You don't believe in ESP? Then maybe your mind's taken a quantum leap.

[Tony]

http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/bwave.html ...full article


Imagine what it might be like to be a sub-atomic particle living in the bizarre and ambiguous world described by quantum mechanics.Single particles going through two holes at once; matter existing in several states simultaneously;pairs of electrons influencing each other though separated by great distances.But suppose those were the rules governing our everyday world?
This radical proposal has just been put forward at an Institute of Psychiatry conference in South London."I don't think we have to assume a universe of independent atoms," declared Chris Clarke, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Southampton."I believe global quantum effects with entities acting in concert are not that uncommon."
One impetus behind Prof Clarke's thesis is the long running problem that consciousness poses for classical physics.What is awareness doing in a universe described totally in terms of matter? A growing number of researchers believe that some features of the mind are better explained by a quantum model.Recently a number of simple psychology experiments have come up with results that pose serious problems for the classical model but fit the quantum one quite well.
One of these was performed at the Institute of Psychiatry last summer by Dr Peter Fenwick,a clinical neurophysiologist and organiser of the conference.He found that one half of a couple who have a strong emotional connection - lovers or parent and child - can tell when something is happening to their other half although both are in separate rooms and cannot hear or see each other.


What is this article saying? Can someone simplify it for a layman like me?

[JamesM]

The short answer is this is mildly entertaining speculation about whether consciousness is a quantum process. If it is, then maybe you can have action at a distance (by law, popular science articles must describe this as 'spooky') and my consciousness can somehow interfere with yours and all sorts of psi effects might be possible. However, the theoretical and experimental justification is lacking, to put it mildly.

The first experiment alluded to, by Peter Fenwick, appears to show ESP between people who are 'close' to each other. I can't find any reference to this having been written up in a journal for our scrutiny, however (which doesn't mean it hasn't been, of course). This is JREF prize territory, reminiscent of both Guy Lyon Playfair's work with twin telepathy, and Rupert Sheldrake's experiments on telephone telepathy (done to death on this thread (http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24714)).

The second experiment, by Chris Nunn, I think is supposed to be about collapsing wavefunctions: by monitoring the side of the brain that was responsible for button-pushing, different results were obtained than when they were looking at the other side. The idea here appears to be something along the lines of: observation of a system causes the wavefunction to collapse (Schrodinger's Cat and all that), consciousness is a quantum process of some sort, so observing the brain in action will cause the wavefunction to collapse and give different results to when you don't observe it. While Nunn has written several articles for the Journal of Consciousness Studies, I can't find any reference to this experiment, and we don't have access to that journal here, so I can't go and have a look, anyway.

What we're supposed to take away from this is the thorny problem of consciousness: can it be explained by the behaviour of all the individual components of the brain following Newtonian laws, or do we need to take into account quantum theory. The rationale behind this seems to be: well, consciousness is weird, ESP is weird and counter-intuitive and quantum theory is weird and counter-intuitive, so quantum theory must explain ESP and consciousness, right?

Roger Penrose certainly thinks that consciousness is tied up with quantum effects, but there is not, as far as I'm aware, much evidence to support this idea.
We are a long way from knowing enough about the brain to be able to construct quantum theories about consciousness. Equally, quantum theory is currently being applied to predict the thermodynamic properties of simple molecules and some progress is being made in predicting, for example the infra-red spectra of simple organic molecules and circular dichroism spectra of proteins. Brains are somewhat further up the food chain, and we aren't going to be able to model them for a good long while.

[Ziggurat]

Originally posted by JamesM

Roger Penrose certainly thinks that consciousness is tied up with quantum effects, but there is not, as far as I'm aware, much evidence to support this idea.


There isn't really any evidence for that at this point. Penrose is just speculating wildly about subjects beyond his expertise, and has no real authority on the topic. And there's every reason to believe that consciousness can't be a "quantum" process in the sense most people mean the term anyways - our brains are hot, and decoherence at human body temperatures is very fast. Penrose basically has to say "don't look at the man behind the curtain" when it comes to decoherence, and nothing he says on the topic should be taken very seriously at this point.

None of the logic used to ascribe ESP-like effects to quantum mechanics makes any sense. There's really no possible mechanism to create coherent states between people. Judging from the way the experiments were reported, I don't really have any confidence that they were properly executed (with good controls, sufficient statistics, etc.). Everything they report could easily have come from data mining after the fact. So I don't really believe the data, and even if correct it isn't attributable to quantum mechanics in the way described.

[Eos of the Eons]

hmm, like making up a bunch of mumbo jumbo and using technical terms to back up theories of mumbo jumbo. Which of course most of us know nothing about, so some would like to think it's a plausible theory. Throw in a few 'experiments', and hey, 'it could be true'...meh, not. :book:

[arcticpenguin]

Originally posted by JamesM

Roger Penrose certainly thinks that consciousness is tied up with quantum effects, but there is not, as far as I'm aware, much evidence to support this idea.

