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Okay, so, let me try to enumerate these. (1) The hardest part of quantum mechanics to understand is intimately tied to our nature as subjects. Quantum mechanic

by drostie 15y ago

Okay, so, let me try to enumerate these. (1) The hardest part of quantum mechanics to understand is intimately tied to our nature as subjects. Quantum mechanics is an entirely deterministic theory about waves in superpositions which even explains how, why, and when it disappears and averages out into classical probabilities. Except it doesn't tell you why we don't see your television as 50% in your bedroom and 50% in your living room. For that we start to invent things like many universes, half of which have a TV in your bedroom and half of which have a TV in your living room -- or Penrose's idea that perhaps some magical interaction not yet observed forces something as large as a TV to "make up its mind" due to its gravitational warpings. It's just the fact that your subjective experience doesn't see this TV as half in one place, and half in another, where the wavefunction description fails. The rest is clean, deterministic, and precise. (2) The second hardest part of consciousness to understand is something we basically take for granted in the hardest part of quantum mechanics. Compatibilist theories of free will make you feel warm and fuzzy but they don't really feel like they address the fundamental mystery: How can a deterministic system be said to "choose" something when that's a fuzzy airy-fairy notion and the actual outcome was written down in the book of history 13.7 billion years ago, full stop? Why do we feel like we've got a million options open when in fact this is false, false, utterly false, moronically-out-of-touch-with-reality crazy false? But in quantum mechanics, the idea that a quantum system has many options open, and can even "sniff around" over the whole space, and that it might make a difference if it does or not -- these things are very acceptable even if you take a deterministic approach to wavefunction collapse. You could maybe in principle go from "warm and fuzzy but I don't get it" to "weird and fuzzy but I think I get it," if the brain is intrinsically quantum. (3) The hardest problem of consciousness -- how we reconcile our touchy-feely alive experience of red with a machine's cold unemotional ones and zeros -- is very easy to solve by saying "we aren't a machine; subjectivity is something more than a program." In fact, since programs can carry out programs, if consciousness is mechanical we might well ask, how do you know that your brain isn't a different conscious process which happens to be carrying out your own conscious process, and might someday soon get bored and kill you out of its own boredom and desire to live authentically? (This absurdity is also at the heart of Searle's Chinese Rooom argument.) The problem is that machines are such a good model that we have no idea what to replace them with. If quantum systems could really feel in a way that machines really can't, this would solve the problem neatly. (4) One minor problem in consciousness is about how I'm able to hear things as I am seeing them -- multithreading would suggest that we have multiple consciousnesses doing the separate tasks separately; multitasking would suggest that we switch between these things so fast that it gives an illusion that they all come together, but I can't really do both at once. Quantum mechanics offers a tantalizing hint; for example, in a superconductor, two electrons of opposite momentum "get together" to form a larger particle called a Cooper pair. (You're advised not to think too hard about how they "stay together" with opposite momenta, because It's All Just An Excitation Anyways.) That larger particle can even do something which electrons never can -- it can form a Bose-Einstein condensate: it can conduct current without resistance. (5) Everybody who watches Star Trek wonders what would happen if someone accidentally forgot to dematerialize you before re-materializing you down on the planet -- which one would be the right "you"? Quantum systems cannot be cloned in this way. The closest we can get is to identically prepare a system -- i.e. take another baby with the same genetic code and give it all of the same life experiences, and kill the ones who don't make the same choices in the same order. Without one of those, you can't clone an arbitrary unknown system into two copies without measuring it and thus forcing it into a classical state. If consciousness is quantum, then the classical state is dead. But if consciousness is just a program, then we're faced with a much scarier situation: in the transporter, you will actually die, but that's okay, because we'll create an impostor who will sleep with your wife for you -- in other words, it's okay because we'll never know the difference, and you'll be dead.

