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Does Quantum Theory Explain Consciousness?
astroengine writes "Quantum theory is often seen as the root cause of unrelated, mysterious phenomena. Take consciousness for example. British physicist Roger Penrose recently argued 'that we will need to invoke 'new physics and exotic biological structures': rewriting quantum theory to make sense of consciousness.' But why do this, especially as there is no apparent causal link between quantum mechanics and the conscious mind? There appears to be a very basic logical fallacy here that even the most prominent physicists seem to be making."
Care to state it?
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made from...
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All consciousness relies on electrons. You cannot have consciousness without electrons. So this would be one place to look.
But basically, if you don't have quantum consciousness you can't have consciousness on higher scales. So on some level these particles have self recognition even if it's through us. This doesn't answer whether or not there is free will, but the math is clear that if there is consciousness on the large scale it will also have to exist on the quantum scale. It's also proven mathematically that if free will exists on the large scale that it also has to exist somewhere somehow on the quantum scale.
For this reason, the fact that the math supports it, it's worth doing research and experimenting on. The problem or fear I have is if we did discover what particle or wave function is responsible for consciousness, or how, we'd have governments around the world using these discoveries to enslave and oppress people. It's the kind of question that I'd personally want to know the answer to, but I also recognize that as soon as we find the answer, it will open pandora's box which governments and corporations intend to completely exploit.
If we found a way to for example give consciousness to inanimate objects, or a way to have complete control over life in some way, or if we discovered that quantum computers could be made conscious, it would change everything probably for the worst because governments would then use this technology to enslave rather than use it in a transhumanist fashion. It would be used to make the perfect cyborg slaves, who have the mix of human consciousness, with the absolute obedience of a programmable robot. In essence this discover could lead to the end of "free will" as we know it, and lead to the beginning of technological slavery.
And unfortunately no political party is truly anti slavery. So we'd be collectively fucked.
Sources
Quantum Entanglement Can be a Measure of Free Will
The same experiments that reveal the nature of entanglement can also be interpreted as a measure of free will, say researchers.
Do subatomic particles have free will?
This means that the particle cannot have a definite spin in every direction before it’s measured, Kochen and Specker concluded. If it did, physicists would be able to occasionally observe it breaking the 1-0-1 rule, which never happens. Instead, it must “decide” which spin to have on the fly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
When he wrote his first book on consciousness, The Emperor's New Mind in 1989, Penrose lacked a detailed proposal for how quantum processing could be implemented in the brain. Subsequently, Hameroff read Penrose's book, and suggested that microtubules could be suitable candidates for quantum processing. The Orch-OR theory arose from the collaboration of Penrose and Hameroff in the early 1990s.
Microtubules are the main component of a supportive structure within neurons known as the cytoskeleton. In addition to providing a supportive structure, the known functions of microtubules include transport of molecules including neurotransmitters bound for synapses and control of the development of the cell.
Microtubules are composed of tubulin protein dimer subunits. The tubulin dimers each have hydrophobic pockets that are 8 nm apart, and which may contain delocalised pi electrons. Tubulins have other smaller non-polar regions that contain pi electron-rich indole rings separated by only about 2 nm, and Hameroff claims that these electrons are close enough to become quantum entangled.[11]
Hameroff further proposed that these electrons could become locked in phase, forming a state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.[12][13] Furthermore, he tho
By "recently" you mean "in the previous century"? He's been arguing this since his book "The Emperor's New Mind" in 1989. Maybe he has some new ideas, but your summary doesn't tell..
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
He wants the brain to be non-computable, non-simulatable. In short, he wants it to be magic. He has no real justification for his position.
Consciousness is weird. Quantum theory is weird. Therefore quantum theory must explain consciousness.
That's essentially the argument here, and it's pretty easily seen as fallacious. There's no actual evidence that consciousness requires quantum mechanics, besides the trivial fact that our brains are chemical computers and chemistry requires quantum mechanics.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Not that interesting of an article, by someone I've not heard of, explaining why Penrose is wrong yet again, as well as others. No real substance. The concept that physics might explain consciousness is much more interesting than this short (in length and in content) article.
It simply debunks the idea but offers no alternative or reason why. It was like reading a movie review from a small town movie reviewer....who didn't really see the movie but a friend told them about it.
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How about filling us in?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This is the most vague, hand-wavy summary I have ever read (didn't read the article...maybe just as vague?). I am a physicist, but even for the non-physicist, this is vague.
But it cannot both exist and not exist at the same time.
This means either you believe you exist, and if that is the case then you have to solve the mystery of your own existence. Or you don't believe you exist, and consciousness and free will are fake illusions. This is the stance of eliminativists and apparently Greenspan.
Just because there are two things that we don't understand, doesn't mean those two things are related. That seems to be a common error that mankind makes, and it was more pronounced when we didn't understand much at all; we assumed birth, death, the sun, the weather, all had the same (mystical) causes.
Sure, there may be a relation between quantum physics and consciousness; but I don't see any evidence of it, and I think that consciousness will be a far harder problem to solve, since we aren't close to resolving some basic philosophical questions about its nature, or even settling on definitions of concepts like 'free will'.
Logic only gets you so far.
People want to be an uncaused cause. That's what the concept of free will boils down to. The will can cause things, but itself is not caused by anything. If it were caused, it wouldn't be free. Of course, this would make any learning impossible. Either the will is a part of the chain of cause and effect, and therefore not free, or the soul (or whatever you believe to be the seat of consciousness) can never learn.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Has had a HYPOTHESIS that consciousness is tied to microtubules in neurons. His idea requires quantum physics to properly handle the mechanism he proposes (it has been a while but I believe it involves wave propagation via microtubules. I also seem to remember reading something not too long ago that SEEMED to provide some indication that microtubules were possibly involved in neural signalling and information transmission in some way...).
Interesting idea BUT it is premature in that it is still not really clear what consciousness is, let alone how it emerges from the brain (of humans AND non-humans...it isn't just a Homo sapiens thing). It may not really require any quantum magic at all, likely being merely an emergent property of complex neural connections and interactions. Hell, there's some indications that consciousness is less than meets the eye: based on fMRI experiments, it appears that "conscious" decisions are often decided PRE-consciously, that is, that one seems to make the decision to act or do this or that BEFORE you are actually consciously aware of the decision. Kinda kicks the idea of free will and conscious action in the nuts eh?
This place is full of Quantum; it's everywhere you look
It's in the halls of Physicists, and pages of a book.
"There has to be a fallacy!" the comment summarised,
And if we care to challenge that, we aren't very wise?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The article basically says "We shouldn't jump to conclusions just because consciousness and quantum theory are both weird" , with an extra page full of waffle to pad it out. I didn't learn anything substantial from this article and I doubt anybody else would have either. The article doesn't propose anything useful of its own, nor does it successfully debunk any other proposal.
It doesn't even understand what "jump to conclusions" means. Penrose is cited as doing that for the WMAP result, but in fact what he did was propose a theory (that turned out to be wrong). That's what science is about. People propose theories or hypotheses, and then people try to prove or disprove them, perhaps discovering new truths along the way. There's no 'shame' to be had in theorizing something and turning out to be wrong, nor does that make the scientist 'bad' if he does propose a wrong theory at some time.
And the answer is 42.
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I think its obvious here that the brain is more complex than our understanding. What I think is startling are the assumptions scientists and other folk have made already. For Example :- Its a computational or logic processing device.
Maybe its more of a network card, linking our actual conscientiousness to our bodies. Its a fundamental difference but it would explain telepathy, reincarnation and a host of other phenomena. Personally I think it provides a better model for understanding our minds which I think are limitless and not limited by the size of our brains.
http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/books-free-online/18-the-shift-of-the-ages/69-the-shift-of-the-ages-chapter-13-the-physics-of-the-spiral-in-the-consciousness-units
Penrose is the only one brave enough to ask the question; "Is consciousness real?" and try to answer it using physics and science.
But it's the same question that would be asked by a solipsist, do other minds exist? Do I exist? Why not try to answer that?
Well there are political reasons why we shouldn't. If we find out one way or another governments will seek to use it to enslave and torture. If we find out consciousness is a matter of physics and can be controlled, it opens up all new ways to threaten people, to torture people, to enslave people. But it also allows for the creation of robot-slaves who would be superior to humans in every way imaginable.
There are political problems, and social problems, and relgious problems involving these questions that overshadow the science. The science is about the only part that doesn't have major problems. Science eventually should be able to show one way or another, it's just a matter of what happens after we prove one way or another?
No free will exists? So who is the master of the universe?
Well, the Copenhagen interpretation leads to problematic issues regarding "measurement", leading to the "observer" being an irreducible part of any QM experiment. There's a solution that exists for all the wonky metaphysics of QM that people like Penrose like to harp on. Pretty much everything is symmetric in particle physics except "causation". "Causation" has been made explicitly asymmetric more due to our own anthropogenic biases than any theoretical need. Eliminating this asymmetry pretty much solves all the nonsensical metaphysics that QM has spawned over the past century.
Honestly quantum consciousness is just Cartesian Dualism fancied up. Replace quantum with soul and you've pretty much got the same thing.
You just explained what quantum physics is. Or translated, if you don't know something, we name it "quantum physics", and voila, Nobel prize. We don;t know why the quantum pair relation is not limited to the distance between them? Here we go another quantum law.
Professional Neuroscientist here... In fact, I'm recording from a sensory neuron that is partially responsible for the conciousness of an awake behaving mouse right now while browsing slashdot.
There is no reason to think that quantum physics has anything to do with the nature of conciousness. It is not useful to explain free will, or the illusion of free will, of the qualia of objects, or the steadyness of perception on a background of constantly varying spike rates in the brain.
Perhaps the best, short, free, relatively recent summary of the field was written by Christof Koch and Francis Crick, A Framework for Conciousness, and is available here : http://papers.klab.caltech.edu/29/1/438.pdf
I also have a little essay on the nature of free will on my blog here, if interested. http://brainwindows.wordpress.com/philosophy/philosophy-the-science-of-free-will/
It is about how the entropy from the second law of thermodinamics is defined in the same way as the entropy of information, all linked by information proprieties that are probabilistic and the quantum particles probabilistic nature url=http://critical-path.itgo.com/Articlesanscover.html.
