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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.
Agreed.
I thought that the quantum consciousness people were claiming that QM effects (superposition, entanglement, etc) play a role at the scale of brains. Indeed, Penrose claims superposition.
Hard disagree. A quantum system is not just a classical system of similar complexity where we do not have access to all the variables. An electron is not just a point-like particle whose position and momentum is not precisely knowable to us. Instead, it is its wave function, which is a much richer object than any classical point mass.
Crucially, quantum objects can become entangled. Where a register in a classical computer holds exactly one out of 2^N possible values, N qbits can hold a linear combination of all these 2^N. If you want to simulate that on a classical computer, you need not N bits but 2^N numbers. While building an interesting QC is hard, the physics fundamentals about the speedup you would get are solid.
Are there deterministic theories with non-local hidden variables? Sure. But they only save you from god throwing dice when you measure a spin, they do not get rid of the fact that in the real world, you have particle waves, and only in the boring limit where h is too small to matter do you get objects like cannon balls which can be described with just a few parameters.
I'll seize upon your post to address your claims as well as the claims of /u/BahRamYou below since he claimed my education was amiss, and since they somewhat overlap and I won't end up repeating the same arguments. I'm also not a proponent of the Hidden Variables Theory which I got saddled up with earlier. I'm a supporter of Many-Worlds.
First, what you and him are doing to a degree is drawing light to the distinction that's already been known between quantum consciousness and quantum 'cognition'. Quantum consciousness is garbage. Quantum cognition is not. My conclusion as maybe an informed layman, or statistically/mathematically literate student is right in line with what the cutting edge of science gives you in popular format or an undergraduate textbook:
The human brain is a classical scale system and as such can't really be guided in any meaningful way by quantum phenomena. Because even a single perception or decision involves the operation of millions if not billions of neurons, which are massive systems already (even just one neuron is a cell comprised of trillions of atoms). So any quantum indeterminacy that's there will be completely washed out by the system as a whole. This is exactly the reason hardly anyone (and especially experts actually in neuroscience, rather than other fields who are nosing in) buys the quantum consciousness thesis beyond the role of analogy, which is what I was alluding to earlier. And this is the difference between the Weak vs. Strong forms of quantum cognition.
Even if quantum effects became relevant somewhere within a single molecule within a single neuron, and even if this were somehow pertinent to the I/O protocol of the neuron (and had any effect at all on computation) and that’s already two “ifs” for which still no evidence exists, that still would not explain consciousness in any way. All it would explain is how each neuron runs its I/O protocol (which is all to say how the neuron decides what the output signals should be, given the input signals). Single neurons are not conscious. And there won’t be any shared quantum states between neurons, because any molecule doing anything meaningful quantum mechanically in one neuron will be separated by any other neuron by trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms chugging right along as a classical system.
So there cannot be any superposed macrostates in the brain. Moreover, anything the proposed quantum effect “does” to determine a neuron’s I/O protocol can be replaced by a classical circuit doing exactly the same thing and therefore won’t even be necessary to the output of the neuron, much less the whole brain. This is why consciousness can never and will never be explained by quantum mechanics. All sorts of classical systems can replicate quantum outcomes (well weighted dice are just as random and classical waves do many of the same things as quantum waves; when I was in high school we were replicating matrix mechanics with any classical algorithm).
This is also why quantum consciousness can't do what some of it's advocates claim and rescue contra causal free will (which doesn’t exist, and no one should want to exist anyway). For quantum indeterminacy (if that even exists) to change the output of the otherwise deterministic system of the brain, it would require spontaneous coordinated events across trillions of atoms, which even at most (at literally the most ridiculously most) won’t happen but maybe once in a trillion decisions. Which at a decision a second is once every thirty thousand years or so. This is the problem with vast macrosystems like the brain: quantum phenomena simply can’t cause or explain anything relevant about them.
I've read Penrose's book years ago as well as the claims of many of his supporters and the ensuing criticism of his work. There's already a real good summary of this school of thought and it's why only the advocates of the 'Weak' end of quantum cognition (which is to say those who use quantum mechanics as an analogy) are worth taking seriously. The people on the other end of that argument are all cranks. Even the best supporters of legitimate quantum cognition are all rooting their work firmly in classical mechanics by viewing neural computing as a geometric process (an exploration of a vector or concept space) rather than a linear process (say a hand calculation on paper or a Turing machine, although the latter isn't entirely accurate I recognize).
So legitimate researchers can say the brain functions 'like' a wave tank that can produce analogous circumstances of superposed wave-forms, interference patterns, and quantum switching between binary states without literally being quantum mechanical. We know the human brain cycles at around 40 Hz for instance, which seems related to our conscious perceptual threshold of about 20 Hz (that's why film and television media shoot to exceed that in frame rates to get our visual system not to notice). But even then, individual perceptual events often involve waves of coordinated signals across neural nets in the brain, hence entertaining two thoughts simultaneously, and using interference patterns to locate and determine outcomes. So obviously we'll get some analogous phenomena to wave particle duality; but none of this is quantum mechanical, it is all entirely explicable with classical mechanics, just like waves and sound (even hydrons and phonons, though no analog to those has been discovered yet in neuroscience far as I know).
Real quantum cognition research doesn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics and postulates no strange or mysterious physics like indeterminism. It is classical and deterministic through and through. It deviates from classical probability theory (which is linear), not classical physics. Wikipedia even provides a good summary for why thinking the alternative is bunk.
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