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"Since we don't know of another (i.e,. classical) way that anesthetic binding to microtubules would generally reduce brain activity and cause unconsciousness," Wiest says, "this finding supports the quantum model of consciousness."

This is an incredible leap of reasoning. Flumazenil binds to GABA receptors and blocks diazepam. So since we don't know of another (i.e. mechatronic) way that binding to GABA would cause sedation, it must be the frobbles.

Reading a brief quote given to a journalist and assuming you fully understand the scientific reasoning that went into that snippet intended for lay audiences is also a remarkable assumption. There is an incredible amount of context missing from the article, the quote, and of course discussion in this thread. But my main issue is that you jump from phrasing in the quote, 'supports the model,' to 'must be' which is an underhanded way to make the researcher seem ridiculous.

"We can't come up with anything better, and have ruled out everything we reasonably can at this point in our inquiry, so therefore the findings support the only remaining plausible mechanism" is literally how science works a lot of the time. It's why the researcher specifically said 'supports the model' not 'must be quantum consciousness,' because this researcher knows and is implicitly acknolwedging there is a whole lot more work to be done.

> We can't come up with anything better, and have ruled out everything we reasonably can at this point in our inquiry, so therefore the findings support the only remaining plausible mechanism.

No, quite the opposite. As the top-level comment pointed out, this is god-of-the-gaps reasoning. If you fail to find discrete evidence of consciousness anywhere in the brain, the natural conclusion is not "it must be an inscrutable quantum phenomenon that we have been unable to investigate thus far." The natural conclusion is that consciousness is simply not a discrete phenomenon.

We have zero scientific evidence that a mechanism for consciousness is hiding in some part of the brain, waiting to be found. Rather, there exists a popular intuitive dualism that suggests our own consciousness must be more than an emergent neurological phenomenon—that it must be a discrete thing caused by an exotic mechanism with non-computable properties. Ideas like quantum microtubule consciousness (or "orchestrated objective reduction") are the product of motivated reasoning: They exist only to keep dualism on life support, in the face of adverse evidence.

I don't have a methodological problem with this study in particular. If we take quantum microtubule consciousness seriously, it's a perfectly good study. But we shouldn't take it seriously—it's a ridiculous ad-hoc hypothesis that mashes together various cutting-edge fields of science with a hefty dose of quantum mysticism in order inject doubt and escape the potentially upsetting conclusion that consciousness is not a "real" phenomenon in the way that we perceive it to be.

I do have methodological issues with the study, but that's not the issue at hand, I guess. It is that the study does nothing to support a microtubule/quantum theory of consciousness, because there is no reason why boring cell biology stuff (vesicle transport on tubules, electrical conductivity, etc.) couldn't explain anything here. The paper doesn't present any mechanism or theory. So it's irresponsible to say that it "supports" anything other than a possible effect of a drug known to stabilize microtubules interfering with gas anesthesia.

Methodologically, it is curious that the 2 rats that got 2 doses of epoB during the study had no effect and the 6 rats that had 1 dose had effects varying from not much to a lot, but not every time. No control rats per se, it was self-controlled, by testing them for a period of time before the first or only dose.

Often I think about the subtext when I read a paper. Where is the benchtop research before going to animal model? Why this choice of rat and not inbred mice, for example? Why have 4 pairs F, G, H, and I but only 1 pair (I1 and I2) have any difference mentioned in the methods section and then they don't talk about the surprising result for I1 and I2 in their results section? Why do they have a chart that shows each individual test but they don't connect the dots to show you which rat is which? It's really not a great paper.

> Rather, there exists a popular intuitive dualism that suggests our own consciousness must be more than an emergent neurological phenomenon

I don't get a challenge of consciousness as something else than an emergent neurological phenomenon. The problem is by what mechanism does it emerge. Animals without language show sign of consciousness (even if more limited form), and conversely high level computation does not especially in the light of the capabilities of LLMs (computers are crushing numbers identically no matter if the matrix multiplications are for rendering a scene or LLM inference, otherwise it would mean that some arbitrary sequences of numbers lead to consciousness like magic formulas). That leaves only something physical/biological to explain the emerging phenomenon, which is what the research is trying to do.