See his book Emperor's New Mind. Most AI people viewed this skeptically back then, too.
http://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computers/dp/0192861980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306449679&sr=8-1
Materialist views of mind have failed thus far. An appeal to Quantum ideas is where you have to go if you are going to remain a materialist and cling to the hope that you will eventually be able to explain mind. Materialism relies on the idea of cause and effect. The mind defies that assumption. What is the cause of a thought, what is the cause of mind. At this point we cannot even effectively define what consciousness is, much less discuss it in terms of cause and effect.
Ideas like free will, intuition, choice are absurdities to committed materialists. Mind, consciousness, self awareness is the great tabu subject of materialism. Many go so far as to deny the existence of these phenomenon. After all, there is nothing you can do to prove to me that you are conscious.
While I do agree with you it all comes down to free will, I don't think you have to believe in a soul to believe in free will.
Free will could be quantum. If it is then it could very well be caused by a particle just as the Higgs particle could cause matter. It would be a matter of finding the quantum mechanism that causes free will, or if it's not a particle it could be anything else on the quantum level that we have not been able to fully understand such as entanglement or wave function collapse.
That being said, we have to consider the political implications of answering this question. If we find out there is free will, this has a specific political implication on the side of advancing liberty. If we find out there is no free will, then how do you make the case against slavery if you're just a robot?
What I'm saying is governments and in some cases corporations seek to create the perfect robot, perfect machine, perfect android, and this question of free will is at the center of that. Do we want to answer the question? If we do it could very well create an arms race to gain control of the free will particle or of the human species on a level far more complete and thorough than currently imagined. Control of your ability to think, control of what you think about, control of your dreams, and of your brain in a way that a programmer controls the brain of a computer or a robot is what this could lead to.
From a blog post at Cosmic Variance: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/09/29/seriously-the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-really-are-completely-understood/
I've copy/pasted the relevant portion here:
Obviously there are a lot of things about the workings of the human mind that we don't understand. So how can we be so sure that new physics isn't involved? Of course we can't be sure, but that's not the point. We can't be sure that the motion of the planets isn't governed by hard-working angels keeping them on their orbits, in the metaphysical-certitude sense of being "sure." That's not a criterion that is useful in science. Rather, in the face of admittedly incomplete understanding, we evaluate the relative merits of competing hypotheses. In this case, one hypothesis says that the operation of the brain is affected in a rather ill-defined way by influences that are not described by the known laws of physics, and that these effects will ultimately help us make sense of human consciousness; the other says that brains are complicated, so it's no surprise that we don't understand everything, but that an ultimate explanation will fit comfortably within the framework of known fundamental physics. This is not really a close call; by conventional scientific measures, the idea that known physics will be able to account for the brain is enormously far in the lead. To persuade anyone otherwise, you would have to point to something the brain does that is in apparent conflict with the Standard Model or general relativity. (Bending spoons across large distances would qualify.) Until then, the fact that something is complicated isn't evidence that the particular collection of atoms we call the brain obeys different rules than other collections of atoms.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
yes, it most definitely "explains" it. though really it just quantifies consciousness in linear left-brain terminology / bridges the path to spirituality / mysticism /metaphysics.
Short answer... No...
Consciousness barely explains quantum theory... so how could it be the other way?
However, I am sure quantum "stuff" and freewill consciousness are related deeply...
But beyond any explanation better than faith....
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Simply put no it does not explain consciousness. Quantum Field Theory(QFT) may explain all physical processes which go on in the universe but until we are able to make infinite observations (read never) it will not be predictive for emergent phenomenon (physical 'laws' which appear for large ensembles of particles). QFT is probabilistic when the question posed is looking for a deterministic answer, QFT can thus not provide such an answer.
You get this from homeopathy to religion. Take something really complicated, that's poorly understood by all but a relatively few number of people, that's really hard to test, point at it it, and use it as a difficult to falsify method of justifying your sugar pills/ religion.
Multiply that with consciousness -- which as a former neuroscientist, I can say that I certainly don't understand enough to even point to what it actually is (too many gene products interacting at so many levels!) -- and I doubt any of my former peers could either -- means that it's just handwaving bullshit that ticks some popsci boxes for people to buy his book. Imho.
We are biological computers experiencing itself subjectively.
Contemplate this thought experiment: You have a supercomputer cluster, in which you create a simulated environment where life can evolve (maybe you intervene to speed things up but nevertheless it's allowed to evolve and change to some extent).
Given enough computational power there is no reason why some kind of entity couldn't emerge (or be created) within this environment that was capable of pondering it's own existence and studying it's own environment scientifically.
You reveal yourself as a creator to this being and have a conversation with it, explain it isn't real.
The being reveals it has created it's own simulations within the simulation, in order to study it's environment.
It may respond "You on the outside have no more evidence than you do that your existence is real, and that you are not in a simulation yourself. Which from my demostration is equally likely"
Crap.
"You created me in your image, so you could see yourself"
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
A: No.
Signed, God.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
New rule for Science Journalism: If your article can be summarized as "No.", don't write it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVC0FcSRxL8 robert anton wilson explains quantum consciousness very well
Merely due to lack of enough data. Just because materialistic explanations don't work YET doesn't mean they wont, or cannot. Don't get all mystical/magical on us. We are not magical/mystical, just not yet explained in full.
It will come though. We are biological machines like all other biological machines. No magic, no Harry Potter crap, no soul nonsense, no spirit nonsense, no disembodied consciousness that exists OUTSIDE of or IN SPITE OF the body. Your mind is inseperable from the biological organ called the brain. You ARE your brain, not some occupant of it.
But Underminable without interference..
Last I heard about this, was over ten years ago. Roger Penrose was involved.
Ah. Found a reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
He wrote about this in '89. More than 20 years ago.
I read Penrose' book a long time ago. He seemed desparate to deny that consciousness could be built out of logic of any form.
For me the best part was his argument that if you could build a machine that exhibited human-like consciousness, it would necessarily deny that it was built that way. My reaction was "yes, just like you".
Isn't the goal of quantum theory to explain electric and chemical phenomena on a molecular/sub molecular scale? Since the behavior or electrons on this scale is part of the workings of the brain (as we currently understand it), and consciousness seems to occur in the brain, isn't it reasonable to hypothesize that quantum mechanics might someday explain consciousness? I'm not saying it will, and we're certinally no where near that point, but you have to admit it's not completely off the wall either.
No, quantum theory does not explain consciousness. That was an easy one. Next!
But I have to admit that this would give interesting explanations to, e.g., empathy.
Quantum theory to me is a hint we may be living in a simulation. Therefore consciousness is subjective phenomena.
If you were in a simulation the best test would be looking for the inevitable discrepency in the physics of the environment which would emerge as you approached the limits of the computational substrate. On a small scale things would start to look fuzzy and the rules of the system would stop making useful predictions.
Crap that sounds familiar.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
First, define consciousness or, better yet, prove it matters. Explain fMRI studies that indicate that one actually makes decisions PRE-consciously yet still makes consciousness relevant. That's right, fMRI studies indicate that you make a decision to take an action BEFORE you are actually consciously aware of it. Turns the entire idea of consciousness on its head so that it is merely becoming conscious of what your brain/mind has already decided microseconds BEFORE you are conscious of making the decision.
Once we get past the above, THEN we can get into explaining what it is and how it comes about. It is way premature to assign quantum anything as an explanation before we really know what we are explaining or even if it needs explaining.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Considering quantum theory is a twisted figment of somebody's imagination, I dare say that conciousness causes quantum mechanics.
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we find a way to survive long enough for us (science to come to that understanding). I think we would also find that though we understand how it is that we are able to know; and that we know that we know; but also know, we can never know how to create that link that spark that give something life, as opposed to making something be; exist. We could understand this engine; we could never know how to start it.
Maybe...but we can't say with any certainty.
Consider the reverse: only consciousness itself could propose quantum theory, let alone explain it. Consciousness is prior. Isn't that obvious? Any "explanation" of consciousness by quantum theory would necessarily be contained in consciousness, which would make the "explanation" less than, or incomplete. Unless physicists are proposing an epistemology based on a theory of unconsciousness, which would necessarily be, well, stupid.
I read that the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics requires the presence of a "conscious" observer in order for "vector state collapse" to occur. Apart from the consciousness of the observer, nothing ever leaves an indeterminate state.
I don't pretend to understand these terms.
Is it true that this interpretation (which I am told is the most accepted), requires the presence of consciousness? And can anyone explain the nature of the evidence that compells us to accept this conclusion?
We -appear- to have the property of having Free Will (e.g. if I ask you to raise one of your hands, there will be the rather compelling sense of you choosing which one). Apart from the opportunities for indeterminacy allowed by quantum behavior, this would be an illusory perception.
The implications of not having Free Will would be so psychologically and morally broad, I think it fair to say that no one can -consistently- maintain they lack Free Will and remain a functional consciousness on a decision-by-decision and day-to-day basis.
Given the empirical force of the premise of Free Will, and the compelling psychological necessity for it, it seems unsurprising that we tend to seek to integrate this premise with our underlying metaphysics.
To do so, there are basically two choices: a "spiritual" attribute unconstrained by physics we generally ascribe to matter at the scale of our brain's chemistry, or, a broadening of our concept of the practical causal scope of quantum effects.
So, the connection here seems clear to me. I think most of the "problem" is a perceived one for specifically those who have no real answer to how to integrate a free consciousness with a deterministic chemistry. Some of us will say "soul", and... problem solved. Others of a more naturalistic metaphysical stance have a -lot- more work to do.
The requirements for a coherent worldview here are pretty persistent across the history of philosophy. Two interesting lines of inquiry here are the Mind-Body Problem (described well here, and by a stridently atheist philosophy professor, lest I be accused of bias), and questions of Supervenience (the notion that, say, Economics can be reduced to Chemistry, which is actually a rather subtle and extensively-examined question in philosophy).
Anyway, these topics can get huge. Short form to the question "Why are these associated?"... because of the recognition that these levels need to be integrated by individuals to maintain a rational consciousness, and naturalism providing no straightforward means this this integration.
