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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

This only shows the mechanism that impairs the brain enough for it to become unconscious is related to the microtubules.

Absolutely everything in the real world is quantum-related because that’s the very structure of reality.

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  > Absolutely everything in the real world is quantum-related because that’s the very structure of reality.

Yes but AFAIK, reality is "quantum" in the sense that something like the scale of Avogadro's number (N=10^23) quantum processes interact and average out to typical classical behavior. It's only in limited situations where the actual quantum mechanical nature pops up in the macro world, right? (eg Bose-Einstein condensate, the ultraviolet catastrophe, energy bands of semiconductors, emission spectra, etc).

The idea that Penrose posited is intrinsically HARD to measure. Moreover, consciousness itself is not well defined to begin with.

If anything, it appears that neural networks are far further along than any quantum mechanism for approximating whatever "consciousness" actually is? And neural networks are absolutely not quantum mechanical.

> Yes but AFAIK, reality is "quantum" in the sense that something like the scale of Avogadro's number (N=10^23) quantum processes interact and average out to typical classical behavior. It's only in limited situations where the actual quantum mechanical nature pops up in the macro world, right? (eg Bose-Einstein condensate, the ultraviolet catastrophe, energy bands of semiconductors, emission spectra, etc).

This is not very clear at the moment. Of course, observations make it obvious that classical objects don't behave like quantum objects, and all quantum objects we know of are small, and all classical objects are big.

We even know of one mechanism that prevents certain quantum effects from influencing large systems - decoherence. Decoherence explains why, when a quantum system that is all in the same phase interacts with a large system where everything is out of phase, the various parts of the quantum system also quickly go out of phase, and thus can't constructively or destructively interfere with each other any more. This explains for example why, if you repeat the double-slit experiment with ping pong balls instead of atoms, or if you repeat it in a dense gas at high temperature, you won't see the interference patterns form.

However, we don't understand at a high level why it is that quantum experiments only have "a single result". Basically the schrodinger equation applied for the double slit experiment, even taking decoherence into account, still predicts that the particle-wave will move through both slits to some extent. And yet, with or without decoherence, we only ever see a single photon or tennis ball hit the screen, with some probability that can be deduced from the square of the amplitude of the Schrodinger function. And even worse, this single measurement outcome only happens if the quantum particle has hit a classical screen. If instead at the same distance we only have other quantum particles, then it can actually hit several of them, and change all of their positions and momenta. This despite the fact that, of course, even the classical wall itself is made of particles which should obey the same laws of quantum mechanics.

> all quantum objects we know of are small

There are quantum effects that manifest at macroscopic scale. For instance, superconductivity and superfluidity occur on bulk volumes but are due to quantum effects.

One might even say emergent behaviour.

> If anything, it appears that neural networks are far further along than any quantum mechanism for approximating whatever "consciousness" actually is? And neural networks are absolutely not quantum mechanical.

I know next to nothing about either, but I wanna try to disagree with that.

LLMs fool people into believing they‘re conscious, because they‘ve been trained on extraordinary amounts of thoughts and data outputted by the world‘s top conscious creature. They appear conscious because consciousness is in the training data.

To me, neural networks more closely mimic the brain in what I would (poorly) call „bodily functions“. I include language processing and speech in this definition.

There are people that don‘t have an inner monologue - which is totally fascinating to me - who are perfectly conscious like everyone else. Simon Roper, who doesn‘t, has fascinating YouTube videos on these topics.

> There are people that don‘t have an inner monologue -

I think it's more likely they do and just don't 'hear' it or 'verbalize' it.

I guess that‘s more or less the definition. They don‘t hear a voice in their head when they think, but their thinking is completely „normal“ otherwise.

I believe in a video, Simon mentions some examples where people with an inner monologue can experience a lack thereof. I think one is the moment _right_ after you wake up. You‘re able to think, but usually without a voice in your head. I could be misremembering that though.

How are people that do not have inner monologue able to write? And if they are capable of writing how does whatever they output as writing differ from inner monologue?

