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Penrose’s vindication: In a broad philosophical sense. His intuition that quantum effects might play some role in cognition seems less far-fetched now than it d

Penrose’s vindication: In a broad philosophical sense. His intuition that quantum effects might play some role in cognition seems less far-fetched now than it did 30 years ago. But vindication of Orch OR specifically (microtubule-based quantum gravity collapses driving consciousness) not yet. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.1998.0254 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.1998.025...

fair_enough 1y ago
The OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation: Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells. Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
- Noaidi 1y ago
  Wow, this is such an odd response. There’s plenty of research that link microtubules to consciousness. I don’t understand this pushback other than one being sped in a certain scientific dogma that doesn’t allow new thoughts or questioning to creep in. Just say that Penrose is a crank is way off chart in my opinion
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ljlolel 1y ago
    Also microtubules with quantum…
  - ben_w 1y ago
    The word "consciousness" means at least 40 distinct things; some of those (e.g. brain being alive and functioning) are obviously connected to microtubles; others (e.g. qualia, which is what most understand Penrose invoked microtubles to explain) are so ill-defined as to be untestable and unfalsifiable. That Penrose also seems to have a fundamental error in his understanding of the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, doesn't help.
    - Noaidi 1y ago
      It means one thing to people who study consciousness. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/consciousness-is-a-great-mystery https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/consciousness-is-a...
      - galangalalgol 1y ago
        But that accepted definition is that it means everything... "What it means to be a bat" isn't a useful definition. I will accept that is what the word means and defend the viewpoint the word is thus useless.
        Noaidi 1y ago
        This is the last paragraph of his article for people who aren’t going to read the whole article. “ So yes, there is scientific confusion about what consciousness is! And there’s metaphysical confusion about what consciousness is! But there’s no definitional confusion about the word “consciousness” itself. People know what needs to be explained, it’s just that explaining the phenomenon is very hard, and no one fully has yet.“
        mensetmanusman 1y ago
        /anything I don’t understand is useless/
      - ben_w 1y ago
        That linked page is just a long-winded assertion that only their own definition counts. It's also a definition which is completely untestable and presently unfalsifiable.
        Noaidi 1y ago
        He’s a neuroscientist that studies consciousness. I think that gives him more valid reasons to have this definition than someone who programs computers.
  - exe34 1y ago
    Penrose's theory is this: consciousness is really weird. quantum is really weird. there's got to be a connection. Just because he is brilliant in one field doesn't mean he's remotely competent in every field.
    - Noaidi 1y ago
      He came up with his idea in collaboration with scientist to study consciousness. It’s not his idea really it’s a group of people’s ideas. His brilliance in his field contributed to the brilliance of other people’s fields. This is how collaborative science works. If you seen any of Penrose’s talks or read any of his books, you know that this was not fundamentally his idea.
      - KingFelix 1y ago
        Yup, even the Dioso-Penrose limit has two sides. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13490 https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13490 Paraphrasing here: The paper above was looking for energy given off during collapse, (which they did not find) on the Diosi side, where Penrose' idea is more in the retro-causal, you wouldn't find an energy signature. I am sure someone can call out a better representation, but similar to your response that Roger has these ideas and looks for collaborators, but still has his own ideas on things that may differ. Interesting seeing this conversation going on, Roger / Stuarts work has been trashed over the years, Max Tegmark did the maths and said brain is too wet/warm for any quantum stuff, but we've been finding this in tubulin* and other places, never retracted the paper. Either way, consciousness is amazing, and a mystery, anyone interested should come to Tucson in April for Towards a science of Consciousness, good conversations, interesting people, usually more questions than answers. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-9321/4/2/19 https://www.mdpi.com/2673-9321/4/2/19 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
        markhahn 1y ago
        No, there's no evidence against Tegmark's math. Finding isolated quantum effects is emphatically unsurprising: after all, everything is quantum. It's just limited in locality, which is basically what Tegmark is talking about (locality and decoherence time being somewhat dual). There is no evidence for the kind of quantum effects that would involve multiple neurons. This is quite a block, since afaik, even the quantum-woo types (Penrose, emphatically) are not claiming that consciousness comes from the quantum behavior of a single neuron. (And that would be profoundly ignorant of basic neuroscience.)
