Was Penrose right? New evidence for quantum effects in the brain [video]
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1. Cells in the brain function quantum-ly. Honestly, most people shouldn't care about this, in the same way most people shouldn't care about the refractory period of neurons.
2. The brain simulates quantum calculations in situations of uncertainty, by bonding to/mirroring other people and the environment. This one everyone should care about.
How a group picks a leader, how people pick partners, important social decisions feel very quantum:
- uncertainty until they are suddenly resolved
- the "inside" view is different from the "outside" one
- spooky entanglement
Even if we find some brain structure somewhere using some sort of large-scale entanglement to do something, all that has proved is... the brain is using entanglement. So what? Even Penrose, someone who is definitely very intelligent, seems to have fallen at least a bit prey to the idea that showing that entanglement is in use is sufficient to demonstrate... something... about... something... maybe consciousness?
But even if you accept that entanglement is "spooky action at a distance", "spooky action at a distance" is an exceedingly large class of phenomena. And the dominant "null-hypothesis" guess that QM would yield at the moment is that it is a source of true randomness, which is not particularly different than the wide variety of classically-random effects the brain (and biology in general) is already working with.
Yes, it has not escaped my notice that if there is a such thing as a soul, that if it has some sort of non-physical existence, and if it can still impact the physical world through our body, that quantum collapse is definitely a place in our physics where there could be a reasonable mechanism for such influence to be exerted in a way that does not violate any physical laws but still allows for "external" information to be conveyed into the physical universe. But from where we stand scientifically, it is a long, long way to get to all of that. Huge, huge amounts of work to be done. The work might even be impossible. But it seems like a lot of people, even smart people, seem to think that chasm isn't there, and all we have to do is just establish "quantum", and we're done.
To put it another way, there is an exceedingly great chasm between someone saying "electricity!" and a modern computer, CPU, GPU, and all. Yeah. Modern computers use electricity. But just sending that fact to someone back in the 19th century would give them no useful information in building one. By contrast, give them information about how to build a transistor and maybe an example of a logic gate, and they'd be off to the races just the same as 20th century scientists and engineers were, even if they'd have farther to travel before they really understood the physics.
Maybe the brain "quantum"s... but how? What is different about the brain's quantum versus in-the-wild "quantum"? By what mechanism does organized information of any kind, from any source at all, emerge from the "quantum"? What kind of information can emerge? What kind can't? How is this information from "quantum" converted by the rest of the brain into anything useful? (That is, I'm not calling for anything as high as "human-visible changes in behavior"; I'll settle for any useful effect.)
From my perspective, that's just one step across a Grand Canyon-sized chasm. About all it does is fail to disprove that long chain of "ifs" above.
I'm not a secular humanist and I'm quite open to a wide variety of ideas... but scientifically, just showing "quantum" in the brain doesn't seem to carry anywhere near the amount of water a lot of people think it does.
It's been repeatedly experimentally 'proven' that there are no hidden variables.
It seems like you are disagreeing with me but no 'local hidden variable' is exactly my point. It's obvious you don't even have a basic introductory grasp of the topic at hand and yet you bothered to comment.
Since the point of hidden variable theory at that point in time was to reframe "quantum weirdness" into "classical sanity", if not outright "classical determinism", and the Bell experiment proved there was no way to do so, the hidden variable theory was then unfit for purpose, and was dropped.
However, it is simply impossible to demonstrate that a particular waveform collapse was not influenced by something beyond science. Consider that if we could prove that, we would therefore also have a proof that reality is not a simulation, but is somehow irreducibly "real" in a non-simulatable way. But we can't prove that; it's too much. (Heck, we can't even really define what that means.)
So the common interpretation that the Bell experiments prove a lack of any external influences beyond randomness whatsoever is not correct, which even a non-quantum physicist can verify by observing that such a claim is simply impossible to ever prove. It is beyond the bounds of what a scientific experiment can prove, even conceivably, so clearly, that scientific experiment did not prove that.
As for how would you ever demonstrate such a thing... well, back down from the loaded term "soul" and let's go with "information source". You prove that an external information source is affecting quantum collapse precisely by demonstrating some set of quantum collapses that demonstrate the existence of information. Of any kind whatsoever, doesn't have to be consciousness; science fiction is full of instruments that extract completely mechanical, physical information from such hypothetical processes. There's nothing really impossible about this, it would just mean our best science and math are incomplete, which is a known thing anyhow (though that doesn't mean that it is unknown in this particular way, but, in general, we know QM is missing something). It's just we've never seen even a hint of such a thing, other than at the fringes of science where the p-hacked phantoms are constantly dancing in front of us but never quite materializing. (See experiments like trying to measure the "world mood" through measuring radioactive decay times; I class this in the p-hacked phantom category.) If I set up a classical double-slit experiment, and instead of the usual interference fringes they started pulsing left and right in a clear Morse code that said something meaningful, that would be that. But we've never seen such a thing, which is why as I said, the default null scientific hypothesis even if we did demonstrate some larger-scale use of "entanglement" in the brain would be that it is still not an information carrier, until demonstrated otherwise.