Why does high level computation not show signs of consciousness? I'm not sure what crushing numbers identically has to do with anything.

Once again, you've converted "this supports [alternate theory]" into "it must be [alternate theory]." At least address the argument being made instead of a strawman.

Suppose I wrote a paper about how the low oxygen content on Mars means that Martian leprechauns, should they exist, must have extra-large lungs in order to thrive on the surface. Is this a sensible scientific publication? It's not wrong. It doesn't assume Martian leprechaun theory is true—it merely seeks to establish its parameters more clearly. I would not call it serious science, though. It's farcical. Any discussion of the paper should primarily regard the fact that leprechauns almost certainly do not live on Mars and so the question of their lung size is entirely moot. In fact, discussing Martian leprechauns as if they're at all a serious subject is itself a form of deceptive rhetoric.

Agree. It's incredibly frustrating seeing takes on science by engineers on HN. It's as bad as, if not worse than, the takes I see about politics around here.

For context, this is what the paper itself says:

> In order to experimentally assess the contribution of MTs as functionally relevant targets of volatile anesthetics, we measured latencies to loss of righting reflex (LORR) under 4% isoflurane in male rats injected subcutaneously with vehicle or 0.75 mg/kg of the brain- penetrant MT–stabilizing drug epothilone B (epoB). EpoB-treated rats took an average of 69 s longer to become unconscious as measured by latency to LORR. This was a statistically significant difference corresponding to a standardized mean difference (Cohen’s d) of 1.9, indicating a “large” normalized effect size. The effect could not be accounted for by tolerance from repeated exposure to isoflurane. Our results suggest that binding of the anesthetic gas isoflurane to MTs causes unconsciousness and loss of purpose-ful behavior in rats (and presumably humans and other animals). This finding is predicted by models that posit consciousness as a property of a quantum physical state of neural MTs.

> Our study establishes that action on intracellular microtubules (MTs) is the mechanism, or one of the mechanisms, by which the inhalational anesthetic gas isoflurane induces unconsciousness in rats. This finding has potential clinical implications for understanding how taxane chemotherapy interferes with anesthesia in humans and more broadly for avoiding anesthesia failures during surgery. Our results are also theoretically important because they provide support for MT-based theories of anesthetic action and consciousness.

Let me emphasize:

> This finding is predicted by models that posit consciousness as a property of a quantum physical state of neural MTs.

If people here want to criticize the paper, I want to see some citations of passages from the fucking paper, and not some hur-dur quote from a popular science article meant to convey the paper to a lay audience. But you know, 99% of the paper would be indecipherable to most people here, so all we get is these surface level takes that wastes everybody's time.

The intellectual laziness in these comments is galling.

I'm all for a rant on how computer science isn't, but this attack on only the comments seems a bit over the top. Why not attack the posting of the pop-sci article with quotes so bad in the first place?

My issue with the ScienceDaily and even the original eNeuro article isn't with individual quotes, but with the apparent motivated reasoning of the papers. I'm generally aware of the field quantum-consciousness, Orch OR, and with Penrose's theories. I'm also aware of the funding/publishing methods in science and this looks a bit weak. The evidence is, we didn't find another mechanism. That there had to be corrections on supporting research, which included the names of additional funders (Templeton Foundation) is also not a wonderful sign (if you know you know).

The actual article research covers the effect of epoB on tolerance and latency of anesthesia in rats, which support the action of isoflurane on microtubules (MT) as at least one mechanism. There is a bunch of other stuff about quantum consciousness that reads like a review paper. Quantum is mentioned 58 times and plays no role in their actual measurement or results.

https://www.eneuro.org/content/11/8/ENEURO.0291-24.2024

I actually didn't find the paper that hard to read, it's mostly basic science and huge review of Orch OR. I don't consider it a big prestigious journal, and I don't recognize names on it, but the actual results (limited as they are) don't seem outrageous or unsupported. I'm also not sure they're that interesting unless you already have a fringe theory to support.

