quantum theory of consciousness

davidsmith73 · 3rd July 2003, 07:26 AM

Here's a theory of consciousness from the perspective of electron tunnelling across synapses (?) from Evan Harris Walker

http://users.erols.com/wcri/CONSCIOUSNESS.html

There's a bit of blurb about him here:

http://www.parapsych.org/members/e_h_walker.html

What do poeple who are mathematically inclined make of this ?

arcticpenguin · 3rd July 2003, 07:46 AM

Electron tunneling at synapses? But then what are all those neurotransmitters and receptors for? If this guy wants to understand synaptic action, he should study neuroscience not quantum mechanics.

Yahweh · 3rd July 2003, 09:17 AM

I would assume consciousness occurs at a larger level than quantum range.

whitefork · 3rd July 2003, 09:32 AM

There's this one: http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showt...742#post369742

Dancing David · 3rd July 2003, 10:40 AM

Uh, sorry but there is NO ELECTRICAL CONDUCTION in the neurons, it is a biochemical wave that travels along the neurons, there is no electrical conduction between neurons, thats what the transmitters are for, I am sure it some wonderful poetry.

Oook I spoke too soon, the guy is a duck , he quacks like a duck.

It may be good philosophy but his understanding of science is somewhat lacking.
Quote-
However, based on this argument, it might seem that consciousness must be connected to the physical world by means of the electromagnetic processes described by the fundamental equations that underlie all electrochemical processes. The problem with this argument lies in the fact that electromagnetic forces, and, as a consequence, the electrochemical processes in the brain, would include too much. Only a very small part of the overall electrochemical activity of the body is involved in the chemical events that have to do with the data processing that goes on in the brain. There is far more electrochemical activity in the simple chemical synthesis that produces heat and proteins in the body than is involved in the neural activity immediately involved in data handling by the brain. Moreover, even for the electrochemical activity within synapses, only a part of that activity is tied immediately to the processes of synaptic firing, and only a portion of the information handling of all the synapses seems to be consciously experienced. Most of the neural and synaptic activity of the brain appears to be involved with the vast data handling needed to support pattern recognition, and the like, that we do not experience immediately as it is going on, but only as the product of that processing that is "handed over" to the conscious experience (we experience the seeing of a horse, for example, but we are not conscious of the vast data processing needed to single out that image from the background data and distinguish it from a being another cow, or a dog).

Because of this line of argument, we are left with only the last of these possibilities, namely, that consciousness is somehow tied to some quantum mechanical process that is associated with the brain's functioning, and more specifically with synaptic activity, as that is where the data handling of the brain actually takes place.

End quote

So0rry consiousness is electro chemical in nature, that is why we have brains.

ceptimus · 3rd July 2003, 11:39 AM

Sir Roger Penrose has written a few books examining this subject, "Shadows of the Mind", "The Emperor's New Mind", and "The Large, the Small and the Human Mind".

In a nutshell he says that current science is insufficient to explain conciousness. He doesn't doubt that impulses flow along nerves etc., but he believes that conciousness is too complicated to be explained by these mechanisms, and therefore operates at a deeper, possibly quantum, level that is not yet understood.

Sir Roger Penrose is a well respected scientist and mathematician. I don't know if he is a skeptic, but I suspect he is.

I recommend his books mentioned above, in the order mentioned.

Google on his name to find more.

ceptimus.

Dancing David · 3rd July 2003, 11:43 AM

Is Penrose a psychiatrist, neuro-biologist or neuro chemist.

There are chunks of the process that are very well understood, this is the 'god of the gaps' argument, same one that some use to disprove evolution.

Just one example of consiousness outside of organic framework is all it will take.

In future years there is a good chance that this kind of idealism will be up there with numerology.

Damage the brain and you damage consiousness.

arcticpenguin · 3rd July 2003, 11:47 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by ceptimus

I recommend his books mentioned above, in the order mentioned.

Google on his name to find more.

ceptimus.

I have read as much of The Emperor's New Mind as I could stomach. Penrose is a very well-respected mathematician/physicist, but he is very badly out of his field on this issue.

