ORCH OR (Penrose/Hameroff) - First test of their theory of Quantum Consciousness

[TripSitterNZ]

anybody can verify their nature of consciousness through self enquiry and it sure is not limited to such things as quantum particles inside a meat suit. So it is not unverifiable.

I like roger Penrose but maybe he should stick to physics and black holes you know his field of study. Consciousness is unable to be pinned down by any tool we have and will always be so. The mind and the brain 100% do not generate consciousness

 

[Jabberwocky]

Ah... gotta love hearing from someone who has actually studied, worked with, and has some genuine understanding of quantum mechanics, @chinup, very much enjoyed reading your contributions.

thank you!! i still have a massive soft spot for this kinda subject matter but don't get to discuss it often so hope there are some fruitful conversations to be had here.

The mind and the brain 100% do not generate consciousness

so why do we only have evidence of consciousness arising from brains? i think it is entirely possible for other systems to develop consciousness but that it would require a sufficiently complex physical substrate.

i have practised self enquiry but it has given me no understanding of the metaphysical basis for consciousness. if it were a valid route of gaining information, we shouldn't disagree. replicability is important.

godel, escher, bach: the eternal golden braid and i am a strange loop by douglas hoftstadter are the best and most convincing explanations of consciousness that i have read. also phenomenally beautiful. i would really recommend them to anyone interested in this subject.

 

[TripSitterNZ]

our bodys are sense machines to look at the universe and behold its beauty. But underlying all things is the awareness that was just always there. Self enquiry should not be meditated on or should i say alot of the times in meditation people are still seeking a experince where there is nothing to seek expect just be. Surrender is the best tool for self enquiry surrender let go of all understanding into deeper levels of being in the present moment.

But its really something that is unspeakable because as soon you engage words it is already missing the point of it all. Alan watts described that about zen aswell. Its something that can only be directly experienced. For years i was down the Buddhist route before i realized the teachings were just plain wrong and moved to ramana maharshi.

You are consciousness there is no need to seek reality is already the highest truth that has always being.

Even psychedelics well showing that brain chemistry will radically alter perception of reality. The underlying awareness is never changed its still and unmovable witnessing all.

Awareness itself does not need quantum or physics or anything it is itself. Awareness of empty space is still there how could anything even form physics or chemistry without those things been aware. A chemical is aware of its environment as are particles thus said chemical reactions take place in awareness even without a brain to observe said things happening.

If the consciousness relied on quantum effects then i reckon it would glitch out at one point for everybody. The brain is a high level biochemical network of electrical signals and wiring a powerful biocomputer to process inputs and outputs. I really do think penrose was reaching pretty far out there about quantum microtubes and that stuff.

 

[Jabberwocky]

The underlying awareness is never changed its still and unmovable witnessing all.

if underlying awareness doesn't change and is independent of physical substrate, then why don't we remember before we were born? my awareness certainly feel like it disappears at times when i'm sleeping.

its accepted that the brain mediates reality. we never directly perceive anything, and what we do perceive is highly specialised towards our ecological niche. if our awareness is separate to this then you would need to explain how it interacts with the brain to get those inputs.

the OP posted about a falsifiable and inherently materialistic theory of consciousness and as you are making a claim to the contrary the burden of proof lies with you. 'i feel it' is not sufficient.

The brain is a high level biochemical network of electrical signals and wiring a powerful biocomputer to process inputs and outputs. I really do think penrose was reaching pretty far out there about quantum microtubes and that stuff.

this i agree with.

though its pretty certain that quantum mechanical effects will affect the functioning of the brain- you can't accurately model most biological processes without taking them into account, for example if you use a ball on stick model of electrons as was done until recently due to lack of computing power- i don't think they are what generates consciousness for the reasons i outlined in my original reply to this thread.

 

[thegreenhand]

Consciousness is unable to be pinned down by any tool we have and will always be so.

Perhaps math? it has an uncanny ability to usefully model observable events

 

[TripSitterNZ]

if underlying awareness doesn't change and is independent of physical substrate, then why don't we remember before we were born? my awareness certainly feel like it disappears at times when i'm sleeping.

its accepted that the brain mediates reality. we never directly perceive anything, and what we do perceive is highly specialised towards our ecological niche. if our awareness is separate to this then you would need to explain how it interacts with the brain to get those inputs.

the OP posted about a falsifiable and inherently materialistic theory of consciousness and as you are making a claim to the contrary the burden of proof lies with you. 'i feel it' is not sufficient.


this i agree with.

though its pretty certain that quantum mechanical effects will affect the functioning of the brain- you can't accurately model most biological processes without taking them into account, for example if you use a ball on stick model of electrons as was done until recently due to lack of computing power- i don't think they are what generates consciousness for the reasons i outlined in my original reply to this thread.

