[HN Gopher] Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds
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Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds
Author : lisper
Score : 113 points
Date : 2024-05-12 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (backreaction.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (backreaction.blogspot.com)
| ttctciyf wrote:
| The paper itself[0] is a little (hah!) over my head, but this[1]
| tickled me:
|
| > I've heard more than one person say that what a pity that
| Penrose fell for this crazy Hameroff person. But, well, I've met
| both Penrose and Hameroff and they're both crazy of course, but
| neither of them is stupid.
|
| 0: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6G1D2UQ3gg&t=181s
| Animats wrote:
| The important thing in that paper is not "quantum", but the
| claim that internal data transmission by light within neural
| systems is a thing. The paper cites this result on ultra-weak
| light emissions from neurons.[1] The paper is behind Elsevier's
| paywall.
|
| So the paper then takes data transmission by light as a given,
| and goes on to hypothesize structures that direct light as
| fiber optics do, and from there goes on to "ultrafast" data
| transmission.
|
| Comments from biochemistry people would help here. It's not at
| all clear what's an actual result and what's hand-waving.
| However, it is clear that this is an area where experimentation
| is possible. Further work should move this out of the range of
| speculation and either confirm or dismiss it.
|
| [1]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10111...
| nutrie wrote:
| Every time I listen to Sir Roger speak, I wonder how much he
| keeps to himself. He is such a gem.
| nomemory wrote:
| I suspect a lot. He has unorthodox views on lots of topics. For
| one he doesn't seem to believe in the heat death of the
| Universe. He has some interesting theories in regards to
| gravitational waves and so on.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > he doesn't seem to believe in the heat death of the
| Universe
|
| I'm not sure I believe that the heat death of the universe
| really is the end of all things forever and for all time
| either, after reading Asimov's _The Last Question_ and a
| particularly fantastic manga oneshot adaptation by manga
| artist Ryul.
|
| If you haven't read it, I can't recommend it more highly, and
| the manga version is a nice addition to the canon. I found a
| version narrated by the man himself on the Internet Archive,
| and I also found a fully voice acted audio version from the
| Drabblecast, also linked below.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
|
| https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41230
|
| Original publication:
|
| https://archive.org/stream/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Ser.
| ..
|
| Manga version:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/9KWrH
|
| https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/oo67iat/the-last-
| questio...
|
| https://mangadex.org/title/f1e5d886-cc50-4cbf-
| ac8b-6914d9343...
|
| https://archive.org/details/manga_The_Last_Question
|
| Audiobook versions:
|
| https://archive.org/details/IsaacAsimovAudioBookCollection/1.
| ..
|
| https://www.drabblecast.org/2011/03/11/drabblecast-200-the-l.
| ..
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| One interesting angle I've heard proposed with regard to
| this is that even post-"heat death", there is no guarantee
| that local pockets of low entropy will not exist. Indeed -
| quite the opposite is true: let's say being in a maximum-
| entropy state requires all particles to assume a fully
| random distribution (otherwise a potential gradient would
| exist somewhere, a form of order, and the entropy would not
| be maximized). Now, take a description of an NxNxN chunk of
| universal "stuff" (energy, matter, etc). Similar to how we
| can find every string of digits in Pi if we look long
| enough (each given substring is equal to the search string
| with probability 1/10^N, N is length of string), we should
| be able to find every possible chunk in the maximum-entropy
| universe, with the probability for any given chunk matching
| being 1/M^N^3, (M is the universal "base", how many options
| a given location has for what it can be in the encoding we
| are using).
|
| Long story short, assuming an infinite universe post-"heat
| death", we'd expect to be able to find every possible
| arrangement of particles represented at some location, even
| very complex ones such as the entire universal state we
| observe today.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I've heard these theoretical ideas advanced also, perhaps
| in writings by Richard Dawkins but I'm not sure; iirc the
| idea is loosely related to the concept of quantum foam
| but I may be mistaken.
|
| > Quantum foam or spacetime foam is a theoretical quantum
| fluctuation of spacetime on very small scales due to
| quantum mechanics. The theory predicts that at these
| small scales, particles of matter and antimatter are
| constantly created and destroyed. These subatomic objects
| are called virtual particles. The idea was devised by
| John Wheeler in 1955.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5yngp/the-universe-is-
| made-...