The article linked in the opening post and Penrose's quantum gravity & microtubules BS are both attempts to postulate a quantum mechanism for brain activity so as to invoke some features of quantum mechanics in explaining it. Both attempts come out very badly as far as the biology. There is no evidence that consciousness or brain activity is a quantum phenomenon, and there is no need to invoke QM to explain brain activity. A hundred billion neurons, each able to make a hundred or more connections isn't enough?

ceptimus · 3rd July 2003, 12:44 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by arcticpenguin
There is no evidence that consciousness or brain activity is a quantum phenomenon, and there is no need to invoke QM to explain brain activity. A hundred billion neurons, each able to make a hundred or more connections isn't enough?

Actually I (sort of) agree with you. A slight quibble, I thought QM was needed to explain the existence of solids and liquids, which are pretty essential in most brains

I still found the books a challenging and interesting read though. Even though I didn't agree with everything in them, I learned a lot, and that's why I recommend them. Penrose is a very clever bloke, much cleverer than me, probably cleverer than almost everyone. Maybe there is something in what he says.

Throughout human history, people have (necessarily) attempted to explain things in terms of their current level of understanding. We look back at medics of a few hundred years ago, and realise that they had no hope then of understanding, say viral infections, or how heredity works. Maybe in a few hundred years time, scientists will say of us, "Poor things, how could they hope to understand the action of the brain, when they didn't even know of the existence of calzan particles and bootlum waves".

ceptimus.

arcticpenguin · 3rd July 2003, 12:48 PM

If you want an interesting and critical treatment of Penrose's quantum gravity & consciousness schtick, I can recommend Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett.

ceptimus · 3rd July 2003, 12:55 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by arcticpenguin
If you want an interesting and critical treatment of Penrose's quantum gravity & consciousness schtick, I can recommend Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett.

Thanks. I'll put it on my reading list.

ceptimus.

Dymanic · 4th July 2003, 08:56 AM

As I recall, in The Emperors's New Mind, Penrose devoted a lot of space to laying the mathematical groundwork for a quantum explanation of consciousness, but he almost seemed to be doing it for its entertainment value (for himself) because he ended up basically observing that there is as yet no evidence to support such a conclusion.

Quote:

"Just as people can be surprised by their own complexity, so can machines, in that they can't predict their own behavior. People attribute this feature of themselves to "free will", and speak of "making choices". Turing's observation that machines will go into endless loops when trying to predict their own behavior suggests that a sufficiently complex machine might also come to suffer from that seemingly inevitable human delusion: believing that one has free will and is able to make choices that transcend physical law."
- D. Hofstadter

The search for a quantum theory of mind seems like a last-ditch effort to rescue the unique status of human consciousness as being 'special' -- a scientific explanation of us as spiritual beings -- if we can't justify the claim that human thought transcends physical law, let's find some really, really special physical laws to explain it.

Quote:

from Kullervo's link

The total amount of clue is a multiplicative function, expressed as a function of the products of the individual wit-weights of each individual. Thus, two half-wit individuals will never equal one-wit, but will have a weight between one-quarter and one-half, depending on the individual modalities.

ROFLMAO!

BillyJoe · 5th July 2003, 02:28 AM

Penrose only went for a quantum theory of consciousness because he couldn't see how computation could do it. Unfortunately, he has no idea about computers and apparently doesn't even own one. He did not even understand that algorithms can be heuristic.

Hofstadter (quoted above) on the other hand, has spent his life in the artificial intelligence field.

NWilner · 6th July 2003, 07:30 PM

I was always puzzled by Penrose's quantum consciousness in that it seemed to make human brains unique at the subatomic level, yet obviously dog and ferret and everybody else's brain on down the phylogenic scale works basically the same!

BillyJoe · 7th July 2003, 04:47 AM

.....not to mention those microtubules.

7th July 2003, 05:55 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by arcticpenguin

There is no evidence that consciousness or brain activity is a quantum phenomenon, and there is no need to invoke QM to explain brain activity. A hundred billion neurons, each able to make a hundred or more connections isn't enough?

I have heard that the number of possible connections in the brain dwarfs the number of neutrinos it would take to completely fill up the known universe. That's a LOT of connections.

I think the question of scientifically explaining consciousness is so far ahead of us that we shouldn't even be thinking about it at this point. There are too many gaps in our knowledge that need to be filled in first.

Paul C. Anagnostopoulos · 7th July 2003, 05:58 AM

Aw Aggle, let us think about it. Just don't let us conjure up some huge, hairy, convoluted god-gap to explain it.