All memories themselves if following the philosophy of Hinduism and Buddhism are themselves a illusion a past that can never be revisited or changed. I.E the only moment is the present all things before and coming should be let go. When you sleep your awareness resides in being of the absolute reality i.e a void of nothingness and everything deep sleep the true nature.

This book explains all these things better than i could its a good read and poses many questions then answers to pretty much every question that could be asked about the practices. http://cloud2.snappages.com/ed35bc0...akening to Infinite Presence Free Edition.pdf

awakening to infinite presence free pdf.

I can not prove or disprove my philosophy with words or anything only a person themselves can prove it themselves the true nature of things with dedication and work. 5000-7000 hours of meditation done right should lead to total awakening for anybody but this can be cut down way shorter if things are properly understood. sadly Buddhism teachings have been either corrupted or never were the full truth to awakening or self realization unlike the vedas. because there are still people meditating 50 + years later without awakening. After self realization there is no more meditation.

The brain is physical function to get to know this universe and behold its mysteries a vehicle for the self to look at the self.

I don't think we could ever devise a method with our current level of brain development to understand life or the brain its in highest functioning and have answers to all questions for at least another 1000 years of human development. There is simply not enough people on this planet that could do all the work of high level quantum physics and math etc any science though AI powered computing could be a thing that fully changes that timescale.

 

[Jabberwocky]

When you sleep your awareness resides in being of the absolute reality i.e a void of nothingness and everything deep sleep the true nature.

what is your evidence?

This book explains all these things better than i could its a good read and poses many questions then answers to pretty much every question that could be asked about the practices.

you have said yourself that it cannot be put into words so i don't see how by your own argument a book can explain anything.

5000-7000 hours of meditation done right should lead to total awakening for anybody

5000 hours is 208 days, would take 14 years of an hour a day- plenty of people who have practised for a very long time make different claims to yourself so i don't think it proves anything. you can't claim that none of them have done it right. have you done this yourself? how can you be sure that you did it 'right'? the way i was taught, there wasn't a right or a wrong way to do it, just a surplus or deficit of effort.

it is not possible for us to agree. myself and other posters in this thread have a certain standard for theories: replicability, falsifiability, internal coherence, etc that do not apply to any of your mystical claims, so we are talking at completely cross-purposes and it is therefore pointless.

back to the OP, i would really love it if anyone can elucidate what Penrose means when he says that wave function collapse is non-computable or how, if it were the case (which it isn't as explained above) that would relate to consciousness. does anybody agree with my perception that he is giving Godelian intuition a new gloss of paint for a new era? or disagree, and if so where is my thinking going wrong?

if it turns out that their predictions for these experiments are correct, what does that mean? how does it get us closer to an understanding of consciousness? maybe i am thinking too mechanistically, but i know exactly where the processing is going on in this computer and have a good theoretical grasp of logic gates etc but i couldn't tell you exactly what the processor is doing as i write this.

 

[Foreigner]

had time to read through the thread in more detail. i absolutely love stuff like this and have found everyone's input really interesting.

but i'm now going to be an arsehole and correct people where i think it may effect further reasoning.

i'm not sure its instantaneous. i studied the continuous time quantum walk model of exciton transfer in the FMO complex (originally developed by alain aspuru-guzik's group iirc) until we had to abandon it due to the discovery of a new chromophore, and at least in the model, which agreed extremely well with experimental results until the ones that fucked it, the transfer was not instantaneous.

technically a superposition is not a third position, its a completely different type of thing, namely an element of a Hilbert space. it can be any linear combination of 0 and 1, but its in a definite state. quantum computers cannot compute things instantaneously, we haven't even actually proved where BQP lies in comparison to complexity classes traditionally used to characterise classical algorithms. the parallelism offered means that we think we can compute some things blindingly fast compared to classical computers, but fundamentally the systems performing still evolve according to the schrodinger equation, i.e. over time.

the only thing that is instaneous in most interpretations of quantum mechanics is the 'collapse' of the wavefunctions of entangled but spatially distant particles. if you measure one it really does instantaneously affect the state of the other. but really they are still the same system, and are thus still evolving together. once you have measured one, the particle that has been measured becomes partly entangled with the measurement apparatus, diluting its original entanglement (due to the monogamy of entanglement, which is a bit of a misnomer as multiple systems can be entangled at once, but the correlations weaken each time you add a system), so at that point they can more correctly be considered as distinct systems, but prior to that, it doesn't really make sense to consider them as separate particles.


what do you mean? there is a no cloning theorem.


it wasn't necessarily dogmatism- it was based on calculations of decoherence rates at room temperature with an approximate distribution for the associated phonon bath. the decoherence was expected to be faster than any known biological process. this has now been demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally not to be the case, because science progresses, but working within the limits of the best known theory at the time isn't really dogmatism.