I'll bite.

This paper doesn't show anything beyond an anesthetic's possible effect on microtubules, assuming it's reproducible. I see nothing about ruling out other pathways that may also affect consciousness. That big leap from MT to consciousness is still there, for which there are plenty of solid criticisms [0] by other respected scientists.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

> I see nothing about ruling out other pathways that may also affect consciousness.

Especially given how many things are simply not understood about the neuron and other cells in the brain.

The discovered complexity continues to expand every year and each new discovery (e.g. dynamic tunneling nanotubes in vivo) takes a lot of effort to try to figure out the impact on computation.

OP's criticism was useful, because there is indeed a gap that needed to be filled and you did just that, thanks.

Conversely it would have been bad to take what the article says at face value - that's how you end up believing in astrology. Even Nobel prize winners can go terribly wrong, after all [1]. But as you said, not everyone has the knowledge or time to dig the connection between the two statements out of the paper.

I can only suggest to ask questions when one does not understand something; sarcasm in particular can backfire hard when you're wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

>> It's incredibly frustrating seeing takes on science by engineers on HN.

That’s crazy talk. I personally find the various takes on topics here on HN valuable and insightful and sometimes it’s the out of the box thinking that you get when an engineer talks about science - especially when it’s broken down to levels I can start to understand.

Your appeal is staunch but your own quotes from the paper fail to give a convincing argument for the jump to quantum physics.

The abstract itself didn't assert such a thing. Just that it 'lends support' for that explanation.

How does it "support" or "lend support", wouldn't it be more correct to say "it doesn't rule out" and which likely seems a bit pointless statement so why bring it in, in the first place?

Support seems like an active statement kind of like if we realize that 2 + 2 != 5 it lends support to 2 + 2 = 6.

You're doing an awful amount of nitpicking. I didn't find the abstract that hard to read. There's a big discussion in the scientific community about whether consciousness involves quantum effects or not, and this nudges that debate more into quantum territory. Unless you are part of that community, you're going to be reliant on others to characterize these kinds of results. That characterization was helpfully provided in the abstract, which is a good thing because otherwise we'd need to rely on profit-motivated journals to do it for us.

> You're doing an awful amount of nitpicking.

I'm absolutely not. I have a problem with science wording such as "suggests", "linked to", and "supports", since many times these findings could be just a complete coincidence or chance, but the way the titles are worded is implied it's actually somehow making a case for that. It's not explicitly falsifying the idea of A, but it doesn't mean it's supporting it either. Maybe it also supports the idea that God is behind all of that and is just trolling us.

The microtubule "quantum consciousness" hooey has been around since the 90's. It was paid lip service in my biochemistry and molecular biology classes almost as a joke when covering dynamic instability and transport.

While it wouldn't be strictly impossible to test, it's very much cut in the same cloth as string theory.

Roger Penrose pushing hooey?

he wouldn't be the first (won't be the last) celebrated hard science guy to have very bad takes on human biology (and consciousness).

at least they have some kind of falsifiable model: https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-theory-of-consciousness-p...

Kind of like the "God of the Gaps" concept, where anything science can't currently explain is taken as proof of the existence of God.

Like that Venus phosphine gas story, "the only synthesis route we know is biological, thus it's presence must mean life if there"

> thus it's presence must mean life if there

Nobody said that. It's on you for making the leap, whether out of hope or misguided combativeness, to the assertion that it must mean life, which I don't recall ever being stated by any of the researchers involved or any reputable articles.

It's not so uncommon in science to come to a strange conclusion by excluding all "reasonable" alternatives. For example, black holes have a similar status: no one has conclusively seen one, but we know of no mechanism for matter to support itself beyond a certain density, so black hole it is.

