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I recently learned about Sir Roger Penrose's research about Qualia. Then I formed my own conclusion of one of the universal truths;
That the "0th Dimension (The Nothing) Emerges/Balance All Infinite Possibility Across The Conceivable & The Inconceivable Reality"
I wrote an essay on it, as well as a wrap-up of our future. What do you think?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lqBvh5xohGid4U685aJBCp1h1a2RET7Wl6gBn3GhELk/edit?tab=t.0
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1loPX-ESVGv-0EevZxYkZ9bZgRzTVxbUNlVRq05HNPh8/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Penrose is an astrophysicist. His work on neuroscience has always been one step above Time Cube. The Emperor's New Mind (his first popular book, published in 1989 when he was still doing decent physics) was a crank manifesto in the same tradition as Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach or Brian Josephson's research on psychic phenomena.
Personally, I liked GEB. I think that a lot of it was just a popularization of the Incompleteness theorem.
Normally I have a working BS detector which goes off at woo (e.g. "brains are macroscopic quantum systems"), and I do not remember it beeping.
While I probably did not fully grasp the incompleteness theorem, I also did not think that Hofstadter was trying to sell me any deepisms.
In short, I see GEB like HPMOR in that it packs claims which have been made before into a narrative. Some people like to read about Mr Crab or Harry P-E-V, some don't.
Brains/Consciousness being some kind of magical quantum system was always nonsense. I took physics classes in high school as well and at least what we learned even then was enough to expose several problems with that thesis. You still see similar pseudo-science get peddled when Wolfram published A New Kind of Science, despite it not being taken seriously and the problems with it have been well known for a long time.
If you ever took a physics class in your life that did any unit on quantum mechanics, you will have watched double-slit experiments (just as we all did) that were performed in front of you using sheets of common craft material and a tank of water. Not a single thing you saw there was quantum mechanical. All that you saw was that classical systems that carry waves can do weird things very similar to what quantum mechanical systems do. You can generate static wave interference patterns with just ordinary waves in water, which is a totally classical system. No quantum mechanics is required for this. This is not quantum mechanics.
You can also have quantized interacting systems (standard desktop computers do this) where there are only two states, and the system flips between one and the other (on or off, 1 or 0, contained or flooding) once the classical system reaches a threshold. The human brain can also do this too, where you can be in two states (think of turning right or left, running mental simulations for both outcomes like we do when driving), and when a threshold is reached (eventually enough neurons fire on one side over the other to cause a cascading outcome, leading us to turn right or left), and therein a state is chosen. This is "quantum" in the analogous sense that it is an undecided either/or, on/off state that can be flipped (or "collapsed" if you want to call it that) under the right quantitative conditions. But the point remains, no actual "quantum mechanics" is involved.
You can talk about modeling consciousness by analogy to quantum mechanics if you like. Just like we can also do for wave mechanics in a bathtub, or acoustic mechanics in the construction of a concert hall, or in designing decision-making CPU's in computers. If you want to speak of a cognitive state of considering options as "quantum superposition," that's true in a very loose sense of the word (there are 2 states being considered simultaneously and 1 of them hasn’t been chosen yet, so the superposed state has yet to "collapse" into a decision), but again it's not literally true. It's only true as a useful comparison. There is no "quantum superposition" going on. The entire system is an analog "classical" computer. Not a quantum computer.
So a lot of "quantum cognition" garbage you’ll see published is doing this. It's just looking at how our brains work as classically mechanical computers, and only finding similar operations to quantum mechanics, much in the same way looking at how ocean or sound waves work in classical mechanics, and then finding behaviors that resemble ones we observe in quantum mechanics. But it’s not quantum mechanics, which means in turn that most quantum cognition models allow no indeterminate, "quantum spookiness" to hang your hat on (looking at you, Deepak Chopra). They are all deterministic macroscopic systems. They just share behaviors in common with quantum systems in physics. That's all.
It's actually evidence that quantum mechanics is itself also just classical mechanics. We just can’t observe the operating variables so it only "looks" really mysterious; just as if we could not see the ocean but could only see the peaks of waves as individual particles, and found the behavior of those particles really strange, and then we invented a bunch of woo bullshit about it, when in reality it was just a perfectly sensible deterministic system in classical mechanics. But we don’t know if this is the case. Maybe quantum mechanics behaves the way it does because it is somehow fundamentally indeterministic. At bottom it could be. But we don’t really know that either.
Physicists have been reproducing even the weirdest quantum mechanical phenomena within entirely classical systems (both with fluids and sound and even so, hydrons and phonons entirely obey classical physics). And should Superstring theory turn out to be validated one day, would even further reduce all quantum phenomena to a classical system.
I think your high school physics class left out some important details about quantum mechanics. The point of the two slit experiment is that you're not just doing it with solid particles, like water... that would be a classical wave. It also works with photons, which have no mass and can travel through a vacuum like a bullet. It even works with just one photon at a time. You can see them arrive at the target with a detector, individually, and if you set it up right they'll still follow the same interference pattern of a wave, even though there's nothing for them to "wave" through. The famous Michelson-Morely experiment proved that there's no medium to carry light. It's a strange result that really does require quantum physics to explain- you can't explain it with just classical physics.
When you say:
That's a very old argument, but this point pretty much disproven unless you allow for some even stranger results (like waves travelling backwards in time levels of weird). People have been trying to knock down the standard model of QM for a long time now, but it just keeps giving correct results... at this point you kinda have to accept that it has some truth to it, even if the math looks odd.
I do agree that there's a lot of cranks and grifters using the word "quantum" to sell nonsense, and that's really a problem. It's unfortunate that Penrose (who really is a respected scientist) gave them cover by writing a book that seems to agree with their woo. On the plus side, his book forces you to wade through like 400 pages of dense math about regular physics before it gets to the woo stuff, so I think most cranks wouldn't make it that far. He's also upfront that he's just offering some speculation about consciousness, not any sort of proof.
He paired up with a professional neuroscientist to develop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction. It's still speculative, but it's a lot more detailed than just "hey dude whatever the brain is, like, quantum..." They've done recent experiments showing there really are some strange effects going on in the brain in ways that you'd normally see in quantum mechanics, not classical. EG absorbing light more slowly than would normally be possible, and than re-emitting it in a higher intensity than normal.
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