polynomial 14y ago
> If quantum systems could really feel in a way that machines really can't, this would solve the problem neatly. Late to the party, but pretty sure that's the situation we're in.
hej 15y ago
Satire, right?
- batista 15y ago
  Useless comment, right? What part looks like satire to you? They are all pretty standard philosophical arguments, re Searl, Penrose et al.
  - hej 15y ago
    It's confused bullshit. The rest doesn't matter.
    - batista 14y ago
      Citation needed.
klodolph 15y ago
I'm not sure whether you're being satirical or whether you're explaining viewpoints other people or whether you're representing your own opinion. In response, (1) It's deterministic w.r.t. the wave functions, but you can't really measure wave functions, you can only measure classical things like momentum or energy. (A measurement is actually an interaction, of course.) If you manage to give your TV a wave function 50% in the bedroom and 50% in the living room, then you decide to watch TV, you've just given yourself a wave function that is 50% in the bedroom and 50% in the living room, and 100% correlated with the TV's wave function. A wave function can't be measured because if you try to measure it, all you're really doing is correlating yourself with the wave function. So the real problem is that it's hard to reconcile our description of quantum mechanics with our experience of it. We describe QM as if we're outside Schroedinger's box, but we experience it from the inside. "Many worlds" describes it from the inside, but people don't like the many worlds interpretation exactly because it doesn't privilege one of the worlds as "real". (2 & 3) Theories of free will were kind of worn out during the 17th century. Associating free will with quantum mechanics is kind of like shoving the Christian god into the cracks in evolutionary theory. There's little actual evidence that the brain takes advantage of QM decoherence on any scale worth appreciating. QM consciousness theories seem to have forgotten all of the progress during the age of enlightenment (David Hume, for example) wrt the definition of free will itself, and the phrasing of questions about free will in such a way that the discussion can be productive. The discussion about "qualia" in philosophical circles is equally unproductive. They call it "qualia" because they don't want to be called dualists, which is understandable. (4) I'm not sure how this has anything to do with QM. The fact that our brain can do to things at once (which it demonstrably can) doesn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics. A car can do things that engines or wheels never can, but you'd never call it quantum. (5) QM provides an "out" for objects which are cloned in the classical sense. In QM, there is no such thing as identity; two electrons (for example) are interchangeable. This means that if you prepare a classical clone of yourself but the two clones get mixed up, from a QM perspective the question of identity is meaningless. So if you say X is the clone and Y is the original and Y is dead, the labels "clone" and "original" are actually arbitrary and you could relabel X as the original and Y as the clone, so the clone is dead and the original is alive. It's like you have a bucket of electrons, and you paint one of them orange so you can remember it later. Can't do that in QM. Even if you put one electron in a magnetic trap, there's no saying it doesn't swap places with one of the electrons still in your bucket. You can't paint one copy of yourself as "clone" and one as "original". Of course, two copies of a person (neither privileged over the other as "original") don't stay interchangeable for long. Summary: Many philosophers and physicists alike have a warm and fuzzy conception of consciousness, but they're just being noisy and some folks are actually making progress. Warm and fuzzy is old news, and quantum is just the latest flavor of warm and fuzzy. Daniel Dennett is an example of someone worth listening to about cognition, though I'm not saying he's right.

by drostie 15y ago

polynomial 14y ago

> If quantum systems could really feel in a way that machines really can't, this would solve the problem neatly. Late to the party, but pretty sure that's the situation we're in.

hej 15y ago

Satire, right?

batista 15y ago
Useless comment, right? What part looks like satire to you? They are all pretty standard philosophical arguments, re Searl, Penrose et al.
- hej 15y ago
  It's confused bullshit. The rest doesn't matter.
  - batista 14y ago
    Citation needed.

klodolph 15y ago

I'm not sure whether you're being satirical or whether you're explaining viewpoints other people or whether you're representing your own opinion. In response, (1) It's deterministic w.r.t. the wave functions, but you can't really measure wave functions, you can only measure classical things like momentum or energy. (A measurement is actually an interaction, of course.) If you manage to give your TV a wave function 50% in the bedroom and 50% in the living room, then you decide to watch TV, you've just given yourself a wave function that is 50% in the bedroom and 50% in the living room, and 100% correlated with the TV's wave function. A wave function can't be measured because if you try to measure it, all you're really doing is correlating yourself with the wave function. So the real problem is that it's hard to reconcile our description of quantum mechanics with our experience of it. We describe QM as if we're outside Schroedinger's box, but we experience it from the inside. "Many worlds" describes it from the inside, but people don't like the many worlds interpretation exactly because it doesn't privilege one of the worlds as "real". (2 & 3) Theories of free will were kind of worn out during the 17th century. Associating free will with quantum mechanics is kind of like shoving the Christian god into the cracks in evolutionary theory. There's little actual evidence that the brain takes advantage of QM decoherence on any scale worth appreciating. QM consciousness theories seem to have forgotten all of the progress during the age of enlightenment (David Hume, for example) wrt the definition of free will itself, and the phrasing of questions about free will in such a way that the discussion can be productive. The discussion about "qualia" in philosophical circles is equally unproductive. They call it "qualia" because they don't want to be called dualists, which is understandable. (4) I'm not sure how this has anything to do with QM. The fact that our brain can do to things at once (which it demonstrably can) doesn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics. A car can do things that engines or wheels never can, but you'd never call it quantum. (5) QM provides an "out" for objects which are cloned in the classical sense. In QM, there is no such thing as identity; two electrons (for example) are interchangeable. This means that if you prepare a classical clone of yourself but the two clones get mixed up, from a QM perspective the question of identity is meaningless. So if you say X is the clone and Y is the original and Y is dead, the labels "clone" and "original" are actually arbitrary and you could relabel X as the original and Y as the clone, so the clone is dead and the original is alive. It's like you have a bucket of electrons, and you paint one of them orange so you can remember it later. Can't do that in QM. Even if you put one electron in a magnetic trap, there's no saying it doesn't swap places with one of the electrons still in your bucket. You can't paint one copy of yourself as "clone" and one as "original". Of course, two copies of a person (neither privileged over the other as "original") don't stay interchangeable for long. Summary: Many philosophers and physicists alike have a warm and fuzzy conception of consciousness, but they're just being noisy and some folks are actually making progress. Warm and fuzzy is old news, and quantum is just the latest flavor of warm and fuzzy. Daniel Dennett is an example of someone worth listening to about cognition, though I'm not saying he's right.