic dualist argument), so while there may, in fact, be some part of your cognitive cycle that flirts with the quantum side of physics, it's really unlikely that that is the seat of consciousness.
There are examples everywhere of complex structures arising out of simple parts. There is no reason, aside from wishful thinking, to imagine that we are any different.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Favorite quote about consciousness:
"When asked the question, 'what is consciousness?' we become conscious of consciousness. And most of us take this consciousness of consciousness to be what consciousness is. This is not true."
--Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
The book's basically one long, roundabout, assault on god, but it's well written.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
That argument has been around for a while: Ultimately neurons connect on a quantum level and that affects thinking (and consciousness).
If it was true, a cactus would burn to release prodigious amounts of energy, and the same goes for burning other plants for fuel. Cacti receive more sunlight than most other plants per capita since they're isolated and have a long growing season. A cactus doesn't heat up but doesn't really take the energy either. Where does it all go? If you sit beside a cactus, you'll fry. How much energy is reflected versus absorbed?
I'm not a big fan of fancy physics to explain consciousness. It's like someone saying, "Consciousness seems mystical. Quantum mechanics seems mystical. So it looks like QM effects bring about consciousness." Ugh.
I am pretty partial to the qualia argument of the dualists, though. Consciousness trying to figure out the nature of consciousness seems a bit too self-referential to come up with a satisfying, materialist explanation without a lot of hand-waving. Probably the best understanding of consciousness is, well, simply the state of being conscious.
One of my favorite quotes goes, "If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it."
Happy people make bad consumers.
I'm not postulating anything, nor am I engaging in wishful thinking. I simply won't go so far as to assert that there is no "magic" me in my head that is not covered by current physics. Complexity theory may get involved in there somewhere, but I won't throw away the possibility that consciousness could be some kind of intrinsic property of the universe, as fundamental as anything else in our present theories. We simply have no idea. Until someone comes up with a more or less complete model of consciousness, I will not pass judgement. Maybe I've misunderstood, but I took your original post as an indication that you had already closed your mind to the possibility of new phyisics being discovered with relation to consciousness.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
In terms of carbon exchange, the plants have it easier because they don't have to chew: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html.
s -selling-solar.html
--
Sprout silicon leaves! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Photochemistry uses what is called quantum efficiency (QE). The number of reactions (electron transfer) of interest divided by the total number of photons absorbed X 100.
The truly amazing feature of nature's photochemical reactions is their QE - exceedingly high (typically around 100%) compared to anything humans typically accomplish photochemically (typically single digits, if that).
It really is difficult to achieve a perspective on the mechanism that conveys how incredible photosynthesis is. Plant photochemistry occurs in chloroplasts -- organelles or "organs" in individual cells. A cell typically has a few chloroplasts. A key component within a chloroplast is a molecule from the family called porphyrins that is holding a single atom of magnesium in a "pocket". The 100% efficiency is from the fact that the energy from every photon that is absorbed by the chromophores (pigments, i.e. chlorophyll, carotenoids, etc.) goes into the photosynthesis pathway that creates the plant portion of our world. The key here is that it is really a relatively few molecules that create essentially all of the biomass in the world.
In comparison, lets say humans could devise a chemical system to absorb photons and direct the energy into a relatively simple reaction pathway, say for example, cleaving a bond between a hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom. And say we could make our system around 10-15% efficient. If we could achieve these meager results, we would worry about energy no more, since converting water into hydrogen and oxygen at even 10% efficiency using sunlight could be converted into enough electrical energy to supply the world's demand.
Incidentally (well, probably not incidentally, but I don't know the progression), take the molecule in chlorophyll as a basic skeleteon, make a few periphery changes, then replace the magnesium atom with an iron atom, and you have hemoglobin.
Man I love science.
Molecular Mechanic
Googling on (( Penrose-Hameroff Microtubules coherence )) verifies that their prediction of longer-than-expected quantum coherence ( at body temperatures ) being majorly involved in consciousness has been WIDELY scoffed at. So the kickoff quote from that article "...remarkably long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence plays an important part..." relit my New-Age-Lamp bigtime. Maybe I will actually have to buy one of those "What The Bleep" DVD's now...
But that's just it - philosophers should stay out of the realm of cognitive psychology and neurology. Your consciousness is a LOT more than a mechanical response to stimuli. In fact, the different parts of your neural system responsible for such responses are well known and mapped. Higher functions however are incredibly more complex, and are not perfectly understood at all. There may not be anything mystical about cognition, but our knowledge of it puts us somewhere in the dark ages compared to other areas in biology.
Well, professor, when can we see your definitive book that puts the hard problems of consciousness, physicalism and intentionality to rest?
IAALS.
Instead of Heisenberg, you should really say Godel... he's the one who actually proved that what Hilbert wanted to know was in fact impossible to know...
The problem with explaining consciousness in terms of mathematics and postulates is that, while they will describe it, you still don't truly understand where the ghost in the machine is. Kind of like inertia.
Depends on what kind of thinking you are talking about. The phonocological loop is probably about as fast as you can possibly speak, but the visospacial sketchpad is about as fast as you can see. And then there is that weird kind of thinking when you are making seemingly unrelated connections. How fast can that happen? Lots of weird stuff.
Shields at 100%, Captain!
