Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm sorry to disappoint, but consciousness explanations follow a predictable pattern - one that you can't unsee once you learn it.

Consciousness explanations historically align with what's considered "mysterious" in science. We have a correspondence heuristic that perpetually fails at explaining consciousness. Previous explanations included nous, pneuma, fluids, monads, vibrations, libraries/memory banks, magnetic fields, computers, and now quantum mechanics and simulations. The association with the current trends of what constitutes "mystery" in science is a negative signal and reduces the likelihood to that it's correct. I wish it wasn't, but history rhymes.

This isn't pop science woo-woo, it's a journal article that examines scientific evidence of and posits a theory.

I don't see how you can say that using quantum chemistry (the best description we have of the physical world at the scale of molecules) to analyze brain processes (something that happens using molecules) to using a "monads" to understand the brain is at all similar.

Furthermore, I reject your entire premise. Of course we should be using the most recent scientific concepts to study difficult questions in science! What's the alternative, we study consciousness only by using concepts from ancient Greek philosophy?

This is a bad faith reading of the comment. They meant that “theories” of consciousness often rely on semi-mystical woo-woo with very little actual evidence and no plausible causal explanation. And that is exactly what has happened here - some intriguing results about anesthesia buried under a pile of pseudoscientific nonsense about quantum computing, and making unfalsifiable claims that this solves “problems of consciousness” which are themselves too vague to be scientific.

I don’t think the author is dishonest - lots of smart and honest people get misled by ideology or aesthetics - but I am confident this paper is 95% bullshit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com