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  Penrose may well be completely wrong about this, but I think he's easily done enough important science work to not be called a crank.
  - Marazan 1y ago
    You can be a genius in one field and a crank in another. For example: Penrose.
    - nrml_amnt 1y ago
      I think of Linus Pauling
    - oh_my_goodness 1y ago
      This feels a bit like a circular argument.
      - somewhereouther 1y ago
        [dead]
      - r2_pilot 1y ago
        How about Linus Pauling and vitamin C then?
        sarchertech 1y ago
        It happens. It’s surely possible. But does it happen enough that anytime a Nobel laureate says something a little out there, this is the immediate explanation? Especially if what he’s saying has lacks a major hallmark of crackpot theories. That is he is very open to his theory being wrong and he won’t even say that it’s probably correct. He just thinks it’s possible and would like to see more work done on it.
        Retric 1y ago
        Yes in that when they something outside their field that’s ‘a little out there’ Nobel laureate’s aren’t as a group more useful than random noise. Similarly a crank can happen to say a true statement, but the issue is the process with which the statement is derived is flawed to the point of uselessness. The derogatory aspect of calling someone a crank is obviously uncalled for, but as a shorthand it’s not unreasonable to use the term.
- westurner 1y ago
  But does this help explain Representational drift? From "Concept cells help your brain abstract information and build memories" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42784396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42784396 : > the regions of the brain that activate for a given cue vary over time "Representational drift: Emerging theories for continual learning and experimental future directions" (2022) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959438822001039 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943882... >> Future work should characterize drift across brain regions, cell types, and learning. How do nanotubules in the brain affect representation drift? There is EMF to cognition given that, for example, "Neuroscience study shows the brain emits light through the skull" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697995 Aren't there certainly quantum effects in the EMF wavefield of and around the brain?
  - soulofmischief 1y ago
    The common understanding is that at the molecular scale that your nervous system operates, quantum effects are averaged out and don't lead to instability of neuronal activity.
    - markhahn 1y ago
      Tegmark has used actual, you know, numbers and stuff to show that quantum effects in the brain are pretty implausible. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11088215/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11088215/
      - westurner 1y ago
        Again there, does the EMF/RF field created by the electrovolt wave function of the brain affect the electrovolt wave function of the brain? If so, isn't that a feed-forward feedback loop (where there may be quantum behavior)? Does this paper also fail to assess other fields relevant to understanding nonlocal neuroactivation in disproving that there is any quantumness in cognition? How do humans simulate digital and quantum circuits with the brain? And, why do attempts to localize activations in the brain weeks apart fail; why is there representation drift?
- oh_my_goodness 1y ago
  I don't see that offering an alternative hypothesis disproves anything.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    By Occam's razor, it could be said that offering an alternative hypothesis that explains all facts equally well but is also simpler does "disprove" more complex hypotheses. For example, it is often said that Einstein's special theory of relativity disproved the idea of an aether - but special relativity is compatible with the existence of an aether with certain properties, it just is a completely unnecessary extra complication.
    - oh_my_goodness 1y ago
      Special relativity is a lot more than a hypothesis at this point. I think the ideas in this paper may be a little bit more speculative than that.
- sarchertech 1y ago
  Penrose doesn’t hold the microtuble hypothesis strongly at all. He’s very very careful to say that it’s just something he’d like to see tested and he has no idea whether it’s true or not. That very much distinguishes it from Crank science.
  - btilly 1y ago
    In 1989, Penrose picked up Lucas' 1961 argument that no computer can possibly simulate intelligence. The argument rests on fundamental misunderstandings of logic, that are well-known among logicians. See, for example, https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1995-32-03/S0273-0979-1995-00606-3/S0273-0979-1995-00606-3.pdf https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1995-32-03/S0273-0979-1995... for an article explaining this, written some 30 years ago. The fact that Penrose has maintained his misunderstandings for 30 years, demonstrates that, on this topic, he has been a crank for a long time. No matter his other accomplishments.
