Is consciousness to be found in quantum processes in microtubules?

In the same breath I am accused of appeal to authority and then that authority is used to qualify my quotes. That is supposed to prove my "prejuduce"? I post both pro and con and try to provide current science. But "damned if I do" and "damned if I don't". Nice......

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Eureka!!!

I am expected to respond to a challenge when someone brings up QM, no? I have not claimed any expertise. Does anyone here have expertise in QM? Why are they bringing up the subject and feel authoritative enought to label me with ad hominens?

 

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YOU brought up QM, as an example, you said, of something poorly understood and without practical application, in post 461.

As for the rest, it seems to be gibberish.

 

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Is QM well understood? I know we can apply it. But we don't really know why it is what it seems to be. It is one of those unprovable "observations", no?

Bohm's Pilot Wave hypothesis is just as practical as Bohr's and Heisenberg's Copenhagen Interpretation.
btw. Why is it called "interpretation" ? Are there other interpretations?

1. Well here we are discussing QM. Are you qualified? I'm not and I'd rather not.

 

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Quantum explanations of manifestation (experiences) offer more intriguing physical items and circumstances. But such likewise still suffer the same limitation as conventional physical affairs (as abstract description, relational configurations, procedural manipulation of concrete objects, etc). The very evidence for physical furniture of a world requires that "stuff" be manifested in various modalities (vision, hearing, smelling, etc) which also includes private thoughts engaged in reasoning (i.e., inferring and inventing useful general concepts in the physical sciences which don't correspond to distinct phenomenal entities).

"Physical affairs" require experience to exhibit or represent their supposed mind-independent existence. Matter in general is not phenomenally conscious and thereby normally lacks presence of itself as anything. That dependency on experience or the latter's prior-in-rank status obstructs matter from being deemed as having the properties and powers to constitute and yield what is "showing physical stuff" -- explaining the latter manifestations in a deep manner, beyond mere correlation to _X_ physical system (magical-like conjuring or brute emergence).

David Chalmers: We have seen that there are systematic reasons why the usual methods of cognitive science and neuroscience fail to account for conscious experience. [...] This makes for a challenge to those who are serious about the hard problem of consciousness: What is your extra ingredient, and why should that account for conscious experience?

There is no shortage of extra ingredients to be had. [...] Nonalgorithmic processing, for example, is put forward by Penrose (1989; 1994) because of the role it might play in the process of conscious mathematical insight. ... For a nonalgorithmic process as much as an algorithmic process, the question is left unanswered: why should this process give rise to experience? In answering this question, there is no special role for nonalgorithmic processing.

The same goes for nonlinear and chaotic dynamics. These might provide a novel account of the dynamics of cognitive functioning, quite different from that given by standard methods in cognitive science. But from dynamics, one only gets more dynamics. The question about experience here is as mysterious as ever. The point is even clearer for new discoveries in neurophysiology. These new discoveries may help us make significant progress in understanding brain function, but for any neural process we isolate, the same question will always arise. It is difficult to imagine what a proponent of new neurophysiology expects to happen, over and above the explanation of further cognitive functions. It is not as if we will suddenly discover a phenomenal glow inside a neuron!

Perhaps the most popular "extra ingredient" of all is quantum mechanics (e.g. Hameroff 1994). The attractiveness of quantum theories of consciousness may stem from a Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source. Nevertheless, quantum theories of consciousness suffer from the same difficulties as neural or computational theories. Quantum phenomena have some remarkable functional properties [...] But when it comes to the explanation of experience, quantum processes are in the same boat as any other. The question of why these processes should give rise to experience is entirely unanswered.

[...] Purely physical explanation is well-suited to the explanation of physical structures, explaining macroscopic structures in terms of detailed microstructural constituents; and it provides a satisfying explanation of the performance of functions, accounting for these functions in terms of the physical mechanisms that perform them. ... But the structure and dynamics of physical processes yield only more structure and dynamics, so structures and functions are all we can expect these processes to explain. ... Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical. The moral of all this is that you can't explain conscious experience on the cheap.... ​

 

This may mesh nicely with the above.



I learned a new term "diffusive computation".

And is actually a furtherance of the Anil Seth video I posted earlier. "How your brain hallucinates your conscious reality."

 

And this entertaining video on thr concept of an emergent consciousness which can be found in the transition from unconscious sleep to fully conscious waking with drowsy disorientation (or dreams) in between.




It made me ask if macro quantum is similar to throwing a stone in a pond and the resulting collapse of the previous tranquil state of the lake into sets of waves and ripples.
A macro quantum event?

 

But does a dynamical cause not cause an experiential result?
A threshold transmission of dynamic action, a macro quantum event?

