Organisms might be quantum machines
bbc.com
bbc.com
Well I second you on that. Even stronger:
All of (theoretical) science is a leaky abstraction. When an area is new, people are doing the spherical-cow-approximation willy nilly. After it gets established, corner cases start to surface.
Incidentally, theoretical physicists are the masters of creating spherical-cow-approximations and leaky-abstractions. They're always going for the next big unexplored territory. E.g., once QM got established as a theory, they moved on to high-energy, while there is about 1000x more work to be done picking up the pieces of QM in the areas of solid-state-physics and molecular-chemistry. (largely speaking that is; not everyone is like that).
http://euclid.trentu.ca/math/sb/misc/mathsci.html
> The natural sciences investigate the physical universe but mathematics does not,
> so mathematics is not really a natural science. This leaves open the subtler
> question of whether mathematics is essentially similar in method to the natural
> sciences in spite of the difference in subject matter. I do not think it is.
Example: When you are doing math in economics you are not doing something that is even more foundational than physics.
> if all that exists follows mathematical law
From a certain level such questions become completely arbitrary and useless: Remember, it's your brain that interprets everything and you can just say whatever you want when there are no consequences.
If this was true, it would severely limit the usefulness of math. We'd see our predictability break down much sooner than we do actually. Read up on it here:
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-06-07
I said - and I have no idea why I have to paraphrase my one sentence - to try a thought experiment, to see what happens when you reverse the direction.
Not to mention that you didn't really say anything? I have no idea what your point even is.
In any case, I should have read more carefully, because
> reality is a subset of what's mathematically possible
I probably replied to the wrong post, but I wanted to say that math is in fact a tool for science - instead of being the most fundamental science itself. I've met some people, including mathematicians, who think that because everything can be described with math, it means that math is all that's needed to find the truth about reality. My point is that the process of appying math to find the model that best fits our own world is something that's outside of math itself.
EDIT: After skimming the Wikipedia article, both articles agree that it is a possible but not yet confirmed mechanism.
OTOH, we have a theory that classical computation adequately accounts for intelligence. Finding an unavoidable quantum route that nature has picked would certainly be interesting, despite that quantum Turing machines are also classically computable (I think).
I don't think we have a foundation for classical computation without thermodynamics, which is a classical theory whose ultimate foundations probably require quantum information theory.
Evolution contradicts this, because it is a genuinely new idea. Some may say it is the ONLY new idea in biology, but that's good enough.
It's often quoted here that "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." You could extend this to "Biological science is no more about chemistry..."
There has never been "classical" theory for chemistry like there has been classical mechanics that works reasonably well within limits, just weird heuristic rules. Chemistry is quantum chemistry is quantum electrodynamics.
It's a really good series I highly recommend, and it's won awards because Robinson put a lot of research into make the book believable. The descriptions and time scales used in the book make it very accessible to engineers while also containing incredible character development.
Anyway, memory could be very well related to the quantum world. There's a lot we do not understand about the brain, and what we do know raises a bunch of questions about how does our brain store information when it seems to have such limited potential capacity?
(Here, I'm talking about vague statements like those, or sci-fi theories like those in a Stephenson novel, as opposed to actual analysis like that of photosynthesis in the linked article.)
To me, it's not the inscrutability of the brain that makes this seem likely... it's the bare knuckled win-at-all-costs no-holds-barred nature of natural selection.
The default assumption would be our current model of how the brain works; any model proposing effects (quantum or otherwise) not yet accounted for would require an appropriate amount of additional proof. When I suggested which seemed more likely, I was taking priors into account.
More generally, though, I wasn't referring to concrete models that make specific claims about how the brain works; I was referring to the rather frequently stated vague claims that use "quantum" in a way that would have no more or less meaning with the word "magic" substituted. A specific concrete model would be amenable to prediction and experiment.
