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Quantum Approaches to Consciousness (2015)

48 points by lainon 9y ago

beloch 9y ago
"The original motivation in the early 20th century for relating quantum theory to consciousness was essentially philosophical. It is fairly plausible that conscious free decisions (“free will”) are problematic in a perfectly deterministic world,[2] so quantum randomness might indeed open up novel possibilities for free will. (On the other hand, randomness is problematic for volition!)" This is an aspect of this debate that utterly fascinates me. Many people reading this have probably heard the argument that free will does not exist because the human brain is just a molecular computer. If we could measure it's state perfectly at a given moment, have knowledge of future inputs, and possess adequate classical computational power, we could perfectly predict the future decisions made by your brain. Hence, you are a deterministic creature with no free will. Quantum processes underlie all classical processes, not unlike how the physics of individual water molecules underlie the behaviour of a river. While individual molecules or even drops of water can do bizarre things, the course of a river is easy to predict. A coin toss or weather patterns may seem random, but they're classical systems that would be utterly predictable if we had a perfect measurement of their current state, knowledge of input from outside the system in question, and the computational resources to work out their future evolution. As with a river, the weather, or a coin toss, quantum weirdness should average out on the scale of a human brain, leaving only classical predictability behind. Or does it? One aspect of this quantum weirdness I'm referring to is truly random behaviour. Single quanta (e.g. photons or atoms) can be manipulated to produce measurements with truly random results that are, according to quantum theory and every experiment conducted to date, impossible to predict, even with perfect knowledge of the system, knowledge of all inputs, and infinite computational resources. Free will and being unpredictable are intrinsically linked. If your brain is just a classical machine behaving according to the laws of chemistry and physics, you are predictable and have no free will. If your brain amplifies the results of quantum outcomes to a macroscopic level, your brain may be inherently unpredictable and thus you may possess free will. Fascinating stuff!
- dghf 9y ago
  > Free will and being unpredictable are intrinsically linked. If your brain is just a classical machine behaving according to the laws of chemistry and physics, you are predictable and have no free will. If your brain amplifies the results of quantum outcomes to a macroscopic level, your brain may be inherently unpredictable and thus you may possess free will. But how do you address the last part of the quote you lead with ("randomness is problematic for volition")? How is your will any more free if it depends on random physical processes rather than deterministic ones?
  - beloch 9y ago
    At some point in the future, I could have a quantum random number generator implanted in my skull and defer many of my decisions to its outcomes. I wouldn't be predictable, but would I have free will? Probably not. How our brains use quantum processes really is the heart of the debate, but we don't even know if they use quantum processes in a way that isn't averaged out at the level of neurons or our entire brain. If our brains do make use of quantum processes in a way that manifests at a macroscopic scale, that alone doesn't guarantee that we have free will, but it does open up that possibility. If our brains are classical, chemical computers, that possibility doesn't even exist.
  - n4r9 9y ago
    Agreed. I would be no more assured that I had free will if you convinced me that there's a truly random factor in my decision making. It seems kind of paradoxical. Either the universe is completely deterministic, in which case my decisions are already set in stone; or there's a truly random element, in which case my decisions might be probabilistic. Neither of these feels like free will. I'm inclined to think of free will as a concept that is only meaningful in the context of higher-order abstractions. It's a facet of our internal monologue and interactions with other people. Asking whether humans fundamentally have free will seems like asking whether computers fundamentally have cursors.
  - rothron 9y ago
    The type of free will people often talk about is the type where if you rewind time to give you a second chance there is a potential for you to chose differently. But whatever decision you want to make will ultimately be a function of your state of mind. How can you will something that isn't a result of your experiences? What else informs your will? The type of counter-causal free will people think they want probably doesn't exist. You have free will, but it is determined. It's a result of physical processes. How we think may be difficult to computationally reduce, so it still might not be predictable. Counter-causal free will would force you to look outside the universe for causes. You get duality. Quantum randomness is not an escape for this.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bcherny 9y ago
I'm currently on the Free Will chapter of Aaronson's Quantum Computing Since Democritus [0], where he treats this question directly in the context of computational complexity theory. Highly recommended to anyone interested in this stuff! [0] https://smile.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-Aaronson/dp/0521199565 https://smile.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-...
stared 9y ago
