10 ms·

Can consciousness be explained by quantum physics?

31 points by GordonS 5y ago

stared 5y ago
"Quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent." https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
- civilized 5y ago
  If there is a less silly argument that quantum phenomena are somehow essential to consciousness, I haven't heard it. Drive-by downvotes aren't an argument, by the way.
bluepanda928752 5y ago
Consciousness has an easy enough explanation requiring no quantum physics
- teilo 5y ago
  Dunning-Kruger. Consciousness has, as yet, no empirical explanation. Only a variety of theories that, so far, have failed to make any headway in providing an explanation. That's why it's called the "hard problem of consciousness." If you think there is an easy answer, then you do not yet understand the question.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    I think the OP meant that no fancy physics is required for neurons to work, and consciousness is in some not yet known way the result of our brain wiring. Just like you do not need quantum physics to explain how muscles work.
    - seiferteric 5y ago
      Not saying I believe it but I think it is conceivable that the neural networks in our brain are there for certain things like motor function learning, basically like a fancy control system, while the "mysterious quantum stuff" is there for "consciousness". The fact is we can't really define consciousness so we don't know what it takes to make it...
      - mannykannot 5y ago
        The view stated in your last sentence is a commonly-held one, but if we needed complete definitions of something before we could have knowledge of it, I doubt we would ever have come up with the idea of a gravitational field or a wave function. The solid definition of consciousness will follow from our future understanding of how minds work, not be a prerequisite for it.
        seiferteric 5y ago
        > I doubt we would ever have come up with the idea of a gravitational field or a wave function. But that is the opposite of the case here. We came up with those ideas after we had an understanding of the system. With consciousness, people casually use the term all the time and think they have a vague idea of what it is, but we have little understanding of the system. It may be that it simply does not exist for example.
        mannykannot 5y ago
        you have a point - they are not exact analogies - but, as you say, we came up with those ideas after we had an understanding of the system. If we can discover things without having a prior definition of them, then having a vague prior definition should be no obstacle - even if it leads to some initial confusion, clearing that up through the gathering of evidence should be no harder than coming up with a definition for something we previously did not suspect through the gathering of evidence. This is so even if it turns out that the phenomenon does not exist, such as in the case of the mythical causal effects of the four humors.
  - mannykannot 5y ago
    The "Hard Problem" is much more specific - and speculative - than the observation that current theories have made little or no progress (whether they have made any progress remains to be seen, and any claim that they have not is just opinion.) It is the claim that the scientific method cannot, in principle, explain the "what it is like" aspect of experience - that there is some sort of unbridgeable explanatory gap.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > Consciousness has, as yet, no empirical explanation. Because nobody has a definition and when it turns out that computers can fit the definition people will move the goalposts. The hard problem of consciousness is getting a priest to agree to a definition that a scientist can test. Because everything that touches the real world can probably be modelled with distressing accuracy by matrix multiplications and a little non-linearity.
    - mistermann 5y ago
      > Because nobody has a definition That's not the only reason though. > The hard problem of consciousness is getting a priest to agree to a definition that a scientist can test. Scientists are free (assuming free will) to define their own, which I think they (some) actually have.
  - breuleux 5y ago
    > If you think there is an easy answer, then you do not yet understand the question. There is no easy answer that people find satisfactory, but it very well might be that people's intuitive understanding of their own consciousness is incoherent and there are in fact no answers at all that don't violate one or more of the arbitrary axioms that populate the thoughtspace regarding that concept.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    The hard problem of consciousness seems almost entirely made up by people who a priori reject physcalism and reductionism. They generally start by assuming that there is something different between knowing what, say, a color is vs the experience of seeing that color, and deduce from this that qualia exist and have definite meaning. However, if we don't start with such assumptions, it is easy to accept that our attention mechanisms have some way of interpreting the stimuli that they receive, and that similar computational architectures will interpret these stimuli the same way. It is entirely possible that all humans experience pain almost identically, aand that it is even more or less identical to how dogs experience pain; while at the same time, an alien or AGI might experience these things entirely differently. It is also quite obvious that a being without self-reflection, such as a microprocessor, will not have this experience mechanism, almost by definition. With enough study of the computational structure of the brain, we will likely come to even understand the precise advantage that experiences (self-reflection) have. To give just one personal reason why I don't believe in the idea/importance of qualia, I feel very clearly that there are certain mental states that I experience (such as colors and smells etc), but there are also mental states that don't have an associated experience. for example, I don't think there is such a thing as 'the feeling of thinking about the number 277`. This to me suggests strongly that experiences are a specialized part of our computational apparatus, with specific roles that we don't understand precisely now (like so much about our minds), but with limited applicability - not some be-all, end-all of consciousness and thought. I will also note that my position is entirely in line with philosophers like Daniel Dennett, it is not some dismissal of mainstream philosophical thought.