Whether any particular such concrete model seems probable or not would depend on what it claims. For instance, a claim that the brain depends on macroscopic quantum effects at a far larger scale than observed elsewhere seems improbable; a claim that the brain depends on properties of chemical or electrical interactions that quantum mechanics explains better than other physics models seems relatively less improbable by comparison, depending on the details. Whether any particular claims seem probable or improbable would depend on our current understandings of quantum mechanics, the brain, evolutionary search processes, and so on.
"1. Penrose posits, in The Emperor's New Mind (ISBN 978-0192861986) and Shadows of the Mind (ISBN 978-0195106466), that the human brain takes advantage of quantum effects to do what it does. This has been so controversial that I have found it impossible to have a dispassionate conversation about it with any learned person. The dispute can be broken apart into a number of different sub-controversies, some of which are more interesting than others. The science-fictional premise of Anathem is based on the relatively weak and modest assumption that natural selection has found some way to construct brains that, despite being warm and wet, are capable of exploiting the benefits of quantum computation. Readers who are uncomfortable with the specific mechanism posited by Penrose might also wish to read Henry Stapp's Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics (ISBN 978-3540407614) which posits a quantum brain mechanism that is completely incompatible with Penrose's."
Also read this, I was lucky enough to do an academic level course on parapsychology long ago with Dick Bierman for 4 study points:
* Quantum States In The Retina? Pierre St. Hilaire, Dick Bierman, Stuart Hameroff http://quantum.webhost.uits.arizona.edu/prod/content/quantum...
Why is research like this not funded and practised more? Is it to far out, costly or difficult?
So they may be essential to basic plumbing shared by many species, but not otherwise a game-changing factor for "consciousness" or "intelligence".
All this information is serialized onto pretty much 5 channels (excluding things like one's sense of balance, or the awareness of how your body is posed), all streamed concurrently.
Sounds like a recipe for high bandwidth consumption. Many cycles per second.
Based on this, I'd wager we (and our perception of self) only exist in the ether between our body's neurons.
Says who? Just because you can invent categories doesn't mean you've identified channels. That would be like walking up to a computer, say "pictures, sounds, storage", and assume that the computer must contain 3 enormous channels dedicated to each type of information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibular_system
built-in to give us the sense of balance:
Masgrau et al. (2006) Atomic Description of an Enzyme Reaction Dominated by Proton Tunneling
"The wet, warm, bustling environment of living cells is the last place you might expect to see quantum events."
stuff like this is misleading imo. its exactly the sort of place you expect to see quantum effects - because its in the universe and at the appropriate scale.
Isn't this a few orders of magnitude above where you'd expect to see quantum effects?
No. Chemistry itself is fundamentally dependent on quantum effects; quantum effects determine the structure of atoms and molecules, how they combine, and how much energy is involved in those processes. That's true whether the processes are taking place in living bodies or not. My reaction to this article is basically the same as jheriko's: this is news?
"Chemistry" as you're using the term here is a name for a set of models made by humans, not something in actual atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules don't know that they're supposed to be doing "chemistry" instead of "quantum stuff".
When I say chemistry is fundamentally dependent on quantum effects, I mean the things atoms and molecules actually do would be impossible without quantum effects. The very existence of atoms depends on quantum effects; in a purely classical world atoms would be impossible. The chemical properties of atoms--their valences, for example--require quantum mechanics to explain.
Often in human models of chemistry, the details of how things like valences of atoms are produced from quantum effects are left out. But that doesn't mean quantum effects aren't being seen when we observe atoms with particular valences, for example. It just means the details aren't explicitly present in those models.
Depends on what exactly you do in chemistry. Understanding structures like molecules and chemical bonds takes you deep. I f you only care about macro effects, like how to turn this input into that output in an industrial process than you move away from the low-level basics.
The same as in any field, you get to choose if you want to invent new algorithms or if you care about software architecture - both valid jobs for a CS person but it's different worlds.
[0] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-solid-state-chemistr...
But actually the scale of cells and their structures is macro-molecule scale... a lot of the behaviour of those things (DNA, proteins etc..) is very quantum mechanical.. there are also structures working with ions and even protons (hydrogen ion) in there.