This is awesome! Thank you. I accept your corrections as they've taught me something. I'll respond more later.

 

[Jabberwocky]

fun coincidence. awake early so reading before work....

literally just read a passage suggesting the idea that our brains ability to approximately solve some problems computers find hard easily, like travelling salesman, is due to our consciousness residing across many worlds of the multiverse (i.e. evertiann interpretation of quantum mechanics)- so like a quantum computer it can test many possibilities at once. and when, after long confusion, you 'just know' something, it is because, from some reference frame, the wavefunction governing the decision making process has collapsed onto the right answer.

i am not saying i believe (or disbelieve) this but it is fucking cool to come across, about 3 pages in a 900 page book (Anathem by Neal Stephenson), so pretty mad to read it exactly while thinking about the potentially quantum mechanical nature of consciousness.

 

[TripSitterNZ]

i know for one thing that there is a creative field where you have to silence your mind and tap into and make music and art in the state of flow.

 

[Jabberwocky]

I accept your corrections as they've taught me something. I'll respond more later.

i have an erratum to my erratum so don't accept too quick!! there is instantaneous 'transport'- the teleportation protocol. but in my defence, it doesn't transport physical matter, it replicates the state of a particle. whereas when we talk about quantum transport, for example in light antenna complexes, we mean transport of physical stuff, which is limited in speed by relativity.

i look forward to your reponses and hope we can get some good discussion going.

 

[Foreigner]

i have an erratum to my erratum so don't accept too quick!! there is instantaneous 'transport'- the teleportation protocol. but in my defence, it doesn't transport physical matter, it replicates the state of a particle. whereas when we talk about quantum transport, for example in light antenna complexes, we mean transport of physical stuff, which is limited in speed by relativity.

i look forward to your reponses and hope we can get some good discussion going.

Honestly, a lot of the terminology you used is beyond my comprehension, either due to not being part of that niche community of science, or because I just don't know enough science -- or both! When I next go on a posting binge and am doing a lot of leisure reading, I'm going to cross-reference your post with google to try and learn some stuff... then I'll respond to you. Might be a while though?

 

[psy997]

Great discussion so far. I don't have anything to contribute but I really appreciate what's happening here.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Honestly, a lot of the terminology you used is beyond my comprehension, either due to not being part of that niche community of science, or because I just don't know enough science -- or both! When I next go on a posting binge and am doing a lot of leisure reading, I'm going to cross-reference your post with google to try and learn some stuff... then I'll respond to you. Might be a while though?

no problem. do feel free to ask (and anyone else too). when you start an internet discussion you never know who you're really discussing yet.

if it is helpful i can try to compile a glossary- would be useful to know which terms to add though.

i'll define a couple of the terms i used as a start:

Transport - something physically moving from A to B
Quantum walk - a mode of transport that is the quantum mechanical analogue of the classical random walk. It has discrete and continuous time flavours, discrete is useful for algorithms and continuous is useful for modelling physical phenomena
Hilbert space - a vector space with an L2 (Euclidean) norm. i don't know how to put this in English but its where quantum mechanical states live. elements of this vector space (i.e. specific quantum states) can have a mixture of real and imaginary components.
BQP - bounded error quantum polynomial time- the complexity class of problems that can be solved with bounded error (so the computer may make a mistake, but you'll know how often its likely to be wrong) in polynomial time, so as your problem size increases, the time taken to solve it increases according to a polynomial function like x^2.... or x^100000000000000 which would still be pretty slow. if we can prove where this lies in comparison to the complexity classes for classical algorithms, we will be able to prove whether quantum computers are genuinely fast or our algorithms for classical computers are just really inefficient. so yes, an entire subject area exists for computers that we don't know for sure are better than the ones we already have, what's more, we don't even know if we can build them in real life!!!
Decoherence - the process by which a quantum mechanical (coherent, von Neumann entropy = 0- technical, don't worry, included for completeness) state evolves into a classical (decoherent, von Neumann entropy > 0) state. This occurs when the quantum mechanical system interacts with another system (quantum or classical) but only arises if you continue to model the system in its original reference frame (technical term is basis but that's probably not very illuminating), rather than expanding to consider both the system+thing its interacting with. this is important when considering the potential relevance of quantum mechanics to biology because heat and surrounding particles cause decoherence, so the question is, whether anything interesting can happen before then.
Everett's many world interpretation - an interpretation of quantum mechanics that takes the mathematical formalism at face value. This solves the problem of the 'collapse of the wavefunction' by positing that every possible state in fact arises, and evolves in a 'parallel universe' that becomes causally separated from the other possible states represented in the wavefunction upon decoherence, which is when, traditionally, the wave function is considered to collapse and the system take on a classical, definite, state.