    - teilo 5y ago
      "knowing" and "experiencing" may or may not be different things. I believe they are aspects of the same thing. But equating them does not solve the problem. What does it mean "to know" as opposed to contain, or have access to information? A computer program, in one sense, "knows" what the current value of a variable is. But it has no awareness of its own knowing. There is no doubt that we are creatures of stimuli that is computationally processed in the nervous system. However, there is an ontological difference between the the ability to process stimuli, and the experience of said stimuli. The presumption is that with a sufficiently complex system, the ability to experience stimuli will self-reflective awareness, i.e., consciousness will emerge. But that's a whole lot of hand-waving. What is the mechanism? None is offered. It is only assumed. As others have noted, we cannot even agree on what the term "consciousness" means, and because of this, some would like to posit that consciousness does not actually exist, i.e., that it is illusory. The irony of this conjecture is that they are trying to convince self-aware beings that they are not self-aware. The intent to convince the other is itself a function of self-awareness. Intent cannot exist without self-awareness, and Persuasion of "the other" also cannot exist without self-awareness. Denying a phenomenon does not make it go away. I could just as easily respond to the person making this argument that if, indeed, self-awareness is an illusion, then so is their argument. It is mere data, the product of a series of calculations leading to a linguistic expression that intends to communicate nothing. It is merely the output from an extremely complex set of interlocking algorithms. Despite the difficulty of agreeing to a definition of consciousness, we each, to a person, know what it is because of our own experience. The reason all current attempts to explain consciousness are unsatisfactory is because these attempts contradict our common experience. In fact, every attempt so far denies experience itself. They are unsatisfactory because they are illogical, or because they do not provide any explanation at all, but merely presume that somehow the conclusion is achieved, despite the lack of any mechanism in the proposition that can bring us to that conclusion. If we can even go so far as to agree: "Consciousness is a property of a being that is aware of its own existence, and is able to contemplate its own existence as an entity distinct from its environment," this does not make it any easier to explain how any computational model will arrive at such a property. One does not have to be a theist to acknowledge this. Some of the best minds in consciousness research are atheists.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  Do tell.
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  Would you mind sharing it?
- umvi 5y ago
  Let me guess though, the margin is too small to contain said explanation? (This is a reference to Fermat's Last Theorem in which Fermat confidently proclaimed in a margin of his book that he had a simple elegant proof which the margin was too small to contain)
mikewarot 5y ago
I believe that there may be quantum mechanisms providing the efficient computation substrate that is our brain. They may also lie at the center of how our long term memories are stored. However, I believe that consciousness itself is an emergent phenomenon. I believe you could set up a huge neural net (as much as all computation hardware extant in 2021), give it sensors and servos much like the human body, and AGI would be the result after decades of learning. First it would have to figure out how to hold up it's head, and work with those low resolution cameras that flitter about under servo control. And do all the other things babies do.
- seiferteric 5y ago
  Doesn't that assume the mind is blank slate to start? Don't you think its possible that the human brain has many important and hard won (over millions of years of evolution) hard-wired pieces that a blank slate NN can't easily learn?
  - dmbaggett 5y ago
    Indeed, this possibility is the key underlying assumption of Chomskyan linguistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
  - aaron-santos 5y ago
    "Huge neural nets" as the parent suggested tend to have hardwired architectures but randomly distributed parameters. Whether or not that is analogous to the human brain is anyone's guess and probably more of a philosophical question than a compu-biological one.
    - seiferteric 5y ago
      That is interesting, but just thinking, there are things that humans can do "out of the box" so to speak like face recognition and language acquisition and more.
  - mrbbb 5y ago
mgraczyk 5y ago
Since it's not mentioned in the article, it should be kept in mind that most practicing physicists and neuroscientists consider Penrose's theories of the brain to be philosophy rather than science, and many consider it pseudoscience. It doesn't make practically testable predictions yet, and it doesn't provide additional explanatory power compared to classical (non-quantum) theories of the brain for any existing observations. The research described in this article is similar. Even interpreting it charitably, it has nothing to do with the human brain. The research shows that it may be possible to build quantum devices with certain properties that could have high communication complexity. It doesn't show that human brains have any of these properties or that these properties are in any way necessary to explain consciousness.