~~ Paul

Diamond · 7th July 2003, 07:40 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
Aw Aggle, let us think about it. Just don't let us conjure up some huge, hairy, convoluted god-gap to explain it.

~~ Paul

Never say things like that to a man with a VERY vivid imagination....

That's all.

7th July 2003, 10:19 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
Aw Aggle, let us think about it. Just don't let us conjure up some huge, hairy, convoluted god-gap to explain it.

~~ Paul

Well, to me, it's kind of like primitive island-dwellers trying to figure out how a laptop works. They need to take some computer science classes first.

(You didn't say anything about conjuring up a huge, hairy, convoluted analogy.)

3rd July 2003, 07:26 AM	#1
davidsmith73 Graduate Poster Join Date: Jul 2001 Posts: 1,697	quantum theory of consciousness Here's a theory of consciousness from the perspective of electron tunnelling across synapses (?) from Evan Harris Walker http://users.erols.com/wcri/CONSCIOUSNESS.html There's a bit of blurb about him here: http://www.parapsych.org/members/e_h_walker.html What do poeple who are mathematically inclined make of this ?

3rd July 2003, 07:46 AM	#2
arcticpenguin woo ban clan Join Date: Sep 2002 Posts: 5,717	Electron tunneling at synapses? But then what are all those neurotransmitters and receptors for? If this guy wants to understand synaptic action, he should study neuroscience not quantum mechanics.
	__________________ The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it. - George Bernard Shaw

3rd July 2003, 09:17 AM	#3
Yahweh Ayay ashay ayay Join Date: Apr 2003 Posts: 9,029	I would assume consciousness occurs at a larger level than quantum range.
Yahweh Ayay ashay ayay Join Date: Apr 2003 Posts: 9,029

3rd July 2003, 09:32 AM	#4
whitefork None of the above Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: aka kullervo Posts: 2,339	There's this one: http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showt...742#post369742
	__________________ Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies - Nietzsche

3rd July 2003, 10:40 AM	#5
Dancing David Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Central Illinois Posts: 34,708	Uh, sorry but there is NO ELECTRICAL CONDUCTION in the neurons, it is a biochemical wave that travels along the neurons, there is no electrical conduction between neurons, thats what the transmitters are for, I am sure it some wonderful poetry. Oook I spoke too soon, the guy is a duck , he quacks like a duck. It may be good philosophy but his understanding of science is somewhat lacking. Quote- However, based on this argument, it might seem that consciousness must be connected to the physical world by means of the electromagnetic processes described by the fundamental equations that underlie all electrochemical processes. The problem with this argument lies in the fact that electromagnetic forces, and, as a consequence, the electrochemical processes in the brain, would include too much. Only a very small part of the overall electrochemical activity of the body is involved in the chemical events that have to do with the data processing that goes on in the brain. There is far more electrochemical activity in the simple chemical synthesis that produces heat and proteins in the body than is involved in the neural activity immediately involved in data handling by the brain. Moreover, even for the electrochemical activity within synapses, only a part of that activity is tied immediately to the processes of synaptic firing, and only a portion of the information handling of all the synapses seems to be consciously experienced. Most of the neural and synaptic activity of the brain appears to be involved with the vast data handling needed to support pattern recognition, and the like, that we do not experience immediately as it is going on, but only as the product of that processing that is "handed over" to the conscious experience (we experience the seeing of a horse, for example, but we are not conscious of the vast data processing needed to single out that image from the background data and distinguish it from a being another cow, or a dog). Because of this line of argument, we are left with only the last of these possibilities, namely, that consciousness is somehow tied to some quantum mechanical process that is associated with the brain's functioning, and more specifically with synaptic activity, as that is where the data handling of the brain actually takes place. End quote So0rry consiousness is electro chemical in nature, that is why we have brains.
	__________________ Hell, dynamiting fish in a barrel is more challenging. - Ladewig I suspect you are a sandwich, metaphorically speaking. -Donn And a shot rang out. Now Space is doing time... -Ben Burch You built the toilet - don't complain when people crap in it. _Kid Eager