You are 100% right, but I also wanted to show the stark contrast between the mathematical and physical paradigms today. Despite Godel's efforts, mathematics goes on in the same way..the incompleteness of any theorem has become accepted. It is physical reality that is truly shocking because it's not just a contradiction to self-referential statements that bothers us, but in fact the very nature of fundamental physics. None of the founding fathers of QM truly accepted this, or it's ramifications.
I agree with a lot of what you say, although I'm no quantum physics expert, just an interested amateur. The idea that you can do away with the special status of the observer seems to be one of the features of the decoherence approach to quantum theory. This does away with the collapse of the wave-function, and thus the need for an observer to collapse it, by instead describing interacting systems. When they interact, they decohere, giving the appearance of wave-function collapse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence
I can't go from there to "every interacting system is conscious" though. My problem with it is that it doesn't really explain anything for me. For example, there are a lot of things going on in your body and brain that you are never conscious of, but systems interact to manage them. Do they have a separate consciousness? What defines the boundaries of systems and consciousness?
Experiments have shown that the brain decision potential peaks about half a second before people become conscious of having made the decision - why would there be this delay if consciousness arose naturally out of the system interactions? And if all systems produce it by the mere fact of their interaction, why does it exist at all? At the very least, the theory doesn't give any insight into what consciousness is and why it exists.
Having said all that, I don't have a better explanation than yours. I swing between quite a mechanistic information-processing viewpoint stance (although why should some information processing be conscious and some not?) but then I get hung up on qualia, experience, and why is the feeling even necessary - why are we and all other animals not simply clever "zombies"? Daniel Dennet argues that this is exactly what we are, that consciousness is a sort of illusion. Searle asks "who is having the illusion, and why is it necessary?". I really don't know the answers to these, but I sure love to think about them.
Sheesh, everyone's always so ready to blow off new experiments as worthless or a waste of time. Just because it's reasonable to assume that a photochemical process relies on quantum mechanics doesn't mean it's a piece of cake to show it, or that we can assume we understand it. I mean, has anyone else here shown that an enzyme uses quantum mechanical effects to catalyze a reaction? It seems unlikely. And seriously, who funds proposals that DON'T seem to be 'obvious' from the get-go? No one!
And why does a new discovery have to have an immediate practical application? I mean, history has shown that we can't predict how new technology will come about. This stuff might be useful for some crazy new idea we haven't even thought of yet.
I say props to these guys for doing something super hard and figuring out a way to test a complicated hypothesis, and props to the reporter who braved through that dense Nature paper to write an article comprehensible enough for us to argue about.
I think free will relies on quantum effects. I think that "consciousness" is a bit of quantum effects, but mostly is in your brain, and you cannot understand anything without your brain! In my opinion, quantum mechanics lets contradictory theories exist and possible both correct (such as: evolution/intelligent design).
I guess if you were to press me on the issue, then I'd still stick to the idea that rocks are "conscious." It's an illusion, yes, but not therefore entirely untrue. The special thing about ourselves is that we have this information-processing brain that says "this is me" and "that is not me," and this separation of self from not-self is itself an artifice. The advantage that non-thinking entities have is that there is no separation. And I think that this is the central insight of meditation. When you stop reinforcing the self-nonself dichotomy your brain gets a great insight! You realize that you are not a separate entity but wholly integral to the expansive present.
... don't know.
This is why I feel that consciousness is itself a more primary element than the atom or electron - or you might say it is a holistic quality of the present moment. It seems that everything is made of this luminous substance of which we are a tiny part, and this substance is the present total existence, from which we can never separate ourselves - as much as we may ignore it while attending to "gross" pattern-awareness. We don't have nerve tendrils that reach into every corner of existence, and so we can't coherently integrate the whole universe into our discursive thoughts. However, we can directly experience the dissolution of self, identification with "the all," and come away from the experience profoundly affected, inspired, awed, and moved in many other ways.
Generally, we're moved to tell others about it... but why tell them when you can show them? And this is where it becomes important to just do your meditation and such, and be an inspiration for others who are interested in what you
-- thinkyhead software and media
The basic idea is as the following, and I am of course not posting it here completely. You should read the book before accepting or refuting this.
... (Cq where q is 0, 1, 2, 3, ...) and the data they act upon is enumerated as n. So we have computations C0(n), C1(n), C2(n), ... (I like to think that any data that can be listed as 0s and 1s can be thought of as a huge sinble number written in binary.)
We have the set of all possible computations that can exist C0, C1, C2, C3,
We then have the function A which acts on the set of computations Cq and their data n. A's job is to determine if C(q, n) will continue indefinately or if it will halt. A need not ever halt, in which case we don't know if C will or not if it acts on data n. But if A(q, n) does halt, then we know that Cq(n) or C(q, n) does not ever halt.
(H) IF A(q, n) stops, then Cq(N) does not stop.
Then take the cases in which q = n
(I) If A(n, n) stops, then Cn(n) does not stop.
Since A is now depending on only one number, n, it must be one of the computations in C which is the set of all computations and would include A. Let us suppose this is Ck so...
(J) A(n, n) = Ck(n)
Now we take the case when n = k and we get from (J)
(K) A(k, k) = Ck(k)
and from (I), with n = k
(L) A(k, k) stops, then Ck(k) does not stop.
Subtituting K in L we get:
(M) If Ck(k) stops, then Ck(k) does not stop.
From this we can see that Ck(k) will not stop because if it did then it could not (paradox). But A(k, k) cannot stop either since it is the same as Ck(k). Thus A is not able to determine if Ck(k) doesn't stop even though the human mind can see that it will not stop.