- civilized 5y ago
  The "theory" is, essentially, "what if quantum fractal microtubules somehow consciousness". String theory, "not even wrong" as it may be, was at least inspired by an empirically adequate way to explain certain experimental data.
meroes 5y ago
One theorem that gets little discussion is John Conway's Free Will Theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem IF our choices and actions are free, quantum particles' behavior is free in the exact same sense, assuming three postulates, FIN, SPIN, and TWIN. Neither random nor deterministic, but free. I take its lack of being discussed by the usual heavy-hitters in quantum physics as a sign it is not well received, but there is still a lack of discussion for being a theorem developed by Conway and Kochen, both very highly regarded. "Free choice" is so visceral, and it is hard to imagine how experimental outcomes would be determined in heavily contrived ways such as the 9182nd word in a some book chosen by some other contrived way, and so on and so on to choose which spin axis to measure. And all done after the particles are spacelike separated
- breuleux 5y ago
  > Neither random nor deterministic, but free. What does that mean, though? It seems to me that a mixture of randomness and determinism covers all logically possible systems. I don't understand what "free" is supposed to represent at all. The Free Will Theorem is about certain events not being a function of the past, but does it exclude randomness? How does it do that?
  - nahuel0x 5y ago
    That's the crux of it. Free will is an elusive concept who sits over randomness and determinism, being neither of them. We stick to it because it reflects our internal sensation, "I'm choosing this", and because is related to the consciousness/subjective problem ("I feel this"), not mentioning historical baggage.
    - breuleux 5y ago
      Isn't a simpler explanation that we're just... wrong about what we're feeling? My thought about this is that the feeling of free choice that we have stems from a form of irreducible epistemic uncertainty: we can't know what we are going to do before we do it, because our knowledge would influence our action. Furthermore, when choosing between A and B, we may use our self-concept to simulate our choices, meaning that by necessity our self-model is non-deterministic: it indeed performs several different choices during deliberation. I think our error is that we mistake epistemological uncertainty for metaphysical uncertainty, and the non-determinism of our self-model for the non-determinism of our real self.
gaze 5y ago
“We did a transport experiment on some fractal structures and therefore consciousness and quantum mechanics are related.” Come on.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
awinter-py 5y ago
wait so TLDR they printed a sierpinski triangle on a chip and then photons demonstrated quantum behavior? I'm not a physicist or a consciousness researcher, but I'm not sure what the discovery is here. Unless they used fractal patterns to produce quantum effects at macroscales? But the article doesn't say what the scale is, and 'printed on a chip' + 'injected a photon' sounds pretty small.
- mannykannot 5y ago
  The argument is pretty thin, but it seems to go like this: Penrose and Hameroff have speculated that specifically quantum effects (i.e. those for which classical physics does not give a close approximation), arising within supposedly fractal structures of neurons, may be necessary to explain consciousness. The experiment demonstrates some specifically quantum effects in a fractal structure. This, therefore, can be seen as supporting evidence for the Penrose-Hamerof hypothesis, but only for an uncontested part. No advance in understanding consciousness has been made here.
  - awinter-py 5y ago
    but this team hasn't shown any quantum effects in their fractal chip that you wouldn't expect from a normal chip, right? this is analogous to saying that 'all hexagons turn to ice when frozen' and then freezing a hexagon made of water. we already knew that water freezes to ice, we haven't discovered a novel property of hexagons
    - mannykannot 5y ago
      I do not know if this gave results compatible with prior calculations, or whether the size of the setup was too large for calculating an expected outcome, but either way, if they had found something unexpected, I do not know why they would not mention it. All they say in the abstract of the paper is "Our experiment allows the verification of physical laws in a quantitative manner and reveals the transport dynamics in great detail", and to me "verification of physical laws" seems to be the opposite of finding anything unusual. There is value in demonstrating that our suppositions hold, but, by their very nature, such confirmations are unlikely to herald breakthroughs. They do not seem to have demonstrated anything specific to the Penrose - Hamerof hypothesis.
kordlessagain 5y ago
Told y’all so!
Bombthecat 5y ago
Aaaand here we are again. Every few years a story about how quantum physics is releated to our brain..
Deneb58 5y ago
No. However, if you count that protein folding implies quantum effects and brain fuctionning is, as all other parts of life, essentially using proteins, then yes, any living cell is a quantum "computer" linked to a quantum "3D printer". A chinese scientist Liaofu Luo published a study about it, unfortunately far above my comprehension. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262954925_Quantum_theory_on_protein_folding https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262954925_Quantum_t... But as we all know: magic works, because quantum something or whatever ...

