The theory that consciousness is a quantum system gains support | Hacker News Reader

The theory that consciousness is a quantum system gains support

mindmatters.ai

16 pointssheepscreek22 comments

Connecting quantum physics and consciousness feels like a God in the Gaps fallacy to me, but I don’t have any real strong argument against it

I'm sure it felt the same when neurons were found to use that weird stuff in lightning, what-do-you-call-it, electricity. Are you telling me my brain is like lightning!?

If quantum physics can model consciousness, it'll take a few generations before it feels normal to talk about it that way.

That’s different though, because it was _found_. People have been postulating that consciousness is somehow related to consciousness with hand wavy arguments for decades

> In short, it says that consciousness arises when gravitational instabilities in the fundamental structure of space-time collapse quantum wave functions in tiny structures called microtubules that are found inside neurons – and, in fact, in all complex cells.

What... this isn't even wrong.

Modernity sees state as the building block of reality. Quantum dynamics says it is POTENTIAL through constructive and destructive interference resolving into state in the moment of now (a continuously transitive and ephemeral moment.)

Is it so hard to see consciousness as the domain of existential POTENTIAL, and living systems as a feedback loop into this echo chamber of potential?

Does potential not sound more like consciousness than the arrangement of state?

If I'm reading you right, I'd say post-chaos maths and post-computing revolution it's much easier for us to see process, not state, as the crucial element (see Ted Chiang's Exhalation). Whether that process requires QM... that's so far above my pay grade I don't even have an opinion.

Not process.

Potential is composed of the super-amplitude. Process would be the physical system influencing the resolve (which may vary allowing different technological approaches, i.e. organic or silicon or otherwise.)

QM exclusively allows this super-amplitude. No physical process can compare, yet without some physical medium the amplitudes would be unbound.

  For example, the order in which questions are asked is important in quantum physics but not in classical physics. But in that respect, the human mind often behaves more in a quantum way, he says:
  
  For example, in a study published 20 years ago about the effects that question order has on respondents’ answers, subjects were asked whether they thought the previous US president, Bill Clinton, was honest. They were then asked if his vice president, Al Gore, seemed honest. ... (the question order affected the outcome -ed).

This to me seem like a ludicrous leap in logic.

It's absolutely certain that quantum processes are involved in the brain, as part of basic chemistry. Whether any strange quantum effects 'bubble up' beyond this, and are exploited for consciousness is what needs to be proved, and I am skeptical. The recent rise of LLM's indicates to me that you don't need exotic physics to get spectacularly complex behaviour.

Orch OR isn't taken seriously by people in this field, and I annoyed a lot of people asking about it since I knew about it online and most people only know of it because Penrose's name is on it so it means it must be true. Everyone who watched YouTube knows about this theory and thinks it to be true. The consensus seems to be IIT. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...

There is no consensus amongst philosophers on consciousness, and if there is, it isn’t IIT. I don’t know about cogsci people though.

It was a consensus of the people I talked to orch OR isn't taken seriously, and IIT is. I only hear of orch OR from people who watched the video online and heard of the great toilet paper maker rodger Penrose.

Why sniping Penrose? Some scandal for which I am not aware?

His explanations of manifold contours was an epiphany of enlightenment for me.

Sorry, it's just what people remember about him for some reason. That hes a Nobel prize winner who must be right about consciousness, sued a toilet paper company and won. Hard for the laymen to speak of his scientific work.

Penrose’s excursion into logic and philosophy by way of Gödel is nearly universally rejected in my experience and according to the standard reference work: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/#Gd...

I would disagree on one hand as mechanisms can and shall inevitably outperform human thought capacity at some scale.

And agree on another, the human mind is an efficient quantum computer (I know …) which uses constructive and destructive interference for some holographic rendering rather than a composition of linear conditional logic.

Do not let the confines of human ignorance set the horizon for Truth!

Allow that science is only a tool for undeceiving ourselves. Universal rejection sounds like dogma, not science.

Orchestrated Objective Reduction is a terrible name for it.

Philosophers take plenty of non-consensus positions seriously.

Are philosophers the most qualified to answer the question? To me it sounds like “there’s no consensus amongst botanists on P=NP”. I’d expect biologists/psychologists to have the most experience with the subject matter. And if we’re talking about quantum theory then maybe add some physicists.

There is no substantial botanical literature on whether P=NP, and the early literature on it is hardly botanical in nature.

There is a very substantial literature in philosophy of mind on consciousness, and many within the field are up to date on modern cogsci and psychology. Indeed, cogsci and philosophy quite fruitfully interact—as far as I can tell, with similar closeness to that of semantic theorists in linguistics and in philosophy. There are also philosophers of physics who are perfectly up to date with modern physics and quantum theory. I have not met any philosophers who were clearly up to date both with physics and psychology to the same level, but I expect some philosophers of physics have gone into philosophy of mind. Considerations at the level of your comment therefore point to taking philosophical work on consciousness seriously, which is not to say that the plurality view, so far as there is one, is correct.

Basically the punchline to this SMBC comic [0] (this is your chance to stop reading because of spoilers.)

> If you don't talk to your kids about quantum computing... Someone else will:

> "Quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent!"

[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

Quantum physics is a part of physics and brains work using physics. They are not digital, however much some would like them to be. So of course quantum physics plays a part in how they work. I am not sure that leads inexorably to the conclusions reached here. Consciousness is poorly defined and quantum physics is weird and wobbly, that doesn't make them connected.

This is basically the plot of the Ender’s Game sequel series (Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide/etc)

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