Here is a complete list of the evidence tying consciousness to quantum mechanics:

[davefoc]

Perhaps, this is also a relevant addition to your list AP:

[Peter Soderqvist]

Amit Goswami professor of physics at Oregon University
is there evidence of the quantum nature of the mind?
Yes, there is. The physicist David Bohm noted long ago that we cannot simultaneously follow both the content of a thought and the direction the thought takes. This is like the quantum uncertainty principle — you cannot simultaneously ascertain both the position and the momentum of a material object (or thought).
http://www.swcp.com/~hswift/swc/Spring97/9701goswami.html

Soderqvist1: I will give you some examples so you get a feeling for what Bohm mean!
Note also that heat disturb quantum superposition of states, according to David Bohm! Schoolboys at oral exam can suffer from tongue-tied-ness when they think too much about the content of what to say, and because of that lose their ability to talk (momentum). You lose your ability to write if you have too much attention on spellings, since an experienced writer's hands, write precisely as they are doing it by themselves, just as we walk without any attention what our legs are doing, and vice versa! An inexperienced car driver has lot of attention on the car's details and knows less where the car is going, compare that with the Racer driver, whom somehow know the details, but have close to no attention on them, because he is totality focused on the target

But a parallel computer in an airplane can simultaneous exert computation about where the plane is, and its internal, and external conditions, etc, together with data about where the airplane is going! Even if the brain have similar functions as a parallel computer has, since the brain regulates many bodily functions simultaneously, for instance the insulin level, and balance, etc, the mind cannot simultaneously follow both the content of a thought, and the direction the thought takes, isn't that evidence that the mind is not an parallel computer, even if the brain is? Therefore the quantum factor of mind is not ruled out as far as I have understood!

[BillyJoe]

Peter, analogies can illustrate your point but they cannot prove it.

[Ziggurat]

Originally posted by Peter Soderqvist
An inexperienced car driver has lot of attention on the car's details and knows less where the car is going, compare that with the Racer driver, whom somehow know the details, but have close to no attention on them, because he is totality focused on the target


There is nothing mysterious or quantum mechanical about any of this. All it shows is the limited power of the mind. When a task becomes well ingrained in your brain (like driving for a race car driver), the task is handled rather directly by neural pathways that have formed for that specific purpose. Since it's routine, memories don't form - you generally don't remember all the turns you took to drive home from work, for example. Thus, you're not "paying attention" to it, even though you really are. If the task is new, you can't handle multiple stuff at once just because a person's mind has limited ability, it's got nothing to do with quantum mechanics. As for analyzing your own thoughts (not being able to analyze both content and direction), that's because we're not BUILT to analyze our own thoughts. That would be inefficient, it would take a LOT more neurons to do what you suggest, with basically no added survival ability - all that matters in the end for survival is what you choose to do, not how your mind got there. But it's a biological limit to how WE have evolved, it's not any sort of intrinsic limit. Suggesting this is evidence for some sort of quantum consciousness confuses a peculiarity our our particular circumstances with something fundamental.

[arcticpenguin]

Originally posted by BillyJoe
Peter, analogies can illustrate your point but they cannot prove it.
He had a point?

[Jethro]

Does conciousness involve quantum mechanics? Probably not. The scale on which brain activites take place is just to big for quantum effects to show up.

[tracer]

From the OP:
One impetus behind Prof Clarke's thesis is the long running problem that consciousness poses for classical physics. What is awareness doing in a universe described totally in terms of matter?Um ... There's nothing special about "awareness" that can't be described totally in terms of matter, if by "awareness" you mean a person's sense that he or she exists. And
The queston seems to imply that the laws of matter can't describe awareness but the laws of quantum mechanics can; trouble is, matter obeys the laws of quantum mechanics.

[athon]

It constantly amuses me how people strive to explain conscious thought, self-awareness and abstract thought with strange theories. So often we hear how people 'must' have a soul, because we 'feel' it.

IMHO, I feel that we find it difficult to accept how basic we are on some levels. Sure, oour nervous and endocrine systems are intricate, and rather complicated, but the basics make sense. A thought can inspire a physical reaction - a real sense that can manifest as a nausea, an elation...something that has a physical impact on us. And that concept, to many, must have significance.

Here we see a case of somebody trying to use quantum physics to explain something that does not need explaining.

Next we'll be reading a theory based on the principles of methylation of genes to explain how the stork brings babies.

Athon

[reprise]

I think you're right about people finding it difficult to accept that things such as our thoughts and our emotions can be influenced by something as "mundane" as chemistry, athon. The idea that who "we" are could be altered by simply changing the chemical soup in our bodies is a pretty scary one to most people, even when most of us have seen direct evidence of people's intellectual and emotional behviours being significantly changed under the influence of prescription medications or recreational drugs. Many of us have also seen radical changes in the intellectual and emotional responses of those who have suffered some kind of brain trauma.

[athon]

Originally posted by reprise
I think you're right about people finding it difficult to accept that things such as our thoughts and our emotions can be influenced by something as "mundane" as chemistry, athon. The idea that who "we" are could be altered by simply changing the chemical soup in our bodies is a pretty scary one to most people, even when most of us have seen direct evidence of people's intellectual and emotional behviours being significantly changed under the influence of prescription medications or recreational drugs. Many of us have also seen radical changes in the intellectual and emotional responses of those who have suffered some kind of brain trauma.

Actually, maybe I'm a little weird, but I find this very fact more amazing than any 'soul' or 'quantum ESP'. It blows my mind, and is one reason I went into science in the first place.

Athon