| icf80 wrote:
| TEXT 24: This individual soul is unbreakable and insoluble, and
| can be neither burned nor dried. He is everlasting, present
| everywhere, unchangeable, immovable and eternally the same.
|
| https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/2/
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Quantum effects allow for randomness which is nice since it gives
| some sense of not being a machine entirely on rails.
|
| That alone alone doesn't give determinism though. For that we
| still need to have some influence on the outcomes of quantum
| events. If there's a mechanism by which we can will for some
| quantum outcomes to be more likely than others that'd be nice.
| It'd fit with intuition that we aren't just observers of a series
| of events but actual participants that determine the outcome.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| I find the notion that free will requires a non-determistic
| system strange. Consider for the sake of argument that you love
| apples and hate oranges. Then given a free choice between an
| apple and an orange, you'll always pick the apple. The system
| is determisitic, _and your free will is what makes it
| deterministic_. On the other hand, if you were required to
| choose an apple or an orange based on a coin flip, you wouldn
| 't call that free will.
| jl6 wrote:
| Someone who hates oranges might still, on rare occasion, pick
| one. Maybe they're having a bad day, misunderstood the
| instruction, or wanted to turn their life around starting
| _now_. We might make decisions with high likelihood but it's
| a qualitative leap to go from 99.999999% to 100%.
| ben_w wrote:
| If there's a reason for it, that's still deterministic; if
| there is no reason for it, that's still random.
| Retric wrote:
| There's always more context to a choice than a simple
| question, but we aren't limited to vague questions.
|
| What you ate for breakfast January 3, 2024 could be what
| you always eat with those memories, that body, those
| resources etc. So saying yes once could very well mean you
| would say yes 100% in exactly that context without meaning
| you would always say yes in similar but not identical
| situations.
|
| On the other hand if it's random in identical contexts then
| it's just random not free will.
| matt-attack wrote:
| There's an excellent 2hr or so podcast episode on free will
| that has drastically changed my mind on the notion of
| determinism. The main argument is that the notion of "choice"
| is in fact an illusion and when you dive into what you're
| actually doing when you "choose" you realize that it's really
| just determinism under the hood.
|
| In other words a deterministic universe is actually
| completely consistent with our experience once you realize
| that the mechanism of us "choosing" anything is really an
| illusion.
|
| Highly recommend it.
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-sense-with-
| sam-...
| raindeer2 wrote:
| Indeed. The problem is that the word "free" has different
| meanings when talking about free will and freedom in other
| contexts. What you talk about is value freedom, while ppl
| denying the existence of free will refer to "physcial"
| freedom. Few ppl notice the distinction though which makes
| the debate somewhat strange.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08435
| teew wrote:
| One thing that's really strange about this article is that
| it presents compatibilism and incompatibilism as having a
| different concept of 'free will' - compatibilism sporting
| an everyday sense of _free_ and incompatibilism roughly a
| more scientific one. The article assumes incompatibilism to
| be correct on those grounds and goes from there. Coming
| from the philosophical literature, this is simply not the
| case. If both sides assume the same definition of free
| will, e.g. as "the agent could have chosen differently",
| they still have a genuine disagreement...
| teew wrote:
| For some reason, most opinions on this topic that one reads
| on forums with of technically inclined people are non-
| compatibilist (the view that causal determinism and free will
| are mutually exclusive) while a good number of people that
| think a lot about will (i.e. philosophers) are
| compatibilists...
|
| Note though that in metaphysics/theory of mind determinism is
| defined as the state at a given moment being necessitated
| from the state at a previous moment. I think one could
| critique your argument by saying that you're just pushing
| back the question of determinism by one level (i.e. "what's
| responsible for your preference of apples in the first
| place?"). The fact that you always choose the same way can
| then be taken to be a proof of determinism instead.
