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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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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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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.
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
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.
You're playing pointless, autofellating wordgames.
So, uh, keep up the good job with your philosophy courses!
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/
Ok, can someone explain to me how consciousness is represented mathematically? I'm not aware of any theorem that proves you can't have consciousness on higher scales unless it occurs at the quantum level. Mostly because consciousness is usually dealt with as an abstract topic.
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.
If a a man disagrees in the forest, where his wife cannot hear him, is he still wrong?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If we don't experiment and look we wont find out whether or not new physics are involved.
Sarah said she was locked up in the madhouse and we were all a delusion. When they came to lock her up, she said "Oh not this again. Now I'm in five deep."
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Maybe...but we can't say with any certainty.
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.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Empathy is easily explained by the noting (both conscious and subconscious) of the physical emotional cues of the other party. Or, if you're talking about ESP empathy, then you first need to demonstrate that there's something that needs to be explained; despite many attempts, this has not been done yet.
Sarah is apparently a slow learner. After the third or fourth recursion, I would've figured out to keep my mouth shut.
This would mean that quantum theory is a relevant consideration for all processes in the universe. The fact is that quantum theory generally only applies on the atomic and sub-atomic scales. When trying to understand more advanced systems you rely on the highest level abstraction which provides an understanding of the function. In neuroscience this is the neuron, which, if the neuron doctrine holds, means that the neuron is the lowest level abstraction in the central nervous system which processes information, it would only be necessary to look to a deeper explanation should it not be possible to understand why and how a neuron works using biological and higher-level chemical principles. (This isn't my area of expertise, Bugpowda might be able to explain in more detail)
Furthermore, the only thing that quantum theory could provide as part of the explanation of consciousness is a source of randomness. And it's obvious to anyone who observes the world around us, there are many sources of apparent randomness in the macroscopic world. You can't accurately predict the outcome of dice rolls, this isn't an issue of quantum theory, it's just that the difficulty of calculating all the variables. In this same way the randomness of human consciousness can easily be assumed to be the result of an inability to calculate all the variables that go into the brains internal processing, which are astronomically more then in the roll of a die.
"Observer" has nothing to do with a conscious human observer, but just refers to whatever tool or technique you use to measure a physical effect. At large scale you can shine a light on an object and observe it by the photons are reflected without problem, if you want to observe a single atom on the other side by shooting photons at it, the photons will have an effect on the atom.
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)
I have to wonder what you consider to be "free will" that it may be caused by some particle. Do you see that in a deterministic, i.e. no free will, scenario you drink that cup of coffee because that was the inevitable action, but then some free will particle comes along and ZAP! you are drinking that cup of coffee because you "decided to"?
If the universe is deterministic then there is no free will. If it is not deterministic then it is random and there is no free will. Free will as it is usually thought of would require a physics that was neither random nor deterministic.
However it could be random in a sufficiently complex way so as to falsely appear that we have free will. Or was I destined to think that? Hmmmm....
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
"And as the great Deepak Chopra taught us, quantum physics means that anything can happen at any time for no reason."
-Prof. Farnsworth
That is the point. Only the observable universe exists.
Citation needed. It might appear that only the observable universe exists, but that may not be the case, unless you want to get into semantics regarding "exists". I would be hesitant to say with 100% certainty that there is only one universe. How would that be possible for anyone to know? What's to prevent other, separate universes from existing, both ones with and ones without conscious observers within them?
No observers would mean no universe because there wouldn't be a thing in it to perceive of itself. This means either our current universe is conscious, or our current universe is an illusion. And I don't think both these theories can be right.
While you might think both these theories can't be right, there are millions of Hindus who think exactly the opposite, in the concept of "maya".
So if it's an illusion, then consciousness is not real, when you look into the mirror thats not real, and nothing you observe or experience can ever be said to be with 100% certainty the real universe. Because in the universe typically you are going to see yourself as the most real thing in it, and if your consciousness is fake or illusion, then how would you jump to conclude that all these particles and other stuff you observe is anything more than information at best?
One can take another tack and look at Buddhism, which doesn't necessarily consider the everyday experience as illusion, only that what you consider "real" is not the only permanent reality. More accurately, the illusion is that you (your consciousness) and the universe are distinct entities. It's like each drop of seawater proclaiming, "There's the ocean, and then there is me."
Will implies control. You do understand that if it is random then there is no such thing as free will, right?
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Classical physics describes a mechanical universe in which everything is fully pre-determined, such that conscious awareness of things can make no difference at all in outcomes and actions. As such, there would be no basis for consciousness to be selected for by evolution. As such, there would be no reason to expect consciousness to be part of biological creatures.
Therefore either classical physics suffices, and we have no free will, and possibly aren't even really conscious, in fact most likely aren't ... or else classical physics is only a crude approximation of the universe quantum physics describes. At a minimum, quantum physics describes a universe which is not deterministic. There are some who argue that it nonetheless only introduces chance, still leaving no reason for biology to include consciousness, or method for consciousness to alter the course of ones life.
But there are others who argue that quantum physics at least opens the door to a true explanation of consciousness. And if you're satisfied that there's an explanation for consciousness in a universe in which it could not, literally, have evolved, because it provides no advantage to select for since every motion of matter is predetermined independently of it, well, good luck getting through life. Because to live like that would be to be clinically insane. And some of us perceive that would have dire consequence. If it does, if we're right, then classical physics is insufficient for explanation of consciousness, so we move to the next available candidate, quantum physics. Or the successor thereof at which Penrose points.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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
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
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
Is it true that this interpretation (which I am told is the most accepted), requires the presence of consciousness?
No, its just a very common misinterpretation. An observer in quantum mechanics is essentially everything that interacts with a particle. So if two particles collide, one of them is an observer. It has nothing to do with consciousness.
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
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
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'.