31 points by GordonS 5y ago

"Quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent." https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

civilized 5y ago
If there is a less silly argument that quantum phenomena are somehow essential to consciousness, I haven't heard it. Drive-by downvotes aren't an argument, by the way.

bluepanda928752 5y ago

Consciousness has an easy enough explanation requiring no quantum physics

teilo 5y ago
Dunning-Kruger. Consciousness has, as yet, no empirical explanation. Only a variety of theories that, so far, have failed to make any headway in providing an explanation. That's why it's called the "hard problem of consciousness." If you think there is an easy answer, then you do not yet understand the question.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  I think the OP meant that no fancy physics is required for neurons to work, and consciousness is in some not yet known way the result of our brain wiring. Just like you do not need quantum physics to explain how muscles work.
  - seiferteric 5y ago
    Not saying I believe it but I think it is conceivable that the neural networks in our brain are there for certain things like motor function learning, basically like a fancy control system, while the "mysterious quantum stuff" is there for "consciousness". The fact is we can't really define consciousness so we don't know what it takes to make it...
    - mannykannot 5y ago
      The view stated in your last sentence is a commonly-held one, but if we needed complete definitions of something before we could have knowledge of it, I doubt we would ever have come up with the idea of a gravitational field or a wave function. The solid definition of consciousness will follow from our future understanding of how minds work, not be a prerequisite for it.
      - seiferteric 5y ago
        > I doubt we would ever have come up with the idea of a gravitational field or a wave function. But that is the opposite of the case here. We came up with those ideas after we had an understanding of the system. With consciousness, people casually use the term all the time and think they have a vague idea of what it is, but we have little understanding of the system. It may be that it simply does not exist for example.
        mannykannot 5y ago
        you have a point - they are not exact analogies - but, as you say, we came up with those ideas after we had an understanding of the system. If we can discover things without having a prior definition of them, then having a vague prior definition should be no obstacle - even if it leads to some initial confusion, clearing that up through the gathering of evidence should be no harder than coming up with a definition for something we previously did not suspect through the gathering of evidence. This is so even if it turns out that the phenomenon does not exist, such as in the case of the mythical causal effects of the four humors.
- mannykannot 5y ago
  The "Hard Problem" is much more specific - and speculative - than the observation that current theories have made little or no progress (whether they have made any progress remains to be seen, and any claim that they have not is just opinion.) It is the claim that the scientific method cannot, in principle, explain the "what it is like" aspect of experience - that there is some sort of unbridgeable explanatory gap.
- roenxi 5y ago
  > Consciousness has, as yet, no empirical explanation. Because nobody has a definition and when it turns out that computers can fit the definition people will move the goalposts. The hard problem of consciousness is getting a priest to agree to a definition that a scientist can test. Because everything that touches the real world can probably be modelled with distressing accuracy by matrix multiplications and a little non-linearity.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    > Because nobody has a definition That's not the only reason though. > The hard problem of consciousness is getting a priest to agree to a definition that a scientist can test. Scientists are free (assuming free will) to define their own, which I think they (some) actually have.
- breuleux 5y ago
