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Consciousness is a quantum process,?

Gord_in_Toronto

Penultimate Amazing
Gord_in_Toronto
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Theory suggests that consciousness is a quantum process, connecting us all to the entire universe

At last an explanation for psychic phenomena!

www.earth.com

Theory suggests that consciousness is a quantum process, connecting us all to the entire universe

A controversial theory suggests that brain microtubules could contain quantum phenomena, linking your consciousness to the entire universe.
www.earth.com www.earth.com

Original paper here:


Standing by for confirmation. ;)
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
Theory suggests that consciousness is a quantum process, connecting us all to the entire universe

At last an explanation for psychic phenomena!

www.earth.com

Theory suggests that consciousness is a quantum process, connecting us all to the entire universe

A controversial theory suggests that brain microtubules could contain quantum phenomena, linking your consciousness to the entire universe.
www.earth.com www.earth.com

Original paper here:


Standing by for confirmation. ;)
Click to expand...
This theory goes back to the 1990s. I dated the guy who helped come up with it. They hold "Quantum Mind" conferences every year.

He kept pretending to understand quantum mechanics, but I'm pretty sure he didn't. However he astutely contacted Roger Penrose and got some traction. Penrose had published a book in 1989 called "The Emperor's New Mind."

It's basically an argument from dualism - Plato's Cave - and its archenemy, philosophically, is AI.

I'm not sure I ever understood the actual claim. He had become fascinated with microtubules and thought they might be related to consciousness. He thought they were doing "classical computing," Penrose had said something about consciousness, or the brain's processes, as being non-computational So together they hashed out a theory involving the collapse of the quantum wave function.

I admit I haven't clicked, I've been kind of allergic to this topic since then.
 
Does saying that it is a "quantum process" actually explain anything? I mean, sure, that seems likely to me too (more likely than that we have a "soul" that is distinct and separable from the material of our bodies). But to me, saying that something is "quantum" doesn't explain anything because quantum mechanics is just the lowest level of reality, and so literally everything is ultimately quantum.

Also, a famous physicist (Feynman) once said that "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
 
The "connecting us all to the entire universe" is sheer bunkum - if consciousness should directly involve a quantum mechanism we would be no more or less connected to the universe, even if entanglement is part of that mechanism it would still require one of the entangled particles from our brain to travel the universe at the speed of c for us to have any instantaneous "communication". It is in the end the same as many woo merchants do: and we usually sum it up as "god of the gaps", only this is trying to shove consciousness into the gap.
 
Puppycow said:
Does saying that it is a "quantum process" actually explain anything? I mean, sure, that seems likely to me too (more likely than that we have a "soul" that is distinct and separable from the material of our bodies). But to me, saying that something is "quantum" doesn't explain anything because quantum mechanics is just the lowest level of reality, and so literally everything is ultimately quantum.

Also, a famous physicist (Feynman) once said that "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
Click to expand...
As you say everything is ultimately "quantum" and we are affected by quantum processes, it is possible for a single photon to trigger a rod or cone in our eye, but that doesn't mean we need to model an eye at a quantum level to understand how it works.
 
I love the idea that the brain isn't really predicting the world around it, but perceiving a parallel universe in which a version of itself is experiencing the future a few moments hence- for a SciFi story.
 
We're never going to get away from this woo. It all stems from a misinterpretation of quantum "observation" as something conscious instead of any interaction that requires a discrete state. People have "quantum" and "consciousness" so close together that the concepts tunnel over without passing any logic in between.
 
If existence is fundamentally made of matter, the question of how we arrive at a sense of "being" is a hard problem.

If existence is fundamentally made of "being", then matter is something we arrive at through measurement, which is a much easier problem.

This has actually been "known" for thousands of years, as Heidegger sought to remind us:
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Read the OP, and kind of skimmed through the other posts. And nor have I clicked open any of the links. So, apologies if this has been explicitly discussed already. ...But, I just now posted this on another thread, and that thought led to this:

I've seen Penrose argue that consciousness is quantum. That is, the mechanism consciousness can only be explained by quantum mechanics. Whatever that means. Obviously Penrose is Penrose, but, I"m thinking, that part of what he's saying is woo. Or at least, rank speculation. ...Well, then, as far as free will, quantum randomness kind of sort of negates determinism. (I'm not very sure if it really does, or if it largely cancels out at our scale, but it kind of does, I think.) Maybe what he was about, in trying to argue for a consciousness-is-explained-by-QM formulation, was to open a back door a crack, in order to let in free will?
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
Theory suggests that consciousness is a quantum process, connecting us all to the entire universe