So, basically it comes from a massive, unresolvable, inescapable problem for the worldview of the average Slashdotter, which happily is not a problem at all for me given my metaphysical premises.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Kind of a strange Slashdot topic since as pointed elsewhere Penrose has been working on this since 1989!
Meanwhile bear with me for a mini rant, in that Submitter dived right into a topic covered by some 50 books, by taking a simplistic double quote of Roger Penrose, famous British physicist, recently argued "that we will need to invoke 'new physics and exotic biological structures': rewriting quantum theory to make sense of consciousness," Brooks writes. (Which he then dismissed as disappointing.)
Meanwhile, back at the more erudite book level, let's see some of what's out there.
Pleading rustiness on the original Penrose text, Douglas Hofstadter has been working for 20 years on analogy-based thinking. To get to your question, he calls the electrons and cells and even small neurons little billiard-ball-like stuff that "careens around in a careenium". Then from a second story window, you don't see those individual balls anymore, nor does any one matter. But the holistic big level then becomes consciousness as a "emergent" property that you just can't dissect past a certain point.
On another tack, Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Alpha fame put another 20 years at about the same time period doing computational pattern science developing the idea that within perfectly special cases in what otherwise look like simple rules, fantastic complex structures simply emerge "out of nowhere". Yet the trick is that they have to be computed, and no fancy equation quite produces the whole result in one sweep - some data absolutely requires the raw minimum iterative processing. He called this something like the law of irreducibility. For consciousness, this means that there are limits to genius, and cavemen can't make cars because it simply takes a raw amount of pre-processing to produce the context that pushes forth an idea. Past that absudium example, it also means for non-geniuses that you can't know why cattle won't go into a vaccination ramp until someone else discovers that cattle hate shifts in light intensity and the ramp looks like a big cave.
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I'm sorry, but "recently"? I read Penrose first book on this subject in 1990. Actually it was reading this book that inspired me to go to University to study Intelligent Systems (an oxymoron, so I discovered). I also have his second book on this subject, Shadows of the Mind, on my bookshelf.
I find that his basic argument that there is something missing in our conception of reality that makes understanding of conscious experience impossible, to be fundamentally correct. Philosophers differ on whether or not consciousness and the mysteriousness of QM are related. Intuitively I would suggest that they are, but science by intuition isn't very robust so I won't explain why.
It's important not to forget that Physics and Mathematics are good tools for describing the regularities of experience, but they have absolutely nothing to say about the nature of that experience. Philosophers like Dennett would do away with the entire problem by simply denying it. David Chalmers would take the opposing view, that conscious experience can never be explained with a purely functionalist or materialist world view.
Perhaps the most interesting recent advance in this area was the discovery that plants take advantage of quantum effects in optimising photosynthesis. Evin Harris Walker makes a convincing argument for quantum effects in the brain (although he tends to focus on tunnelling, rather than the microtubule coherence that Penrose points us to). I would find it extraordinary if the brain did not take advantage of such effects in order to increase its efficiency.
I think the most important point in all of this however, is that we know very little about consciousness and we know very little about how the brain works. But more than that, it is my belief that even after science has enumerated all of the particles, fields and laws of physics, there will still be something left to explain. This is the central mystery of conscious experience that Penrose talks about and it is why Chalmers says that conscious experience does not logically supervene on the physical.
Maybe, maybe not.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
I was under the impression that there was a link between consciousness and matter due to the observer problem. It really doesn't help that the wikipedia article has a bunch of [who's] and [citation needed].
Does someone with more knowledge about the subject care to explain?
To me that sounds like you are agreeing with the premise. In a way it appears that you are just restating the measurement problem.
According to some interpretations I've run across of Gottfried Leibniz's Monadology , particles of matter represent particles of intent. From this perspective, indeed, you can't have electrons without consciousness.
To put it in more religious terms better in line with the thought of the time, and to expand beyond Descartes logical fallacy: Deus cogitat, ergo sumus, or in this more doubting age, aliquid cogitat, ergo sumus -- "something thinks, therefore we is."
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Short answer is, yes. long answer is yes, but with a lot of quantum wigle-tee-wogle-tee.
so allow me to share my opinion..
There is an interesting likeness between
the field of possibilities which may or may not be, then when observed collapse into what is observed
see schrodinger and physics post 1930
and
the array of possibilities generated and selected from by our brain in its course from imagination to action
see gerald edelman's work of the last decade and a half
Both of these 'fields' of potential converge and meet in the middle.. or are they the same thing? Do they start from the same place and move out?
This is the interesting part-- what presently is a very philosophical question.. "how to tell what is and what is not possible before it is observed?"
Hofstadter has convincingly suggested that "I" is a symbol our minds develop for self-reference. A conscious thought of 'i am myself' feels instantaneous.. The sum of experience and nerve firings that process and recombine that experience. If it is not instantaneous.. how long does it take? Perhaps it is instantaneous, and, what would seem more astounding, is that it is the sum of more than one moment in space and time-- the interweaved, entangled, experience of a brains' nerve firings' worth of space and time. We may be the information itself, organized and floated on our neural mass like the rainbows reflecting off an oil slick on water. But to what are we reflecting?
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Its not just concisousness that is weird, evolution is weird too. The fact that such complex systems evolved in reaction to environment is something hard to digest. There must be a law of the universe behind it. Also, its funny that beings that were created in response to environment changes are recreating beings using materials they use.
A: No.
Signed, biology.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Care to state it?
From TFA: "conservation of mysteries". Pretty straight-forward.
/can/ see sentient actors as causal agents, but suck at making predictions. These processes gave rise to the conception of quantumn mechanics.
We seem to have free-will (very important for spirituality), but the universe appears to obey well ordered rules (laws of physics), so how can we have free will (and by proxy, a meaning to life)? Simple: stick it in quantumn mechanics, the new pineal gland that joins the ghost to the machine. That, we have reduced two mysteries to one.
One problem comes from understanding what we mean by free will -- I side with Daniel Dennett on this. Another problem comes from choosing one perspective over another because it makes people feel good.
The brain processes that process sentient creatures work under the assumption of an essence (ghost) in a sentience actor that has attributes (personality characteristics), which can be used to predict their behaviour. The notion of free-will and the spiritual path arise naturally out of this perspective, which can only see sentient actors as causal agents. Aspergers people have problems with this faculty.
The brain processes that see the ordering of the universe according to principles and rules give rise to logic. These processes probably arose originally as a by-product of brain processes that reverse engineer perspective and such from sensory information. These processes
Yet a third process creates the illusion that you have a unified consiousness, and only a single interpretation of sensory information (in the present moment), and a single story line for what is going on (again, in the present moment). This process needs to unify what is happening beneath, and creates a biased by simple and powerful construction of reality that can be used for further contemplation on the meaning of life, and calibration of the underlying mechanisms that give rise to the moment of consciousness.
Yet a forth process (the final one for this discussion), is building schema, and wants to create an over-arching and consistent and abstract conception (schema) of reality. The spiritual individual will found this abstract conception in sentient-processing processes, and have a problem with the ordered principle nature of reality, which must be suppressed (internally). This forth process jumps of quatumn mechanics to make itself consistent with the undeniable perception of an ordered universe, and the fact that things like computers work.
It is all very simple to me, because, like everyone else, I believe my abstract conception of reality (whatever it is) in any given present moment. If I am ever wrong, it is always about a previous instance of consciousness. But if we are both right, then someone must be in denial. Considering the immense caloric investment in creating your abstract schema, it is no wonder that the mind resorts to subconscious tricks to protect it. (This can lead to psychosis.)
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Good news for the new-age-y psychic fair nutjobs who want to "heal" me with their "quantum metaphysics". Now they'll have an article to link to that will "prove" their baloney. Oy!
Brrr. A guy could catch his death of incompetent philosophy here.
FTFY
Wouldn't that be philosophistry?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
There is a much more interesting explanation for empathy and it is researched in detail in the field of social-neural-science. Goldman has a book that broadly covers some of the interesting ideas: "Social Cognition".
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Read "How the Mind Works" for an alternative discussion on consciousness, that steers clear of quantumn mysticism, which really doesn't explain anything at all.
Besides, nobody has to provide something better than quantum mysticism to point out how intellectually trashy it is. It is just a pointless distraction from the serious work of understanding how our minds work.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
http://spacetrawler.com/2011/05/24/
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
For those of you who hear that quantum mechanics is strange, but aren't sure exactly why, here is a little primer, based on the opening lecture from my intro quantum course:
Pass a a beam of electrons through two closely spaced gaps. If the electrons were like bullets, one would expect to detect two bright spots on the detecting screen directly opposite the holes. This is not what you will observe however. Instead you will see on the detector a single location midway between the two holes with many electron strikes. The locations opposite the holes receive few electron strikes, but continuing outward there will be locations with lots of electron strikes followed by locations with few electron strikes. How can we explain this?
Well the bright and dark patterns are consistent with wave diffraction and interference. We see similar interference patterns with light, and with other types of waves. So the electrons have wavelike properties. Are multiple electrons "interfering" with each other? Well, if you reduce the beam intensity so that only single electrons are passing through the slits, perhaps only one every few seconds, then the same pattern of diffraction and interference occurs! So, that seems to imply that single electrons are passing through both slits and once, and then interfering with themselves! I thought single electrons were particles!??? !
Now install a device or mechanism that measures which slit electrons pass through and indicates the results to you. What do you observe now? The electrons will now behave like bullets, dutifully going straight through one hole or the other and striking the detector screen directly opposite the holes. No diffraction. No interference, or at least not enough to speak of. Experiments like this led Bohr to exclaim that "those who are not shocked when they first see quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it."
One interpretation of this is that if you don't know which hole the electron goes through, then it goes through both holes at once. If you don't know what spin an electron has, then it has both spin up and spin down. At the small scale, probability seems to be everything. If there is a 40% chance that an electron is at location A, and a 60% chance that the same electron is at location B, then 40% of it is located at A, and 60% of it is at B. It seems your lack of knowledge about the electron can cause it to be "smeared" over multiple locations. This smearing is related to the wavelike properties. As soon as you pin down the location of the electron, then it is no longer in two places at once. It is a definite particle.