|
| A compatibilist line of argument for your position might go
| something like this: What we consider a free will would
| hardly be met by a will completely detached from any
| deterministic constraints whatsoever. If a necessary
| condition for free will was that it is free from any external
| conditions, what would there even be for it to 'choose', and
| on what basis could its choices be made? Only if your mind
| knows of apples and oranges (objects subject to deterministic
| systems) and can interact with them (is at least partly part
| of the same system) can it make a meaningful choice between
| them. (Again, this view is based on the assumption that
| determinism exists and that free will is possible.)
| numpad0 wrote:
| [delayed]
| MeImCounting wrote:
| The question is rather what circumstances gave rise to the
| system that would make a given choice. Thats all "free will"
| is: the current state of a system that gives rise to a
| specific choice.
|
| Free will as its commonly understood is an entirely religious
| concept and has little/no utility in explaining behavior. It
| is, IMO entirely unrelated to consciousness and a distracting
| subject that traps people into circular reasoning.
| Animats wrote:
| Thermal noise alone is enough to yield randomness.
| moralestapia wrote:
| "Randomness" is not a correct interpretation of quantum
| mechanics, all you can say is that, beyond some limit,
| uncertainty in measurements kicks in. A deterministic process
| being behind it cannot be ruled out (yet?).
| heisenzombie wrote:
| Hmm, we have actually ruled out quite a lot of that sort of
| thing... For example we're pretty sure there's nothing like a
| "local hidden variable", e.g. a little deterministic process
| in an electron determining if it's going to be spin up or
| spin down when measured.
|
| See: Bell's theorem.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Oh, I may have missed that. So, can a deterministic process
| be ruled out?
| Fourier864 wrote:
| An experiment that proved that there are no local
| variables which secretly determine the outcome of a
| quantum measurement won the Nobel Prize in 2022:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
|
| It appears to be completely random.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Not an expert in physics but nowhere in there says any of
| the statements you make (well, except for the Nobel
| Prize).
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| For a detailed investigation of this topic by an renowned
| quantum computer scientist: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159.
| layer8 wrote:
| Instead it's a machine on a roulette table? There is no third
| state between determinism and randomness. Either something has
| a cause, or it doesn't, and hence is random (or a combination
| of both).
|
| > actual participants that determine the outcome.
|
| Nobody disputes that we are (well, almost nobody). But we as
| participants are ourselves an outcome of processes that are
| somehow determined, and our decisions have causes. And assuming
| that they're instead random doesn't improve the situation.
| _Microft wrote:
| ... but so does anything that performs photosynthesis?
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| There is a lot of intelligence in plants. For example crown
| shyness, navigating to water, trees informing each other that a
| giraffe is eating their leaves, etc.
| ben_w wrote:
| None of that is what I'd call "a lot" of intelligence, not
| even in aggregate.
|
| (Evolution itself can be described as a form of intelligence,
| but evolution is as different from individuals as humanity
| collectively is from a single thought).
| ioblomov wrote:
| Given that it took probabilistic models to create the fluency of
| generative AI, it would only make sense that brains exploit
| quantum effects.
| api wrote:
| I've speculated for many years that biology is harnessing quantum
| computing in some way and that this is one of the simplest
| explanations for how the brain can do what it does so quickly on
| so little power. It only consumes around 40 watts and does things
| an entire AWS data center can't do.
|
| Quantum compute could be being leveraged to do things like
| accelerating search for gradient descent. This would allow very
| rapid learning in polynomial time. There are also quantum
| algorithms that can more or less serialize parallel search, etc.
|
| The objection is usually that biology is hot and noisy and wet
| and that this is a poor environment for QC. This assumes that
| it's doing QC in a remotely similar way to how the quantum
| computers we are trying to build would do it. Billions of years
| of evolution might have found ways to harness quantum phenomena
| for information processing that are quite radically different.
| It's all analog for starters, so nothing like a "qubit" or
| rigidly defined circuits.
|
| Maybe some biochemical reactions are structured so as to invoke
| and amplify useful quantum effects that allow things to happen
| informatically that would be much slower or more costly without
| those effects.
|
| Without understanding what's happening this would just look like
| noise and luck to us. I do know that there are "unreasonably
| effective" enzymes and reactions involved in things like DNA
| repair, though it's been a while since I read about this. I think
| there are cases where repair complexes find DNA errors more
| effectively than can easily be explained by basic chemistry and
| chance, and we are not sure exactly what's going on. Maybe
| there's something involving quantum information processing
| happening somewhere.
