Photon entanglement could explain the rapid brain signals behind consciousness

Roger Penrose proposed that there are three distinct worlds: matter, consciousness and nous (forms or ideas, like mathematics).

I love this idea. It is actually very old. The Pythagorean Philolaus (5th century BC) taught that the soul is mathematical and that it loves the material body, because without the body, the soul cannot feel (be conscious).

What’s interesting about this is that the soul is not consciousness itself, which it is often equated with. In fact, many other Platonists (like Iamblichus) taught that the soul does not feel (also, gods don’t feel!).

So, the idea is that the soul is the immaterial, eternal, mathematical forms of our being. The noetic soul, then, interacts with the body to produce sensation (consciousness). In other words, consciousness emerges from the resonance between the material body and the immaterial world of nous. It’s a really fascinating perspective.

And even then free will is useless, but then again desperately wanting there to be a free will is part of determinism and was bound to happen.

I thought the last thing people held on to was that we have the perception of making choices and physics only states that observed states of systems follow the distribution of the wavefunction.

This is a great example of issues with LLM design, which is that they apply a constant amount of compute to both sentences (modulo a token or two).

Yes they can. Changes in an electrical field travels much faster than the chemical propagation. At the level of a neuron, the field change is weak. But many neurons can create a meaningful change in electrical field potential that propagates much faster than the action potentials.

I also don't get it. I'm surprised this made it through review with this title and abstract. They should have left the speculation about consciousness out of it.

I did a quick google for explanations:

https://theconversation.com/what-is-quantum-entanglement-a-p...

In the simplest terms, quantum entanglement means that aspects of one particle of an entangled pair depend on aspects of the other particle, no matter how far apart they are or what lies between them. These particles could be, for example, electrons or photons, and an aspect could be the state it is in, such as whether it is “spinning” in one direction or another.

The strange part of quantum entanglement is that when you measure something about one particle in an entangled pair, you immediately know something about the other particle, even if they are millions of light years apart. This odd connection between the two particles is instantaneous, seemingly breaking a fundamental law of the universe. Albert Einstein famously called the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance.”

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/10/popular-physicspr...

Interesting things happen if the particles in an entangled pair travel in opposite directions and one of them then meets a third particle in such a manner that they become entangled. They then enter a new shared state. The third particle loses its identity, but its original properties have now been transferred to the solo particle from the original pair. This way of transferring an unknown quantum state from one particle to another is called quantum teleportation.

Remarkably, quantum teleportation is the only way to transfer quantum information from one system to another without losing any part of it. It is absolutely impossible to measure all the properties of a quantum system and then send the information to a recipient who wants to reconstruct the system...However, entirely unknown quantum properties can be transferred using quantum teleportation and appear intact in another particle, but at the price of them being destroyed in the original particle.

Once this had been shown experimentally, the next step was to use two pairs of entangled particles. If one particle from each pair are brought together in a particular way, the undisturbed particles in each pair can become entangled despite never having been in contact with each other. This entanglement swapping was first demonstrated in 1998 by Anton Zeilinger’s research group. Entangled pairs of photons, particles of light, can be sent in opposite directions through optical fibres and function as signals in a quantum network. Entanglement between two pairs makes it possible to extend the distances between the nodes in such a network.

We know from the No Communication theorem that quantum entanglement does not transmit information between classical observers who have no role in preparing the initial state of the entangled elements. Why should one think that this No Communication theorem is applicable to the phenomenological description of brain behavior? It seems that the speed of nerve conduction is at odds with the time constants of brain synchronization. If we are to doubt that quantum entanglement plays a role in accounting for this discrepancy, then what are the assumptions that underlie this doubt, and are they reasonable?

Right. It's plausible mathematics, not an experimental result. That's reasonable research, but the title and conclusions overreach.

The gap between the speed at which atoms move at room temperature and the speed of light is massive.

Also, I didn't mean to imply that faster than light travel is necessary, just faster than the speeds with which electrochemical signals can flow in the wet medium of the brain.

That's why I said maybe the fields move fast enough. As in, the quantum fields.

Yes, but as you said much slower.

And yet massively parallel, which means an incredible amount of synchronization of information feeding into different parts of the brain.

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