Consciousness seems to play a role in this, as it seems our measurement of either the momentum or the position of an electron seems to fundamentally change its properties. It seems that our knowledge of the particle changes the particle. I understand this is difficult to accept. But any alternative explanation must take into account the strange results from experiments such as the one described above. I am not sure where the logical fallacy would lie here.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
In a fit of free-thinking, I once proposed that god/nature invented the unpredictability of quantum events expressly for the purpose of enabling free-will. Or more generally, quashing determinism.
If we are really all just a pile of chemicals and electrical signals, our universe is determinate.
However nature gives us chaos at the quantum level. If any of that craziness influences anything at a larger scale, (in aggregate, how could it not?), then our universe is not determinate.
So why would nature 'choose' to ensure that determinism is not the law of the land?... Nature wouldn't, but perhaps a bored god would.
"And as the great Deepak Chopra taught us, quantum physics means that anything can happen at any time for no reason."
-Prof. Farnsworth
I already posted on this article. Someone mod this guy up to a billion.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
None of this shit is real, and when you die poof that's it.
But then again, how would he know? I mean NOW he knows... or doesn't know of indeed he is truly gone....
OH MY GOD
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I skimmed TFA (I couldn't go reading it, I'm pretty sure you get banned if you) and it doesn't conclusively prove that quantum theory isn't involved with the human brain or consciousness, just that the person making the claim has absolutely no evidence to suggest that is the case (beyond the fact that they are both mysterious).
Still, it more then passes a religious level of scrutinisation and seeing as more then half the population of earth have religious beliefs and that schrodinger's cat proves that things that have a 50% chance of being true are always true and false, this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is correct.
Q.E.D motherfucker.
I think they are connected. But wait, hear me out.
First off, consider the brain. A supercomputer capable of complex logical and illogical(creative) operations. An advanced image, sound, touch and smell processor with noise suppression and extremely high fidelity. A memory storage system capable of storing DECADES of observed data, with advanced compression, keyword-like index, and meta storage of multiple multimedia types together. A complete autonomous maintenance and life support system which directs multiple organs each with numerous functions. Thousands of functions which run simultaneously in real time!
All running within an average of one hundred billion neurons. Don't get me wrong, a neuron is not truly analogous to the transistor... but right now we've got 3 billion count chips out - and so far they're not making pottery or scratching cave paintings, much less doing half the functions described above.
As a good counter example of quantum applications in biology, consider the recent discovery of quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems.
I'll be the first to admit that there is *absolutely no scientific evidence* of quantum-type processes in the brain, and what we do know of physics tends to discount any possibility that we'll every find such processes. However - it was only a year ago that we discovered quantum biology systems in photosynthesis.
Biology, at it's heart is a molecular-level science. It only makes sense that the evolution of biological life would take advantage of quantum mechanics.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
...but Penrose is kind of a crackpot these days. I've been to two of his talks in the last year or so, and he's pushing this theory that the universe is cyclic in the following fashion: everything falls into a bunch of black holes, then the black holes someday pop in a burst of Hawking radiation, and then if you rescale the entire universe so that everything that exists so far looks like a point, the result looks similar to a big bang.
The problem is that rescaling the universe in such a manner would require you to rescale things like atoms, which have a size that is fundamental to the properties of the universe as we know them. An undergraduate could tell you this.
I love the man's early work, but in his old age he's gone a little crazy.
If you want to understand consciousness in terms of vector space and probabilities, quantum theory is a good context. If you want it in terms of neurons and dendrites, then neurology would probably be better. You could also look at it in the context of organic chemistry or theology.or that we are not smart enough to understand how dumb we really are. The article refers to a physicist at LHC, musing about his big banger while drinking. My limited understanding of consciousness is that alcohol limits and even eliminates consciousness. Before he lost his he behaved like any expert. A carpenter sees every problem as a nail and every solution as a hammer. The LHC guy's tool is his big banger. The problem doesn't matter. Chopra is trying to promote his book, and Penrose is British (need I say more?).
Penrose and Hameroff propose that micotubules in the brain are small enough that quantum effects can occur there and may be the connection to consciousness. Perhaps the reviewer needed to dig a little deeper before ridiculing Penrose.
oh it sure does, but the how of it is weird to explain...
"Don't you reckon it might uncover some sort of particle, or energy, that might explain our connectivity with the Universe?" Sounds like Orson Scott Card's "philotes" to me. While I loved the series when I read it as a kid and I still love it now, as someone who has a decent background in physics, I find the idea laughable. I'm a firm believer that consciousness is simply a "complex systems" / nonlinear dynamics effect, but that's a topic for a different debate.
You could only describe a woman's mind, using Quantum Mechanics.
Hehehe, but... I understand why - They're just using the tools @ hand they know & understand, to quantify + measure & understand something, in the human psyche! I do things like that programming (objects are sort of REALLY ALL about that in fact).. Would I put faith in it? Not really. I'd only use it @ a sort of measuring stick @ most, but not a guide.
(Anyways/anyhow - & the naysayers here? They're doubtless like ones who must have been at first about mathematics + physics. It's only a tool folks, not an absolute authority on "all things" - take anything with a grain of salt! E.G.-> Statistical math? While useful, can be 'bent/skewed' easily, for example! Discrete Math?? Put a 1 or 0 into some equations there & watch them fail/ go loopy! I could go on, & on - always exceptions to rules!)
Same thing here though really: Geeks, attempting to describe parts of & a synergy of a whole via facts you know about them + with the tools you understand!
(lol, friggin' GEEKS! They make the world go around @ times though!)
In the end here? Well - Didn't mean to offend anyone, & was actually being humorous for once (a little bit of good news today & all that is why).
APK
P.S.=> However, imo @ least: Since anything's possible in String theory, you might use THAT as a tool to describe women, & even better: LOL!
... apk
Okay, here's the deal.
Any computer program run on a deterministic machine is predictable. It may be complex, in which case the prediction can be made by simply running the program until the prediction time, noting the state, then deleting the program state and going back to square one. Congratulations - you've just predicted the program behaviour!
In order for a program to be unpredictable, information must be passed in from outside its universe. That is to say, information which is NOT encoded in the program and NOT available in it's input stream.
From the point of view of the program, this information is random, which is the definition of unpredictable. From the point of view of an observer outside the scope of the machine and its universe, the information may not be random. It may be based on something that's altogether outside the measurement capability of the program, in which case there is no way to predict the behaviour of that program without the extra information.
The universe I'm talking about is *our* universe, the programs I'm talking about are people, the information is quantum randomness, and the outside observer is God. Quantum randomness is essentially information passed into this universe from outside. It is the basis of free will - without it, our actions would be completely predictable. Put a baby in a VR environment and let them grow up and they would make exactly the same choices and grow up to be exactly the same person - except for quantum randomness.
The fallacy is confusing the terms, which leads to all sorts of mistaken ideas and beliefs. Consciousness is simply the ability to have a mental model of one's universe, with oneself as a separate entity within that model. This is different and completely separate from the concept of free will.
Quantum randomness is the embodiment of free will, not consciousness.
Gee whiz, people! Doesn't anyone study AI any more?
Problem is the human brain does not have the computing power to support consciousness - unless it is using quantum level methods which are not yet understood ...
There's a historical context to this.
Before quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics made the world seem totally deterministic. In (the) theory (of the time), if you could identify the position, mass, speed, and direction of every particle in a closed system, you could compute its state at every point in the future. Yes, it was impractical, but if you considered how it applies to the brain, it begged the question: "Does this leave any room for free will?" That takes it into the realm of philosophy, rather than mathematics or physics, but in a totally Newtonian physical world, free will was hard to explain.
The first crack in this problem came with quantum mechanics. Now, mechanics was no longer deterministic. There was room for randomness, and the future is not preordained by the present state of everything. That wasn't quite enough, though. Quantum randomness is about as microscopic as you can get. But, it could be argued that at the macroscopic level, randomness averages out, and things become predictable. Yes, you can get electrons to tunnel in a diode, but at a predictable rate. Uncertainty be damned, no one *really* suddenly appears on the other side of the room. This wasn't a new notion at all: The temperature of a gas comes from the random movement of its molecules, but you don't need to know the trajectory of each molecule; PV = nRT summarizes it all very nicely.
The last key was chaos theory. The butterfly effect implies that (in appropriate systems), very tiny differences in an initial state can have profound results on the eventual state. Now, all bets are off. Uncertainty says that there are unpredictable variations, and chaos theory suggests that those differences can show up at the macroscopic level. You can have free will, after all. (By the way, Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia does a much more entertaining job of explaining this than I just did.)
But, (with apologies to followers of B. F. Skinner) assuming that there is such a thing as free will, does conscious choice **really**, physically, depend on quantum randomness magnified by chaos theory? Or, is that just a philosophical existence proof that free will **can** exist?
And that is how quantum theory might or might not be related to consciousness.
This is sounding a lot like "Experimental Theology" and "Dust"...the melding of religion and [particle] physics - particals which have a consciousness to them.
For those of you who hear that quantum mechanics is strange, but aren't sure exactly why, here is a little primer, based on the opening lecture from my intro quantum course:
Standard double-slit intro into quantum weirdness. You could just link to the Dr. Quantum video.
By fallacy you mean ignorance of science. Theory explain phenomena, not the other way around.
I fail to see the logical fallacy. Is it not all quantum mechanics at the most fundamental level? Why should consciousness be an exception? My holographic self demands to know.
Let's not assume that quantum mechanics is in its final state. Logic is not necessarily the only path to truth, especially, truth about consciousness. I'd try intuitive shortcuts.
"A quantum brain drinks up waves from an ever-present background ocean of pure possibility, the ocean out of which comes everything, mind and matter alike."
I can be both conscious and unconscious at the same time.
It's 100% certain that chemical reactions involve quantum mechanics.
It's 100% certain that consciousness involves chemical reactions.
Therefore, consciousness involves quantum mechanics
But it would be greatly overreaching to state that consciousness requires changes to quantum theory. Consciousness doesn't even require non-deterministic physics. Deterministic is not the same thing as predictable.