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      Penrose essentially wrote an entire book responding to that critique. Which side you support largely comes down to a philosophical question. The notion that he just made a stupid mistake and doubled down on it is absurd. Having a different opinion about the soundness of a proof could make him wrong but it hardly makes him a crank.
      - btilly 1y ago
        The fact that he repeated the same logic errors at book length doesn't change the fact that they are errors. And the question of whether they are logic errors is a question of mathematics, not philosophy. Dismissing the conclusions of logic on the basis of philosophy, is a mistake of the same type as dismissing the conclusions of science on the basis of theology. Logic cannot speak to the philosophy that Penrose pushes forth. But it can and does speak to the validity of the argument from logic that he puts forth in support. Hilary Putnam did a good job of explaining the mistakes. I am not a logician, but my background in logic is good enough to verify the explanation. And every logician that I personally know has come to the same conclusion. Like you, I find it absurd to claim that Penrose has been doubling down on a basic logic error. And yet we have the basic logic error, and Penrose has clearly been doubling down on it. You don't even need to be an expert to understand that he can't be right. Penrose argues that the capacities of human reasoning is such that Gödel's theorem proves that a mathematician's brain cannot be replicated by any mechanical process. But the reasoning process that mathematicians use is fallible. The output most emphatically is not logically consistent. The appearance of consistency is only obtained after much reexamination of those errors which were discovered. Absolute certainty of lack of error is unachievable by any kind of human reasoning. The history of mathematics is filled with examples of errors that were not discovered for shockingly long periods. So we do not have a proof of the consistency of human reasoning, or its products. Therefore Gödel doesn't apply. Human reasoning, including the outputs that Penrose cites, do not strictly follow first order logic. Therefore Gödel again doesn't apply. And Gödel is entirely silent on the potential prospects of a heuristic algorithm that can produce inconsistent results. Which is what our brains do. The inapplicability of Gödel's theorem to our thinking process is an absolute barrier to Penrose's attempts to prove that our thinking process cannot be the result of a mechanical system. It may be that it is not. Personally I fail to see how a strictly mechanical process can create my experience of consciousness. But this is a question that Gödel's theorem cannot address.
- Apocryphon 1y ago
  Someone oughta notify Peter Watts https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references
- chvid 1y ago
  Why is it crank science? He clearly states that it is hypothetical, speculative and open research.
  - markhahn 1y ago
    The main reason is because it's arbitrary. His "speculation" is litereally: I think quantum is mysterious, and brains are mysterious, so there must be quantum in the brain. That's just silly - even if only because his opinions about mysteriousity is of no importance.
    - halifaxbeard 1y ago
      If the universe is closed and knowable, free will can't exist. Fortunately, Heisenberg left the door open.
      - drdeca 1y ago
        I don’t think non-commuting observables really helps much in the “free will existing” department.
- IdSayThatllDoIt 1y ago
  This seems like a straw man argument. That the brain uses electrical/chemical signals is crank science about subatomic particles messing with your aura in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology. If that were not so, electrical/chemical engineers could upgrade our brains with their knowledge of electricity/chemistry. Scientific progress is thinking about stuff. And my Occam's razor is leaning toward "if just arithmetic could yield consciousness we would have figured it out by now".
bbor 1y ago
How does this vindicate Penrose in any slight sense?? This is using "nanotubular" in the sense of "ultrathin membrane bridges" that serve as "long-range intercellular transport" for macro objects in the um range, NOT "polymers of tubulin" that "provide platforms for intracellular transport" with an inner diameter in the low nm range. (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule) More importantly, these are transporting things that can plausibly impact other neurons, instead of possibly interacting with things that are far too small to ever impact a neuron in any way we've ever seen before (AKA without magic). IMHO, this vindicates Penrose and Hamerhoff in no way whatsoever; nonetheless, I'm sure there will be a flood of YouTube videos subtly conflating the two senses of the term "nanotube" in order to promote the idea of a universal noosphere that ties us all together through the magic of quantum entanglement and positive vibes. Fun... (More on topic: anyone with access to Science know why these are called "nanotubes" if they transport things in the micrometer range? Microtubules are named for their length, but it doesn't really make sense in reverse to have a tube 1000 times as wide as it is long... Maybe they're elastic? Or does "nano" just mean "really small" here?)
- Noaidi 1y ago