| 613style wrote:
| This feels a lot like a standard line of muddy thinking we see
| in youtube videos about consciousness (for example): "we don't
| understand brains, and we don't understand quantum mechanics,
| so they're probably related."
|
| It's easy to speculate, but it's not easy to find any evidence
| at all to back up those guesses. It's still not clear that this
| has anything to do with consciousness or information processing
| or AWS datacenters.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| There's evidence that biology takes advantage of quantum
| effects on all levels - all the way from individual chemical
| bonds and interactions of molecules (quantum biochemistry) up
| to cellular and multi-cellular. Mostly because there's no way
| it could work on such small scales and be so energy efficient
| if it didn't.
|
| So one thing is certain - the brain does use quantum
| mechanics just like the rest of the body, because otherwise
| it wouldn't be possible to have so much done inside such a
| small volume, with such small amounts of energy.
|
| Of course this question is actually meant to be "is brain a
| quantum computer?" and we don't have any idea.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| If you take the results of this work and also recent work in
| understanding what's called the "Null space" of preparatory
| neuronal activity prior to action [1] then it paints a fairly
| clear picture that the null space might be interacting with this
| micro tubular architecture, and perhaps the activation function
| for skeletal muscle act is this wave collapse, informing the null
| space function evaluation
|
| [1]
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-024-00796-z.epdf?shar...
| coppsilgold wrote:
| Would it be surprising if evolution managed to exploit quantum
| mechanics for function? It did exploit everything else.
|
| There is also a theory that quantum mechanics plays a role in
| olfaction[1].
|
| [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction>
| moralestapia wrote:
| It plays a role in photosynthesis, I don't have the reference
| at hand (I'm on my phone), but that one is 100% verified.
| dekhn wrote:
| You can start at
| https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/06/14/photosynthesis-key-
| to-... and https://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/PBD-
| quantum-se... and use the names in those articles to pull up
| the relevant literature.
| dekhn wrote:
| There are several biological processes for which we're fairly
| certain that some quantum mechanical process is exploited.
| Strictly speaking, everything about biology is ultimately
| explained by quantum chemistry and physics, but not in a
| particularly exciting way. However, I don't think anybody has
| found any concrete evidence that any process in biology
| exploits entanglement. Instead, the examples we've seen so far
| are mostly around tunnelling, and coherency.
|
| People argue a lot about the "meaning of quantum" but nearly
| all the arguing is about the behavior of entanglement and
| wavefunction collapse. Tunnelling and coherency are pretty
| banal QM phenomena at this point.
|
| As for Sabine... I don't find her popular science vides about
| biology to be particularly enlightening or accurate.
| greyface- wrote:
| It would be surprising if it _didn 't_. Why would an
| evolutionary process avoid searching through mechanisms that
| involve quantum effects?
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| Not at all! There is evidence of quantum effects in the light
| harvesting complexes in chlorophyll that operate at ambient
| temperatures. This appears to be a key element to the
| efficiency of guiding photons to the photosystem.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Didn't Thunderf00t perform an experiment to prove that heavy
| water tastes sweet due to a quantum effect?
| Hugsun wrote:
| The first thought that came into my head reading this title was:
| "Ah, so they turned off the quantum effects for someone and they
| became dumb".
|
| I guess that someone was me.
| alevskaya wrote:
| This referenced paper seems like primarily a theoretical
| modelling paper (almost all of its figures are simulations?) that
| contains as far as I can read 3 (!) actual experimental
| measurements in bulk on a fluorospectrophotometer. The claim is
| that the observed increased fluorescent quantum yield (QY) of
| microtubules over tubulin can be explained by the ideas in their
| simulations.
|
| It's hard to buy that their proposed stories are the simplest
| explanation for these few measurements. Much more boring
| phenomena can influence QY. e.g. simply occluding fluorophores
| from the bulk solvent can have a huge influence on QY and
| spectra. (I used to design biological fluorescent reporter
| reagents...)
| QuantumG wrote:
| Or to put it more clearly: bullshit
|
| Every article on Roger Penrose's nonsense is just like this.