  > If you think there is an easy answer, then you do not yet understand the question. There is no easy answer that people find satisfactory, but it very well might be that people's intuitive understanding of their own consciousness is incoherent and there are in fact no answers at all that don't violate one or more of the arbitrary axioms that populate the thoughtspace regarding that concept.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  The hard problem of consciousness seems almost entirely made up by people who a priori reject physcalism and reductionism. They generally start by assuming that there is something different between knowing what, say, a color is vs the experience of seeing that color, and deduce from this that qualia exist and have definite meaning. However, if we don't start with such assumptions, it is easy to accept that our attention mechanisms have some way of interpreting the stimuli that they receive, and that similar computational architectures will interpret these stimuli the same way. It is entirely possible that all humans experience pain almost identically, aand that it is even more or less identical to how dogs experience pain; while at the same time, an alien or AGI might experience these things entirely differently. It is also quite obvious that a being without self-reflection, such as a microprocessor, will not have this experience mechanism, almost by definition. With enough study of the computational structure of the brain, we will likely come to even understand the precise advantage that experiences (self-reflection) have. To give just one personal reason why I don't believe in the idea/importance of qualia, I feel very clearly that there are certain mental states that I experience (such as colors and smells etc), but there are also mental states that don't have an associated experience. for example, I don't think there is such a thing as 'the feeling of thinking about the number 277`. This to me suggests strongly that experiences are a specialized part of our computational apparatus, with specific roles that we don't understand precisely now (like so much about our minds), but with limited applicability - not some be-all, end-all of consciousness and thought. I will also note that my position is entirely in line with philosophers like Daniel Dennett, it is not some dismissal of mainstream philosophical thought.
  - teilo 5y ago
    "knowing" and "experiencing" may or may not be different things. I believe they are aspects of the same thing. But equating them does not solve the problem. What does it mean "to know" as opposed to contain, or have access to information? A computer program, in one sense, "knows" what the current value of a variable is. But it has no awareness of its own knowing. There is no doubt that we are creatures of stimuli that is computationally processed in the nervous system. However, there is an ontological difference between the the ability to process stimuli, and the experience of said stimuli. The presumption is that with a sufficiently complex system, the ability to experience stimuli will self-reflective awareness, i.e., consciousness will emerge. But that's a whole lot of hand-waving. What is the mechanism? None is offered. It is only assumed. As others have noted, we cannot even agree on what the term "consciousness" means, and because of this, some would like to posit that consciousness does not actually exist, i.e., that it is illusory. The irony of this conjecture is that they are trying to convince self-aware beings that they are not self-aware. The intent to convince the other is itself a function of self-awareness. Intent cannot exist without self-awareness, and Persuasion of "the other" also cannot exist without self-awareness. Denying a phenomenon does not make it go away. I could just as easily respond to the person making this argument that if, indeed, self-awareness is an illusion, then so is their argument. It is mere data, the product of a series of calculations leading to a linguistic expression that intends to communicate nothing. It is merely the output from an extremely complex set of interlocking algorithms. Despite the difficulty of agreeing to a definition of consciousness, we each, to a person, know what it is because of our own experience. The reason all current attempts to explain consciousness are unsatisfactory is because these attempts contradict our common experience. In fact, every attempt so far denies experience itself. They are unsatisfactory because they are illogical, or because they do not provide any explanation at all, but merely presume that somehow the conclusion is achieved, despite the lack of any mechanism in the proposition that can bring us to that conclusion. If we can even go so far as to agree: "Consciousness is a property of a being that is aware of its own existence, and is able to contemplate its own existence as an entity distinct from its environment," this does not make it any easier to explain how any computational model will arrive at such a property. One does not have to be a theist to acknowledge this. Some of the best minds in consciousness research are atheists.
mandmandam 5y ago
Do tell.
squeaky-clean 5y ago
Would you mind sharing it?
umvi 5y ago
Let me guess though, the margin is too small to contain said explanation? (This is a reference to Fermat's Last Theorem in which Fermat confidently proclaimed in a margin of his book that he had a simple elegant proof which the margin was too small to contain)