  to understand that nano tubules interact with microtubules is part of the answer to your question. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211379717303054 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221137971... And you’re talking about transporting “things” and microtubules are not about transporting things in Penrose theory, but rather serving as quantum machines that are linked across the brain.
Noaidi 1y ago
I agree, and I was about to post the same thing. The idea of quantum processes fueling consciousness is my latest obsession. Specifically because I have genetic polymorphisms in the DNM3 gene that help maintain the functionality of these microtubules. https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q9UQ16/entry https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q9UQ16/entry And let’s just say my experience of reality, or my consciousness, is quite unusual. My gene polymorphisms in DNM3 are linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have. Like Penrose said, I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field, and not anything solid, but rather a femoral and affected by electromagnetic forces inside and outside of our brain
- BirAdam 1y ago
  I've had a weird thought that it might be that consciousness is the result of a quantum field that collapses to instantiate a consciousness when enough feedback mechanisms are present to allow for its function. Of course, this is likely not true, but it would explain a few things.
  - exe34 1y ago
    I too am emotionally sensitive to the electromagnetic field. My phone is the transducer.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  Interesting. I don't know that it's a literal electromagnetic field, but it does seem to be a dynamic pattern. I don't personally think I have enough information yet to guess at what medium that pattern is encoded in (I mean, except, broadly, "Brain stuff"). Not long ago, I suffered the first bout of unexpected unconsciousness I'd ever experienced; a series of unfortunate events caused me to pass out from pain (which I didn't quite understand was really a thing before then... Haha no that's real, you can get your brain shorted out from too much pain signal). The experience was a little... Cosmologically-reframing. It wasn't like sleep; it was a missing-time experience. Like, post-event me is acutely aware of a lack of me in that period of time; the body was there (I assume; I couldn't see it but there's nowhere for it to have gone), the thing I'd call myself seems to have completely 404'd for about a half hour. Put lots of thoughts of my own mortality in my head. Not sure I'd recommend it.
sim04ful 1y ago
I don't see why this idea is controversial at all; of course intelligence would evolve to leverage every possible physical mechanism and property inherent in matter, from classical structures like dendritic nanotubular networks facilitating intercellular communication, to potentially quantum effects that support intricate computation and the emergence of thought, since that's the nature of evolution: massively exploring the possibility space.
- cnity 1y ago
  Materialists always seem to forget that they're kicking the can down the road.
  - sim04ful 1y ago
    There's no non-physical "ghost in the machine," and I don't even see the value in probing consciousness down to its most fundamental essence.
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      So, we know enough now, and it's time to quit sciencing about it? Weird response.
    - cnity 1y ago
      > There's no non-physical "ghost in the machine" But of course there is a physical one, that at some point appears. Or, it is a kind of gradation that at its highest peak is a human, and at its deepest depths is...
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    Penrose is very much a materialist. He thinks that humans could someday create machines that can tap into whatever quantum effects the brain uses.
    - cnity 1y ago
      I didn't say I wasn't a materialist :). It's important for consciousness philosophers to have a sense of humour, I think (and remember the shortcomings of their own arguments).
amelius 1y ago
But chemistry is basically impossible without quantum effects ...
sarchertech 1y ago
If you’ve listened to anything he’s said in the last few years he doesn’t hold very tightly to the microtublule explanation. Paraphrasing what he said in a video from a year ago or so: it’s an interesting theory that he’d like to see tested, but he has no idea whether it’s correct or not.
CGMthrowaway 1y ago
Would do a lot to explain many's understanding of the brain as a non-deterministic machine (or, their reasonable resistance to the idea that it is a deterministic one)
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
that seems kind of pointless to speculate about? unless you were into reading this sort of thing a long time ago and it is interesting to you? aren't there more convincing modern models of consciousness that don't rely on spookiness?
markhahn 1y ago
no, this does not validate quantum mysticism. yes, it's microtubules, but there's no sign of any weirdness here. and Penrose's whole theory is "quantum is weird and I think brains are weird, so brains must be quantum. so where can we find some quantum stuff?"
robwwilliams 1y ago
No, nothing to do withPenrose’s idea. No quantum effects just the traditional use of microtubules for transport of cargo — in this case between adjacent dendrites.
onjectic 1y ago
Microtube != Nanotube as far as I understand, though I admit the name is terrible and Penrose was my first thought when I read the title.