3rd July 2003, 11:39 AM	#6
ceptimus puzzler Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 3,316	Sir Roger Penrose has written a few books examining this subject, "Shadows of the Mind", "The Emperor's New Mind", and "The Large, the Small and the Human Mind". In a nutshell he says that current science is insufficient to explain conciousness. He doesn't doubt that impulses flow along nerves etc., but he believes that conciousness is too complicated to be explained by these mechanisms, and therefore operates at a deeper, possibly quantum, level that is not yet understood. Sir Roger Penrose is a well respected scientist and mathematician. I don't know if he is a skeptic, but I suspect he is. I recommend his books mentioned above, in the order mentioned. Google on his name to find more. ceptimus.
ceptimus puzzler Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 3,316

3rd July 2003, 11:43 AM	#7
Dancing David Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Central Illinois Posts: 34,708	Is Penrose a psychiatrist, neuro-biologist or neuro chemist. There are chunks of the process that are very well understood, this is the 'god of the gaps' argument, same one that some use to disprove evolution. Just one example of consiousness outside of organic framework is all it will take. In future years there is a good chance that this kind of idealism will be up there with numerology. Damage the brain and you damage consiousness.
	__________________ Hell, dynamiting fish in a barrel is more challenging. - Ladewig I suspect you are a sandwich, metaphorically speaking. -Donn And a shot rang out. Now Space is doing time... -Ben Burch You built the toilet - don't complain when people crap in it. _Kid Eager

3rd July 2003, 11:47 AM	#8
arcticpenguin woo ban clan Join Date: Sep 2002 Posts: 5,717	Quote: Originally posted by ceptimus I recommend his books mentioned above, in the order mentioned. Google on his name to find more. ceptimus. I have read as much of The Emperor's New Mind as I could stomach. Penrose is a very well-respected mathematician/physicist, but he is very badly out of his field on this issue. The article linked in the opening post and Penrose's quantum gravity & microtubules BS are both attempts to postulate a quantum mechanism for brain activity so as to invoke some features of quantum mechanics in explaining it. Both attempts come out very badly as far as the biology. There is no evidence that consciousness or brain activity is a quantum phenomenon, and there is no need to invoke QM to explain brain activity. A hundred billion neurons, each able to make a hundred or more connections isn't enough?
	__________________ The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it. - George Bernard Shaw

3rd July 2003, 12:44 PM	#9
ceptimus puzzler Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 3,316	Quote: Originally posted by arcticpenguin There is no evidence that consciousness or brain activity is a quantum phenomenon, and there is no need to invoke QM to explain brain activity. A hundred billion neurons, each able to make a hundred or more connections isn't enough? Actually I (sort of) agree with you. A slight quibble, I thought QM was needed to explain the existence of solids and liquids, which are pretty essential in most brains I still found the books a challenging and interesting read though. Even though I didn't agree with everything in them, I learned a lot, and that's why I recommend them. Penrose is a very clever bloke, much cleverer than me, probably cleverer than almost everyone. Maybe there is something in what he says. Throughout human history, people have (necessarily) attempted to explain things in terms of their current level of understanding. We look back at medics of a few hundred years ago, and realise that they had no hope then of understanding, say viral infections, or how heredity works. Maybe in a few hundred years time, scientists will say of us, "Poor things, how could they hope to understand the action of the brain, when they didn't even know of the existence of calzan particles and bootlum waves". ceptimus.
ceptimus puzzler Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 3,316

3rd July 2003, 12:48 PM	#10
arcticpenguin woo ban clan Join Date: Sep 2002 Posts: 5,717	If you want an interesting and critical treatment of Penrose's quantum gravity & consciousness schtick, I can recommend Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett.
	__________________ The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it. - George Bernard Shaw

3rd July 2003, 12:55 PM	#11
ceptimus puzzler Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 3,316	Quote: Originally posted by arcticpenguin If you want an interesting and critical treatment of Penrose's quantum gravity & consciousness schtick, I can recommend Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. Thanks. I'll put it on my reading list. ceptimus.
ceptimus puzzler Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 3,316