Beware that in professional physics Rogers Penrose's view on QM and consciousness are not considered mainstream (to put it mildly). I had a great pleasure of talking him in person, and he falls into the Platonic trap. The best antidote is to talk with some actual neurobiologists, or read philosophy of mind (e.g. Daniel Dennett with Consciousness Explained). At the same time I recommend reading "How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival" by David Kaiser (http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/ http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/) - a general reading on the beginnings of quantum information (also, why quantum metaphysics is tempting but does not work); bear in mind it overvalues hippies - this field has also different, Soviet roots - vide Holevo’s theorem. Or even better - start actually interacting with some quantum mechanics, rather than considering it mystical or esoteric. As Griffiths put it in his Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (Chapter 4.4.1, https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToQuantumMechanics_718 https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToQuantumMechanics_7...): "To the layman, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a statement of the form “this particle doesn’t have a well-defined position” [...] sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is none of these." ...an of course, play http://quantumgame.io/ http://quantumgame.io/ :) (a recent submit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432176)
- zeotroph 9y ago
  > Platonic trap. i.e. is a believer in the mind & body dualism, an idea first put forth by Aristotle and Plato, and later famously championed by Descartes. Though the "quantum" variant is not as far out as the "soul" one. However neither are supported by science, but the knowledge gap regarding consciousness is still large enough that something might still hide in it. Though Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle fell into many traps, this is probably the relevant one.
  - stared 9y ago
    Well, once you start believing that mathematical objects (or any other concepts) exist in some abstract sense (rather than are some kind of emergent property of our bodies, minds and social interactions) it's an easy path to get to ridiculous conclusions. (Cf. a very naturalistic vision of science itself by Ludwick Fleck.) Sure, we don't understand consciousness yet (or maybe we never will). Still, it doesn't mean that it is good to fall into some plausible, and comforting, mental trap. Vide Feynman's "I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong".
ebcode 9y ago
Just throwing this apology out here in case anyone from the future might come across it: We were trying our best to figure shit out, but we were so self-centered and enamored with our own brains that we only focused on human consciousness, and didn't give much thought to the consciousness of other species in the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom. There were some of us who thought water itself was conscious, but the idea was too radical a departure from the established, human/brain-centric theories. I, for one, knew that trees and plants were conscious (from both personal experience and books), but in 2017 it would have been impossible to try to convince anyone of that. I didn't have a suitable vocabulary to express my ideas; the majority of scientists were reductionists (/materialists); and basically, the most common reaction would have been "so what if they are?" We weren't going to stop cutting down the forests, even if the trees were conscious. Cutting down trees was part of our patterning, our upbringing, and we hadn't yet learned how to make massive shifts in our collective behavior. As an example of our attitudes towards forests in the U.S.A, "The Forest Service" was housed within the "Department of Agriculture". If we had wanted to protect the forests from ruin, it should have been housed within the "Department of the Interior", whose mission statement started with, "Protecting America's Great Outdoors ..." So, for the sensitive ones among us, the turn of the third millenium in the year of the Lord was a very hard time to be human. And I'm sorry we didn't do better by you.
- szemet 9y ago
  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/
- lawless123 9y ago
  >There were some of us who thought water itself was conscious I really want to try LSD now..
  - CuriouslyC 9y ago
    Absolutely. Going throughout life without a breakthrough psychedelic experience is like going throughout life without having been in love. As for water being conscious, we're 99% water by molecule count, or about 70% by molecular weight, and we're conscious. It seems rather odd to me to think that the main constituent of our bodies wouldn't be taking part in our consciousness. From there it isn't such a far leap to think that there may be something that it is like to "be" water when it isn't part of a human being.
macawfish 9y ago
As it turns out, tools from quantum mechanics just so happen to be very useful in modeling stuff from the human realm, like decision making in surveys, word/concept associations, game theory, and more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition This is mildly controversial to people hung up on classical rationality or uninformed "skeptics", in spite of the fact that the research is pretty mainstream and doesn't make many philosophical assumptions about the 'reality' of quantum theory. There has been a yearly conference called the Quantum Interaction conference where people have presented research using quantum theory outside of physics. I don't know what's up with the 2017 edition, but it's been held for quite a few years. http://www.quantuminteraction.org/ http://www.quantuminteraction.org/
- stared 9y ago
  Well, big controversy is that it uses word "quantum" (to sound it sexy and attractive; any imply, even if implicitly, that mind has anything to do with QM) rather than "linear algebra". And linear algebra is a very powerful framework for describing phenomena (including things related to cognition like word2vec, vide http://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king-man-woman-queen-why.html http://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king-man-woman-queen-why.html). Also: it is the language of Deep Learning.