fair_enough 1y ago

The OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation: Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells. Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.

Noaidi 1y ago
Wow, this is such an odd response. There’s plenty of research that link microtubules to consciousness. I don’t understand this pushback other than one being sped in a certain scientific dogma that doesn’t allow new thoughts or questioning to creep in. Just say that Penrose is a crank is way off chart in my opinion
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ljlolel 1y ago
  Also microtubules with quantum…
- ben_w 1y ago
  The word "consciousness" means at least 40 distinct things; some of those (e.g. brain being alive and functioning) are obviously connected to microtubles; others (e.g. qualia, which is what most understand Penrose invoked microtubles to explain) are so ill-defined as to be untestable and unfalsifiable. That Penrose also seems to have a fundamental error in his understanding of the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, doesn't help.
  - Noaidi 1y ago
    It means one thing to people who study consciousness. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/consciousness-is-a-great-mystery https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/consciousness-is-a...
    - galangalalgol 1y ago
      But that accepted definition is that it means everything... "What it means to be a bat" isn't a useful definition. I will accept that is what the word means and defend the viewpoint the word is thus useless.
      - Noaidi 1y ago
        This is the last paragraph of his article for people who aren’t going to read the whole article. “ So yes, there is scientific confusion about what consciousness is! And there’s metaphysical confusion about what consciousness is! But there’s no definitional confusion about the word “consciousness” itself. People know what needs to be explained, it’s just that explaining the phenomenon is very hard, and no one fully has yet.“
      - mensetmanusman 1y ago
        /anything I don’t understand is useless/
    - ben_w 1y ago
      That linked page is just a long-winded assertion that only their own definition counts. It's also a definition which is completely untestable and presently unfalsifiable.
      - Noaidi 1y ago
        He’s a neuroscientist that studies consciousness. I think that gives him more valid reasons to have this definition than someone who programs computers.
- exe34 1y ago
  Penrose's theory is this: consciousness is really weird. quantum is really weird. there's got to be a connection. Just because he is brilliant in one field doesn't mean he's remotely competent in every field.
  - Noaidi 1y ago
    He came up with his idea in collaboration with scientist to study consciousness. It’s not his idea really it’s a group of people’s ideas. His brilliance in his field contributed to the brilliance of other people’s fields. This is how collaborative science works. If you seen any of Penrose’s talks or read any of his books, you know that this was not fundamentally his idea.
    - KingFelix 1y ago
      Yup, even the Dioso-Penrose limit has two sides. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13490 https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13490 Paraphrasing here: The paper above was looking for energy given off during collapse, (which they did not find) on the Diosi side, where Penrose' idea is more in the retro-causal, you wouldn't find an energy signature. I am sure someone can call out a better representation, but similar to your response that Roger has these ideas and looks for collaborators, but still has his own ideas on things that may differ. Interesting seeing this conversation going on, Roger / Stuarts work has been trashed over the years, Max Tegmark did the maths and said brain is too wet/warm for any quantum stuff, but we've been finding this in tubulin* and other places, never retracted the paper. Either way, consciousness is amazing, and a mystery, anyone interested should come to Tucson in April for Towards a science of Consciousness, good conversations, interesting people, usually more questions than answers. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-9321/4/2/19 https://www.mdpi.com/2673-9321/4/2/19 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
      - markhahn 1y ago
        No, there's no evidence against Tegmark's math. Finding isolated quantum effects is emphatically unsurprising: after all, everything is quantum. It's just limited in locality, which is basically what Tegmark is talking about (locality and decoherence time being somewhat dual). There is no evidence for the kind of quantum effects that would involve multiple neurons. This is quite a block, since afaik, even the quantum-woo types (Penrose, emphatically) are not claiming that consciousness comes from the quantum behavior of a single neuron. (And that would be profoundly ignorant of basic neuroscience.)
BurningFrog 1y ago
Penrose may well be completely wrong about this, but I think he's easily done enough important science work to not be called a crank.
- Marazan 1y ago
  You can be a genius in one field and a crank in another. For example: Penrose.
  - nrml_amnt 1y ago
    I think of Linus Pauling
  - oh_my_goodness 1y ago
    This feels a bit like a circular argument.
    - somewhereouther 1y ago
      [dead]
    - r2_pilot 1y ago
      How about Linus Pauling and vitamin C then?
      - sarchertech 1y ago
        It happens. It’s surely possible. But does it happen enough that anytime a Nobel laureate says something a little out there, this is the immediate explanation? Especially if what he’s saying has lacks a major hallmark of crackpot theories. That is he is very open to his theory being wrong and he won’t even say that it’s probably correct. He just thinks it’s possible and would like to see more work done on it.
        Retric 1y ago
        Yes in that when they something outside their field that’s ‘a little out there’ Nobel laureate’s aren’t as a group more useful than random noise. Similarly a crank can happen to say a true statement, but the issue is the process with which the statement is derived is flawed to the point of uselessness. The derogatory aspect of calling someone a crank is obviously uncalled for, but as a shorthand it’s not unreasonable to use the term.
westurner 1y ago
But does this help explain Representational drift? From "Concept cells help your brain abstract information and build memories" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42784396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42784396 : > the regions of the brain that activate for a given cue vary over time "Representational drift: Emerging theories for continual learning and experimental future directions" (2022) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959438822001039 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943882... >> Future work should characterize drift across brain regions, cell types, and learning. How do nanotubules in the brain affect representation drift? There is EMF to cognition given that, for example, "Neuroscience study shows the brain emits light through the skull" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697995 Aren't there certainly quantum effects in the EMF wavefield of and around the brain?