any more for any more?

i have sacrificed some clarity in an effort to be concise and may well have garbled something but if anything is incomprehensible please ask

 

[extropy]

@chinup
Hey can i just say sorry about the time it's taken me to reply, man these pregabs hit hard on the comedown, and if i'm honest i find writing about these subjects quite hard. it takes me a while to really dig into ideas like this.

and can i say thanks for the really enlightening and fascinating contributions you have made to this thread. i don't know how much more i can contribute by putting forward any more knowledge on the subject because i'm basically at the limit of my understanding of the topic. there are a few points you've raised i wanna dig into a little further though, but i hope you don't mind if i take a little time.

it wasn't necessarily dogmatism- it was based on calculations of decoherence rates at room temperature with an approximate distribution for the associated phonon bath. the decoherence was expected to be faster than any known biological process. this has now been demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally not to be the case, because science progresses, but working within the limits of the best known theory at the time isn't really dogmatism.

yeh for what it's worth i actually adore Tegmark and believe he was acting in good faith when he was putting forward his rebuttal. i just meant in general, there is a very dismissive approach by a fair amount strict materialists to the idea of quantum consciousness. the idea seems to rub them the wrong way, and i get it i do, but i just think they could have been a bit more open.

 

[extropy]

@TripSitterNZ
can i just apologise about my dismissive attitude to the ideas you raised, i was being a bit of a dick. i generally only post when i'm high so i can come across contrary to my genuine nature. it's something i'm working on.

i like your ideas man and i get them, i love the vedas and i also find the puranas have some very interesting predictions about the age of the universe for example. they have it pretty much right, but i'm no expert in this and you probably know more than me.

Even awareness can be before consciousness now that is a true mind fuck but truths that can be directly realized through dedication and following the vedas.

i see awareness and consciousness as seperate. i kinda think of awareness as before consciousness. consciousness is perhaps like our mirrow to the world - it is an output to another 'thing', and then the subsequent projection of awareness by that thing, back to you. that lets you say I AM, which you can only really say via relation to another, like a loop. whereas awareness is just the initial projection by you, the urge, the strive to be. consciousness seems to be a higher grade function than mere awareness. i dunno, something like that.

 

[extropy]

Hi @Vastness, sorry about the time it's taken me to reply, i kinda explained why it takes me a while to chinup so i wont repeat myself here.

Daily Mail is a rag with zero credibility, but even if it wasn't, this statement, intuitively, sounds false, taken out of context or just flat out wrong. I'll duckduckgo that shit though and get back to you...

haha, yes mate, the daily mail is indeed a fucking rag, i hate it...but, Wiseman did admit it here, and i have the article. it was tricky to find as it's been a while since i defended his statement but here is the full article. it's strange, he admits that by the standards of statistical analysis PSI is proven, but then goes on to say maybe we need stricter standards. i mean, c'mon dude, the mental gymnastics, combined with his need to re-establish a whole new standard for statistics, is stretching it a bit...

Could there be proof to the theory that we're ALL psychic?

A series of intriguing experiments show that people can 'see' events hundreds of miles away. Bunkum? Then why did British military chiefs conduct their own study - but refuse to reveal the results?

www.dailymail.co.uk

and i have more evidence for PSI than just skeptics admitting it, here is a meta analysis published by American Psychological Association, a flagship journal in the study of psychology. this journal has no love for PSI research and has often rebuked it, but here they concede the evidence is just too strong. i'm surprised at how this was barely noticed by most skeptics. i find their level of self obfuscation quite irrational.
unfortunately it's not publicly available and i don't know what access you have to journals (i have none), and i'm not entirely sure how it works but you may be able to get it, but for what it's worth here it is.

APA PsycNet

psycnet.apa.org

and here is a list of peer reviewed studies into PSI

[PDF] Evaluating the evidence for paranormal phenomena. | Semantic Scholar

Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century is a successor to an earlier Handbook of Parapsychology published 38 years ago (Wolman, 1977). The authors of the present Handbook discuss the relevant empirical, methodological, and conceptual developments that have taken place in the field of...

www.semanticscholar.org

so we're at least at the point we can agree agree something is going on here.