  - macawfish 9y ago
    The research is more centered around a specific use of Kolmogorov's classical probability theory, which takes context into consideration. This realization has allowed "classical probability theory" to be used in a characteristically "quantum" way, by paying attention to higher dimensional probability distributions, and how "observation" tends to draw these probability distributions through lower dimensional subspaces. Some people doing this research also employ fancier probability theories, but to me it is profound that classical probability theory can be used in the same basic way. So yeah, the research relies on linear algebra, sure, but specifically in the same way quantum theory relies on linear algebra: as a way of projecting probability distributions into different subspaces during measurement ("collapsing the wavefunction").
- deleted 9y ago
scotty79 9y ago
For me the best way to think about consciousness is that it's a function of the brain, one of the organs of the body (that's pretty much a fact as far as we can test it). If some statement seems profound when it refers to consciousness it's best to replace it with another function of another organ, for example digestion. Suddenly "Quantum Approaches to Digestion" and "What happens to your digestion when you die?" sound way less profound.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  >the best way to think about consciousness is that it's a function of the brain, one of the organs of the body (that's pretty much a fact as far as we can test it). Using consciousness to determine the nature of consciousness...how is that not fallacious? Like trying to see if fire burns things by burning fire with fire.
  - scotty79 9y ago
    Using physics to investigate physics. Fallacy!
albertTJames 9y ago
wow, working in the field, i must say this is the best written piece of bs I have ever encountered. "The most discussed counterarguments against the validity of such strong reductionist approaches are qualia arguments, which emphasize the impossibility for materialist accounts to properly incorporate the quality of the subjective experience of a mental state, the “what it is like” (Nagel 1974) to be in that state" If that is the most discussed counterargument you probably could have stopped there, it is not a counter argument at all. The apparent immediateness and reflexive nature of consciousness is in no way proof of its immaterial or "quantic" nature. Consciousness is a seemingly unitary process, a monade, an indivisible phenomena, but it is not. It is partial, biased, composed of continuous unconscious preprocessing steps, of attentional, memory retrieval, reflective post-processing that can be measured, deconstructed, and tempered with through experimentation. Their argument is that a qualia appears to be more than the sum of its parts. All evidences would actually favor the opposite, consciousness, and the information it holds is less than the sum of its part. I will not delve into the details, because I am depressed/frustrated by the fact HN comments disappear so fast in the abyss, and time is precious, but i will give an example. Taking a simple psychophysical GO task, let's say click on a button every time you see a dog in a series of fast pace images appearing on the screen. While performing the task sometime a dog will appear and not produce a conscious recognition nor a motor response, but recording the brain using EEG, you would usually be able on those trial to detect error signals. Those signal appears for rare events of interest -here the dog. Although this error information is present at a subconscious level, and implied already a load of preprocessing steps (proportional of the delay between stimulus and the error signal), it did not reach full consciousness to produce the motor response. A machine then, trained to recognize such error signals on both correct trials and errors of omission will be able to detect the dog, when the human did not, using the signal of the human's brain. This is proof that consciousness is less than the sum of its part, it is using a final filtered hyper relevant representation of your inner and environmental reality. Not to talk about the monadic indivisible view of consciousness which is even more absurd: just look at heminegligence. Functions is lost, but the brain even forgets it had ever access to this function, it forgets it had a left side, that there is a side side in the room. This is not an isolated syndrome, focal neurological deficits are often associated with some degree of negligence of the loss functions. Wernicke's Aphasia for example produce a syndrome in which patient do not realize they are saying or hearing non-sense, what could be there qualia then ? If you believe your consciousness is more that the sum of its part, and monadic, just take an LSD trip and you will see what your brain has in store for you, what it filters out, what it can enhance or produce by itself - but also what is your consciousness then, is it not different above and beyond any information processing? But maybe then you will say LSD molecules are in resonance with a central string of the universe, it is the gateway to the quantic perception ! The brain has nothing to do with qualia, it works at the opposite of what a monade or a qualia is supposed to represent. The brain use distributed computation, distributed representation, multiple neurons for one concept, and each neurons participating in various concepts. Multiple brain regions for a function, and each brain region participating to a function. Conscious experience arise from these distributed networks interaction, make the mental experiment of killing one