New research suggests our brains use quantum computation
phys.org
phys.org
They found a nice signal (Figure 1 in the paper) that correlates with the oxygen level in blood that is essentially the heartbeats. So my first assumption is that they are measuring noise instead of some deep consciousness property.
Quantum effects are very important inside molecules, you can't calculate anything about them without QM (or an effective model).
There are some quantum effects in slightly larger system, like photosynthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis#Efficiency but it's not a global effect or something that can solve complicated problems. It's just a very local, very short lived improvement, not something that can solve the TSP or think about the meaning of life. It's something in between of the intelligence of an electric switch for a lamp and a very cheap calculator.
To get a global long lived quantum effect on a big system, you need very cold and very isolated systems. Otherwise, the noise breaks all the quantum correlation and you get a global classical system.
Being very optimistic, perhaps they measured some very local and very short lived quantum effect. My biology is not strong enough, but perhaps some of the pores of the neurons use some quantum effect to open and close, for example to let sodium get in and out, or oxygen, or whatever.
It's perfectly possible that cells use some short lived local quantum mechanics effect to improve some the efficiency of some living function, but it would be surprising that a neuron in the visual are in the back of your brain has an entangled electron with a neuron in the front of your brain that is thinking about the meaning of life.
My proposal is to repeat the experiment with other organs, like the liver, the toes or whatever organ is the most stupid organ in your popular culture. If they are only measuring noise caused by some uninteresting quantum effect correlated with blood flow, I expect it to be also visible in other organs.
They are biologists, though, who do not generally have a good track record on replication.
The part I really disbelieve is the implication that this new measurement method is getting a signal that is related to consciousness or other high level stuff. For example, quoting a quote in the press article:
> "Quantum brain processes could explain why we can still outperform supercomputers when it comes to unforeseen circumstances, decision making, or learning something new."
Nah.
What, now biologists too? o-O I thought the list consisted of economists and social scientists.
This is far too confident a statement. I totally get that there may not be strong, or really any, evidence for quantum effects being a component of consciousness. But the converse is true as well. There is not definitive or even strong evidence that quantum effects do not contribute to consciousness. These sorts of religious statements belay a misunderstanding of nature of science - science is a process, which builds models that best fit the data found through experimentation, and the models get updated or even completely refactored as new data arrives. Science does not state anything as a definitive truth. We've seen countless times throughout history and "fundamental truths" get upended as a new hypothesis much better fits the data.
That there are entangled particles in the brain is no surprise. Any cup of coffee will have a million. That the brain uses quantum computing is a bit of a reach it seems.
- The agents actions are entirely determined by its environment
- The agents actions form a probability distribution determined by it environment
- The agent actions from their environment are annotated in some way that we haven't or can't have thought of that represents what the agent is. In my opinion, something that we can't think of or experience and something that doesn't exist are indistinguishable and we shouldn't really separate them except for making this statement.
- There is no agent and subjective existence is merely one route down immutable decision tree that is our choices and their consequences.
None of these options really intuitively sound like free will to me. Ultimately thinking along these lines requires separating the agent from the environment.
EDIT: I see now the reply is to the YouTube link which I missed
(Personally as a compatibilist, I assert it's a map-territory error; the counterfactual worlds represent evaluated decisions, not real universes.)
This shit, of "who has God considered holier than you to go to heaven" is just more mental gymnastics of not-science.
But if you think about free will for a few minutes then you'll uncover many other issues with it at different levels.
Even at the very top level. Deciding if you want a coffee? Thirsty? Remember the taste and desire it? But wait, you also recall it keeps you awake and its a bit late in the afternoon. You weigh all these things up quickly and decide... but even if the universe itself isn't deterministic, your decision making is surely not free, you took inputs with weights and that WAS the decision. It was not random.
Actual free will, at the top level, would look like rolling the dice every time. My personal belief is that if we had free will life would be unbelievably chaotic and society couldn't exist.