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  The common understanding is that at the molecular scale that your nervous system operates, quantum effects are averaged out and don't lead to instability of neuronal activity.
  - markhahn 1y ago
    Tegmark has used actual, you know, numbers and stuff to show that quantum effects in the brain are pretty implausible. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11088215/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11088215/
    - westurner 1y ago
      Again there, does the EMF/RF field created by the electrovolt wave function of the brain affect the electrovolt wave function of the brain? If so, isn't that a feed-forward feedback loop (where there may be quantum behavior)? Does this paper also fail to assess other fields relevant to understanding nonlocal neuroactivation in disproving that there is any quantumness in cognition? How do humans simulate digital and quantum circuits with the brain? And, why do attempts to localize activations in the brain weeks apart fail; why is there representation drift?
oh_my_goodness 1y ago
I don't see that offering an alternative hypothesis disproves anything.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  By Occam's razor, it could be said that offering an alternative hypothesis that explains all facts equally well but is also simpler does "disprove" more complex hypotheses. For example, it is often said that Einstein's special theory of relativity disproved the idea of an aether - but special relativity is compatible with the existence of an aether with certain properties, it just is a completely unnecessary extra complication.
  - oh_my_goodness 1y ago
    Special relativity is a lot more than a hypothesis at this point. I think the ideas in this paper may be a little bit more speculative than that.
sarchertech 1y ago
Penrose doesn’t hold the microtuble hypothesis strongly at all. He’s very very careful to say that it’s just something he’d like to see tested and he has no idea whether it’s true or not. That very much distinguishes it from Crank science.
- btilly 1y ago
  In 1989, Penrose picked up Lucas' 1961 argument that no computer can possibly simulate intelligence. The argument rests on fundamental misunderstandings of logic, that are well-known among logicians. See, for example, https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1995-32-03/S0273-0979-1995-00606-3/S0273-0979-1995-00606-3.pdf https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1995-32-03/S0273-0979-1995... for an article explaining this, written some 30 years ago. The fact that Penrose has maintained his misunderstandings for 30 years, demonstrates that, on this topic, he has been a crank for a long time. No matter his other accomplishments.
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    Penrose essentially wrote an entire book responding to that critique. Which side you support largely comes down to a philosophical question. The notion that he just made a stupid mistake and doubled down on it is absurd. Having a different opinion about the soundness of a proof could make him wrong but it hardly makes him a crank.
    - btilly 1y ago
      The fact that he repeated the same logic errors at book length doesn't change the fact that they are errors. And the question of whether they are logic errors is a question of mathematics, not philosophy. Dismissing the conclusions of logic on the basis of philosophy, is a mistake of the same type as dismissing the conclusions of science on the basis of theology. Logic cannot speak to the philosophy that Penrose pushes forth. But it can and does speak to the validity of the argument from logic that he puts forth in support. Hilary Putnam did a good job of explaining the mistakes. I am not a logician, but my background in logic is good enough to verify the explanation. And every logician that I personally know has come to the same conclusion. Like you, I find it absurd to claim that Penrose has been doubling down on a basic logic error. And yet we have the basic logic error, and Penrose has clearly been doubling down on it. You don't even need to be an expert to understand that he can't be right. Penrose argues that the capacities of human reasoning is such that Gödel's theorem proves that a mathematician's brain cannot be replicated by any mechanical process. But the reasoning process that mathematicians use is fallible. The output most emphatically is not logically consistent. The appearance of consistency is only obtained after much reexamination of those errors which were discovered. Absolute certainty of lack of error is unachievable by any kind of human reasoning. The history of mathematics is filled with examples of errors that were not discovered for shockingly long periods. So we do not have a proof of the consistency of human reasoning, or its products. Therefore Gödel doesn't apply. Human reasoning, including the outputs that Penrose cites, do not strictly follow first order logic. Therefore Gödel again doesn't apply. And Gödel is entirely silent on the potential prospects of a heuristic algorithm that can produce inconsistent results. Which is what our brains do. The inapplicability of Gödel's theorem to our thinking process is an absolute barrier to Penrose's attempts to prove that our thinking process cannot be the result of a mechanical system. It may be that it is not. Personally I fail to see how a strictly mechanical process can create my experience of consciousness. But this is a question that Gödel's theorem cannot address.
Apocryphon 1y ago
Someone oughta notify Peter Watts https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references
chvid 1y ago
Why is it crank science? He clearly states that it is hypothetical, speculative and open research.
- markhahn 1y ago
  The main reason is because it's arbitrary. His "speculation" is litereally: I think quantum is mysterious, and brains are mysterious, so there must be quantum in the brain. That's just silly - even if only because his opinions about mysteriousity is of no importance.
  - halifaxbeard 1y ago
    If the universe is closed and knowable, free will can't exist. Fortunately, Heisenberg left the door open.
    - drdeca 1y ago
      I don’t think non-commuting observables really helps much in the “free will existing” department.
IdSayThatllDoIt 1y ago
This seems like a straw man argument. That the brain uses electrical/chemical signals is crank science about subatomic particles messing with your aura in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology. If that were not so, electrical/chemical engineers could upgrade our brains with their knowledge of electricity/chemistry. Scientific progress is thinking about stuff. And my Occam's razor is leaning toward "if just arithmetic could yield consciousness we would have figured it out by now".

