Is consciousness to be found in quantum processes in microtubules?

Discussion in 'Pseudoscience' started by Write4U, Sep 8, 2018.

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  1. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Thank you for that well considered posit. This is the good stuff.....

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    As I understand it ORCH OR does not deal with the neuronal network per se, but at one level deeper, the hundreds of billions of microtubules inside the neurons. The mathematical beauty and computing abilities of microtubules is testable and apparently anesthetics work on microtubules and not the way that has been assumed before, which would indicate a connection with "consciousness".
    I may be wrong, but I believe Hameroff also rejects the concept of algorithmic computing in the brain.
    I agree. And Hameroff admits that much research still needs to take place, he argues only for the what he believes are the as yet undiscovered potentials in microtubules at one level deeper and bypassing the obstacles presented with considering only the gross neural system.
     
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  3. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Oh yeah, I remember them trying to pound Van der Waals forces into my head when I was a biology undergraduate. It's mostly dribbled out my ear in the decades since. I remember liking chemistry back then (it's the heart and soul of biology) and maybe I should review it.

    But I have to say that I liked the image of you that I got in my head when I heard "London forces"! (Kind of like Yahweh on the mountaintop with clouds and lightening boiling all around.) W4U had better be careful!
     
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  5. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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  7. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Heh heh.

    But actually, Fritz London was German! Like so many Jewish scientists, he was chucked out of his job by the Nazis and emigrated, first to Britain and France and then to the USA.
     
  8. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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  9. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    No, I'm saying that the hypothesis of entangled particles in bird eyes allow birds to navigate by the earths magnetic fields is not part of ORCH OR , but still proof of quantum functions (entanglement) and therefore supporting the concept of functional quantum mechanics in biological organisms at very fine scales.
     
  10. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    Goff would at least be a break from microtubules and Hameroff. But the title slash nature of the thread entails enslavement to that, no lengthy detour from the two.

    Charles Peirce (1892): "Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness." --Man's Glassy Essence

    Philip Goff (21st century): . . . physics is confined to telling us about the behaviour of matter. For example, matter has mass and charge, properties which are entirely characterised in terms of behaviour – attraction, repulsion and resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us nothing about what philosophers like to call "the intrinsic nature of matter", how matter is in and of itself.

    It turns out, then, that there is a huge hole in our scientific world view – physics leaves us completely in the dark about what matter really is. The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.

    The result is a type of "panpsychism" – an ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. But the "new wave" of panpsychism lacks the mystical connotations of previous forms of the view. There is only matter – nothing spiritual or supernatural – but matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter "from the outside", in terms of its behaviour, but matter "from the inside" is constituted of forms of consciousness.

    The word "consciousness" shouldn't be used so much, though, as that often gets conflated with cognition and in turn even a limited degree of intelligence. It instead concerns ontological properties, what's left out of abstract physical description.

    From Structural Realism, an entry in the SEP: . . . Peter Unger also argues that our knowledge of the world is purely structural and that qualia are the non-structural components of reality. Frank Jackson argues that science only reveals the causal / relational properties of physical objects, and that “we know next to nothing about the intrinsic nature of the world. We know only its causal cum relational nature”.

    Donald Hoffman is arguably of similar category to Goff, but there are probably differences, especially with regard to focusing on his so-called "Multimodal user interface theory":

     
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  11. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Considering that plants do not have brains, their growth and survival behaviors are remarkable. Just look at a carnivorous Venus Fly-Trap and the sensory mechanisms it uses to decide when to close the trap. Microtubules .
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_flytrap

    Those cilia (sensitive hairs) are powered by microtubules....

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    Inventing a better mouse-trap, anyone?

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_flytrap#cite_note-12 Evolving Darwin's ‘most wonderful’ plant: ecological steps to a snap‐trap

    2. Letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray;
      ‘I care more for Drosera than the origin of species ... it is a wonderful plant, or rather a most sagacious animal. I will stick up for Drosera to the day of my death.’
     
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  12. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    CC
    If it is connected to "consciousness" be my guest and post away. The subject is so large it can probably accommodate a host of discussions on the subject. I am not in any way against any science that can explain "consciousness". The problem is that most science is used to try to disprove some of the possible avenues to "consciousness", but very little in the way of new and revelatory science other than the ones currently under discussion.

    Is "spooky action at a distance" related to QM? Is the mechanism of entanglement related to the mechanisms of "information sharing at a distance", i.e. a form of conscious communuication? As I understand it, entanglement does not recognize spatial geometry.
    IOW, it's strictly temporal (instantaneous).

    Can there be quanta of consciousness?
     
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  13. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    With London Forces? I wield them!

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  14. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    The nice thing is that there's really little more to add about their view, anyway. Manifestation as the so-called "inner" manner in which matter exists wouldn't be subject to measurement beyond what such correlates to in the structural processes, technical descriptions and mapping of causal relationships. Those extrinsic affairs which it exhibits in perception and rational thought or inferences about experiments. Although these guys doubtless cough-up tons of filler for lectures, books, and articles (i.e., somebody else could add that stuff to quibble over).