neuron one by one (leave the pons and medulla alone) and you will not see the qualia disappear abruptly, but you will see part of the experience, part of the function, of what constitute the notion of self first slightly disfunction then progressively disappear at different unpredictable pace with complex interactions between functions. "As a consequence, it is inessential whether a detector or the human brain is ultimately referred to as the “observer”" From a dualistic view arise false premises. The brain is not an observer, you are not observing the state of your brain, or collapsing any function. You are your brain, living in an illusion created by the interaction of systems inside your brain. It is all well packaged with your sense of self, which is an illusion, a function that can be altered: depersonalization, derealization. And I wonder, in their view, which animal nervous networks have access to such quantic wonders? The worm ? the ant ? The squid ? The dog ? The chimp ? Or just us ? You do not need anything but distributed computation to explain everything about the brain. But I guess everybody needs to believe in something, at least he is not teaching creationism, and seems open to debate.
omalleyt 9y ago
Philosophers latched onto the idea of QM in consciousness bc they thought the randomness aspect left room for free will. Of course it doesn't, any more than hooking up an axe over your head that will only drop if a certain atom decays means that you can now choose the time of your death. The point being we don't control the randomness, it evolves according to the laws of QM and therefore there is no role at all for "choice" to play. Also observe that a rock has the same level of access to the underlying randomness of QM and we don't say it has free will. Even if the human brain propagates the randomness upwards to larger systems, there is still no choice in how that is done. Theoretically, it is possible for a rock to exhibit crazy quantum behavior every once in awhile as well. Of course, free will is an inconsistent notion predicated on the idea that there is a "you" separate from "your chemicals" that would do something different if only that dang physics would let it. But separate yourself from your chemicals and you don't get free will, you get literally nothing. People don't realize the implicit dualism in all of this free will stuff
- zeotroph 9y ago
  "There is no free will!" is also used by some radical neurologists to suggest questionable changes to society, some seriously close to human rights abuses. So to counter that other areas of science (or gaps therein) are searched for what seems like free will, but as you said this won't change anything. I think the concept of free will is needed, and not as a necessary lie to hold society together. I think of it as the number of paths open to you and the likelihood of every one. With every decision you will then randomly fall into one (aided by QM or not). So every person can and should be encouraged to cultivate their pathway network, which is what an open society based on discussions and science already does. Yes, all this is not "free will" in the strictest sense and should probably get a hipper name, but this will serve humanity and humanism more than the alternative of what in the end is just fatalism.
  - danbruc 9y ago
    With every decision you will then randomly fall into one (aided by QM or not). »Making a decision« is not a coherent concept. Your actions can either be a function of the current state of the universe or they can be independent of the current state of the universe, they can be either deterministic or random. Or some combination of the two. »Making a decision«, at least that is the way I understand it, means choosing one of several different possible actions and this choice is neither random nor determined by the current state of the universe. As far as I can tell such a thing can not exist, random means not a function of the current state, a function of the current state means not random, there is no room for a third option. And if you think carefully about it, you will notice that »making a decisions« really makes no sense despite the fact that we use the phrase all the time. Just think a bit about a thing that is neither a function of the current state nor random, it just makes no sense. If it existence, then we are currently missing something extremely fundamental about the world. So every person can and should be encouraged to cultivate their pathway network, which is what an open society based on discussions and science already does. We will probably do this but it is fundamentally an illusion without free will and as I just said I am pretty certain it is. Without free will things like encouraging people are meaningless, things just happen, whether deterministically or randomly. I am as stuck as everyone else with the belief that I can make decisions and go down one path or another, but it is an illusion. We will probably keep talking as it were not for the foreseeable future, we will encourage people to do this or that, we will decide to do one thing instead of a different thing, we will be happy or disappointed or angry that someone decided to a specific thing. We will continue to ignore that all this is not in my or your or anyone's control. Not that we could change it, outside of our control, too.
WhitneyLand 9y ago
Would it be difficult to to use this start a religious cult? Something like: 1) Lead with content that for some people mixes science and spirituality: Quantum Approaches to Consciousness 2) Add context using sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism 3) Add self-serving message (give me your money, I am the messiah, etc) 2) Coup de grâce: Hold up domain from an institution of high reputation: stanford.edu
mcbruiser3 9y ago
the universe is deterministic. it might not seem like that because of the massive scale, but it is therefore free will is an illusion

