Quantum Approaches to Consciousness (2015)

Philosophers latched onto the idea of QM in consciousness bc they thought the randomness aspect left room for free will. Of course it doesn't, any more than hooking up an axe over your head that will only drop if a certain atom decays means that you can now choose the time of your death. The point being we don't control the randomness, it evolves according to the laws of QM and therefore there is no role at all for "choice" to play. Also observe that a rock has the same level of access to the underlying randomness of QM and we don't say it has free will. Even if the human brain propagates the randomness upwards to larger systems, there is still no choice in how that is done. Theoretically, it is possible for a rock to exhibit crazy quantum behavior every once in awhile as well.

Of course, free will is an inconsistent notion predicated on the idea that there is a "you" separate from "your chemicals" that would do something different if only that dang physics would let it. But separate yourself from your chemicals and you don't get free will, you get literally nothing. People don't realize the implicit dualism in all of this free will stuff

Beware that in professional physics Rogers Penrose's view on QM and consciousness are not considered mainstream (to put it mildly). I had a great pleasure of talking him in person, and he falls into the Platonic trap. The best antidote is to talk with some actual neurobiologists, or read philosophy of mind (e.g. Daniel Dennett with Consciousness Explained).

At the same time I recommend reading "How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival" by David Kaiser (http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/) - a general reading on the beginnings of quantum information (also, why quantum metaphysics is tempting but does not work); bear in mind it overvalues hippies - this field has also different, Soviet roots - vide Holevo’s theorem.

Or even better - start actually interacting with some quantum mechanics, rather than considering it mystical or esoteric. As Griffiths put it in his Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (Chapter 4.4.1, https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToQuantumMechanics_7...):

"To the layman, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a statement of the form “this particle doesn’t have a well-defined position” [...] sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is none of these."

...an of course, play http://quantumgame.io/ :) (a recent submit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432176)

As it turns out, tools from quantum mechanics just so happen to be very useful in modeling stuff from the human realm, like decision making in surveys, word/concept associations, game theory, and more.

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

This is mildly controversial to people hung up on classical rationality or uninformed "skeptics", in spite of the fact that the research is pretty mainstream and doesn't make many philosophical assumptions about the 'reality' of quantum theory.

There has been a yearly conference called the Quantum Interaction conference where people have presented research using quantum theory outside of physics. I don't know what's up with the 2017 edition, but it's been held for quite a few years.

http://www.quantuminteraction.org/

"The original motivation in the early 20th century for relating quantum theory to consciousness was essentially philosophical. It is fairly plausible that conscious free decisions (“free will”) are problematic in a perfectly deterministic world,[2] so quantum randomness might indeed open up novel possibilities for free will. (On the other hand, randomness is problematic for volition!)"

This is an aspect of this debate that utterly fascinates me. Many people reading this have probably heard the argument that free will does not exist because the human brain is just a molecular computer. If we could measure it's state perfectly at a given moment, have knowledge of future inputs, and possess adequate classical computational power, we could perfectly predict the future decisions made by your brain. Hence, you are a deterministic creature with no free will.

Quantum processes underlie all classical processes, not unlike how the physics of individual water molecules underlie the behaviour of a river. While individual molecules or even drops of water can do bizarre things, the course of a river is easy to predict. A coin toss or weather patterns may seem random, but they're classical systems that would be utterly predictable if we had a perfect measurement of their current state, knowledge of input from outside the system in question, and the computational resources to work out their future evolution. As with a river, the weather, or a coin toss, quantum weirdness should average out on the scale of a human brain, leaving only classical predictability behind.

Or does it?

One aspect of this quantum weirdness I'm referring to is truly random behaviour. Single quanta (e.g. photons or atoms) can be manipulated to produce measurements with truly random results that are, according to quantum theory and every experiment conducted to date, impossible to predict, even with perfect knowledge of the system, knowledge of all inputs, and infinite computational resources. Free will and being unpredictable are intrinsically linked. If your brain is just a classical machine behaving according to the laws of chemistry and physics, you are predictable and have no free will. If your brain amplifies the results of quantum outcomes to a macroscopic level, your brain may be inherently unpredictable and thus you may possess free will.

Fascinating stuff!

I'm currently on the Free Will chapter of Aaronson's Quantum Computing Since Democritus [0], where he treats this question directly in the context of computational complexity theory. Highly recommended to anyone interested in this stuff!

[0] https://smile.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-...