By contrast, if we lived in a hypothetical world where pretty much every time we set up a double slit experiment it started sending us Morse code messages, and in fact it was only the rare experiment that worked like it does in our universe, we would be somewhat more entitled to assume that whatever our brain is doing might be related to those information sources. But that's so not the world we live in it it is hard to even speculate where we'd go from there. Depends on what the information is. And again, let me emphasize I'm not trying to backdoor consciousness here. Maybe the Morse code is information about the current state of the fusion reactions in the sun or some complicated, but purely physical, galactic resonance of this or that that happens to work out to a Morse code pulse pattern that spells YNK but actually still means nothing much. This is not impossible because it is an intrinsically impossible idea and no universe could possibly run that way. It is instead an idea that does not correspond to what we see.
The problem is that we are all here on hacker news talking about this, so somehow this aspect is not just observing, it’s affecting our brains enough that at least we know it exists.
So then the problem is that physics as we understand it doesn’t provide much room for an external force to affect things. The one area where there is maybe some wiggle room is wave function collapse. The state of a quantum system after collapse appears to be completely random, so it’s possible that an external force could affect it.
"Completely random" means the opposite of "an external force could affect it." It means there is no relationship between input and output.
That’s what the hype men say, but increasingly I don’t believe it. I read yesterday that most major AI systems cannot correctly answer “which is larger, 7.11 or 7.9?”.
Often I read of these strange examples, and struggle to remember each one or provide accurate examples when people challenge my claims that these systems still have many flaws. And fair enough. I’ve thought about that recently, and I think this is partly due to the fact that intelligence is a complex highly dimensional phenomenon, and failures in artificial systems manifest as all these weird little quirks and strange behaviors and failures and they are honestly hard for me to remember as an interested lay person.
That said, these systems have loads of shortcomings, and in particular they’re not good at learning from small datasets which means they can’t easily generalize to humanoids (for example) doing the millions of little real world tasks humans do. And they can’t serve as general algorithms for all software problems. They work well with text and pretty well with images but I think we will find for a long time to come significant shortcomings that prevent them from really manifesting as a truly general intelligence.
And I don’t know about this quantum stuff but until we actually solve AGI I don’t think we can really say with confidence what it takes to make intelligence function.
Worst part about these LLMs is they don’t ask clarifying questions, they just provide false answers.
It's largely irrelevant whether an AI system (say, GPT for example) can or can't correctly answer this number question. Many otherwise normal, socially functional humans would be stumped by it too though they without a doubt have self directed cognition and more or less the same sense of self awareness that you or I feel.
The real distinction with GPT or any known modern AI system is that it lacks that sensor of distinct self and its essential cognition, regardless of how well they do with number puzzles.
Something like GPT being largely able to pass the Turing test in the eyes of a human interacting with it doesn't demonstrate that the AI system has cognition, it instead evidently demonstrates that the Turing test was always a poor metric of advanced AI performance..
The universe is a chaotic system, the only thing in it that might be deterministic is the universe in totality, but even then we have relativity and everything in it is happening in it's own universe with respect to time. It's like a giant real time distributed system with a speed of light latency. Human made computers are designed to isolate as well as possible determinism, built using the chaotic substrate, the material of the universe which is the universe itself. It's not perfect because you can't entirely isolate any system, so you get bit flips that are caused by the chaos of the universe, but they do pretty good. The brain is evolved, it doesn't care if it's deterministic or not, it only emerged to work properly, whatever that means. Digital computers are designed with a goal in mind, to isolate from the chaos and deliver determinism for practical use. Nothing else in the universe works this way, not brains, not gas giants, nothing is constructed to isolate a deterministic space.
I believe that this chaos is where intelligence and consciousness come from, or at the very least that it is a core component of what they are. With deep learning and tensor models and the like, we are attempting to emulate the chaotic nature of a brain on aachine isolated from it's chaotic substrate. Even if you can get something that kind of resembles a mind, you've got massive unnecessary overhead due to this emulation. It's legacy architecture all the way down. And I believe this isolation has it's own impact, an emulated chaotic mind on a digital computer, prevents it from interacting with the world around it fully on the bare metal of the universe, low latency via the API that is direct interaction. Until we decide to scrap the emulation and build a physical architecture specifically for the purpose of generating thought I don't think we will make much headway on general intelligence. Such an architecture in my view can have no abstraction or emulation in it's design, it will have to be entirely analog, less than analog even, like a car cigarette lighter.
tl;dr: New evidence weakens one of the arguments against Penrose and Hammeroff's ideas of consciousness.
We still have no idea if Penrose was correct when he wrote that his educated guess is that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. But new findings of "room temperature bigger-than-an-atom size quantum effects" are pointing to Hammeroff being right about the microtubules in neurons being capable of conducting such effects.
There's no further evidence for quantum computations in neurons or panpsychism (as one explanation of the Penrose-Hammeroff hypothesis seems to require).
At any rate, Penrose is someone that still should be taken seriously, whether or not Objective Reduction is a thing (Penrose's solution to the measurement problem).