Support SETI@home
No more than a Cheezburger explains a lolcat. Seriously, leave consciousness to philosophers and leave quantum mechanics to scientists, when one tries to play the other I run visions of Charlie Sheen's tiger blood through my head to wash away the absurdity.
The article is a "Straw Man" argument, that is to say based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.
To my knowledge, no one makes such a statement as "Quantum Theory Explains Consciousness". There are some sceculative attempts to explain consciousness, but none that I know of use Quantum Theory as the be-all and end-all.
What people might be saying is, there are some interesting relationships between Quantum Theory and Consiousness, which merit further exploration. This is hard to dispute, given the seemingly important role of the conscious observer in the act of measurement.
Thus, "Quantum Theory relates to consciousness" has been mistaken for "Quantum Theory explains consiousness". These are two very different ideas, as "relates", and "explains" are two different kinds of relationships. In fact, "explains" is a special case of "relates to", is the meta-relationship, but I digress.
This sounds more like someone wants to work in the field of philosphy of consciousness, but is grizzling about being expected to know the difficult field of Quantum Theory.
What would make you happy? That thinking about Quantum Theory be banned in all discussions about consciousness?
In the middle, there is a clear example of tautology, with the phrase "no apparent causal link", expressed as though it is an observation to use as input. "Consciousness is not explained" because "there is no apparent link", both expressing essentially the same idea, and the latter is just assumed to be true.
Your argument degenerates into terms like "very basic". When you just keep saying how obvious it is, usually it's the result of the argument lacking any real content.
Now I don't expect this will serve any purpose, but I will take this criticism and make it constructive. It would advance the cause if Science better for you to say what you think consiousness *might* be explained by, rather than what you think it "probably isn't" caused by.
Or if you really want to help rule it out as a cause (which *would*, I admit, have some benefit), then MAKE A MORE SOLID CASE.
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
Standard double-slit intro into quantum weirdness. You could just link to the Dr. Quantum video.
LOL...standard quantum weirdness...as if its commonality makes it any less shocking and germane to the discussion. There is a reason why most quantum courses begin with this...because it is accessible and clear, yet underlines the implications of Schroedinger's equation beautifully.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Chopra also wants to create a woo equivalent of the Templeton Prize for this kind of crap. As others have mentioned - this is old news and something of a personal obsession with Penrose and requires numerous leaps of faith to follow. Penrose has been taken down by Victor Stenger quite some time ago - http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/is_the_brain_a_quantum_device/
smilies are for reetards
Quantum mechanics has become the final resting place for metaphysics and empty speculation. Before the 19th century the answer for every question not of the specialty of the one asking the question was 'God'. Now, after two century of progress the answer for a question not of the specialty of the physicist is 'Quantum Mechanics'. Why? Because Feynman once said that nobody understands QM, just like a believer could say about his god. Irony is overwhelming.
Very confusing article. At first glance it appears the author is making a link between consciousness and quantum mechanics. But he is actually just pointing out that it is a fallacy because both being "mysterious" does not constitute a connection. So this article is not about anything at all --just pointing out a misconception very few people have.
if you don't know something, we name it "quantum physics"
We know quantum mechanics quite well and can make extreme precise predictions with it. The only problem with QM is that it doesn't follow our intuition, but that really shouldn't be much of a surprise given that our intuition has evolved so we can make decisions in a macroscopic world, not on an subatomic level.
Well, what a blast from my college past. I vividly recall all the late night manic chat sessions trying to decode Patricia and Paul Churchland's Neurophilosophy and Daniel Dennets Conciousness Explained.
Anyway, after years of rumination, to me it's clear that:
Quantum mechanics are definitely a part of neurobiology, and hence a critical building block of conciousness. We couldn't think without quantum mechanics. But plants couldn't photosynthesize without quantum mechanics either.
The quantum mechanical properties of neurophysiology apply just as much to clams as it does to humans. And it's just as applicable to those in a coma as to those engaged in a peak experience of some sort. So quantum mechanics definitely don't explain the conciousness of humans and in lesser degrees of other species.
Conciousness is an emergent property of the brain. Most of our evolutionary ancestors weren't concious in the sense we mean it today. Our massive brains are evolutionarily adaptive. Humans pay a big biological cost in having these big brains; very difficult childbirth, very long period of helpess infancy, wide pelvises to accomodate these giant heads, and a whole lot of extra calories and oxygen needed. But we're obviously breeding like rabbits as a species, and the primary limitation on further explosions of population are conciousness-driven (deciding not to have children, and having developed the means to do so).
Conciousness is, pretty much by definition, a really thorny thing to think about and almost perfectly designed to drive philosophers and cognitive scientists into mental loops. Since conciousness can also be described as self-insight, you get into a deep virtualization question in trying to have accurate insight into how you have insight :)!
So the trickiest part about conciousness is figuring out our own conciousness! It's a lot more easy and productive to try and consider someone else's conciousness than our own. Thinking about our own conciousness can easily get to the "eye of the universe question" - even if one has a good biological theory of conciousness, why do *I* have an experience of unique selfhood? That winds up being one of those unsolvable Big Questions, like "why is there something instead of nothing." Whether the existence of existence is explained via the Big Bang or theology, there's still the unanswerable question of what was the first mover. What started the cosmological ball rolling for there to be a universe in the first place?
Well, that was my moment of peak nerditry for the day! I'm going to go kiss a pretty girl for a while as penance...
My video compression blog
Reminds me of the Star Trek NG episode with the traveler:
"You do understand, don't you, that thought is the basis of all reality. The energy of thought, to put in your terms, is very powerful. "
I think there are more reasons why people tie quantum physics and consciousness together than has been discussed here. Anyone with a real understanding of science wouldn't claim that there is an actual connection between the two (unless perhaps they are a neurophysiologist and have actual experimental results). What people are doing is conjecturing and hypothesizing, and there is nothing wrong with that. That is quite different from claiming there exists an actual phenomenon. The reasons people conjecture are many, but here are mine:
* Quantum effects at the microscopic level can have macroscopic consequences. A single photon or electron or other particle can be used to affect change at the macroscopic level. For instance, you could connect a photon detector to switch that would decide whether a train goes north or south. The state of a single electron within a computer can have massive effects on the stock market.
* The observer is a critical aspect of quantum theory. Incoherent systems cohere (in relation to the observer) once the state is observed. An "observer" is really just another particle than interacts with the system in question. We as humans are not monolithic objects, but an enormous complex of particles, so when we "observe" a system, what does that mean? Does it mean when the measurement from the instrument hits your eye? Or when the signal from your eye hits your brain? Or when your cortex processes that data? There is a long complex chain of interaction that happens, so it's not as simple as the thought experiments in elementary physics books.
* Our consciousness is the subjective experience of the particles that make up our brain. What state are these particles in in a quantum sense? Are they coherent or not? Can we "observe" our own brain? What are the implications of the observed system being the observer itself?
* Since particles that make up the brain are normal particles modeled by quantum physics, they are also under the same rules, meaning they can be in a decohered state. Since we have already asserted above that single particles can have macroscopic consequences, is there a possibility that a single particle in the brain cohering into one state or another can have real consequences? Being that our consciousness is subjective, internal experience of these brain particles, is it possible that there could be a causal relationship between the subjective thought itself and external phenomenon, in one direction or another?
I recognize these thoughts are not based in deep quantum theory or neurophysiology, but I still think that they reflect what people are wondering, and the experts in these fields aren't addressing the laymen very well when broaching this topic.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
no matter how small. If there is the possibility that information can be stored in some previously-unused niche then it is likely that biological organisms will exploit that niche.
While we have yet little evidence of low-level quantum-related neurological phenomena in living organisms, there is no doubt that every chemical reaction can be described in terms of quantum mechanics ultimately. And what are we but electro-chemical beings?
I hope Penrose is not correct. I hope, I hope, I madly hope! Because if he _is_ correct, the likelihood of a breakthrough in artificial human intelligence may have to be postponed indefinitely, yet I was hoping to see it within my lifetime.
If we can agree that quantum phenomenon apply to the matter that comprises our neurology then it is a given that quantum behavior is an element of the environment in which our neurology has evolved. Being an intrinsic property, isolating conscious activity from that inherent dynamic requires fully encompassing its behavior in such a way as to sufficiently capture and nullify these characteristics. Barring achieving that effect, we are left with a situation in which quantum phenomenon plays some role in the way our neurology and by that our consciousness works. Frankly, the non sequitor is in thinking that quantum theory DOESN’T play a role in consciousness.
The most substantial fallacy here however is in all this trite search for a silver bullet, the “QUANTUM PHYSICS WILL EXPLAIN MY SOUL” mysticism some seem to embrace. It’s one a piece of a bigger puzzle; there will never be a simple answer at which we can point to and declare “That is I”. Still, why do rational people presume quantum mechanical inclusion as a factor in consciousness? It’s because quantum theory is EXTREMELY useful for explaining how the computationally complex aspects of our cognition are capable of operating; probabilistic computation makes almost trivial types of tasks which are FAR beyond our binary computational approaches. Tasks which are critical to simulating reality in a non-polar universe. If we have an evolutionary system developing with access to the components useful for developing a computational advantage that increases survivability, Occam’s Razor (or to stick with the popular Latin phrasings here, lex parsimoniae) in the very least can be used to show that the presumption of exclusion of these properties is the less defendable position.
Our brains, of course, are quantum in nature. So are our shoes and our light bulbs and everything else we see and touch, so that doesn't necessarily mean much. But it certainly means that there is a connection of some sort between our brains and quantum mechanics. It may or may be an interesting connection, but it certainly exists. (I don't really know what the OP means by a "causal connection" in this context, but I assume they mean that one requires the other.)
The real question is, does consciousness have anything to do with Boolean logic ? Or, to be a little fancier, can consciousness be computed on a Turing machine ?
AI types tend to assume this as a given, but there is of course no actual evidence for it, and the abysmal progress of AI doesn't give much confidence in their assumptions. If our consciousness isn't calculable on a Turing machine, then suspecting a deep connection with quantum mechanics is very reasonable.
In any case, hypothesizing a physical cause for a physical phenomenon is not a logical fallacy. It may or may not be correct, but it's not a logical fallacy.
