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Comment by croemer | Hacker News Reader

I studied Physics. Sure they calculated that some entanglement can happen in some theory. But it's a huge stretch to relate it to consciousness. That's just clickbait in my view and should have been left out. It's trending here just because of the clickbaity title.

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I studied neuroscience and I agree, this is unlikely to have anything to do with anything. In my view it's much more likely that the speed of processing is due to the brain constantly making predictions - it's an interesting thought experiment to consider the brain as simply a huge prediction machine in various modalities - most of which are pretty accurate, and therefore fast, once you've been alive for a while.

Once you get unexpected outcomes then the speed of thought slows down a lot. I was studying the neurobiology of reading and a good example is the difference in brain activity caused by the two sentences "The jam on the motorway was very slow" and "The jam on the motorway was very sticky" - the first elicits almost no activity, but the second causes a lot more activity because of the unexpected word "sticky" needs to be parsed consciously.

I think it's an issue of scale in some ways. The brain is so complex it's almost impossible to think about it clearly except in very focused studies. There's a lot of deeply methodologically flawed research out there making overly broad claims.

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).

Don't LLMs do some degree of search and backtracking if they end up in a dead end (with limits, a couple of tokens at least). Sometimes you'd see ChatGPT hanger words it had already output.

Actually I am not very familiar with the internals, I am mostly repeating what Yann Lecun said in an interview a few months ago about autoregressive models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lHFUR-yD6I

So beam search _does_ do some sort of search: https://towardsdatascience.com/temperature-scaling-and-beam-...

Seems like a reach. However there does seem to be growing support for quantum interactions in the brain. Originally it was thought the brain was much to warm and wet to support quantum behavior.

Apparently Roger Penrose had a crazy idea about quantum consciousness, with precious little to support it. But there's been several papers since that provide interesting hints. One is "Ultraviolet Superradiance from Mega-Networks of Tryptophan biological networks".

Another noticed by Suart Hameroff (Arizona university) noticed that some anethesias do not have an explained mechanism. Especially noble gases that are inert and generally do not chemically interact with the body, but do work as an anethesias. Turns out they do interact with tryophan rings, changing the quantum properties.

trypophan can form tubules, which are VERY common in the body, and do seem to have strange quantum properties.

More info, including links to papers at on youtube, search on "Experimental Evidence No One Expected! Is Human Consciousness Quantum After All?" by Anton Petrov.

Apparently microtubules are common and

Cocktail physicists always want some connection between Quantum Mechanics and consciousness. It’s their last thing to hold onto when it comes to believing they have real free will.

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.

You need some more cocktail, less physics :) I'm talking people that say: When we don't observe them, photons can be in two states at the same time, ergo when you don't look at the moon, is it even there? No! It's not rendered, we live in a simulation. You know, Deepak Chopra style.

They should have referenced Penrose theory

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.

Something speculative is where the ghosts and soul live. How else are we ever going to prove Intelligent Design isn't total crap?

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