- 15th century: the brain is the creation of a divine being
- 17th century: the brain is a clockwork
- 20th century: the brain is an electrical computer
- 21th century: the brain is a quantum device
- 22th century: the brain is a ??
It's an interesting thought though, and I especially like Neil Stephenson's idea that the brain is a quantum device that 'leaks out' into parallel universes and uses 'brain capacity' from those overlapping universes, but it's just that: a neat idea, and science fiction. What's different this time? :)
[edit: formatting]
However, we don't have any reason to suppose that quantum computation is involved or relevant in any of the processes mentioned in the article, and we don't really have any evidence or reason to suppose that the brain is a quantum device. It might be one, but for all that we've seen until now it might as well be an electrochemical computer, that is sufficient to explain all observed phenomena.
I both like and dislike theories of mind that describe the brain in terms of n-veiled solipsism. But I generally like them because of the specific (decision-theoretic) statements they make about how an agent is defining its environment.
What's striking to me about life on earth -- mostly humanity, but also the larger notions of noo-/biosphere -- is that, so far, it doesn't match up to our larger-scale evidence about how <things in general> define <their environments>.
We have managed to define our environment in a fashion which is scale-agnostic, at least with respect to the measurement of physical accumulations of stuff. We readily form metaphors between:
(a) things in our locale,
(b) things in the huge,
(c) things in the tiny, and
(d) things in the meta (read: math/pattern).
I think the worst thing we can do -- as engineers or scientists or mathematicians or even metaphysicians -- is to presume that any of |a-d| generate the others "in reality". (I just did a bit of that when I implicitly defined "larger-scale evidence" as "most legitimate evidence".)
In the categorical sense of arrow-reversal-without-structural-change[0], models of |a-d| are dual to any notion of 'environment' we can imagine. That doesn't suggest determinism, but it does offload every variation on the question of free will into a(n empty) simulationist argument whose limit is some computational infinity, like an omni-* deity or an extremely general structure like an ∞-topos[1].
An interesting partial exception is complexity theory. When we map out statements like PostBQP==PP[2], we're doing something fundamental, that bridges the gaps in |a-d| without adding something too weird as |e|. The actual notion of 'complexity-wise truth' that's being generated[3] is a measure of inferential distance that doesn't seem to care about pesky details but is somehow still attuned to specific problems.
There are caveats -- you could imagine each distinct problem/distance class as the dual of a scope (our syntactic presentation of such scope anyway[4]). The segregation of our environment into such scopes is only the first half of the problem. Less trivial is the act of mapping out our environment as a structured space of such scopes, so that we dissolve all questions of type ['what is', 'what should be', 'what was', etc.] into a singular question of type ['what direction to go now'].
To me, this sounds quite dangerous. And yet some variation on that is what many of us in the greater "self-directed tech" milieu are working on. There's an embedded urgency to the framework. Call it "the market" or "the simulation" or "the basilisk" or "bringing about the singularity" or "humans vs. ai" or "geopolitics" or whatever you want, but what's difficult to ignore is how effectively |bcd| equivalences eat up |a|, for any definition of |a| that invites historical norms.
Interpret this how you will.[5] For me it causes a sharp recoil from generalizations like "we are just the universe observing itself." The recoil is followed by a question, "okay what should I observe so that I might identify with it?" To which the answer is usually, "whatever makes me a better engineer, so that I can worry about this later, when I have a better understanding of what I'm asking." (i.e., I fail to prevent |bcd|>|a|, and each iteration on the theme speeds up the process a little bit.)
[0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/duality
[1] I should say I feel pretty awful making this analogy, as it performs a |bc| equivalence at the expense of most of |a| and everything important in |d|. It's no better than "what if atoms are tiny universes?"-type questions, and it should be treated as illegitimate as evidence for anything more detailed than the notion of existence itself.
[2] http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2004/01/complexity-c...
[3] https://complexityzoo.uwaterloo.ca/Complexity_Zoo
[4] https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/07/what_is_a_theor... (though this analogy is almost worse than [1]'s)
> behaviours don’t seem to have much of an impact on the
> macroscopic world as we know it, where “classical”
> physics rules the roost.