They write just like everyone else, there‘s no apparent difference. The parts of their brain responsible for speech works just fine, but it doesn‘t vocalize their thoughts „back to them“.

But then they must have a stream of thoughts that they can't "hear" in their mind themselves that only gets activated or becomes visible when they talk or write?

There's no speech or invisible speech normally, that only appears when writing or talking?

But if they were to talk out loud they could simulate the same thing? Could they simulate it if they just moved their mouth? What about if they imagined they were to move the mouth and what they would say?

I have a hard time grasping this. Because if they can talk they probably should at least be able to simulate this in their mind.

In which case - another topic - I guess if some people don't have it at all, then other people can also turn it on and off. I wonder if then when someone is supposed to meditate is it a very different experience and expectations for different people? So some guidance for some people would sound really weird or impossible? Because e.g. if somebody advices to let go of your thoughts or something, I have no idea what it means, because my thoughts are just coming, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Then some people will say "You should not stop thinking or trying to control them, but instead just notice them, but don't get carried away by them" - which also doesn't make sense to me, because my thoughts are my thoughts, they keep coming, how do I not get carried away by them? They are just there in a continuous flow with me whereever I go.

> LLMs fool people into believing they‘re conscious

I can't prove I'm conscious either. I might just be fooling everyone around me.

Neural networks are also way less power efficient. Quantum computing allows us to calculate things that would take a lot of power or time to calculate (not calculate things that are impossible). If one could create consciousness with classical physics it wouldn't prove anything about how the human brain works. In fact if it was wildly less power efficient it might even suggest non-classical physics in the brain.

Wouldn't the scaling of time be a more reliable tell of quantum computing? If humans can marginally solve problems with a slower increase over time than conventional algorithms that would hint at a quantum algorithm being in use. It certainly wouldn't be faster compared to clocked silicon, and there would probably be a lot of noise and overhead involved.

Thermodynamic analysis would actually be a really useful way to attack this problem, but unfortunately (though fortunately for stability) the brain and our computers are no where near the Landauer limit of computation.

I actually wonder if the Landauer limit applies to quantum computing.

> The idea that Penrose posited is intrinsically HARD to measure. Moreover, consciousness itself is not well defined to begin with.

Indeed. Penrose's hypothesis is very much in the untestable realm. Until there is some way to test it, it deserves little consideration. If there is something like an ad hominem praise, taking this seriously might be a good example.

The two great miracles of quantum entanglement are:

(1) Solid matter. Solid matter is impossible in classical physics but possible in the real world because of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics

(2) The laser. Unlike 1/2-spin particles that can't be in the same quantum state, spin 1 particles want to dogpile in the same state

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_statisti...

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I could care less about EPR (real but not so profound) and speculations about quantum mechanics in consciousness. My first instinct is to think that quantum entanglement around black holes is the same kind of woo but I could be wrong about that.

While the behaviors of fermions and of bosons are indeed responsible for what you consider miracles, I fail to see which is the special relationship between the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics and "quantum entanglement" that you have in mind.

Like so. Using the Schrodinger formulation it is invalid to talk about two particles having separate wavefunctions like ψ(x₁) and ψ(x₂) but rather you have a single wavefunction written ψ(x₁,x₂) and in the case of Fermions you have ψ(x₁,x₂) = -ψ(x₂,x₁) and for Bosons you have ψ(x₁,x₂) = ψ(x₂,x₁).

People get confused about EPR because they think the world is ψ(x₁) and ψ(x₂) when it is really ψ(x₁,x₂).

Having a single wavefunction just corresponds to the normal rule for the probabilities of events that are not independent.

I still do not see any connection with "quantum entanglement".

Quantum entanglement is a very special case of the single wavefunction, not frequently encountered at large scales.

In the general case that is valid for almost everything around us that single wavefunction differs only slightly from the product of many simpler wavefunctions that correspond to parts of the environment between which the interactions are non-existent or minimal.

It would be just a probability of the wavefunction were real valued. Because it is complex valued it's a lot more than a probability, e.g., entanglement is possible.

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