Quantum Vibrations Inside Brain Corroborate 20-Year-Old Theory of Consciousness

Did they really posit a connection between quantum and sonic vibrations (a huge and "woo-woo-y" leap) in the context of consciousness?

> “The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review.

And they're suggesting that consciousness is intrinsic to quantum systems? I think I missed some of the connections between the two.

For that matter, I'm still of a position that the very idea of "consciousness" is an artifact of the brain's anthropocentric and self-image-preserving post ergo hoc systems, as opposed to anything concrete. Compare it to software: we "see" operating systems, drivers, apps, and the like, but those are all labels of our invention. It's ultimately nothing but ones and zeros.

Even if there are quantum effects involved in the operation of the brain, or any other organ of the body, the idea that they are responsible for this thing called "consciousness" anymore than action potentials or chemical messengers is a gigantic, unsupported assumption.

More likely the words "quantum" and "microtubule vibrations" sounds sufficiently mysterious to appeal to the casual reader's dualist bias. A proper scientific study into "X", whether X be consciousness or anything else, would begin by defining it concretely.

I wish there was somebody here who have actually read the mentioned papers, knows something about the relevant physics, is aware of the prior criticism of Orch-OR, and can say what, if anything, the new findings mean for Orch-OR and for its critics.

Reverend Bayes says 99% probability of quackery.

These guys live in a bizarre alternate universe where a number of legitimate experimental results and calculations based on real physics add up to striking conclusions with no basis in reality. They are happy to combined many random factoids -- anything that vaguely supports their ideas -- and pretend that the combination is convincing evidence.

For example, the authors hypothesize that the spin of magnetic dipoles could be quantum bits used for information processing in microtubules. As support, they cite experimental evidence for resonances in electrical conductance in microtubules at certain RF frequencies. But coherent motion of electrons is a totally different physical phenomena than coherent spin.

The most amazing thing to me is that these guys do manage to operate in their own parallel academic universe, with their own journals, conferences and (most frighteningly) funding.

As I found out at the Google workshop (which had been basically hijacked by these guys), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has been funding this fellow Bandyopadhyay's experiments that, at the Google conference, he was touting as "experimental evidence for a topological quantum computing in the brain." An AFOSR officer I talked to was very proud about this project. In my view this is basically a criminal misuse of US taxpayer money (probably 100k/year).

I didn't read the whole thing, but from what I know of quantum mechanics and QFT (standard undergraduate course load) I didn't see anything wildly misguided. This tells me that one of two things are true.

1. This paper describes a legitimate link between a non-classical process occurring in the brain that may "cause" consciousness. I do not know enough about the brain to rigorously evaluate the claims.

2 (more likely). Quantum physics is hard, even for scientists. Neither of the paper's author's are physicists, and neither have done any _recent_ meaningful work in any subfield of physics. I would expect that groundbreaking work in physics would require ideas beyond an undergraduate level, but I did not see any physics in the paper I didn't understand. It looks like at the very least, there is room for a false positive. What I mean by "false positive" is that sometimes not about A will cause you to reason that Q->C even when the truth is A->Q and A->C (correlation does not imply causation...). For example, it could be that the electrical signals of the brain that cause consciousnes + quantum effect, but if the same signals were running through a semiconductor we would instead see a different quantum effect (depletion zones, electron holes...). If our brains were made of 5nm CMOS transistors, a non-physicist might see quantum tunneling and conclude that it somehow caused consciousness.

I think the most important thing for non-physicists like me to remember about papers like this is that although sometimes scientists make important discoveries outside their fields we should allow specialists in the area to evaluate the non-physicists claims before believing them ourselves.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism [2] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76036/how-does-qf...

EDIT

Penrose did important work on the nature of black holes ~40 years ago. At one point in time he was a real physicist.

Anyone else wondering whether psychedelics enhance quantum processes (although I remember reading that LSD mechanism of action breaks links between neurons).

In some respects, the internet never changes. If only there was quantum corroboration for objectivism.