Consciousness is either a product of the natural physical world or it is supernatural. If it is supernatural then it is very surprising that things like sleep, injury, drugs, and electromagnetic fields have such great (if not total) control over it and we would do well to simply study it as if it were only natural until we discover the ways it actually differs from natural processes. If consciousness is natural then it almost certainly arises solely from the interaction of the matter and energy in the brain and nervous system. If the definition of cognition is a complete theory of the operation of the brain and nervous system (something which we obviously don't have yet) then that model would also describe consciousness. I understand the distinction between merely calculating a result (cognition) and being aware of performing the calculation (consciousness). I think it's obvious that our consciousness is the direct cause of much of our cognition and as such a complete model of human cognition must necessarily include consciousness.
The journalist and prominent thinkers behind this article ought to read the paper 'Is the brain a digital computer' by John Searle (http://philosophy.wisc.edu/shapiro/Phil554/PAPERS/Is%20the%20Brain%20a%20Digital%20Computer.htm). Not only is it relevant to current research into strong/weak AI paradigms and philosophy of cognition --- it also provides a nice counterargument against physicalistic reductionism around human cognition.
Tall Aussie guy, long hair, wears leather jackets, sings a mean Zombie Blues*. Chalmers, who's a philosopher, and Stu Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, started a series of conferences at the University of Arizona on "Towards a Science of Consciousness" a decade or two ago; they alternate between Tucson and Somewhere-outside-North-America, and attract a mixed crowd of neuroscientists, consciousness researchers, philosophers who talk about phenomenology, FMRI imagers, tourists (e.g. me), and a few newagey people and random cranks. A few years ago, there were two "Science and Consciousness" conferences in Arizona around the same time - the scientific one in Tucson, and the Deepak Chopra one in Phoenix**.
Hameroff's done work with Penrose on things like quantum effects in microtubules (which are brain cell parts that are small enough to actually have quantum activity going on, though it's a very long step from saying "quantum noise might be affecting chemical reactions a bit" to "Woo-woo! Consciousness is, like, Quantum, man!". I can't say I really understand Stu's arguments about the connections, because while I know a certain amount of quantum physics and biology and philosophy, I don't do neurology or brain cell structures or phenomenology, so the couple of conferences I got to were interesting and a very steep learning curve.
From one perspective, either the world, and therefore consciousness, are entirely deterministic, or else they're not. (Deterministic doesn't mean calculable - Heisenberg among others make it very clear that you can't really simulate the universe using machinery smaller than the universe - but from a philosophical standpoint it doesn't matter if humans can predict what you're doing to do, it just matters whether you've got free will about it.) If you'd like things to be non-deterministic, physics doesn't give you very many ways to hook that into the world, and you're pretty much stuck with quantum mechanics.*** Does that mean that quantum entanglement is involved in any of the processes, particularly between neurons that aren't directly adjacent to each other? Not necessarily (IMHO, probably not.) Does it mean that a non-physical spirit can grab onto some molecules and shake them around in ways that translate up to conscious thoughts, or does it just mean that the chemistry's a bit noisier because God's playing dice with the Universe but your consciousness is still fundamentally a materialist process?
* "Zombie" is a term of art, referring to a hypothetical person or machine that reacts externally as if it were conscious, but doesn't actually perceive qualia the way conscious beings claim that we do, so for instance it can tell you which ball is the red one or the green one, but doesn't experience redness or greenness. ** So of course Chopra caught on to this, and has been one of the sponsors of the more recent round or two of the scientific conference, and he and Hameroff have put out one or two popular press articles together. There are a number of meditation people who come to the conference, but they tend to be the serious "Here's what an FMRI shows about blood flow in your brain while you're meditating" folks, while the cranks are more likely to have opinions about quantum. *** There are some theories of quantum mechanics that say it's still deterministic, just with underlying hidden variables that we can't observe or measure, but it's been too many decades since college physics for me to remember if those got disproved or are still around.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The fallacy here as far as I can tell is the assumption that things which rely on quantum effects on the lowest level have any effect on their _macroscopic_ interpretation of having determinism. Complex systems of probabilities can result in perfectly deterministic computations, when averaged over a number of trials and thresholded. (Otherwise you calculated the probabilities wrong.) There is no theory that I know of that states in a general manner that because something relies on quantum effects it *cannot* be simulated in a Turing machine, i.e., is not computable. Put more tersely, there seems to be an unfounded assumption that quantum effects imply incomputability; where does this come from?
Given the easy ability to manipulate "consciousness" with both chemicals, surgery, and electrical stimulation to the brain, it's pretty obviously doesn't require quanta.
Given the obvious emotions displayed by animals, it's obvious you do not need much of a brain to have emotions.
Given the various mental illnesses which have some fairly striking effects on our consciousness (like the ability to see what's to our left but not describe it), it's clear the brain is a set of systems.
If there is a quantum effect- it's likely to be very minor.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
He's a mathematician and physicist, not a cognitive scientist or neurological biologist. His "ideas" in this arena should hold as much weight as a butcher who says that "Meat is the foundation of all thought." Actually less so - a butcher actually works with biological tissues.
That is all.
I'm dubious. I don't find human consciousness to be that amazing. Its just a behavior. I don't really see a reason why you'd need to invoke Quantum Mechanics.
The only way I can see this being likely is if humans can solve problems computers can't. But that's the problem, Humans don't SOLVE everything, they APPROXIMATE most things. And computers can approximate too. For instance, you can program an approximator for an NP problem that works in P time if you're willing to accept a margin of error. And you don't have to invoke Quantum Mechanics. I think your brain is just a biological computer.
A: Da!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If it weren't Penrose, who'd care? Einstein already had a dice and universe dichotomy, and the rest of us approach these subjects in order to shelve them under My Opinion Exactly. Much gas, not so much Hindenberg either way.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Consciousness is just like your liver. You live 2 seconds in the past, because your consciousness filters out many distractions.
In order to fit best, we sleep 8 hours a day, and live 2 seconds in the past. Evolution at its best.
Most of the neurological theories about consciousness treat it as a complex software process of some part running on brain hardware that's built to do a bunch of things which facilitate it. Most of the physics-related theories about how quantum mechanics affects the brain are that it makes the chemistry a bit noisy (as do all the other things affecting heat and vibration of molecules), so it may occasionally affect how many electrons get involved in a signal or how fast the ions moving around in fluid inside a cell move, so it may occasionally affect whether a synapse triggers, where "affect" isn't anything more than just a bit of noise in the timing. Is that enough to say that "quantum mechanics explains consciousness"? I don't think it's likely. If you want to argue that there's quantum entanglement spreading around the brain making signals happen spookily at a distance, feel free to find some appropriate equations to model it.
On the other hand, I'd really like to be able to say there's something other than deterministic materialist physics going on here, because that might possibly be a way for some kind of soul to be attached to the body that might persist after the body dies, and might have a whole bunch of other philosophical implications that are rather deeply embedded in Western philosophy (and also Eastern philosophy, in somewhat different ways), like free will and meaning and such, and to do that, the physics in your head needs some kind of hooks for the soul to mess around with, which probably have to involve quantum mechanics because there's really not much else that could do the job. But that doesn't mean those hooks are lined up in a way that a soul can grab onto them and shake them in any direction that usefully affects consciousness.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One of the really annoying things about atheism as a possible alternative to Christianity or other religions that involve an afterlife is that you don't get to know if you were right or wrong. I'm sorry, but when I die, if I don't get a real afterlife or some ghostly existence or reincarnation, I at least want the guy with the scythe to show up and tell me "SORRY, DUDE, THAT'S ALL YOU GET, TIME'S UP." And atheists tell me I won't even get that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How do you explain what you can't even properly define yet?
While I appreciate Penrose's books on the subject - and I must admit that my name appears in one of them as well - he wasn't talking about consciousness as you or I might define the term.
For most people, consciousness is something similar to self-awareness. That is not the subject of "The Emperor's New Mind". Rather than worry about something that can't (yet anyway) be properly defined, he focused on something that is defined very well - mathematical logic. I accept that he has shown a computer (as typically implemented) will never be able to perform the full range of mathematical logic Whether that has any real relation to the topic of consciousness is still up for grabs.
I mean, it wouldn't be hard to say that 90% of the people in the world can't perform mathematical logic either, yet we agree they are conscious.
Would you care to elaborate on that? Why is there no such link?
How can you claim that an effect (consciousness in this case) that you do not understand at all is not linked to a particular thing?
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
to make sense of consciousness.
The point of the OP seems to be that consciousness is not scientifically explainable at all.
I've read those books and the Penrose one(s) are certainly the worse: it's basically all handwaving. There's not a single convincing argument or example. Hofstadter gives plenty of insightful examples of emergent properties where the intelligence grows (ants -> ant colony). As for Wolfram I think he's onto something, but's it's gonna be a while before we discover the cellular automata at the base of the universe...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I work with special education kids as an aide in a public school system.
The process of working with special ed kids opens a window into how the brain works. Each kid is different, each kid illustrates a different variation on what happens when something is missing or slightly mis-connected.
There is a way in which every special ed kid is different and every reasonably correctly configured person like a ballet dancer or a college student is the same.
I use the phrase "working with special ed kids" to mean the aide helps the youth to do something. As I work in parallel with the young person, it seems I begin to see memory layers and feedback paths. Why can I fit the puzzle piece in the cutout and why does the young lady do three steps of the task and then let go of the piece?
I think the conversations about consciousness are complicated by two aspects of how the brain works.
First, a correctly configured brain generates an illusion of continuity and smoothness. The individual layers are invisible, like a ballet dancer's intense and long drawn out memory and control effort fuses into a beautiful appearance of continuous motion.
Second, the correctly configured brain generates something that should be cautiously called an illusion of consciousness. I mean illusion in a very limited sense: We have spare memory that holds words and images when we close our eyes. We have a limited ability to summon a few memories into consciousness. We can not fetch anything from anywhere in the brain.
But again, from a correctly configured brain we can't discern the layers, but I feel the process of working with special ed kids helps when one does in parallel what the special ed person struggles with.
Piaget has pointed out there is considerable difference between adults at the levels of mentation adults operate with.