4th July 2003, 08:56 AM	#12
Dymanic Illuminator Join Date: Sep 2002 Posts: 4,729	As I recall, in The Emperors's New Mind, Penrose devoted a lot of space to laying the mathematical groundwork for a quantum explanation of consciousness, but he almost seemed to be doing it for its entertainment value (for himself) because he ended up basically observing that there is as yet no evidence to support such a conclusion. Quote: "Just as people can be surprised by their own complexity, so can machines, in that they can't predict their own behavior. People attribute this feature of themselves to "free will", and speak of "making choices". Turing's observation that machines will go into endless loops when trying to predict their own behavior suggests that a sufficiently complex machine might also come to suffer from that seemingly inevitable human delusion: believing that one has free will and is able to make choices that transcend physical law." - D. Hofstadter The search for a quantum theory of mind seems like a last-ditch effort to rescue the unique status of human consciousness as being 'special' -- a scientific explanation of us as spiritual beings -- if we can't justify the claim that human thought transcends physical law, let's find some really, really special physical laws to explain it. Quote: from Kullervo's link The total amount of clue is a multiplicative function, expressed as a function of the products of the individual wit-weights of each individual. Thus, two half-wit individuals will never equal one-wit, but will have a weight between one-quarter and one-half, depending on the individual modalities. ROFLMAO!
Dymanic Illuminator Join Date: Sep 2002 Posts: 4,729

5th July 2003, 02:28 AM	#13
BillyJoe Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: MOOROOLBARK Posts: 12,539	Penrose only went for a quantum theory of consciousness because he couldn't see how computation could do it. Unfortunately, he has no idea about computers and apparently doesn't even own one. He did not even understand that algorithms can be heuristic. Hofstadter (quoted above) on the other hand, has spent his life in the artificial intelligence field.
	__________________ A secular society is one in which no one loses any liberty as a consequence of someone else's religious beliefs. NB Allowing yourself to get led around the nose by a person like Craig is a losing strategy. SH Morality is a social coating around a Darwinian core. JC My joke about freewill: There is no basis for it.

6th July 2003, 07:30 PM	#14
NWilner Scholar Join Date: Feb 2003 Posts: 56	I was always puzzled by Penrose's quantum consciousness in that it seemed to make human brains unique at the subatomic level, yet obviously dog and ferret and everybody else's brain on down the phylogenic scale works basically the same!
NWilner Scholar Join Date: Feb 2003 Posts: 56	__________________ Norwood S. Wilner

7th July 2003, 04:47 AM	#15
BillyJoe Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: MOOROOLBARK Posts: 12,539	.....not to mention those microtubules.
	__________________ A secular society is one in which no one loses any liberty as a consequence of someone else's religious beliefs. NB Allowing yourself to get led around the nose by a person like Craig is a losing strategy. SH Morality is a social coating around a Darwinian core. JC My joke about freewill: There is no basis for it.

7th July 2003, 05:55 AM	#16
aggle_rithm Guest Posts: n/a	Quote: Originally posted by arcticpenguin There is no evidence that consciousness or brain activity is a quantum phenomenon, and there is no need to invoke QM to explain brain activity. A hundred billion neurons, each able to make a hundred or more connections isn't enough? I have heard that the number of possible connections in the brain dwarfs the number of neutrinos it would take to completely fill up the known universe. That's a LOT of connections. I think the question of scientifically explaining consciousness is so far ahead of us that we shouldn't even be thinking about it at this point. There are too many gaps in our knowledge that need to be filled in first.
aggle_rithm Guest Posts: n/a

7th July 2003, 05:58 AM	#17
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos Nap, interrupted. Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: a little toolshed Posts: 18,592	Aw Aggle, let us think about it. Just don't let us conjure up some huge, hairy, convoluted god-gap to explain it. ~~ Paul
	__________________ Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. ---Susan Ertz RIP Mr. Skinny

7th July 2003, 07:40 AM	#18
Diamond SkepticWiki Founder Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: 'Stralia Posts: 4,748	Quote: Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos Aw Aggle, let us think about it. Just don't let us conjure up some huge, hairy, convoluted god-gap to explain it. ~~ Paul Never say things like that to a man with a VERY vivid imagination.... That's all.

7th July 2003, 10:19 AM	#19
aggle_rithm Guest Posts: n/a	Quote: Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos Aw Aggle, let us think about it. Just don't let us conjure up some huge, hairy, convoluted god-gap to explain it. ~~ Paul Well, to me, it's kind of like primitive island-dwellers trying to figure out how a laptop works. They need to take some computer science classes first. (You didn't say anything about conjuring up a huge, hairy, convoluted analogy.)
aggle_rithm Guest Posts: n/a