| It's stupid pseudoscience meant to make dumb people feel better
| about being meatbags.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| Yeah I put this in the same bucket as religion and freewill.
| These are things people cling onto because we so desperately
| want to feel special and magical.
|
| It's similar to learning that the universe doesn't literally
| revolve around us.
| umvi wrote:
| > free will
|
| Assuming free will doesn't exist, how would a world where
| free will _does_ exist be any different? As far as I can
| tell, our current world is indistinguishable from a world
| with free will, therefore our world is equivalent to one
| with free will.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| No, your response is not scientific. The default,
| rational assumption is that the brain works through
| normal physical processes.
|
| In order for free will to exist there would need to be
| some force outside of normal physics that influences the
| physical world.
|
| No evidence for this force of nature exists. And, at a
| high level, this is no different from other quackery like
| psychics, witchcraft and other similar nonsense where
| people insist that their minds can influence the physical
| world beyond normal physics.
| naasking wrote:
| The paper is not connected to Penrose.
| havaloc wrote:
| Star Trek had it right, living organisms beam at a "quantum
| resolution".
| parpfish wrote:
| this paper is going to unleash a mighty wave of woo-woo
| Animats wrote:
| Most useful comment so far.
| usgroup wrote:
| I think -- roughly speaking -- Penrose argues that human
| capabilities such as transductive reasoning are clearly not
| computable, therefore falsifying the idea that the mind reduces
| to an algorithm. He then goes on to propose how nonetheless what
| the mind does might be physically grounded, even if not in purely
| computational machinery.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| That doesn't make sense to me at all. If something is
| physically grounded and can be achieved then shouldn't it, by
| definition, be computable.
| User23 wrote:
| No. Why should it be?
| naasking wrote:
| If it's physically grounded then it would be computable by
| _some_ machine, just not necessarily a Turing machine. For
| instance, a hypercomputer can solve the Halting problem for
| Turing machines. We just have to be clear about the kind of
| machine on which a problem is computable.
| mb64 wrote:
| It depends on if the universe is fundamentally
| deterministic or not. Right now we don't have any way to
| see beyond the apparent randomness in quantum mechanics
| and we probably never will. This part of the universe
| might be completely non-computable to us, it's just
| random.
| naasking wrote:
| Randomness doesn't have any real impact on whether a
| problem is computable. Just model the distribution of the
| random variable. Non-deterministic Turing machines are a
| thing.
| mb64 wrote:
| That wasn't the impression I got from Sabine's video. It's
| consciousness itself (the subjective experience) that isn't
| computable (AI will probably never be conscious).
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| So there is a chance to abuse a cockroach and turn it into
| quantum computer for breaking encryption on the budget.
| Horffupolde wrote:
| Given that the brain is a physical object subject to all quantum
| effects, wouldn't the novelty be that it _doesn 't_ use quantum
| effects? That it does sounds obvious.
| thsksbd wrote:
| its worse than that. A physical system can go far without QM ->
| see a system subject to Newton laws.
|
| A chemical system is necessarily QM. Chemistry is either purely
| empirical, or quantum.
| amelius wrote:
| Without QM, electrons would just drop into the nucleus. So
| good luck building anything without QM.
| wk_end wrote:
| Words are intended to cut up the world - this is how they get
| their meaning. If you've taken these words to apply to
| everything in the in universe, you've rendered them
| meaningless, which is not the intention. Projectiles are
| subject to quantum effects but you can model their behaviour
| classically perfectly well. A charitable reading would be
| something like "to model the operational behaviour of the
| brain, classical mechanics is insufficient".
| gfodor wrote:
| This is the kindest response I've ever seen to someone
| suffering from whatever it is that causes these kinds of
| comments on this specific website.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| "Whatever it is" == the same neurophysical/genetic factors
| that cause high development of "STEM" intelligence is
| associated with inability to process social cues in a
| dynamic fashion, somewhat related to high function autism.
| A great preference for clear classification that is not
| self-contradicting.
| notfed wrote:
| A charitable reading of _what_? I don 't think that's the
| claim here, is it?