48 points by lainon 9y ago

"The original motivation in the early 20th century for relating quantum theory to consciousness was essentially philosophical. It is fairly plausible that conscious free decisions (“free will”) are problematic in a perfectly deterministic world,[2] so quantum randomness might indeed open up novel possibilities for free will. (On the other hand, randomness is problematic for volition!)" This is an aspect of this debate that utterly fascinates me. Many people reading this have probably heard the argument that free will does not exist because the human brain is just a molecular computer. If we could measure it's state perfectly at a given moment, have knowledge of future inputs, and possess adequate classical computational power, we could perfectly predict the future decisions made by your brain. Hence, you are a deterministic creature with no free will. Quantum processes underlie all classical processes, not unlike how the physics of individual water molecules underlie the behaviour of a river. While individual molecules or even drops of water can do bizarre things, the course of a river is easy to predict. A coin toss or weather patterns may seem random, but they're classical systems that would be utterly predictable if we had a perfect measurement of their current state, knowledge of input from outside the system in question, and the computational resources to work out their future evolution. As with a river, the weather, or a coin toss, quantum weirdness should average out on the scale of a human brain, leaving only classical predictability behind. Or does it? One aspect of this quantum weirdness I'm referring to is truly random behaviour. Single quanta (e.g. photons or atoms) can be manipulated to produce measurements with truly random results that are, according to quantum theory and every experiment conducted to date, impossible to predict, even with perfect knowledge of the system, knowledge of all inputs, and infinite computational resources. Free will and being unpredictable are intrinsically linked. If your brain is just a classical machine behaving according to the laws of chemistry and physics, you are predictable and have no free will. If your brain amplifies the results of quantum outcomes to a macroscopic level, your brain may be inherently unpredictable and thus you may possess free will. Fascinating stuff!

dghf 9y ago
> Free will and being unpredictable are intrinsically linked. If your brain is just a classical machine behaving according to the laws of chemistry and physics, you are predictable and have no free will. If your brain amplifies the results of quantum outcomes to a macroscopic level, your brain may be inherently unpredictable and thus you may possess free will. But how do you address the last part of the quote you lead with ("randomness is problematic for volition")? How is your will any more free if it depends on random physical processes rather than deterministic ones?
- beloch 9y ago
  At some point in the future, I could have a quantum random number generator implanted in my skull and defer many of my decisions to its outcomes. I wouldn't be predictable, but would I have free will? Probably not. How our brains use quantum processes really is the heart of the debate, but we don't even know if they use quantum processes in a way that isn't averaged out at the level of neurons or our entire brain. If our brains do make use of quantum processes in a way that manifests at a macroscopic scale, that alone doesn't guarantee that we have free will, but it does open up that possibility. If our brains are classical, chemical computers, that possibility doesn't even exist.
- n4r9 9y ago
  Agreed. I would be no more assured that I had free will if you convinced me that there's a truly random factor in my decision making. It seems kind of paradoxical. Either the universe is completely deterministic, in which case my decisions are already set in stone; or there's a truly random element, in which case my decisions might be probabilistic. Neither of these feels like free will. I'm inclined to think of free will as a concept that is only meaningful in the context of higher-order abstractions. It's a facet of our internal monologue and interactions with other people. Asking whether humans fundamentally have free will seems like asking whether computers fundamentally have cursors.
- rothron 9y ago
  The type of free will people often talk about is the type where if you rewind time to give you a second chance there is a potential for you to chose differently. But whatever decision you want to make will ultimately be a function of your state of mind. How can you will something that isn't a result of your experiences? What else informs your will? The type of counter-causal free will people think they want probably doesn't exist. You have free will, but it is determined. It's a result of physical processes. How we think may be difficult to computationally reduce, so it still might not be predictable. Counter-causal free will would force you to look outside the universe for causes. You get duality. Quantum randomness is not an escape for this.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bcherny 9y ago

I'm currently on the Free Will chapter of Aaronson's Quantum Computing Since Democritus [0], where he treats this question directly in the context of computational complexity theory. Highly recommended to anyone interested in this stuff! [0] https://smile.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-Aaronson/dp/0521199565 https://smile.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-...