Have we not pointed telescopes into space and seen the way light bends around a black hole? I guess in a way it's true that nobody has conclusively "seen" one (since they don't emit light), but by that logic nobody has conclusively seen the hole in the middle of a donut either.

> but by that logic nobody has conclusively seen the hole in the middle of a donut either.

Not quite..we can see the donut hole very clearly, put things through it, measure it, interact with it. We can measure and observe and test it however we like.

Not so with a black hole. Yet.

I guess I don't understand...what is going on here? https://eventhorizontelescope.org/

My understanding is that the EHT images are a result of a lot (like, months) of data processing, not an image from the telescope. So arguably still not a direct observation.

Digital photographs are just the result of processing the sensor readings of photodiodes. It seems quite arbitrary to say one is an "image" and the other isn't just because the processing step is more complicated. Both accurately represent what you would see if you were there in person (ignoring false color etc.).

Exactly this.

> It's not so uncommon in science to come to a strange conclusion by excluding all "reasonable" alternatives.

That is not what happen in the article, or to my understanding in this field of research.

> For example, black holes have a similar status: no one has conclusively seen one, but we know of no mechanism for matter to support itself beyond a certain density, so black hole it is.

Comparing the equation based methods of physics, often called a "hard" science, to neurology or biology, often called a a "soft" science, is not going to be an apples to apples comparison.

> neurology or biology, often called a a "soft" science,

Neurology and biology are absolutely hard sciences, just as hard as physics.

No, absolutely not.

(my phd is in biophysics; I've worked across many different fields)

Yes, they absolutely are. Congrats on your PhD.

Hard sciences are simply those that can be tested and verified. Biology and neurology fall into this category.

Soft sciences are those that don't lend themselves to testing and verification very well, like economics and psychology.

This is pretty cut and dry. It's not like trying to argue if Star Wars is sci-fi or not or something.

There is a continuum of hardness within the quantitative sciences, and physics definitely lies on the "more testable and verifiable" than chemistry, biology, and neuroscience (not neurology- that's a form of medicine). Many of the biological systems we work with, we don't even really test and verify, especially not at the level that a large-scale particle physics experiment would.

If you want to insist that biology is as testable and verifiable as physics, I have no interest in arguing with you- it's just a difference of opinion (and I think people with experience across the continuum would agree with me).

> If you want to insist that biology is as testable and verifiable as physics, I have no interest in arguing with you- it's just a difference of opinion

I just think the whole "There is a continuum of hardness within the quantitative sciences" is irrelevant. It's more of a binary thing, and biology is a hard science, period. But sure, we can agree to disagree.

Without any doubt though, biology is not a 'soft' science.

You seem to agree that the testability is not binary:

> Soft sciences are those that don't lend themselves to testing and verification very well, like economics and psychology.

But want hard to only used in a binary fashion with some heuristic triggering the step function from soft to hard.

People do talk using the term that way. They also use it as a continuum saying one field is harder than an another. I quoted the terms, "hard" and "soft" in my message above because the terms are used in a few different ways and are not rigorously defined. They only need a rough definition to make the point I was making though.

> Neurology and biology are absolutely hard sciences

Sometimes.

> just as hard as physics.

No. Not even close.

Neurology maybe, specially with the book "The Rhythms of The Brain". Still far from pure Physics.

Biology it's more about classification/sorting than Math.

> Sometimes.

No, always. No exceptions.

> No. Not even close.

It's exactly equal because it's a category not a scale and certainly not a competition.

Hard sciences are those that can be tested and verified. Biology, neurology and physicals all meet that criteria, and thus are all hard.

Soft sciences are those that are harder to test, like economics and psychology.

This sounds like the whole "we've never seen a species evolving". Much like fossils, radioactive dating, geology come together to give us a picture of evolution, we have tons of real evidence for black holes. But we even have two actual pictures now.

yes, but in this case, nobody has excluded all the more probable alternatives.