Now just go down a level and classical physical systems are deterministic, and even if you add quantum probabilities, those are tiny, and importantly, independent effects. i.e. they can't be controlled to make some system that is free of externalities.
And personally I also think superdeterminism is the most likely explanation for even quantum effects, but that is untestable and therefore a somewhat pointless belief.
Your definition of free will is fairly extreme and doesn't really line up with what is typically meant by free will. The discussion of free will typically involves moral agency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will).
A strawman version of your view is that every time you see a bus, it should be 50-50 whether or not you jump in front of it. And, people don't jump in front of buses at that rate, so you conclude that free will is an illusion.
I would flip the baseline assumption around. Occasionally, some people do jump in front of a bus, so everyone (in a place with buses) that doesn't jump has made a choice not to because they could have done otherwise.
Personally, I don't think humans meaningfully exercise free will often because: 1. most of our available "choices" have either an obvious answer (do I eat?) or are largely irrelevant (Italian or Indian dish?). 2. most of us are content to operate on autopilot (as explored in the Adam Sandler movie "Click"). However, I do think the occasional real choices we make can have outsized impacts on the trajectory of our life because that choice becomes your new normal (e.g., kleptomania, drug addiction, waking up early, going for a jog).
<paraphrase>
"This book is intended for a lay reader, but necessarily contains quite a bit of maths. Readers who prefer to avoid equations and formulas can skip chapters 4, 6, 12-20, 26 and 27".
</paraphrase>
Penrose's notion of a "lay reader" is one who doesn't have a maths degree.
https://youtu.be/orMtwOz6Db0?t=2654 (Deep-link half-way through to his discussion on microtubules)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JpOJ4F4984
I wish my biology class back in high school had videos like this.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2399-6528/ac94be/...
It seems to me that trying to find macroscopic quantum effects in the brain is driven more by an illogical top down desire for them to be there, rather than a bottom up evidence-driven investigation of effects that can't be explained by classical physics/chemistry, of which none have been found in the brain.
I’m not sure if you consider that “macro,” but it affects our lives everyday and it blew me away when I first learned that it was an everyday application of effectively teleportation.
Quantum effects are so prevalent on a nanometer scale it's more often a problem than it is a boon.
My guess is that the brain isn’t unique from other tissues on this.
Those ways are quite heavily constrained by needing to start with what is already available, and for each step to be both heritable and reproductively advantageous.
There are many aspects of nature that we have a good grasp on and evolution has failed to exploit, either at all or at non-insect scales. For example nuclear fission and fusion, neutrino detection, radioactivity, radio communication, superconductivity, and even some low-tech ones like chemical explosives, high speed projectiles, metalworking, cooking, lighter-than-air flight...
I was just wondering about animals with a methane balloon. It doesn't look impossible. Fish has an air balloon to avoid going to the bottom, so a similar design may be possible.
Just keep writing bigger and more complex software and one day --- pooff! By some magic neither planned nor understood, the binary logic playback device (aka a "computer") will jump the fence at the reservation for inanimate objects and start writing it's own software.
I know it's true because people make movies about it --- and lots of people on the internet *believe* this is how it works. If enough people *believe*, over time it becomes real. No logic or proof required, this is just how religions work.
A hammer *can* drive it's own nails --- you just have to believe hard enough.
Biggest problem in this area, is nobody really knows what "consciousness" means (or if they are completely certain, then they also disagree with someone else who is also completely certain and/or deny the logical consequences of that definition).
And yet, both the binary logic software and the playback device following the script are completely unaware of what they are doing or why. In terms of consciousness, they are as dumb as a hammer.
In other words, any "consciousness" in this is strictly limited to the author of the software and those who interpret the results. Otherwise, on it's own, it has no impact on reality. An ant comes way closer to exhibiting self awareness and consciousness.
Indeed, this lack of awareness of (and lack of regard for) the lower level of our nature, is why we were very happy to invent birth control, and why the people who get upset about the existence of it are seen by the rest of us as a bit odd.
[0] Depends what you count as a human/person/creature with consciousness, which is of course the point of this thread. Yay for blurry lines!
