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Comment by williamtrask | Hacker News Reader

Assumption: determinism

Counterexample: quantum mechanics

Assumption: consciousness depends on quantum effects in the brain

Counterexample: quantum effects are rare in non-atomic scale, no data whatsoever that indicates they are involved in high level brain functions, rather a lot of data pointing towards the opposite, given rapid progress in modeling said functions.

It might not depend on indeterminacy, but a number of “large” effects are themselves the result of an underlying quantum process, e.g. the black body radiation spectrum.

It may not be needed for consciousness, but even if it is, we can simulate quantum mechanics on traditional hardware, just slowly compared to real life. This is why I brought up possible optimizations to the real world.

If it takes us 100 years to simulate 1 second of consciousness with quantum effects, the consciousness will just experience time differently than we do.

Personally, I think we don’t need to take quantum effects into account to achieve consciousness.

Quantum mechanics isn't a blocker here.

Even if you think quantum mechanics are a necessary part of consciousness, we could use quantum mechanics to simulate quantum mechanics.

What, exactly, in quantum mechanics is nondeterministic and how does that translate to nondeterministicness in the macroscopic/biochemical world?

wavefunction collapse is nondeterministic (at least, that's my simple understanding). There is no known relationship between wavefunction collapse macroscopic biological systems. There are examples of quantum coherence, though.

It's my understanding that the many worlds interpretation puts us back on track for a fully deterministic universe, no?

I do not think the many worlds interpretation provides any value. I only care about what is experimentally determinable.

100% agree. Theory is nice but meaningless until we have evidence

Like all interpretations of quantum mechanics, then.

My understanding was that we don't have the ability to predict collapse, but that doesn't make it nondeterministic. I could be wrong about this, physics is not my field

If there is no connection between wave function collapse and macroscopic biological systems, then that would mean that it doesn't matter. The macroscopic/biochemical world is still deterministic

There's more than enough evidence that macroscopic biological entities use processes that depend on qm effects. See for example photosynthesis or enzymatic reactions.

As I understand it, the wave collapse is wholly probabilistic and there's no "hidden data" (hidden variable[0]) that we could now to predict the outcome. At least not if we want keep expecting locality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory

The level that I understand photosynthesis and enzymatic reactions is that of electron transfer, but I'm not sure how the probabilistic nature of wave collapse impacts that. I would also think its reasonable to assume that we just don't understand wave function collapse in order to be able to predict it. But again, my understanding is at a slightly larger scale

While quantum indeterminacy is fairly offensive to most of our experience, and creating a theory which doesn’t have it is definitely possible, the result is a theory with some equally (or perhaps more so) offensive ramifications. Assuming you accomplish this with hidden variables, this theory would by necessity have to have global hidden variables and instantaneous information transfer.

I don’t know if this actually impacts this broader discussion, and of course we can always discover new science, but there is a reason quantum indeterminacy is so widely accepted despite the near universal distaste for its existence.

Here some more examples of qm effects in biological systems. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5454345/

Wave collapse is only one possible interpretation of qm. And the Copenhagen interpretation - that proposes wave collapse - is not a complete theory. So yes; we just don't understand it.

I wonder in what areas of science are we living/will we be viewed by future humans in a similar light as we view adherents of the “4 Elements” theory big nature are viewed today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element

Quantum theory is only around 100 years old. Maybe we’ve got everything right, but I suspect we’re not the first people to have that thought and therefore we’re probably due for significant learning about the universe in the next 100 years.

Counter-counterexample: Superdeterminism.

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