stared 9y ago

Beware that in professional physics Rogers Penrose's view on QM and consciousness are not considered mainstream (to put it mildly). I had a great pleasure of talking him in person, and he falls into the Platonic trap. The best antidote is to talk with some actual neurobiologists, or read philosophy of mind (e.g. Daniel Dennett with Consciousness Explained). At the same time I recommend reading "How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival" by David Kaiser (http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/ http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/) - a general reading on the beginnings of quantum information (also, why quantum metaphysics is tempting but does not work); bear in mind it overvalues hippies - this field has also different, Soviet roots - vide Holevo’s theorem. Or even better - start actually interacting with some quantum mechanics, rather than considering it mystical or esoteric. As Griffiths put it in his Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (Chapter 4.4.1, https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToQuantumMechanics_718 https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToQuantumMechanics_7...): "To the layman, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a statement of the form “this particle doesn’t have a well-defined position” [...] sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is none of these." ...an of course, play http://quantumgame.io/ http://quantumgame.io/ :) (a recent submit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432176)

zeotroph 9y ago
> Platonic trap. i.e. is a believer in the mind & body dualism, an idea first put forth by Aristotle and Plato, and later famously championed by Descartes. Though the "quantum" variant is not as far out as the "soul" one. However neither are supported by science, but the knowledge gap regarding consciousness is still large enough that something might still hide in it. Though Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle fell into many traps, this is probably the relevant one.
- stared 9y ago
  Well, once you start believing that mathematical objects (or any other concepts) exist in some abstract sense (rather than are some kind of emergent property of our bodies, minds and social interactions) it's an easy path to get to ridiculous conclusions. (Cf. a very naturalistic vision of science itself by Ludwick Fleck.) Sure, we don't understand consciousness yet (or maybe we never will). Still, it doesn't mean that it is good to fall into some plausible, and comforting, mental trap. Vide Feynman's "I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong".

ebcode 9y ago

Just throwing this apology out here in case anyone from the future might come across it: We were trying our best to figure shit out, but we were so self-centered and enamored with our own brains that we only focused on human consciousness, and didn't give much thought to the consciousness of other species in the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom. There were some of us who thought water itself was conscious, but the idea was too radical a departure from the established, human/brain-centric theories. I, for one, knew that trees and plants were conscious (from both personal experience and books), but in 2017 it would have been impossible to try to convince anyone of that. I didn't have a suitable vocabulary to express my ideas; the majority of scientists were reductionists (/materialists); and basically, the most common reaction would have been "so what if they are?" We weren't going to stop cutting down the forests, even if the trees were conscious. Cutting down trees was part of our patterning, our upbringing, and we hadn't yet learned how to make massive shifts in our collective behavior. As an example of our attitudes towards forests in the U.S.A, "The Forest Service" was housed within the "Department of Agriculture". If we had wanted to protect the forests from ruin, it should have been housed within the "Department of the Interior", whose mission statement started with, "Protecting America's Great Outdoors ..." So, for the sensitive ones among us, the turn of the third millenium in the year of the Lord was a very hard time to be human. And I'm sorry we didn't do better by you.

szemet 9y ago
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/
lawless123 9y ago
>There were some of us who thought water itself was conscious I really want to try LSD now..
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  Absolutely. Going throughout life without a breakthrough psychedelic experience is like going throughout life without having been in love. As for water being conscious, we're 99% water by molecule count, or about 70% by molecular weight, and we're conscious. It seems rather odd to me to think that the main constituent of our bodies wouldn't be taking part in our consciousness. From there it isn't such a far leap to think that there may be something that it is like to "be" water when it isn't part of a human being.

macawfish 9y ago

As it turns out, tools from quantum mechanics just so happen to be very useful in modeling stuff from the human realm, like decision making in surveys, word/concept associations, game theory, and more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition This is mildly controversial to people hung up on classical rationality or uninformed "skeptics", in spite of the fact that the research is pretty mainstream and doesn't make many philosophical assumptions about the 'reality' of quantum theory. There has been a yearly conference called the Quantum Interaction conference where people have presented research using quantum theory outside of physics. I don't know what's up with the 2017 edition, but it's been held for quite a few years. http://www.quantuminteraction.org/ http://www.quantuminteraction.org/