mikewarot 5y ago

I believe that there may be quantum mechanisms providing the efficient computation substrate that is our brain. They may also lie at the center of how our long term memories are stored. However, I believe that consciousness itself is an emergent phenomenon. I believe you could set up a huge neural net (as much as all computation hardware extant in 2021), give it sensors and servos much like the human body, and AGI would be the result after decades of learning. First it would have to figure out how to hold up it's head, and work with those low resolution cameras that flitter about under servo control. And do all the other things babies do.

seiferteric 5y ago
Doesn't that assume the mind is blank slate to start? Don't you think its possible that the human brain has many important and hard won (over millions of years of evolution) hard-wired pieces that a blank slate NN can't easily learn?
- dmbaggett 5y ago
  Indeed, this possibility is the key underlying assumption of Chomskyan linguistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
- aaron-santos 5y ago
  "Huge neural nets" as the parent suggested tend to have hardwired architectures but randomly distributed parameters. Whether or not that is analogous to the human brain is anyone's guess and probably more of a philosophical question than a compu-biological one.
  - seiferteric 5y ago
    That is interesting, but just thinking, there are things that humans can do "out of the box" so to speak like face recognition and language acquisition and more.
- mrbbb 5y ago

mgraczyk 5y ago

Since it's not mentioned in the article, it should be kept in mind that most practicing physicists and neuroscientists consider Penrose's theories of the brain to be philosophy rather than science, and many consider it pseudoscience. It doesn't make practically testable predictions yet, and it doesn't provide additional explanatory power compared to classical (non-quantum) theories of the brain for any existing observations. The research described in this article is similar. Even interpreting it charitably, it has nothing to do with the human brain. The research shows that it may be possible to build quantum devices with certain properties that could have high communication complexity. It doesn't show that human brains have any of these properties or that these properties are in any way necessary to explain consciousness.

civilized 5y ago
The "theory" is, essentially, "what if quantum fractal microtubules somehow consciousness". String theory, "not even wrong" as it may be, was at least inspired by an empirically adequate way to explain certain experimental data.

