Hacker News Reader

Comment by sweeneyrod | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the idea that quantum mechanics are involved in producing consciousness is not crazy (although I think Penrose would admit it is pretty speculative). His book The Emperor's New Mind discusses it. But the idea that consciousness produces quantum mechanical effects is (I'm fairly sure) nonsense.

View on HN

I have seen at least one set of studies where yogis in a deep state of meditation are asked to focus their consciousness on an active particle detection experiment, and the results seem to indicate some anomalies directly correlated with the yogi's direction of focus. The scientist's name escapes me, and was someone who had an active libel campaign running on his Wikipedia page.

Just because it's not provable or falsifiable doesn't make it nonsense - just a theory - albeit in this case a weak one.

Many untestable, unprovable theories in the past were considered nonsense and later proven true.

>just a theory

I think the way you're using the word "theory" here dilutes its technical meaning. More accurate to call it speculation or philosophizing.

I take it you don't believe in your own free will?

I certainly don't. Do you have any compelling reason for doing so?

I directly experience the sensation of making choices. All the scientific data I have ever perceived has been through countless filters and transformations. I find it hard to muster faith in my perceptions of scientific data if I can't trust my perceptions of something much more raw and unfiltered.

I directly experience dreams and optical illusions, too. Trusting your perception is basically the opposite of science.

That is going way too far. I would say science is the practice of "triangulating" reality by trying "project" our perceptions (which we assume are noisy) into a space where they are directly comparable - kind of like how you take multiple measurements to get a distribution, then move forward using the mean.

Cogito ergo sum is all we really have to go by.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com