Would it be difficult to to use this start a religious cult? Something like:

1) Lead with content that for some people mixes science and spirituality: Quantum Approaches to Consciousness

2) Add context using sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism

3) Add self-serving message (give me your money, I am the messiah, etc)

2) Coup de grâce: Hold up domain from an institution of high reputation: stanford.edu

For me the best way to think about consciousness is that it's a function of the brain, one of the organs of the body (that's pretty much a fact as far as we can test it).

If some statement seems profound when it refers to consciousness it's best to replace it with another function of another organ, for example digestion.

Suddenly "Quantum Approaches to Digestion" and "What happens to your digestion when you die?" sound way less profound.

wow, working in the field, i must say this is the best written piece of bs I have ever encountered.

"The most discussed counterarguments against the validity of such strong reductionist approaches are qualia arguments, which emphasize the impossibility for materialist accounts to properly incorporate the quality of the subjective experience of a mental state, the “what it is like” (Nagel 1974) to be in that state"

If that is the most discussed counterargument you probably could have stopped there, it is not a counter argument at all. The apparent immediateness and reflexive nature of consciousness is in no way proof of its immaterial or "quantic" nature. Consciousness is a seemingly unitary process, a monade, an indivisible phenomena, but it is not. It is partial, biased, composed of continuous unconscious preprocessing steps, of attentional, memory retrieval, reflective post-processing that can be measured, deconstructed, and tempered with through experimentation. Their argument is that a qualia appears to be more than the sum of its parts. All evidences would actually favor the opposite, consciousness, and the information it holds is less than the sum of its part. I will not delve into the details, because I am depressed/frustrated by the fact HN comments disappear so fast in the abyss, and time is precious, but i will give an example.

Taking a simple psychophysical GO task, let's say click on a button every time you see a dog in a series of fast pace images appearing on the screen. While performing the task sometime a dog will appear and not produce a conscious recognition nor a motor response, but recording the brain using EEG, you would usually be able on those trial to detect error signals. Those signal appears for rare events of interest -here the dog. Although this error information is present at a subconscious level, and implied already a load of preprocessing steps (proportional of the delay between stimulus and the error signal), it did not reach full consciousness to produce the motor response. A machine then, trained to recognize such error signals on both correct trials and errors of omission will be able to detect the dog, when the human did not, using the signal of the human's brain. This is proof that consciousness is less than the sum of its part, it is using a final filtered hyper relevant representation of your inner and environmental reality. Not to talk about the monadic indivisible view of consciousness which is even more absurd: just look at heminegligence. Functions is lost, but the brain even forgets it had ever access to this function, it forgets it had a left side, that there is a side side in the room. This is not an isolated syndrome, focal neurological deficits are often associated with some degree of negligence of the loss functions. Wernicke's Aphasia for example produce a syndrome in which patient do not realize they are saying or hearing non-sense, what could be there qualia then ? If you believe your consciousness is more that the sum of its part, and monadic, just take an LSD trip and you will see what your brain has in store for you, what it filters out, what it can enhance or produce by itself - but also what is your consciousness then, is it not different above and beyond any information processing? But maybe then you will say LSD molecules are in resonance with a central string of the universe, it is the gateway to the quantic perception !

The brain has nothing to do with qualia, it works at the opposite of what a monade or a qualia is supposed to represent. The brain use distributed computation, distributed representation, multiple neurons for one concept, and each neurons participating in various concepts. Multiple brain regions for a function, and each brain region participating to a function. Conscious experience arise from these distributed networks interaction, make the mental experiment of killing one neuron one by one (leave the pons and medulla alone) and you will not see the qualia disappear abruptly, but you will see part of the experience, part of the function, of what constitute the notion of self first slightly disfunction then progressively disappear at different unpredictable pace with complex interactions between functions.

"As a consequence, it is inessential whether a detector or the human brain is ultimately referred to as the “observer”"

From a dualistic view arise false premises. The brain is not an observer, you are not observing the state of your brain, or collapsing any function. You are your brain, living in an illusion created by the interaction of systems inside your brain. It is all well packaged with your sense of self, which is an illusion, a function that can be altered: depersonalization, derealization.

And I wonder, in their view, which animal nervous networks have access to such quantic wonders? The worm ? the ant ? The squid ? The dog ? The chimp ? Or just us ?

You do not need anything but distributed computation to explain everything about the brain.

But I guess everybody needs to believe in something, at least he is not teaching creationism, and seems open to debate.

the universe is deterministic. it might not seem like that because of the massive scale, but it is therefore free will is an illusion