"Therefor Zeus must be producing the thunder"

A quantum leap of reasoning.

Discrete conclusions with no continuous path connecting them? Apt!

Yeah it's abduction/induction over deduction.

Part of the reason why we misunderstand other processes in the brain and have since the Lobotomy times enshrined that approach.

Yeah, that quote stuck me as well. What an irresponsible way to jump to conclusions.

This looks like it's related to the "Orchestrated objective reduction" theory of consciousness [0], which is a brainchild of physicist Roger Penrose and an anesthesiologist named Stuart Hameroff. After 30 years it continues to have very serious problems and is generally rejected by physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

Rejected by other experts who also have no idea how to explain consciousness.

Your theory having serious problems but no competitors does not actually solve the serious problems with it.

If I can't tell you why the sky is blue, it doesn't make your theory that it's green more likely to be right.

Funny example. There are languages where sky is kinda green.

Vietnamese: The word "xanh" can refer to both blue and green.

Japanese: Historically, "ao" (青) could refer to both blue and green.

Welsh: "Glas" can mean blue, green, or gray

We're talking about people like Marvin Minsky or Hilary Putnam, who have made very significant contributions to the discourse. And if Max Tegmark thinks your claims are a bit too far out, you've got your work cut out.

Marvin Minsky, Tegmark and Putnam have nothing to do with neuroscience, and have no authority to speak about the nature of consciousness.

Firstly, I would argue that it is very much in philosophy's remit until we can agree on a definition of "consciousness".

Secondly, if a misapplication of Godel's Theorem is used as evidence for the legitimacy of a hypothesis about consciousness, then it is perfectly valid for a philosopher to point out that misapplication.

I think we're looking at it from the wrong angle. It's really about psychology and theology.

There is no rational reason to even raise the question of why we have free will or consciousness in the first place. We do so because it appeals to our innate human desires that we evolved to follow, such as the desire to feel in control or have purpose.

These instincts are so strong and have such an ability to create biases in our mental reasoning that they cause otherwise very intelligent researchers to speak nonsense.

The more interesting question IMO is how and why exactly, from a neuroscience point of view, people consistently fail in their application of logic when it comes to questions about the meaning of life like this.

I think I get what you're saying. It's as if there was still a section of physicists clinging onto the idea of an ether, saying that it's critical to our understanding of electromagnetism and that the transmission of light cannot be explained without it. Meanwhile everyone else is saying we've moved on; the world makes sense without this.

Why neuroscience has a monopoly on Consciousness?

Because it studies the only known vehicle of consciousness - neurons and their networks.

Looking at neurons doesn’t explain the plane of consciousness.

So? That doesn't rebut the comment you are replying to, which basically states that currently our only window at all into consciousness is through neurons and their networks.

At least neuroscientists are actually looking at the only physical medium we know of that can hold consciousness. Everyone else is just basically philosophizing, at least until anyone can show some other medium capable of holding consciousness.

Our understanding of physical mediums is also new, it’s fields all the way down :7

Sure, and if you want to study physics, at some point you need to experiment in the real world. If you want to study consciousness, that means you need to study the only medium we know that can evoke that phenomenon.

Again. We don't know it can evoke consciousness. It's an assumption of materialisam. If consciousness is fundamental you don't need that argument.

What the hell you mean by neurons holding consciousness lol.

This is known as "the neural correlates of consciousness": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_conscious...

By and large, the current scientific assumption is that everything required for consciousness exists within the physics of neurons, rather than, say, epithilial cells on your feet, or magic brainions that haven't been detected yet. Of course this is greatly simplified- a disembodied brain with no body probably can't sustain consciousness, but As far as we can tell, consciousness is an emergent property of brains which is wholly explicable using scientific methods.

It's not known. It's a belief hold among some scientists.

It also assumes materialisam is true.

> It also assumes materialisam is true.

As it should until we have a better theory we can test.

Ahaha. No, I am a neural network, and I am conscious. Destroying my network will destroy my consciousness.