meroes 5y ago

One theorem that gets little discussion is John Conway's Free Will Theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem IF our choices and actions are free, quantum particles' behavior is free in the exact same sense, assuming three postulates, FIN, SPIN, and TWIN. Neither random nor deterministic, but free. I take its lack of being discussed by the usual heavy-hitters in quantum physics as a sign it is not well received, but there is still a lack of discussion for being a theorem developed by Conway and Kochen, both very highly regarded. "Free choice" is so visceral, and it is hard to imagine how experimental outcomes would be determined in heavily contrived ways such as the 9182nd word in a some book chosen by some other contrived way, and so on and so on to choose which spin axis to measure. And all done after the particles are spacelike separated

breuleux 5y ago
> Neither random nor deterministic, but free. What does that mean, though? It seems to me that a mixture of randomness and determinism covers all logically possible systems. I don't understand what "free" is supposed to represent at all. The Free Will Theorem is about certain events not being a function of the past, but does it exclude randomness? How does it do that?
- nahuel0x 5y ago
  That's the crux of it. Free will is an elusive concept who sits over randomness and determinism, being neither of them. We stick to it because it reflects our internal sensation, "I'm choosing this", and because is related to the consciousness/subjective problem ("I feel this"), not mentioning historical baggage.
  - breuleux 5y ago
    Isn't a simpler explanation that we're just... wrong about what we're feeling? My thought about this is that the feeling of free choice that we have stems from a form of irreducible epistemic uncertainty: we can't know what we are going to do before we do it, because our knowledge would influence our action. Furthermore, when choosing between A and B, we may use our self-concept to simulate our choices, meaning that by necessity our self-model is non-deterministic: it indeed performs several different choices during deliberation. I think our error is that we mistake epistemological uncertainty for metaphysical uncertainty, and the non-determinism of our self-model for the non-determinism of our real self.

gaze 5y ago

“We did a transport experiment on some fractal structures and therefore consciousness and quantum mechanics are related.” Come on.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

awinter-py 5y ago

wait so TLDR they printed a sierpinski triangle on a chip and then photons demonstrated quantum behavior? I'm not a physicist or a consciousness researcher, but I'm not sure what the discovery is here. Unless they used fractal patterns to produce quantum effects at macroscales? But the article doesn't say what the scale is, and 'printed on a chip' + 'injected a photon' sounds pretty small.

mannykannot 5y ago
The argument is pretty thin, but it seems to go like this: Penrose and Hameroff have speculated that specifically quantum effects (i.e. those for which classical physics does not give a close approximation), arising within supposedly fractal structures of neurons, may be necessary to explain consciousness. The experiment demonstrates some specifically quantum effects in a fractal structure. This, therefore, can be seen as supporting evidence for the Penrose-Hamerof hypothesis, but only for an uncontested part. No advance in understanding consciousness has been made here.
- awinter-py 5y ago
  but this team hasn't shown any quantum effects in their fractal chip that you wouldn't expect from a normal chip, right? this is analogous to saying that 'all hexagons turn to ice when frozen' and then freezing a hexagon made of water. we already knew that water freezes to ice, we haven't discovered a novel property of hexagons
  - mannykannot 5y ago
    I do not know if this gave results compatible with prior calculations, or whether the size of the setup was too large for calculating an expected outcome, but either way, if they had found something unexpected, I do not know why they would not mention it. All they say in the abstract of the paper is "Our experiment allows the verification of physical laws in a quantitative manner and reveals the transport dynamics in great detail", and to me "verification of physical laws" seems to be the opposite of finding anything unusual. There is value in demonstrating that our suppositions hold, but, by their very nature, such confirmations are unlikely to herald breakthroughs. They do not seem to have demonstrated anything specific to the Penrose - Hamerof hypothesis.

kordlessagain 5y ago

Told y’all so!

Bombthecat 5y ago

Aaaand here we are again. Every few years a story about how quantum physics is releated to our brain..

Deneb58 5y ago

No. However, if you count that protein folding implies quantum effects and brain fuctionning is, as all other parts of life, essentially using proteins, then yes, any living cell is a quantum "computer" linked to a quantum "3D printer". A chinese scientist Liaofu Luo published a study about it, unfortunately far above my comprehension. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262954925_Quantum_theory_on_protein_folding https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262954925_Quantum_t... But as we all know: magic works, because quantum something or whatever ...