bbor 1y ago

How does this vindicate Penrose in any slight sense?? This is using "nanotubular" in the sense of "ultrathin membrane bridges" that serve as "long-range intercellular transport" for macro objects in the um range, NOT "polymers of tubulin" that "provide platforms for intracellular transport" with an inner diameter in the low nm range. (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule) More importantly, these are transporting things that can plausibly impact other neurons, instead of possibly interacting with things that are far too small to ever impact a neuron in any way we've ever seen before (AKA without magic). IMHO, this vindicates Penrose and Hamerhoff in no way whatsoever; nonetheless, I'm sure there will be a flood of YouTube videos subtly conflating the two senses of the term "nanotube" in order to promote the idea of a universal noosphere that ties us all together through the magic of quantum entanglement and positive vibes. Fun... (More on topic: anyone with access to Science know why these are called "nanotubes" if they transport things in the micrometer range? Microtubules are named for their length, but it doesn't really make sense in reverse to have a tube 1000 times as wide as it is long... Maybe they're elastic? Or does "nano" just mean "really small" here?)

Noaidi 1y ago
to understand that nano tubules interact with microtubules is part of the answer to your question. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211379717303054 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221137971... And you’re talking about transporting “things” and microtubules are not about transporting things in Penrose theory, but rather serving as quantum machines that are linked across the brain.