At last an explanation for psychic phenomena!

www.earth.com

Theory suggests that consciousness is a quantum process, connecting us all to the entire universe

A controversial theory suggests that brain microtubules could contain quantum phenomena, linking your consciousness to the entire universe.
www.earth.com www.earth.com

Original paper here:


Standing by for confirmation. ;)
Click to expand...
Was the paper funded by Deepak Chopra?
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
At last an explanation for psychic phenomena!
Click to expand...
Do we need an explanation for something that almost certainly doesn't exist?
Chanakya said:
Read the OP, and kind of skimmed through the other posts. And nor have I clicked open any of the links. So, apologies if this has been explicitly discussed already. ...But, I just now posted this on another thread, and that thought led to this:

I've seen Penrose argue that consciousness is quantum. That is, the mechanism consciousness can only be explained by quantum mechanics. Whatever that means. Obviously Penrose is Penrose, but, I"m thinking, that part of what he's saying is woo. Or at least, rank speculation. ...Well, then, as far as free will, quantum randomness kind of sort of negates determinism. (I'm not very sure if it really does, or if it largely cancels out at our scale, but it kind of does, I think.) Maybe what he was about, in trying to argue for a consciousness-is-explained-by-QM formulation, was to open a back door a crack, in order to let in free will?
Click to expand...
I read the Emperor's New Mind. Penrose's thesis seems to be based on his belief that some of the things humans do seem to contradict theorems related to computability. He gives the example of how the answers to tricky mathematical problems sometimes seem to pop into his head with no "computation" necessary.

The flaw, in my opinion is that just because you suddenly become conscious of the answer to some problem doesn't mean your subconscious hasn't been working on it. Furthermore, you don't know the answer is correct until you have verified it. The answer that pops into Penrose's head might be a lucky guess. He probably forgets all the times an idea popped into his head that was wrong.

As an example, consider the question "what are the prime factors of 3551?" Some computation is needed to answer that question. Or is it? Suppose you decided to crowdsource the answer, so you publish it on this forum and somebody immediately comes back with 53 x 67. You ask them how they did it and they say "well 53 just popped into my head and I checked it by doing the division". It seems that some mysterious quantum process was going on behind the scenes in their mind to get the 53, but no, it was just a random guess and several hundred other people had different numbers pop into their heads but when they did the verification, they found they were wrong (except the guy who came up with 67 but lost his Internet connection just as he tried to post).

In short, I think the Emperor's New Mind seeks to explain a phenomenon that, like psychic phenomena, doesn't exist.
 
jeremyp said:
...I read the Emperor's New Mind. Penrose's thesis seems to be based on his belief that some of the things humans do seem to contradict theorems related to computability. He gives the example of how the answers to tricky mathematical problems sometimes seem to pop into his head with no "computation" necessary.

The flaw, in my opinion is that just because you suddenly become conscious of the answer to some problem doesn't mean your subconscious hasn't been working on it. Furthermore, you don't know the answer is correct until you have verified it. The answer that pops into Penrose's head might be a lucky guess. He probably forgets all the times an idea popped into his head that was wrong.

As an example, consider the question "what are the prime factors of 3551?" Some computation is needed to answer that question. Or is it? Suppose you decided to crowdsource the answer, so you publish it on this forum and somebody immediately comes back with 53 x 67. You ask them how they did it and they say "well 53 just popped into my head and I checked it by doing the division". It seems that some mysterious quantum process was going on behind the scenes in their mind to get the 53, but no, it was just a random guess and several hundred other people had different numbers pop into their heads but when they did the verification, they found they were wrong (except the guy who came up with 67 but lost his Internet connection just as he tried to post).

In short, I think the Emperor's New Mind seeks to explain a phenomenon that, like psychic phenomena, doesn't exist.
Click to expand...

Yep.

And furthermore, and although one does feel a bit diffident about saying something like this given Penrose is Penrose, but still, the explanation he provides seems to treat QM as woo, as magic. Just because an explanation isn't immediately and clearly forthcoming --- and I take your point that, in this case, an involved explanation per se probably isn't even called for at all --- therefore it must arise from "quantum".

QM is in many ways mysterious, but that is only because it is counter-intuitive. But it is solidly and entirely based on evidence. To invoke QM like Penrose has done, appealing to it is some kind of Mystery, with a capital M, and without a shred of evidence, screams "woo" to me.

Again, given Penrose is who he is, one does feel a bit diffident boldly saying this about him.
 
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