The two components I use for understanding the kids I work with are: memory, as something that is organized in layers. Cerebral palsy kids in particular will show very specific areas where they do not maintain memory. The other idea I use for trying to understand kids is: Feedback loops. Autistic kids will show good memory but they have very puzzling behaviours that seem like some kind of a feed back loop.
A quick scan of the arXiv shows a fair bit of research on this topic. I'm by no means an expert but a lot looks like serious work.
http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+will+AND+quantum+free/0/1/0/all/0/1
This one looks particularly interesting.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.1651
There appears to be a lot more to this than "QM is mysterious" "Consciousness is mysterious" therefore QM is related to consciousness.
My point was that there's no need to reinvent the wheel by typing up a bunch of course notes into a Slashdot comment.
1) Firstly, it's hard to see how biology and classical physics can explain consciousness. Note that I'm not talking about human intelligence etc. because there are at least plausible ways to imagine how this could be "implemented" via classical physics. What I'm talking about is "the inner experience" i.e. the experience of existing, the subjective. Isn't it weird that we have such an experience? What would be the substrate of such an experience? Within classical physics, I could perhaps accept a world full of zombies running around seemingly intelligent but without an inner experience. It's not that I don't accept emergent phenomenon in general. I accept that intelligence can result from very simple building blocks. But I don't see how this is true for the subjective experience of existing.
Now this is Slashdot, so a coding analogy would be in order: Understanding consciousness within classical physics is like trying to play a sound on a computer without a sound card - it can't be done no matter what clever programming you use, since the basic building block or "API" isn't there!
Now, the problem to this idea is that it is very hard to measure this "inner experience" for anyone else than the person experiencing it. This is what it means for it to be subjective, and this is what is "magic" about it. But for the individual, the experience is valid and real. And at least to me, there seems to be no way of understanding it within classical physics.
2) There's some experimental evidence. For instance, the element xenon is almost chemically inert. Still, it is a powerful anaesthetic. However, note that as an anesthetic it doesn't just shut off all cells. It doesn't even shut off all of the brain or anything of that sort. Rather, it selectively shuts off consciousness! A person sedated with xenon can still breath, the heart is still beating etc. However, the experience of existing is (temporarily) gone. Now, how can such a primitive one-atom entity as xenon have such selective effects on consciousness? If consciousness was some complex emergent phenomenon, wouldn't it take a complicated molecule to go into the brain and find out exactly what neurons to affect so as to leave the vital functions intact while retaining consciousness? Xenon doesn't appear to be capable of this!
No one really know how xenon does it - but since it is chemically inert it must at least be at the "van der Waal" level. Some experiments indicate it might affect special pockets in certain proteins via at least semi-quantum effect. Given this evidence, it doesn't seem much of a jump to consider these pockets essential to consciousness - perhaps mediating it?
The link between consciousness and quantum dynamics is a specious attempt to rescue the ideas of contra-causal free will. However it is unsuccessful, unwarranted as well as unwanted.
There is no contra-causal free will, and the ideas that will is either random or determined by hidden variables outside the direct observable universe is misguided. How would you will something other that you will? What outside of the universe should determine your preferences? Who would want their will to be determined by
something other than our genetically determined starting point and the sum of our experience?
Even if we are deterministic it does not make us automatons. The universe is computationally irreducible the same way as some algorithms are.
The only way to see the future is to run the full simulation.
Okay, not an xkcd link, but smbc is good too: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2189
If you have a square where along one axis you have Chaotic and non-Chaotic Mathematics, and you have Newtownian Physic and Quantum Physics along the other axis, there is one quadrant missing where, until my friend Dr Alex Hankey began work on it several years ago, there has been absolutely no Research or Mathematical Theories developed, and it's the Quantum-Chaotic quadrant.
Dr Alex Hankey's hypothesis is that Consciousness operates in this Quantum-Chaotic quadrant, where there are self-referring "loops" in our neural structures which keep a Quantum System on the absolute edge between two critical states. It's complicated - and I can only grasp much of his work intuitively.
suggested reading C.S Peirce, wonderfully predicted some quantum mechanics "problems" even before quantum mechanics was invented and contributions on cognitive psychology, that still haunt cognitive neuro-science.
PS. theres some interesting notions about Artificial Intelligence too.
Moreover, a non-deterministic Turing machine occupies the same level on the Chomsky hierarchy as a deterministic one--it is not fundamentally more powerful. Of course, where non-determinism helps us is that we are more limited than Turin machines. Since our brains are finite in spatial extent, they cannot have unlimited memory (the alternative to infinite spatial extent is infinite information density, but physics forbids that--see Bekenstein bound). We are mere linearly bounded automata. For LBAs, the non-deterministic versions _are_ more powerful than the deterministic ones, but still less powerful than Turing machines. Now, what people like Penrose are proposing is that some new non-computable physics lets us get beyond these limitations, because those poor bastards just can't swallow their bloated egos and accept that their minds have severe limitations in likely unknowable analogues of human brain halting problems.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
The difference between biological evolution and intentional, methodical design is that evolution happens in exposure to everything around it. Design methods exclude what's inconvenient and messy; we deal strictly with voltages of 2.2V and 5V in our electronics, whereas the natural world deals with everything. We are transcripts of every force present since the first living cell and before. They can say that there's no apparent link between quantum physics and neurology, but by which field's definition?
This isn't exactly the Easter Bunny. The accurate response is "we haven't found evidence for that", right?
What a daft question. It's like asking does Camembert cheese explain notoriety (for the stupid amongst you, no it doesn't).
I also think he's barking up the wrong tree.
I think that a mathematician could prove that he is (without us having to wait 20 years or more for full general AI. (IANA mathematician).
TL:DR - A mathematical proof that no Finite Quantum agorithm could self-consistently prove all of the truths of arithmetic.
His argument rests on Godel's theorm, and unfounded metaphysical speculation about how stupendously clever mathematicians are.
Godels theorm shows that no Finite algorithm could self-consistently prove all the truths of arithmetic (by a form of diagonal slash). His unfounded metaphysical speculation is that humans could self-consistently prove all of the truths of arithmetic, given infinite time. He "bases" that [speculation] on the fact that we can detect (toy) instances where a mathematical statement is a self referential Godel statement, which leads him to assume that that means we could detect all of them.
I would contend that there are mathematical statements in arithmetic that are so complex and subtle, that you couldn't even write them down using all the atoms of the universe, such a statement could not be could not be understood by a human being, and a human being could not
a) read it in a lifetime.
b) understand it even given infinite time.
c) and therefore wouldn't be able to see that it is a self referential Godel statement.
but I digress.
Penrose, as I said, thinks (unreasonably IMO) that mathematicians are transcendentally clever, and that the magic of quantum mechanics makes them so. To show this is a lost cause all that needs to happen is for a mathematician to rejig Godel's proof for quantum computers...
And don't get me started on his opinion that evolution couldn't explain mathematicians cleverness, sigh...
Consciousness is description of the state where the brain thinks about itself in first person.
This process is the result of the brain building a model about itself.
The brain works by building models of reality (or what the brain perceives of being reality).
One of the models built by the brain is the about brain itself. This allows for consciousness.
So many physicists, journalists, commenters and whatnot keep bringing up this term "logical fallacy".
Hasn't quantum physics pretty successfully showed that logic itself is not logically valid? It is a fact that the entire universe is fundamentally irrational. People have known this since forever, and eventually the scientific method reached the conclusion that people were right. Like the theory of gravity, the entire concept of logic works sufficiently well up to a certain point, but at a fundamental level it clashes completely with how this world is actually arranged.
The "scientific method" doesn't actually tell us anything about the world, it is merely a great way to spend a very, very long time verifying what you originally intuited in an instant, through the link between consciousness and the entirety of existence.
Or to rephrase it for those who don't mind religious terminology in a scientific discussion, nobody can directly cause anyone else's enlightenment, but you can certainly assist an enlightened individual in confirming her enlightenment once she has already reached it.
If consciousnesses requires as high flow of information as quantum level then I'm stumbfound, why the hell we are so stupid?
"Should our freedom just be a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system?"
"I'd rather be a gear... in a big deterministic, physical machine... than just some random swerving."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life
(and if you never heard of this film, shame on you!)
Emergilent Chaotoplexity to me!
I would like to comment on many of the points raised in this thread, but rather than posting multiple times, I present the following in no particular order. /. is alive and well, and that the topic is relevant to /.ers .
a) The number of posts shows that
b) I suggest that we of all people should understand the distinction between platform and process. Surely the brain is the platform, and I would be very surprised if it did not rely on quantum effects for (proper) functioning. The mind is (obviously) the process set running on that platform, and I do not see how one could apply QM to a process.
c) Consciousness , ( aka self awareness or sentience ) would seem to be the equivalent of a process which monitors other processes. One could argue that such a process could in principle initiate / terminate or modify other processes in response to QM effects in the platform, giving rise to "free will" appearing in the output.
d) The real problem in denying free will is that along with the bath water you end up throwing out the baby viz moral responsibility. If you don't have free will, then how do I justify jailing you for "your" crimes.
nec sorte nec fato
It absolutely does explain consciousness if Quantum Theory fixed its theory. Quantum Theory is incomplete and is too high level. Any theory that can't factor in and explain intelligence, consciousness, technology, human biology, reality, geometry, language, sound, snowflakes, nature, time, etc is a primitive theory made by ego filled scientists that don't know how to relate anything. If you can't unify religion with science, then your theory is a joke. Any theory that can't unify other theories is a joke. Any theory that can't unify math with science and religion is a joke. The real theory of everything is already here...you'll see it soon enough.
Consciousness seems to play a role in this, as it seems our measurement of either the momentum or the position of an electron seems to fundamentally change its properties.
Saying that the measurement 'changes' the properties is an interpretation. There is an interesting correlation between the measurement and the change in properties; using terms implying causation is starting to move into the area of interpretation. These different interpretations are philosophically interesting, but it is hard to come up with ways to distinguish them experimentally.
For example, in a many-worlds interpretation, the different particle states 'cause' the multiplicity of conscious states. Or there is even the time-symmetric interpretation, where there is 'retro-causality' as well as 'causality'.