Noaidi 1y ago

I agree, and I was about to post the same thing. The idea of quantum processes fueling consciousness is my latest obsession. Specifically because I have genetic polymorphisms in the DNM3 gene that help maintain the functionality of these microtubules. https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q9UQ16/entry https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q9UQ16/entry And let’s just say my experience of reality, or my consciousness, is quite unusual. My gene polymorphisms in DNM3 are linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have. Like Penrose said, I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field, and not anything solid, but rather a femoral and affected by electromagnetic forces inside and outside of our brain

BirAdam 1y ago
I've had a weird thought that it might be that consciousness is the result of a quantum field that collapses to instantiate a consciousness when enough feedback mechanisms are present to allow for its function. Of course, this is likely not true, but it would explain a few things.
- exe34 1y ago
  I too am emotionally sensitive to the electromagnetic field. My phone is the transducer.
shadowgovt 1y ago
Interesting. I don't know that it's a literal electromagnetic field, but it does seem to be a dynamic pattern. I don't personally think I have enough information yet to guess at what medium that pattern is encoded in (I mean, except, broadly, "Brain stuff"). Not long ago, I suffered the first bout of unexpected unconsciousness I'd ever experienced; a series of unfortunate events caused me to pass out from pain (which I didn't quite understand was really a thing before then... Haha no that's real, you can get your brain shorted out from too much pain signal). The experience was a little... Cosmologically-reframing. It wasn't like sleep; it was a missing-time experience. Like, post-event me is acutely aware of a lack of me in that period of time; the body was there (I assume; I couldn't see it but there's nowhere for it to have gone), the thing I'd call myself seems to have completely 404'd for about a half hour. Put lots of thoughts of my own mortality in my head. Not sure I'd recommend it.

sim04ful 1y ago

I don't see why this idea is controversial at all; of course intelligence would evolve to leverage every possible physical mechanism and property inherent in matter, from classical structures like dendritic nanotubular networks facilitating intercellular communication, to potentially quantum effects that support intricate computation and the emergence of thought, since that's the nature of evolution: massively exploring the possibility space.

cnity 1y ago
Materialists always seem to forget that they're kicking the can down the road.
- sim04ful 1y ago
  There's no non-physical "ghost in the machine," and I don't even see the value in probing consciousness down to its most fundamental essence.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    So, we know enough now, and it's time to quit sciencing about it? Weird response.
  - cnity 1y ago
    > There's no non-physical "ghost in the machine" But of course there is a physical one, that at some point appears. Or, it is a kind of gradation that at its highest peak is a human, and at its deepest depths is...
- sarchertech 1y ago
  Penrose is very much a materialist. He thinks that humans could someday create machines that can tap into whatever quantum effects the brain uses.
  - cnity 1y ago
    I didn't say I wasn't a materialist :). It's important for consciousness philosophers to have a sense of humour, I think (and remember the shortcomings of their own arguments).

amelius 1y ago

But chemistry is basically impossible without quantum effects ...

sarchertech 1y ago

If you’ve listened to anything he’s said in the last few years he doesn’t hold very tightly to the microtublule explanation. Paraphrasing what he said in a video from a year ago or so: it’s an interesting theory that he’d like to see tested, but he has no idea whether it’s correct or not.

CGMthrowaway 1y ago

Would do a lot to explain many's understanding of the brain as a non-deterministic machine (or, their reasonable resistance to the idea that it is a deterministic one)

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago

that seems kind of pointless to speculate about? unless you were into reading this sort of thing a long time ago and it is interesting to you? aren't there more convincing modern models of consciousness that don't rely on spookiness?

markhahn 1y ago

no, this does not validate quantum mysticism. yes, it's microtubules, but there's no sign of any weirdness here. and Penrose's whole theory is "quantum is weird and I think brains are weird, so brains must be quantum. so where can we find some quantum stuff?"

robwwilliams 1y ago

No, nothing to do withPenrose’s idea. No quantum effects just the traditional use of microtubules for transport of cargo — in this case between adjacent dendrites.

onjectic 1y ago

Microtube != Nanotube as far as I understand, though I admit the name is terrible and Penrose was my first thought when I read the title.