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Assumption: determinism Counterexample: quantum mechanics

• feet 4y ago
  What, exactly, in quantum mechanics is nondeterministic and how does that translate to nondeterministicness in the macroscopic/biochemical world?
  • dekhn 4y ago
    wavefunction collapse is nondeterministic (at least, that's my simple understanding). There is no known relationship between wavefunction collapse macroscopic biological systems. There are examples of quantum coherence, though.
    • virgildotcodes 4y ago
      It's my understanding that the many worlds interpretation puts us back on track for a fully deterministic universe, no?
      • dekhn 4y ago
        I do not think the many worlds interpretation provides any value. I only care about what is experimentally determinable.
        • feet 4y ago
          100% agree. Theory is nice but meaningless until we have evidence
          • barneygale 4y ago
            Like all interpretations of quantum mechanics, then.
    • feet 4y ago
      My understanding was that we don't have the ability to predict collapse, but that doesn't make it nondeterministic. I could be wrong about this, physics is not my field If there is no connection between wave function collapse and macroscopic biological systems, then that would mean that it doesn't matter. The macroscopic/biochemical world is still deterministic
      • esarbe 4y ago
        There's more than enough evidence that macroscopic biological entities use processes that depend on qm effects. See for example photosynthesis or enzymatic reactions. As I understand it, the wave collapse is wholly probabilistic and there's no "hidden data" (hidden variable[0]) that we could now to predict the outcome. At least not if we want keep expecting locality. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory
        • feet 4y ago
          The level that I understand photosynthesis and enzymatic reactions is that of electron transfer, but I'm not sure how the probabilistic nature of wave collapse impacts that. I would also think its reasonable to assume that we just don't understand wave function collapse in order to be able to predict it. But again, my understanding is at a slightly larger scale
          • tuckerman 4y ago
            While quantum indeterminacy is fairly offensive to most of our experience, and creating a theory which doesn’t have it is definitely possible, the result is a theory with some equally (or perhaps more so) offensive ramifications. Assuming you accomplish this with hidden variables, this theory would by necessity have to have global hidden variables and instantaneous information transfer. I don’t know if this actually impacts this broader discussion, and of course we can always discover new science, but there is a reason quantum indeterminacy is so widely accepted despite the near universal distaste for its existence.
          • 4y ago
• armitron 4y ago
  Assumption: consciousness depends on quantum effects in the brain Counterexample: quantum effects are rare in non-atomic scale, no data whatsoever that indicates they are involved in high level brain functions, rather a lot of data pointing towards the opposite, given rapid progress in modeling said functions.
  • tuckerman 4y ago
    It might not depend on indeterminacy, but a number of “large” effects are themselves the result of an underlying quantum process, e.g. the black body radiation spectrum.
• stale2002 4y ago
  Quantum mechanics isn't a blocker here. Even if you think quantum mechanics are a necessary part of consciousness, we could use quantum mechanics to simulate quantum mechanics.
• katmannthree 4y ago
  Counter-counterexample: Superdeterminism.
• swid 4y ago
  It may not be needed for consciousness, but even if it is, we can simulate quantum mechanics on traditional hardware, just slowly compared to real life. This is why I brought up possible optimizations to the real world. If it takes us 100 years to simulate 1 second of consciousness with quantum effects, the consciousness will just experience time differently than we do. Personally, I think we don’t need to take quantum effects into account to achieve consciousness.