    One either gets it or one doesn't. Lee Smolin didn't realize it at the time he did the interview below in 2013, but even being familiar with all the details of that filler in the published literature probably wouldn't add much in the end beyond what he states himself below.

    https://www.independent.com/2013/04/17/time-reborn/

    TAM HUNT: You venture far beyond physics in your Epilogue, including some musings on the nature of consciousness. You discuss David Chalmers favorably, a well-known panpsychist (this is the view that all matter has some associated mind/subjectivity and vice versa). You also discuss Leibniz, Spinoza, and Peirce, all of whom were also panpsychists of various stripes (see David Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West). Would you like to take this opportunity to “out” yourself as a panpsychist?

    SMOLIN: In college I wrote a long essay on the body-mind problem where I invented for myself an idea that I’ve later come to understand is a form of panpsychism. It is expressed on page 270 of Time Reborn as:


    "The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don’t know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe — through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains."

    This is as far as I am willing to go now, on an issue where I don’t know the literature well, and I haven’t thought enough about.
     
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  15. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Until someone has defined and measured "consciousness " quantitatively, no. And that won't happen. This notion is pure quantum woo.
     
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  16. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Venus flytraps are far from the most complex plants out there - and none of them have brains. I recommend "The Hidden Life of Trees" for an overview. Nothing about microtubules in there, though.
     
  17. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    But wait......maybe they have a...sort of...... hive mind!
     
  18. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    With quantum mechanical neurons. I mean, you can't prove they _don't_ have them, right?
     
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  19. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Then answer me this. How does a wave collapse by observation? Where does the wave function collapse, at the object being viewed at a distance or in the retina of the eye? If the wave function collapses at a distance, how can reception of a distant measurement (observation) be causal to the wave function collapse?

    AFAIK, collapse occurs by mere observation without any measurement of some kind. Is that not one of results of the double slit experiment. Just the presence of an observer is causal to wave function collapse?

    Where is the "necessary" physical interference as suggested when considering that "conscious observation" (measurement) is woo?

    Wave function collapse
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse


    Quantum decoherence
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence
     
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  20. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    If this idea is so ridiculous, explain a insect hive-mind to me.

    Hive mind
    • Can insects think?
    Do Insects Have Consciousness?
    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-insects-have-consciousness-180959484/
     
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  21. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    cc
    I did forget another strain of pan-phenomenalism (AKA panpsychism), via Giulio Tononi. Christof Koch favors his integrated information theory as a way to literally measure consciousness or bring it into the realm of quantitative expression. IIT does propose axioms for consciousness.

    But this seems just more of the traditional policy of correlating phenomenal properties to physical relationships, but with the addition of an abstract middleman between the two. That is, information itself is a useful symbolic concept projected upon the structural states and patterns of "concrete" components/entities. There are no fundamental agents constituting information apart from exotic theories that might propose the universe is made up of real bits, rather than such units being part of an accounting strategy.

    The pregeometry movement is arguably shifting to the idea of space and time arising from quantum entanglement (one example below). But again, unless some form of pan-phenomenalism is posited, there's no reason why the most discrete and inter-connected items of QM affairs (prior in rank to space emerging from them) would involve the manifestations of consciousness anymore than neural processes.

    If phenomenal properties aren't how matter exists independent of human representations of it (matter having these so-called internal states), then it's back to the traditional magic of a mechanistic performance conjuring a radical novelty which didn't pertain to the world beforehand. Thereby leaving the door open to dualism since no deeper explanation is offered than that of brute emergence. Versions of classic dualism similarly involved a "summoning" of an immaterial _X_ when the developing/brain body reached a sufficient level of complexity or performance -- i.e., a proper orchestration of biological components.

    Space emerging from quantum mechanics
    http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/07/18/space-emerging-from-quantum-mechanics/

    Sean Carroll (excerpt): Divide Hilbert space up into pieces — technically, factors that we multiply together to make the whole space. Use quantum information — in particular, the amount of entanglement between different parts of the state, as measured by the mutual information — to define a “distance” between them. Parts that are highly entangled are considered to be nearby, while unentangled parts are far away. This gives us a graph, in which vertices are the different parts of Hilbert space, and the edges are weighted by the emergent distance between them.

    We can then ask two questions:

    (1) When we zoom out, does the graph take on the geometry of a smooth, flat space with a fixed number of dimensions? (Answer: yes, when we put in the right kind of state to start with.)

    (2) If we perturb the state a little bit, how does the emergent geometry change? (Answer: space curves in response to emergent mass/energy, in a way reminiscent of Einstein’s equation in general relativity.)

    It’s that last bit that is most exciting, but also most speculative. The claim, in its most dramatic-sounding form, is that gravity (spacetime curvature caused by energy/momentum) isn’t hard to obtain in quantum mechanics — it’s automatic! Or at least, the most natural thing to expect. If geometry is defined by entanglement and quantum information, then perturbing the state (e.g. by adding energy) naturally changes that geometry. And if the model matches onto an emergent field theory at large distances, the most natural relationship between energy and curvature is given by Einstein’s equation. The optimistic view is that gravity just pops out effortlessly in the classical limit of an appropriate quantum system. But the devil is in the details, and there’s a long ay to go before we can declare victory.
     
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  22. river

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    Space emerging from quantum mechanics

    What came first matter or space ?
     
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  23. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Emergent behavior based on signaling (visual, tactile, chemical) between bees.

    Next question?
     
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