Our genome is not a script --- more like a blueprint.
Once construction is finished, the thoughts and actions of your mind/body are not "scripted" --- unless you *believe* in pre-determination.
If you don't want to count the data flow in a human brain as "scripted", you can't count the data flow in an artificial neural network as scripted; if you do count the ANN as scripted, then you should also count brains as such.
Current AI are, it is worth pointing out, less complex than a human brain: GPT-3 is appropriately the same number of parameters as a rat has synapses, while DALL•E 2 is approximately a honey bee. But the argument you're making has not yet touched scale.
Can it diagnose my car engine? It seems to be idling rough and it's using too much gas. Does the throttle body need cleaning or maybe one of the coil packs is failing?
Probably.
My free credit has run out and I've not gotten around to setting up a payment method for more credit, but this kind of random question is the kind of thing it's surprisingly good at.
Does it ever object to answering a question? What does it think about in it's spare time? Is it scared someone will turn it off?
The distinction here tends to highlight the difference between consciousness and programming.
Most humans would fail this standard. (Hence the memes "Never read the comments!" and "Eternal September" and widespread beliefs in paranormal and so on).
The (surprising to me) difference is that GPT-3 generally does a bit better than, e.g. Hollywood script writers when facing similar prompts.
This surprising quality is why GPT-3 led to GitHub Copilot.
https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/people-asked-to-draw-b...
Would the Roomba be conscious if it had a dust sensor? Then it would know that the result cleans the floor.
Are you a robot? Speaking strictly for myself, my brain does not follow a script. I normally operate on my own --- like when I formulated this reply to you.
I think this is at risk of becoming a debate over the word "script". Is it a matter of complexity? Is GPT-3 a script? Is Windows a script, even though it has more bytes of behavioral code than the GPT-3 weights? Will the Roomba be conscious if I replace its programming with a neural network, even if it behaves the same way? What if I add code to randomly vary its behavior? What if I add code to learn at runtime, considering that the learning code is still perfectly static?
You have my sympathy.
What is a thought, if not a pattern of information that in humans is embodied in the energy flowing though our neurons, and which finds an analogy in the information flow though an artificial neural network?
Are human thoughts really any more independent than any self-learning process that happens to be implemented in silicon? What makes the tiny warm bags of chemicals that are our cells, special?
> self awareness
Can you define this in a way that it simultaneously (1) is something that humans do actually have, and (2) is not trivially accomplished by giving an AI access to its own state, whether by internal feedback loops in a neutral net, by embodiment in a real or simulated environment where it can sense its own embodiment as another agent in that environment, or by other similar means?
(Edit: also simultaneously with (3), no references to the word "consciousness")
> motivation
Internal states within an agent which create a disposition to engage in specific actions?
I definitely don't need much to pass that test: both (original 1993) Doom and bacterial cells demonstrate this.
Yes. It's called "creativity" and "independent thought" --- not programming.
What makes the tiny warm bags of chemicals that are our cells, special?
Maybe quantum physics? This remains to be fully answered but their "specialness" compared to silicon/sand is not in doubt.
The AI under discussion here are no more programmed than you or me. The architecture of our brains comes from our DNA, an artificial neutral net from hyperparameters, but in both cases the interesting stuff is learned. The billions of parameters in GPT-3 and DALL•E 2 etc. are beyond the means of humans to program.
Edit:
> Maybe quantum physics? This remains to be answered but their "specialness" compared to silicon is not in doubt.
Quantum computers exist. They are no more animate than classical computers. Would you expect to change your mind if you saw an AI running on a quantum computer, or would you expect to continue to insist that brains are special?
Edit edit:
Can you define "creativity" without reference to any of the other things you're trying to use to define consciousness?
Ah, the standard question-begging ontology backed by nothing more than arguments from incredulity.