Not necessarily, there are plenty of rigorously documented cases of people being conscious without any brain activity.

This article is also pretty interesting: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.9555...

Without brain activity, all that can be demonstrated is the recollection of being conscious. It is well known that we can recall lots of things that never happened, with our brains filling in the blanks with invented details.

I am not aware of rigorously documented cases of people being conscious without any brain activity. Can you point me to some?

See linked article, under "Phenomenon #6: Cognitive abilities can be retained when the brain is seriously compromised", terminal lucidity, etc: "the patients demonstrated normal cognitive abilities just prior to death, contrary to what objective medical findings would have predicted (e.g., EEG, neuroimaging). These patients are operating in an anomalous manner that brings into question the idea that the body is a “puppet” controlled from the inside (the brain) and that perhaps it can function alternately in some instances."

I'm sorry, I can't take anything in that paper seriously, its references are "case reports", which are not rigorous documentation. They're observations mixed with narrative (even the one reference they say is prospective does not appear to be). This is not science, and there are explanations/reasonable alternatives for all the references that make more sense. In short, I question that claim "the patients acted in ways that would have not been predicted by EEG".

Are you aware of any documented cases of observing brain activity without using consciousness?

If that's equivocation as a wisecrack, it's particularly unhelpful in discussion about a pseudodiscipline whose proponents do no small part of their bullshitting by conflating the everyday psychological sense of "observation" with the sense of physical measurement.

Physicals measurements like everything else can be read only through consciousness. I was not talking in terms of wave function collapse. Just simple fact that consciousness is necessary to know there are experiments happening. Consciousness is necessary for you to experience the world and arrive at this conclusions. You take consciousness for granted.

Yes- that's a widely done thing. In particular, brain activity is evaluated using EEG, MRI, reflex response, and many other physiological methods.

Consciousness is a primary requirement to see, operate, read results from all of that.

Stop trolling.

It’s not trolling, it’s an obtuse reference to the unsolved measurement problem of Quantum Mechanics.

Is that how your llm model reacts when you can't formulate back a reasonable argument?

Marvin's work in neuroscience, in his own words: https://web.mit.edu/dxh/www/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky... He invented a very successful sub-area of microscopy specifically to probe brains.

I care about Minksy's opinions in a wide range of science since he demonstrated himself as a capable general intelligence.

> Marvin Minsky, Tegmark and Putnam have nothing to do with neuroscience, and have no authority to speak about the nature of consciousness.

Oh come on. Computer scientists and physicists are the pinnacles of humanity, who can speak with authority on absolutely everything, and have status that trumps every other kind of expert.

That's probably mostly fair, but then would you also agree that a hand-wavy piece of bloviation about purported quantum effects in a ubiquitous cytoskeleton component really doesn't have anything to contribute to the matter either?

The ability to invalidate or critique a solution does not require knowing any part of the solution.

I recently explained my personal beliefs around how you square free-will and determinism (and subsequently consciousness) to GPT-4 and it told me this was the more formal name for it.

I posited that if you can observe and reconstruct the entire state of a complex system then you can predict future states- score one for determinism and no free will. But, we know there exists places that we cannot directly observe or perceive, aka quantum uncertainty, represented by σxσp ≥ ℏ/2 [1].

So based completely in theory, I figure the only way we square FW & determinism, is that free will exists somewhere/in a form we cannot directly observe, and it manifests as tiny influences that add up, in the complex system that is a brain.

This is the way more speculative part and it's more fun than anything to think about- it doesn't change the way I live my life buuuut-

Folded brains dramatically increase the influence a given region in space-time can have, simply due to the increased number of neurons. So our brains double as an antenna for some unseen influence that manifests through quantum uncertainty.

So when I explained this to ChatGPT it told me that OORT was very similar to this, but even the mechanism they use for it seems to be a stretch for me.

edit: But I do think that in order for neural networks to become anything other than outwardly really really good approximations of human minds, there needs to be a way to introduce a small amount of genuine randomness into their calculations, without utterly breaking them. I could see early attempts at doing this causing a form of LLM schizophrenia because the neural network wasn't resilient enough to the induced error.

