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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 tuble
by 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 agoWow, 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 agoAlso microtubules with quantum…
- ben_w 1y agoThe 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 agoIt 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 agoBut 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 agoThis 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 agoThat 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 agoHe’s a neuroscientist that studies consciousness. I think that gives him more valid reasons to have this definition than someone who programs computers.
- ben_w 1y agoHe himself would criticise you for doing so, even just on the basis of what he put in that blog post, as you're using an argument from authority.
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- mensetmanusman 1y agoI love his thoughts on connecting the halting problem to understanding ala Gödel.
- exe34 1y agoPenrose'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 agoHe 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 agoYup, 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 agoNo, 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 agoPenrose 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 agoYou can be a genius in one field and a crank in another. For example: Penrose.
- nrml_amnt 1y agoI think of Linus Pauling
- oh_my_goodness 1y agoThis feels a bit like a circular argument.
- somewhereouther 1y ago[dead]
- r2_pilot 1y agoHow about Linus Pauling and vitamin C then?
- sarchertech 1y agoIt 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 agoYes 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 agoBut 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 agoThe 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 agoTegmark 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 agoAgain 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 agoI don't see that offering an alternative hypothesis disproves anything.
- tsimionescu 1y agoBy 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 agoSpecial 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 agoPenrose 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 agoIn 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 agoPenrose 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 agoThe 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 agoSomeone oughta notify Peter Watts https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references
- chvid 1y agoWhy is it crank science? He clearly states that it is hypothetical, speculative and open research.
- markhahn 1y agoThe 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 agoIf the universe is closed and knowable, free will can't exist. Fortunately, Heisenberg left the door open.
- drdeca 1y agoI don’t think non-commuting observables really helps much in the “free will existing” department.
- IdSayThatllDoIt 1y agoThis 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".