(1) "Animate vs. inanimate" is a separate axis to «every defining feature you've just used for consciousness» vs. «the absence of that»
(2) Inanimate AI can trivially alter their surroundings, all I have to do is say "Alexa, Badezimmer zehn Prozent". And this isn't an AI that I hold in high regard or consider to be conscious or anything like that — I have to ask three times while getting increasingly annoyed, because for some reason Alexa can't hear me properly and the first response is usually "Ich kann nicht Badezimmer auf Spotify finden" even though we don't have Spotify.
Still alters it's surroundings, though.
> It's just one of the things that inanimate objects can't do --- they can't alter their surroundings
And given that you wrote that as a response to the question:
> What's consciousness have to do with impact on reality?
Then you must logically say that it is.
Fortunately I don't have to claim such a belief for myself, because I said earlier:
> nobody really knows what "consciousness" means (or if they are completely certain, then they also disagree with someone else who is also completely certain and/or deny the logical consequences of that definition).
With specific emphasis on "deny the logical consequences of that definition".
Ah well. Perhaps one day, we'll have an AI that can tell us what consciousness is without repeating all the mistakes and pitfalls that humans make when trying to philosophise about this topic.
Consciousness is the perception of self, which is the result of an information model on self built by the brain from a) the external experiences of the entity, b) the internal experiences of the entity.
Personally I find the above definition 'good enough' for all purposes. Are there any disagreements on the above?
In your specific case, for example, there are non-trivial issues with the words "perception", "self", and "internal experiences".
So instead of ben_w saying
>nobody really knows what "consciousness" means
you just changed it to
>nobody really knows what "internal experiences" means
So then we haven't really gained anything in terms of being able to do rigorous science w.r.t. consciousness (except for some vague pointers, which might be valuable nonetheless).
An additional problem is that "a camera pointed at a TV displaying the output of that camera" meets that definition of consciousness.
I don't think that setup should be counted as conscious.
It transforms code from its training dataset in a sufficiently vague and exciting way. That's not all of what writing is.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
For the purposes of this level of the thread, I don't see how it matters what's going on under the hood, just that it can output code when prompted?
(I'm pretty directly saying "consciousness is ill defined", after all).
And that is what I call "religious thinking" or "mysticism".
That's the entire point I was making. ML isn't intelligence. It's data transformation. But calling it "artificial intelligence" has become something of a religion to itself. Just like with any other religion, belief demands ignorance.
You know Searle's Chinese Room? I'd have agreed with you if you'd just written that ML is that room.
I'm also saying fairly explicitly that right now it's impossible (no possibility of Popperian falsifiability) to say if an artificial neural net is or isn't conscious, because we don't know what that word really means.
But, the well-defined common definitions of intelligence are: abstraction (trivial CS), logic (fundamental), learning (all ML is this), reasoning and critical thinking (appears to be demonstrable but might be a Clever Hands illusion), planning (university courses cover this before they get to ML), and problem solving (widely demonstrated in multiple fields).
Again, I'm specifically avoiding the ill-defined parts of the definition. If you want to have a go at defining them, by all means, have fun — but my experience has thus far been that every definition falls into a few categories:
(1) recursive meaninglessness (think "intelligence is consciousness, consciousness is intelligence")
(2) things which humans fail at (think of a test of intelligence which, if applied to a human, would be equivalent to claiming a human born without eyes wound really know what the subjective difference between red and green is)
(3) things which computers can do trivially (sometimes even finite state machines, let alone ML systems)
So yeah, not sure why you think "intelligence" is religious and why textual output isn't "writing".
Confusion can't take the place of knowledge.
We don't know how much of a replacement for intelligence we have created with ML, but we can be certain it isn't a complete one. No matter how difficult it is to articulate, the difference between ML and intelligence is vast and obvious.
Searle's Chinese Room?
On Debian/Ubuntu: install xorg-dev build-essentil git and clone it.
*BSD users: You and we already know what to do.
Note to OpenBSD users: the examples will crash CWM on some machines, use FVWM for the examples, or run Xephyr on a slightly lower res (800x600 will perfectly work against a 1366x768 resolution, these are old programs), export $DISPLAY to :1 and then run the examples.