[1] the standard deviation of position σx and the standard deviation of momentum σp is greater than or equal to half the reduced planck's constant

You can get to this conclusion more directly by noting that computational complexity of any Turing simulator of anything more than a trivial system increases very fast as the precision of the initial conditions for the simulation increases. Even the shift map exhibits this phenomenon.

This can be an even more severe boundary for prediction than the actual measurement accuracy.

In the discussion about determinism vs free will, this leaves us with the situation that we can predict what somebody will do even if we assume perfect measurements, but will only be able to produce this prediction after the fact except for very short term predictions.

Stephen Wolfram calls this computational irreducibility.

You've outlined what I reckon is the appeal of "quantum consciousness". I personally feel that randomness doesn't help to explain free will any more than determinism. I'm more inclined to believe that free will (in the strictest sense) is an illusion.

The problem with this approach is that even if you say that our thinking is non-deterministic because of true random effects on the quantum level, you still have to explain how deterministic calculations on random values make for free will.

You still have no influence on it, even if there is randomness involved.

You also have to explain why will is changed when the brain is damaged.

Really hard to justify free will (IMO) when a person's entire personality can be fundamentally altered by a bash to the head. What does "free will" mean if everything that makes you you can be changed with, say, a lobotomy.

It is, at best, an illusion and nothing more.

There is no illusion, and brain damage has no bearing on free will.

Free will is simply you making a choice, that's it.

If you want to argue about what 'you' means, feel free, but it doesn't really change anything here.

What is "choice"? Is it simply executing one of a set of possibilities? If you take such a general definition of free will, then a slot machine is manifesting it's free will to deny you a payout.

Making a decision either on impulse, intuition, or rational preferences.

> Is it simply executing one of a set of possibilities? If you take such a general definition of free will, then a slot machine is manifesting it's free will to deny you a payout.

Sure, or even just a dice. Except that's a rather silly definition of free will since it omits the 'will' part, i.e. thought.

> free will (in the strictest sense)

In what sense? Can you produce a strict definition, what is "free will", what is "illusion"?

This is a battle of definitions. Pick the definitions you like, and you can prove what you set out to prove.

The "strictest sense" is something like:

1. We have control over our decisions

2. Our decisions are independent of past events

I agree that this is pretty hand-wavey and open to semantics. But I don't think that there is any realistic, coherent way to interpret and reconcile the above two statements [edit - without resorting to some kind of non-physicalism e.g. God, spirit planes... ].

Not even a six-year-old would believe #2. It’s endlessly fascinating that there are people who do, but most people realise their past affects their future decisions.

> We have control over our decisions

That begs the question - what is "me"?

If I take "me" as the configuration of atoms in my brain, or simply the information if you will, then "me" is determining my future actions, therefore "me" is in control of my decisions.

Alternatively, I could define "me" as the whole system - the configuration (electrical signals), the hardware (brain, neurons), the physics. I think most "free will deniers" will say that physics is not part of "me", but I disagree - physics is not separable from matter and information, physical laws permeate everything, they are necessarily part of "me". You don't need any God here, this definition is as physical as it gets.

> Our decisions are independent of past events

Doesn't this require essentially random behavior? Sounds somewhat absurd ...

> I could define "me" as the whole system - the configuration (electrical signals), the hardware (brain, neurons), the physics.

I think that's fine. But imagine an outside observer who is privy to the current state of the system plus future environmental inputs. In principle, that observer is able to calculate the system's evolution exactly, and therefore predict all future decisions of the person-system. For many people this is contrary to the idea of free will. For how can something be "free" if it is bound by the laws of physics and is known in advance to any sufficiently sophisticated observer.

> In principle, that observer is able to calculate the system's evolution exactly

Which is fine, actually even more, it's confirming the presence of free will.

