Is the Brain a Quantum Computer? | Hacker News Reader

Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?

cogsci.uwaterloo.ca

20 pointsilkhd13 comments

I don't feel papers like this are really adding much to the community. Of course all explanations of consciousness go against our conventional understanding of the universe, that's why we don't understand consciousness yet. More likely than not, we just don't understand the universe as well as we thought we did. Bonus points to those who think different.

We're also viewing consciousness from WITHIN consciousness, so our views are distorted by filters that we cannot see, and thus we assume that there is something fundamentally special going on, when in fact we're just viewing the system from an angle that makes it very hard to understand.

While it makes sense that our brains could be structured in such a way that some things are easier to understand than others, I think it would be remarkable that it somehow filters out our understanding of the process of consciousness in particular.

I think that particular criticism is vague and ill-formed, but oft-repeated because it sounds good. After all, having a brain hasn't stopped us from learning about the brain, even though one might think it would be hard to learn about brains with brains.

we assume that there is something fundamentally special going on, when in fact we're just viewing the system from an angle that makes it very hard to understand.

How do you know there isn't something special going on? Seems to me that believing there isn't anything special is just as much a guess as believing there is, given how little we understand consciousness.

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/documents/CogScipub.pdf

For the impatient, the above link is to a paper called "The Brain Is Both Neurocomputer and Quantum Computer," which is a response to the paper linked to in the main post.

Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source.

I was going to answer the title, with "no" - http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/brain.html - but the article itself agrees with me anyway.

So. Your title is misleading & not representative of the article, & that's annoying.

The title of the post is exactly the title of the article, so I'd say it is very representative of the article. That the answer to the posed question is "no" is not misleading.

D'oh! Sorry.

Maybe that is only what happened after we observed it. The title alone of this post blew my mind at the possibility even if not possible.

Although the hypothesis that the brain is a quantum computer is biologically and computationally implausible, there might be psychological phenomena not amenable to a neurocomputational explanation that are explicable by appeal to quantum theory. Penrose (1994, 598 A. Litt et al./Cognitive Science 30 (2006) 1997) and Hameroff (1998a, 1998b) argued that mathematical thinking and conscious experience are two such phenomena.

The abstract makes it clear they argue "no":

We argue that computation via quantum mechanical processes is irrelevant to explaining how brains produce thought, contrary to the ongoing speculations of many theorists. First, quantum effects do not have the temporal properties required for neural information processing. Second, there are substantial physical obstacles to any organic instantiation of quantum computation. Third, there is no psychological evidence that such mental phenomena as consciousness and mathematical thinking require explanation via quantum theory. We conclude that understanding brain function is unlikely to require quantum computation or similar mechanisms.

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