I'm not excluding the suggestion that quantum effects have macroscopic implications, but for example transistors only work due to quantum mechanical effects. That doesn't make all computers containing transistors 'quantum computers' in the accepted sense.
I don't want to be reflexively negative though. One thing we are sure of is that biological systems are unbelievably complicated, and almost every aspect of biological systems has some sort of feedback loop or side effect on everything else, many of which do affect function. Everything we learn, this included, is valuable and could turn out to be significant.
Imagine a band playing a song. The drum beat drives the rhythm and plays a central role in whole performance, but these protons may well be like sand grains bouncing on the surface of the drum.
Also bear in mind that nothing they studied or observed correlates in any way with the specific quantum processes that occur in quantum computation.
What is causation?
That is true - but it does not say anything about the opposite, or say that the objects are not correlated, which is often forgotten, or said with an implicit "there's a 90% chance they aren't correlated" when the statement makes no judgement whatsoever on the likelihood they are correlated. There might be a 90% chance of causation, even if the statement remains accurate.
Example, this statement: Grass grows the fastest when the sun shines. Correlation is not causation - the grass does not grow solely because the sun is shining. Nevertheless the statement is true.
Edit: My main point is that anything can be simply hit with: "Correlation is not causation." It's a skeptic's cop-out because, who can prove causation, really? Technically speaking, is not even gravity only assured by the anecdotes of billions of people? But sometimes it is stupid to remain a skeptic even if the two aren't the same.
Nice.
There are many, many things that could be going on in these processes in the brain. The range of possible mechanisms and effects is huge, and this result gives us just a tiny bit of information, but nowhere nearly enough to determine which possibilities are more or less likely. Some journalist picked one possibility to promote because it's click-baitey, ok fine. It got me to read the article and it's interesting research so we're all good.
But they've not demonstrated any quantum computational behaviour, and there are many, many other things that could be going on here that are nothing to do with quantum computation. I don't see how merely pointing out that fact is 'stupid'.
Skepticism is essential to the functioning of the scientific method, it's what differentiates science from credulous and magical thinking. Yes it's a brake on selecting the best answer or result, but it's a much stronger brake on selecting incorrect answers or results and that's where it provides it's value. It's quite right and proper to put off accepting what is ultimately demonstrated to be the right answer as proven until there is no other choice.
Glue ? Nonono, you gotta use fractally dense nanoscale features that engineer the probability distributions of opposing charges. That's how you adhere to shit
Apparently nature found this so trivial, Geckos lost and re-evolved this ability nine times
This is very poor reasoning, to be frank. By this logic, every computer is a quantum computer. Which is a categorically useless distinction.
The HN conversation yesterday about the complexity of the proton, in particular how we poke and prod at it to suss out its qualities and quantities, got me thinking about the subatomic particles of my personal subjective conscious experience.
We can trace, with quite a bit of precision, how a certain photon cocktail results in me perceiving the orange title bar at the top of HN. But where's the orange paint in my brain? What is it made of and how could we inspect it like we inspect the guts of a proton? And furthermore, where's the camera that puts all of those particles of paint onto the same stage? We know where the visual cortex is, yes, but where's the camera that can see the whole stage at one time?
That part, the integration of all of our perception into a single 'stage', is where I've long felt there has to be some kind of quantum or possibly field effect at play. Then I wondered if it might actually be possible for there to be an 'afterlife' of sorts in which the quantum relationship between particles is sustained beyond our life.
Dunno. Trippy to think about though.
It seems unlikely that awareness is a quantum effect, because it manifests in brain activity across a significant part of the brain. The brain is too hot and chaotic, with too many constant low level interactions, to maintain a macroscopic entangled quantum state for significant time at that level without it decohering.
I'm not as interested in tracing the neurophysical effects of perception. I'm interested in the components and coordinate space inside the 'game engine' where my perception is rendered.
You don't understand how the brain works. You don't understand how quantum mechanics work. Therefore they must be related.
https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/consciousness-migration-...
There's a bunch of other bizarre articles on the website.