stared 9y ago
Well, big controversy is that it uses word "quantum" (to sound it sexy and attractive; any imply, even if implicitly, that mind has anything to do with QM) rather than "linear algebra". And linear algebra is a very powerful framework for describing phenomena (including things related to cognition like word2vec, vide http://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king-man-woman-queen-why.html http://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king-man-woman-queen-why.html). Also: it is the language of Deep Learning.
- macawfish 9y ago
  The research is more centered around a specific use of Kolmogorov's classical probability theory, which takes context into consideration. This realization has allowed "classical probability theory" to be used in a characteristically "quantum" way, by paying attention to higher dimensional probability distributions, and how "observation" tends to draw these probability distributions through lower dimensional subspaces. Some people doing this research also employ fancier probability theories, but to me it is profound that classical probability theory can be used in the same basic way. So yeah, the research relies on linear algebra, sure, but specifically in the same way quantum theory relies on linear algebra: as a way of projecting probability distributions into different subspaces during measurement ("collapsing the wavefunction").
deleted 9y ago

scotty79 9y ago

For me the best way to think about consciousness is that it's a function of the brain, one of the organs of the body (that's pretty much a fact as far as we can test it). If some statement seems profound when it refers to consciousness it's best to replace it with another function of another organ, for example digestion. Suddenly "Quantum Approaches to Digestion" and "What happens to your digestion when you die?" sound way less profound.

deleted 9y ago
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wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>the best way to think about consciousness is that it's a function of the brain, one of the organs of the body (that's pretty much a fact as far as we can test it). Using consciousness to determine the nature of consciousness...how is that not fallacious? Like trying to see if fire burns things by burning fire with fire.
- scotty79 9y ago
  Using physics to investigate physics. Fallacy!

albertTJames 9y ago

wow, working in the field, i must say this is the best written piece of bs I have ever encountered. "The most discussed counterarguments against the validity of such strong reductionist approaches are qualia arguments, which emphasize the impossibility for materialist accounts to properly incorporate the quality of the subjective experience of a mental state, the “what it is like” (Nagel 1974) to be in that state" If that is the most discussed counterargument you probably could have stopped there, it is not a counter argument at all. The apparent immediateness and reflexive nature of consciousness is in no way proof of its immaterial or "quantic" nature. Consciousness is a seemingly unitary process, a monade, an indivisible phenomena, but it is not. It is partial, biased, composed of continuous unconscious preprocessing steps, of attentional, memory retrieval, reflective post-processing that can be measured, deconstructed, and tempered with through experimentation. Their argument is that a qualia appears to be more than the sum of its parts. All evidences would actually favor the opposite, consciousness, and the information it holds is less than the sum of its part. I will not delve into the details, because I am depressed/frustrated by the fact HN comments disappear so fast in the abyss, and time is precious, but i will give an example. Taking a simple psychophysical GO task, let's say click on a button every time you see a dog in a series of fast pace images appearing on the screen. While performing the task sometime a dog will appear and not produce a conscious recognition nor a motor response, but recording the brain using EEG, you would usually be able on those trial to detect error signals. Those signal appears for rare events of interest -here the dog. Although this error information is present at a subconscious level, and implied already a load of preprocessing steps (proportional of the delay between stimulus and the error signal), it did not reach full consciousness to produce the motor response. A machine then, trained to recognize such error signals on both correct trials and errors of omission will be able to detect the dog, when the human did not, using the signal of the human's brain. This is proof that consciousness is less than the sum of its part, it is using a final filtered hyper relevant representation of your inner and environmental reality. Not to talk about the monadic indivisible view of consciousness which is even more absurd: just look at heminegligence. Functions is lost, but the brain even forgets it had ever access to this function, it forgets it had a left side, that there is a side side in the room. This is not an isolated syndrome, focal neurological deficits are often associated with some degree of negligence of the loss functions. Wernicke's Aphasia for example produce a syndrome in which patient do not realize they are saying or hearing non-sense, what could be there qualia then ? If you believe your consciousness is more that the sum of its part, and monadic, just take an LSD trip and you will see what your brain has in store for you, what it filters out, what it can enhance or produce by itself - but also what is your consciousness then, is it not different above and beyond any information processing? But maybe then you will say LSD molecules are in resonance with a central string of the universe, it is the gateway to the quantic perception ! The brain has nothing to do with qualia, it works at the opposite of what a monade or a qualia is supposed to represent. The brain use distributed computation, distributed representation, multiple neurons for one concept, and each neurons participating in various concepts. Multiple brain regions for a function, and each brain region participating to a function. Conscious experience arise from these distributed networks interaction, make the mental experiment of killing one neuron one by one (leave the pons and medulla alone) and you will not see the qualia disappear abruptly, but you will see part of the experience, part of the function, of what constitute the notion of self first slightly disfunction then progressively disappear at different unpredictable pace with complex interactions between functions. "As a consequence, it is inessential whether a detector or the human brain is ultimately referred to as the “observer”" From a dualistic view arise false premises. The brain is not an observer, you are not observing the state of your brain, or collapsing any function. You are your brain, living in an illusion created by the interaction of systems inside your brain. It is all well packaged with your sense of self, which is an illusion, a function that can be altered: depersonalization, derealization. And I wonder, in their view, which animal nervous networks have access to such quantic wonders? The worm ? the ant ? The squid ? The dog ? The chimp ? Or just us ? You do not need anything but distributed computation to explain everything about the brain. But I guess everybody needs to believe in something, at least he is not teaching creationism, and seems open to debate.