> Or, at least, that’s what scientists thought until a few years ago.
Yeah, no. You're reading this on something with a semiconductor inside. Which you might remember from novelties like transistor radio and such.
The best description is the simplest one being able to describe all related phenomena. So unless you have a very good reason, it wouldn't be helpful to start from the standard model of particle physics.
On the other hand, if you tried the classical theories and notice that there are things unaccounted for, then you go and look for more detailed theories to apply to your problem. That's the normal way you do research and that's what happened here.
Remain objective please.
"What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow?"
Free will is not something that needs to be saved. We can't save it, we can't change it, we can't create it if it's not there, we can't remove it from the universe if it's there. It exists (or not) in some particular way, and that's it. It would be interesting to find out definitely, but that wouldn't really change anything; and I don't believe if there's anything in our behaviour that should change upon finding it out.
Determinism (in most accounts) precludes free will. Therefore randomness is necessary but not sufficient for free will. Quantum mechanics is the only avenue we have for randomness/non-determinism, so if free will does exist, it's going to have to involve some sort of quantum "magic".
It's certainly possible to imagine consciousness based on quantum mechanics (ala Penrose) that facilitates some level of choice by selectively collapsing wave-forms (not just randomly collapsing them) and is still compatible with a macro-deterministic universe.
(Personally, Compatibilism offers the only satisfactory way out.)
Why?
> Consciousness can't spontaneously appear so the only way it's possible is through quantum phenomena.
I don't understand at all how these two statements are connected.
http://khanism.org/science/doubt/
Also, the placebo effect shouldn't be used dismissively. If you convince someone they should be feeling pain (tell them they're next to a low frequency transmitter that causes pain when they're really next to an empty speaker box), that pain is real in the sense their nervous system can have a physical reaction to it. It is in their heads, but perceptions can generate physical responses.
The classic study was on asthma treatments. Patients would subjectively report feeling better when on the placebo treatment, but the objective measurements of lung function showed no difference.
If people report being in less pain or less depressed when on a placebo treatment but attempt & complete suicide at the same rate... well, fuck.
Homeopathy doesn't work, that's a fact, what part about that known fact seems to confuse you? Why are you insisting something that is KNOWN to not work, works? What don't you get?
> Clinic results are differente from test with placebo reply
No they aren't.
When you run a well-conducted trial you find zero benefit to homeopathy. When you run a poorly-conducted study, with poor blinding or weak randomization you find some benefits to homeopathy. When you don't even run a study, but just give people homeopathy in clinics they'll tell you it works because they say they can feel a difference.
i don't think its particularly crazy to suggest that people practising mental discipline can alter their minds or perceptions.
its very easy to convince oneself that the left arm is paralysed for instance... or to hallucinate by fixating on an object or point in space.
also, its very well evidenced that psychology has an effect on health...
on the other hand there is no evidence of, nor any need for explanations involving, "mystical energies" of any kind, as far as i can see.
So no actual evidence then?
a lot of things rely on it for their justification. the best example i think i can give in the context of wanky hipster startups would be "agile methodologies"... despite the completely different area of concern they are also attributed properties which are inherently difficult to measure and perform experimentation with. i've seen very little evidence except for anecdotal evidence to back the claims surrounding them (although certainly, they are based on quite reasonable conclusions to reach with no evidence at all - by using logic and "common sense" to derive from better known quantities)
The bias most commit is thinking that a data point is more valuable because you know more about it.
Just because you know the story behind it doesn't mean it's more important.
if 1000s of people are telling the same story, thats 1000s of potential data points... they lose value from being ill defined rather than being small in number.
They don't exist in isolation though. If thousands are telling the same story and there is no independent corroboration then it's more likely that one person told a story and thousands repeated it.
Medicine.
Homeopathy is a very specific thing, where you take a substance with a bad effect and dilute it so much there's none left, in an attempt to cause the opposite effect, with more dilution being better.