Thoughts are just suppositions of electrons (e.g quantum states), so "real" thoughts can only see "real" objects (just as an "real" election can only see another "real electron"). The truth is that nothing is well defined when you haven't resolved it, memories, vision, sounds are all you use to interact with the world and all are quantum in nature (a.k.a there is no spoon, just many possible quantum spoons)
I think this is the correct angle to look at. The brain works on electro-chemical. This use of two pathways could mimic quantum properties of randomness. Now, our thinking is probably not based on quarks, but what a wonderful discovery if, how solar systems mimic atomic structure, electro-chemical consciousness mimics string theory!
It's an interesting theory in the making. It's an avenue to explore. It is a hypothesis. Designing experiments to prove or disprove this hypothesis will be successful, even if they fail, because it will teach us something more about the mind. If nothing else, it forces us to look at it from a new angle.
For the author of this post to say "Fallacy!" is to give up before trying.
I8-D
..something to say about consciousness. And quantum mechanics
"Consciousness seems to play a role in this, as it seems our measurement of either the momentum or the position of an electron seems to fundamentally change its properties."
This is a terrible misunderstanding of what measurement means, especially in the context of quantum effects caused by measurement.
Let the following thought experiment clarify: Suppose you have three electron measuring devices, named A, B, and C. They differ only in that A is connected to a visible monitor, from which humans can and will read the measurements, B is connected to a hard drive, which will store the measurements for a computer to read and calculate from, and C has neither connection; its measurements will be lost and unknown to machine and man.
If consciousness plays a role as you surmise, we would expect electrons measured by device A to fly straight, while electrons measured by device C to continue to be smeared. Whether or not electrons measured by device B get smeared depends on whether any human bothers to check the output produced by the computer. If you were unsure whether anyone was going to remember to check the calculations based on data from device B, you could check the electrons and they would tell you something about the future.
These expectations are absurd and incorrect. In all three cases, the electrons fly straight.
There are Two kinds of Consciousness :
Primary : It's not what you think. Cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.
Secondary : Is what you think. Is only imaginary. It's all in your head. Only exists if you think it does. Can be about what is real or non-real.
'that we will need to invoke 'new physics and exotic biological structures'"
How does the new physics relate to the old physics and evolution. And given the apparient intelligence in AI systems (and presumably even more signs of intelligence as they evolve) would he need to invoke the ghost in the silicon machine. Or does there need to be something magical about neurons and microtubules and therefore it would be impossible to ever design self aware thinking machines.
--
Zaphod: The Mice want your Brain, they'll replace it with an artificial one with the same memories, no one would notice.
Arthur: I would ..
1. consciousness is mysterious.
2. quantum mechanics is mysterious.
therfore...
3. quantum mechanics has something to do with consciousness.
I probably would not have watched the video if it was posted, but was happy to read the text. That the GP bothered to write out the whole thing indicated to me that he thought it was important. Simply posting a link to a youtube video doesn't tell me that.
We have a very precise mathematical way of framing this question. BPP is the class (like P but with probabilistic correctness) of problems solvable in polynomial time with a bounded probability of error (like probabilistic prime number tests) on a Turing machine. BQP is the analogous class on a quantum computer. Supposedly this mathematical model of a quantum computer has unbounded size so is potentially more powerful than a classical computer with an n-qbit quantum register (for any fixed n). I'm not sure if a bounded qbit quantum machine can effectively approximate an ideal machine since adding more qbits is not as simple as giving a computer more storage half way through (due to entanglement issues). Regardless it is an open question as to the speration of BQP from BPP but both are in NP and both are bigger than P so if P were equal to NP all these classes would be identical.
|There appears to be a very basic logical fallacy here that even the most prominent physicists seem to be making.|
You think?
Complementary to parent post's line of reasoning is that the electrochemistry in the synaptic gaps between neurons involve some activities at distances that are within the range of likely quantum effects. There are also aspects about consciouness at a macro level, such as the nature of the way it re-emerges after anesthesia (involving rather large patterns of sensation and cognition emerging simultaneously) that suggest simultaneous re-establishment of patterns in several distant parts of the brain-- one possible mechanism for this would be some kind of controlled quantum entanglement trigger mechanism.
Bear in mind that what we now know about life in general is that if there is any possible way to exploit any aspect of physics or chemistry, somewhere some organism has done that. It is very likely that the brain mixes quantum computing functions in with its electrical and chemical computing functions. Life does things like that; it does not respect the boundaries we impose on our rational, scientific expressions of thought.
Will
I like Edelman's constructive approach to neuroscience and I completely agree with the parent. However, I have my own (admittedly, not yet scientifically verified) definition of consciousness. I am absolutely convinced that Jeff Hawkins' model of memory-prediction framework is correct, with only one small element missing: a loop (it predicts not only sensory perception, but also it's own prediction of sensory perception, and its prediction of its prediction of sensory perception, etc...). I think the brain solves problems by finding a continuous path from the "problem" to the "solution", and it does so by making the assumption of a hierarchically organized universe, and then making an instantaneous prediction based on its current state. Furthermore, I think Jeoffrey Hinton is headed in the right direction, as far as the basic learning mechanism of the brain. So, to be clear, what I am saying is that the brain is in a constant loop (this can be seen in various patients with brain damage, who perceive everything as "pulsating" or "flashing" because part of their hippocampus is damaged). The loop exists between the hippocampus and the cortex, and the interplay between the two is, essentially, capable of solving any problem in O(log n) time (within its knowledge of the the size n universe) we call "consciousness". It solves problems by essentially "inducing" the solution into exist. This is a mathematical technique which essentially attempts to solve problems by a simple process. First, find the continuum in which a problem exists. Second, find a trivial solution. Third, if the trivial solution cannot be solved, find the continuum in which the trivial solution exists, and recurse. Fourth, induce from the trivial solution to the answer. This is consciousness. I have known this for several years now, and it is painful for me to listen to conversations regarding consciousness as if it were the boogie man, and I very much appreciate the comments of the parent.
Probably some others, but this will do ... pig.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2189#comic
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
Before totally dismissing quantum theory explaining consciousness, read "Quantum Evolution: How Physics' Weirdest Theory Explains Life's Biggest Mystery" (http://goo.gl/I2Tp5) and ponder the implications.
All previous physical theories were highly deterministic. Uncertainty was taken to be solely due to chaotic system's behavior. People who believed in a "free will" philosophy had a problem with this idea that consciousness is merely a state of a system of molecules, where an outcome would be deterministic.
With Quantum mechanics came theories which embed uncertainty into the fundamental forces of nature. This provided the philosophers a physical process to "express" the hypothetical free will.
Of course a physicist will realize that this is just jumping to conclusions, and that the brain is still just a system state of molecules, and that the uncertainty basically translates to some quantum effects and random noise.
...eating a heroic dose of Psilocybin Mushrooms on an empty stomach in silent darkness! :-)
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
The fallacy lies therein that already in your physical explanation assume the "knowledge" (presumably the consciousness of a human) to cause the particle to "take a stand". That's simply a step too far.
I suppose this is due to the unfortunate choice of words: If your lecturer had used the word "interaction" instead of "observation" or "measurement" you would probably have had a different perception.
The only way to measure particles is to interact with them. In this context it would seem far more reasonable to assume that the first particle to interact with the electron caused the collapse of the wave function.
Be fair. I was being brief for the sake of clarity.
A model entails predictive capabilities. An image has no predictive capabilities on its own - you also need a mechanism of prediction. An image doesn't rise to the level of "model" as needed for the definition, and the camera has no capacity to make predictions from the model.
Thus, I would say that even though the camera has a "picture" of it's universe and itself within that universe, it can make no predictions about the information - therefore it's not a model. It also has no sense of itself within that model - the picture contains information of the camera within it, but the camera does not distinguish the information describing itself from the rest of the information.
No, a camera pointed at a mirror is not conscious.
You wrote: Our brains have evolved to exclude randomness as much as possible.
I agree completely, but this rather misses the point. The question is whether or not we have free will.
With no free will, then lots of philosophical questions become moot. Criminals can claim that they had no choice, no one can hope to improve their lot... indeed, the very purpose of life becomes unimportant if the outcome is fixed.
Information passed in from outside is necessary for free will. Whether it is sufficient is another matter, but I think it's interesting (and comforting) to know that a necessary condition is satisfied.
Consciousness seems to play a role in this, as it seems our measurement of either the momentum or the position of an electron seems to fundamentally change its properties. It seems that our knowledge of the particle changes the particle.
No, measurement of the particle changes the particle. It doesn't matter if a conscious entity, an unconscious entity, or a machine makes the measurement. Indeed, any object that is capable of absorbing photons at that wavelength will have the same result. In the original papers describing this phenomenon, the case of an observer making a measurement was merely used as an example of something that could cause waveform collapse.
Check out http://www.electrino.pl/ for more details. Quantum physics is now obsolete.
Those who seem to think they know everything and just cant open their minds to anything other than their own preconceived notions. Whats most laughable is that these are the people who claim to champion the "scientific spirit". Hell they found out that photosynthesis has quantum effects in it, and there are people who refuse to believe the mind could be quantum.
What.A.Joke.
Practically, non-deterministic turing machines are quite a bit more powerful. If you can accept a solution with any level of certainty less than 100%, even if you need 99.99999999% certainty, then non-deterministic turing machines can make a huge number of intractable problems into tractable problems.
You're moving far too quickly here (though in a manner that many physicists do).
Even this can be considered a bit of a jump but lets take it as given for the moment. Adding detectors stops the apparent wave-like behavior of the electron. OK.
Consciousness seems to play a role in this, as it seems our measurement of either the momentum or the position of an electron seems to fundamentally change its properties. It seems that our knowledge of the particle changes the particle. I understand this is difficult to accept. But any alternative explanation must take into account the strange results from experiments such as the one described above. I am not sure where the logical fallacy would lie here.
How did we get to "consciousness"? "our measurement ... seems to fundamentally change its properties" => yes but "our measurement" is a physical process done by devices. When did consciousness become involved?
For consciousness to be involved you'd need a much stronger statement connecting the awareness of the measurement to the resulting physical world, not the measurement itself to the physical world. (by "measurement" here I mean the physical activity of the devices in the experiment)