| nsenifty wrote:
| Perhaps the title should have been "Brain uses Quantum effects
| in a useful/controllable way". Sabine explains it well in the
| video. To use quantum effects for computation, you'd need very
| controlled conditions and it was thought be to not possible in
| the brain.
| tensor wrote:
| When these claims come up they don't mean that they are using
| quantum effects to do normal atomic and molecular things, but
| rather that somehow quantum effects are used in the process of
| "cognition" thus allowing us to believe that we are in fact
| more than biological machines and leave room for various
| magical properties we like to think we have (souls,
| consciousness, free will, etc).
|
| While quantum effects have been found to aid in photosynthesis,
| interesting uses in cognition or otherwise are in fact
| extremely rare in biology. I believe photosynthesis is one of
| the few documented examples. Also, despite the popularity of
| the quantum brain idea, no one has been able to show definitive
| evidence of it for decades now.
|
| TLDR yes it would be incredibly novel if this claim were proven
| to be true.
| layer8 wrote:
| "Quantum effects" usually refers to coherent states of
| superposition. In an environment like the brain that is
| suffused with photons (it's warm), if nothing else,
| superpositions decohere virtually instantly. It's therefore
| implausible that quantum effects could play any appreciable
| computational role in the brain.
| alevskaya wrote:
| Quantum mechanics is needed to explain any microscopic
| phenomena in chemistry and biology - that is not at all in
| dispute.
|
| The odd set of claims is that somehow biology has 1) figured
| out how to preserve long-range entanglement and coherent states
| at 300K in a solvated environment when we struggle to do so in
| cold vacuum for quantum computing and 2) somehow still manages
| to selectively couple this to the -known- neuronal
| computational processes that are experimentally proven to be
| essential to thought and consciousness.
|
| This more or less amounts to assertions that "biology is magic"
| without any substantive experimental evidence over the last
| thirty years that any of the above is actually happening.
| That's why most biophysicists and neuroscientists don't take it
| at all seriously.
| thsksbd wrote:
| I'm always amused by the lack of creativity of biologists.
|
| It seems every decade or so some closely held dogma of biological
| systems is proven wrong after they mock physicists, computer
| scientists or mathematicians who first suggest it.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| The following is most likely nonsense, but I always had the
| intuition that there is a hidden connection between mother and
| child that remains after the child's birth.
| victorbstan wrote:
| Could've just asked me.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| So there is a little quantum soul which is the consciousness of
| the brain. How does the soul get it's consciousness?
|
| I think the best attitude is that a. We have no clue what causes
| consciousness and b. it's probably much more widespread that we
| previously assumed. We assume that other humans, cats and
| sufficiently advanced AI are conscious based on observing
| behaviors similar to our own. But why should self awareness be
| tied to specific behavior? Why not a star self aware of being a
| star, without having any of the same senses, drives and
| capabilities as a human? At best we can assume is that some other
| animals/things might be self aware of similar occurrences as we
| are.
|
| As for quantum effects, if brain is able to leverage them in
| computation, that's an obvious evolutionary advantage. One
| obvious person of a brain is to simulate many possible potential
| actions and their real world outcomes. If it's able to use
| quantum states to model multiple scenarios simultaneously, that's
| quicker/more detailed modeling with less energy use.
|
| But as far as quantum effects causing consciousness, how could we
| possibly tell and what useful insights have we gained by making
| this assumption?
| wrp wrote:
| For a popular survey of the relevant neurophysics, try _Stairway
| to the Mind_ by Alwyn Scott (1995). He argues it is very unlikely
| that quantum effects are relevant, and is skeptical of Penrose.
| canjobear wrote:
| If the brain can get any extra fitness from exploiting quantum
| effects, it will. But the reason people are interested in this
| stuff seems to be that they think there's a connection between
| the quantum nature of the brain and consciousness. I don't see
| how the argument is any more than this:
|
| 1. Quantum effects seem mysterious.
|
| 2. Consciousness seems mysterious.
|
| 3. Therefore, quantum effects cause/are consciousness.
|
| ...which seems pretty weak.
| zone411 wrote:
| Why is the link to this blog spam instead of to the paper or a
| better article? Hossenfelder lacks qualifications in neuroscience
| and is often confidently inaccurate.
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