 

They would do that throughout the universe, not just in the brain. Rest assured that most experts in this area are not panpsychists or panphenomenlists. The whole problem is arguably made possible by that being rejected in mainstream accounts of physicalism.

Versions of dualism have probably asserted in the past that _X_ acquires concomitancy to the brain or body at a certain stage of fetal development, minus necessarily being specific about when that is. A structure and set of procedures claiming to conjure experience (brute emergence) similarly leaves the door open to dualism.

Manifestation is an add-on to the scientific account of certain organisms (when wandering into psychological territory). Experience doesn't fall out of pre-existing or recognized properties of cells and the underlying chemistry and physics which make those possible.

"Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical." IOW, it has an anomalous relationship to processes or nervous systems (if one wants to broaden to the entirety of the latter). There's no non-fringe universal principle for reliably predicting it, no non-fringe or non-speculative explanation for how it arises or where it comes from.

Illusionists like Keith Frankish have the right idea in contending that phenomenal consciousness should be a fiction in the context of physicalism. That is, for those who consider belief in physicalism to be more fundamental or sacred than the evidence of one's own thoughts, vision, hearing, and other sense modalities containing content (as opposed to the nothingness of a p-zombie). But it's an incoherent stance since "illusion" entails appearances, experience, manifestations (the latter are merely misinterpreted in terms of identity). You'll often find that in the course of their writings or lectures illusionists will make an obfuscated detour from their original claims and wind-up talking about something other than experience (like the "self" aspect of consciousness). Bait and switch. So that's how an illusionist can dodge the contradiction if they get backed into a corner ("Oh, I wasn't really referring to experience...")

 

I have a problem with that.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. IOW. it is the pattern in which the physical is arranged that creates the difference.
Like the difference between a rock and a sculpture, a BB and a symphony......

Tegmark argues that there is no difference in physical assets between a live person and a dead person. Only their constituent parts are arranged in different patterns.


and his conclusion that consciousness is a result of pattern arrangements. i.e. "integrated information"



And finally I (subjectively) arrive at David Bohm's "Wholeness and the Implicate Order". which IMO is echoed by "Self Referential Integrated Information"

I see a few trillion microtubules, residing in a few billion cells forming a self-referential integrated information system.

They build the cyto skeleton, they control the movement of organelles in the cell, they form an intra-cellular processing of mitosis, as well as an inter-cellular neural network capable of storing "memory" in the entire functional control system of the living organism. The combination of a quasi-intelligent mathematically sensory and self-referential patterns of an emergent self-aware (conscious) organisms should be of keen interest IMO.

 

Yes I am qualified, at least to some extent. Since this seems now to be in question, my qualifications in this area are that I have a degree from a good UK university in chemistry, which is a subject depending almost 100% on QM, and I took the optional QM supplementary course as part of that. I have also read Jim Baggott's book, "The Meaning of Quantum Theory", of which I have an autographed copy, due to the fact that he and I worked together at Shell for a while and we used sometimes to go to the pub and discuss quantum theory, among many other things. It was quite a long time ago now, however, I admit.

QM is very well understood as a predictive model of how atomic scale entities behave and it has never been faulted within its domain of applicability. It has been, and continues to be, a brilliant success at predicting what we can expect to observe, that some of its predictions seem very counterintuitive notwithstanding. That's science.

However, what it tells us about the nature of physical reality (i.e. the philosophical implications of it) is still subject to much debate (Copenhagen, Many Worlds etc.). This is what is meant by "interpretations". Some people, myself included, suspect this may point to an incompleteness in it. The difficulties the physicists have with quantum gravity may also point to this. But incompleteness is inherent in almost any scientific theory, so this does not in any way detract from its success and practical utility. Which is where David Mermin's apocryphal remark "Shut up and calculate." comes in.

Further reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics

 

Thank you for that excellent reference! ........ Much info to digest........

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Point well taken.

Given the OP question is there a preferred path of inquiry? A direction indicated by the metaphysical aspects of QM and the metaphysical aspects of "consciousness"?
Is there a "common denominator" available?

 

Rocks, sculptures, and symphonies are just more structural relationships and/or dynamic patterns residing and occurring in a publicly accessible space. They're not something radically novel like manifestation -- again, in terms of what they are to themselves they lack presentation as anything at all due to their non-consciousness or absence of experiences. They're a mere continuation of physical affairs and characteristics already existing slash happening. A specific action like "running" that emerged millions of years ago via complex life is just another variation within the broader theme of those older properties, not a truly new item escaping it.