omalleyt 9y ago

Philosophers latched onto the idea of QM in consciousness bc they thought the randomness aspect left room for free will. Of course it doesn't, any more than hooking up an axe over your head that will only drop if a certain atom decays means that you can now choose the time of your death. The point being we don't control the randomness, it evolves according to the laws of QM and therefore there is no role at all for "choice" to play. Also observe that a rock has the same level of access to the underlying randomness of QM and we don't say it has free will. Even if the human brain propagates the randomness upwards to larger systems, there is still no choice in how that is done. Theoretically, it is possible for a rock to exhibit crazy quantum behavior every once in awhile as well. Of course, free will is an inconsistent notion predicated on the idea that there is a "you" separate from "your chemicals" that would do something different if only that dang physics would let it. But separate yourself from your chemicals and you don't get free will, you get literally nothing. People don't realize the implicit dualism in all of this free will stuff

zeotroph 9y ago
"There is no free will!" is also used by some radical neurologists to suggest questionable changes to society, some seriously close to human rights abuses. So to counter that other areas of science (or gaps therein) are searched for what seems like free will, but as you said this won't change anything. I think the concept of free will is needed, and not as a necessary lie to hold society together. I think of it as the number of paths open to you and the likelihood of every one. With every decision you will then randomly fall into one (aided by QM or not). So every person can and should be encouraged to cultivate their pathway network, which is what an open society based on discussions and science already does. Yes, all this is not "free will" in the strictest sense and should probably get a hipper name, but this will serve humanity and humanism more than the alternative of what in the end is just fatalism.
- danbruc 9y ago
  With every decision you will then randomly fall into one (aided by QM or not). »Making a decision« is not a coherent concept. Your actions can either be a function of the current state of the universe or they can be independent of the current state of the universe, they can be either deterministic or random. Or some combination of the two. »Making a decision«, at least that is the way I understand it, means choosing one of several different possible actions and this choice is neither random nor determined by the current state of the universe. As far as I can tell such a thing can not exist, random means not a function of the current state, a function of the current state means not random, there is no room for a third option. And if you think carefully about it, you will notice that »making a decisions« really makes no sense despite the fact that we use the phrase all the time. Just think a bit about a thing that is neither a function of the current state nor random, it just makes no sense. If it existence, then we are currently missing something extremely fundamental about the world. So every person can and should be encouraged to cultivate their pathway network, which is what an open society based on discussions and science already does. We will probably do this but it is fundamentally an illusion without free will and as I just said I am pretty certain it is. Without free will things like encouraging people are meaningless, things just happen, whether deterministically or randomly. I am as stuck as everyone else with the belief that I can make decisions and go down one path or another, but it is an illusion. We will probably keep talking as it were not for the foreseeable future, we will encourage people to do this or that, we will decide to do one thing instead of a different thing, we will be happy or disappointed or angry that someone decided to a specific thing. We will continue to ignore that all this is not in my or your or anyone's control. Not that we could change it, outside of our control, too.

WhitneyLand 9y ago

Would it be difficult to to use this start a religious cult? Something like: 1) Lead with content that for some people mixes science and spirituality: Quantum Approaches to Consciousness 2) Add context using sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism 3) Add self-serving message (give me your money, I am the messiah, etc) 2) Coup de grâce: Hold up domain from an institution of high reputation: stanford.edu

mcbruiser3 9y ago

the universe is deterministic. it might not seem like that because of the massive scale, but it is therefore free will is an illusion