It's remarkable how so much of the population is bizarrely, cognitively impaired when it comes to apprehending the gist of something as simple as what Chalmers is expressing here: "But the structure and dynamics of physical processes yield only more structure and dynamics, so structures and functions are all we can expect these processes to explain. [...] The question of why these processes should give rise to experience is entirely unanswered." ["Why" should actually be "how", since a physical universe lacks the unconstrained god-like capacity to magically produce anything it needs to, in addition to lacking "reasons" and the "needs/goals" affiliated with them if it did have those unlimited powers.]

I suspect our impairment in that department results from the dominance of commonsense realism, which is actually an obfuscated species of panpsychism. Which is to say, in that belief the world not only exists outside our heads the way it does inside (the representation), but the former is also "showing" itself as the images, sounds, odors, tactile surfaces, etc just as in the head. We aren't verbally aware that we're entertaining panpsychism or panphenomenalism, yet sub-verbally there's a vague understanding that experience doesn't need to be explained if such appearances are present throughout the cosmos (i.e., atoms manifesting themselves just add-up to larger objects manifesting themselves).

BTW, I'm not anti-panpsychism in the sense of ruling it out. What I'm addressing here is the contradiction of being a mainstream physicalist yet also catering to a sub-verbal panpsychism or panphenomenalism and thereby being incoherently influenced by the latter (albeit lacking awareness of it in terms of being able to report/acknowledge it both to one's self and others). What I'm talking about here is how a literal physicalist should be adhering within the domain of their dogmas rather than inconsistently straying from that chosen thought orientation. (There are rebel materialists like Galen Strawson who embrace panpsychism, but those individuals are not being referred to here.)

 

Checking out Galen Strawson to see what he conjures up....!

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In the mean time, some musings........

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My greatest objection to spiritualism is that nothing is or can be known about a god or deity. They are by definition "unknowable".
OTOH, natural mathematical functions are in abundance for observation. It allowed us to fashion a whole descriptive symbolic language which seems a very close translation of essential universal functional imperatives. We even have recognized certain mathematical constants which in essence guide all physical phenomena. Keyword; "essence" (abstract)

I think I understand Panpsychism as advocated by Roger Penrose, every event (including quantum) yields a threshold resolution , a "bing", which is experienced by the physical object, but I lean more toward Tegmarks Mathematical Universe which expresses an innate quasi-intelligence in the orderly mathematical processing of inherent values (potentials) and mathematically allowable functions.

Mathematics allow for self-organizing patterns via an abstract language of mathematical chronolgies which yield greater complexity over time and seems to me is itself a form of self-referential awareness, but only as an essence of the totality (Bohm's Wholeness), but not necessarily of individual particles.

Also if Bohm's Implicate Order is assumed then a form of quasi-intelligence is already contained in the abstract preview (the implicate) of what is to become expressed in reality. I stop at the presumption of a quasi-intelligent essence which corresponds to physical values and functions without any specific motive other than being guided by the universal mathematical functions.

I cannot visualize a "motivated" consciousness creating physical reality in order to express itself. I believe consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, along with all other evolutionary progression into greater complexity.

For any actionable state there has to be a prior cognition of a actionable condition. An abstract mathematical imperative leading to "a physical movement in the direction of greatest satisfaction", a resolution in accordance with mathematical permission and/or restrictions.

It's late.....I need rest......

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Determinism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

Question: what is it that does the determining? In the absence of a motivated intelligence, it has to be a mathematical function based on the values of the prior causal state, no?

Is there a third alternative?

If not, is it logical to deduce that intelligent action in biological organisms is an emergent extension of the quasi-intelligent mathematical function in all natural phenomena?

https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/v...3434.001.0001/acprof-9780198243434-chapter-12

 

No.
What does the determining is the possible states that can be reached from the prior causal state.
Mathematical functions and values are irrelevant.

No. A ball falls to the ground without any quasi-intelligence.

 

And what constitutes a "state"? Tegmark proposes that a state is a mathematical pattern consisting of values and functions.

1. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/223564/what-is-a-state-in-physics

1. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/state

Note that all definitions are mathematical in essence. Anything to do with "values" and "functions" consists of mathematically defined patterns.

No, you mean the ball falls to the ground without "intentional motive", the function itself is "guided" by the mathematical interaction of extant values and function.[/quote]

 

And here we start, once again, recycling the mathematical mysticism that Write4U goes in for.

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You and I, I suspect, would take the view of rpenner, among others, in viewing mathematics as the stuff out which we build our human models of physical phenomena, and insert rpenner's caveat that the map is not the territory.

There, that should put another 50p in the slot and keep the pinball rebounding for another couple of pages.

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And what exactly is the mystical part of mathematics? They are abstract properties of spacetime and that makes them mystical?

 

....[cue circus music and clowns].......