I have a Snickers bar in front of me. I like Snickers, but I also want my teeth healthy, keep diabetes away from me and keep my weight in check. I will decide to either eat it or not, depending on the current subjective trade-offs between my priorities. Acting on my wishes and priorities like this seems exactly in line with free will.

In your understanding, what behavior does an observer need to see to detect free will for you? The decision cannot depend on my goals of feeling good eating Snickers / keeping my weight in check? Based on what should free will make decisions? If it's on nothing, should the behavior with free will be random? That seems very counter-intuitive.

> if it is bound by the laws of physics

As mentioned earlier, this is no external constraint in my physicalist understanding of the world - laws of physics are an inseparable part of "me" as a system.

> The decision cannot depend on my goals of feeling good eating Snickers / keeping my weight in check?

You have conceded that your decision is pre-determined. Most people consider pre-determined events not to be "free". What are they even "free" from?

> You have conceded that your decision is pre-determined

Yeah, "pre-determined" by "me" (physicalist definition above).

Isn't the ability to determine your decisions exactly free will?

In my understanding of how the phrase is used, "free will" implies being free from pre-determination.

That's completely opposite to my understanding - free will means to be able to determine your own decisions.

I think I kind of get where you're coming from. Would you perhaps agree that the "free from" in your free will is "free from external influence"?

If so, consider the following thought experiment. Let's say I get to pick either an apple or an orange to eat. I'm confined to a white room and the state of the "me" system is such that I am pre-determined to pick the apple. Alice is standing outside the room in front of a button, which blasts an EM wave at my brain after which I am pre-determined to pick the orange.

So, my choice is determined by whether or not Alice presses the button.

Do I have free will when I make this choice?

What if, instead of Alice pressing the button, the wave is blasted with 50% probability?

> I think I kind of get where you're coming from. Would you perhaps agree that the "free from" in your free will is "free from external influence"?

I agree only to a degree. I don't consider free will to be a binary thing, in some cases you exert more free will, in other cases you are more strongly coerced to do something. Like when I talk to my wife during breakfast, she (external entity) is exerting influence on me, but I don't think it cancels my free will.

I don't fully understand the mechanics of your experiment, but assume that this EM wave just completely overwhelms the signalling in my brain - in that case, it doesn't seem like I have (a lot of) free will. But you can design less extreme thought experiments, e.g. where Alice causes discomfort to me which then influences me to favor one of the options more strongly than otherwise, where I still keep some decision making / free will.

I'd say that how much free will you exert is determined by how much your decisions are driven by your internal "me" state vs. the external influence.

> I'd say that how much free will you exert is determined by how much your decisions are driven by your internal "me" state vs. the external influence.

I reckon this definition would be very difficult to formalise meaningfully. Going back to the thought experiment in the white room, it might be that my choice is strongly influenced by whether the walls are cream or vanilla. My choice might be influenced by whether a certain smell or noise happens to occur just before I decide. I have a constant stream of inputs flooding into my system, affecting my choice-making. Some of those inputs involve deliberate actions by other agents (e.g. Alice pressing a button) whilst others are simply the goings-on of the environment. I suspect it is impossible in the general case to conclude that a choice is driven more by internal state than external influence or vice versa.

#2 is obviously false - and #1 is obviously true, to me. Whether or not you wrote this comment was a decision you made. The only way "free will" is even an open question is if you can't decide what "you" are.

If you only allow yourself to identify with the highest-level, most rational aspects of the decision engine you live inside, then that's a mistake which will haunt you with questions like "am I really in control?" forever. If you identify with a broader sense of your self, it's pretty obvious that you are making decisions, for both rational and irrational reasons. Your conscious experience is part of what it feels like for a human to make decisions.

Why would “my decisions are determined by sub-nuclear divine dice rolls” be any closer to free will than “my decisions are determined by algorithms operating on my sensory inputs and memories”? What’s more “free” about introducing that factor?

Randomness just introduces branch points into the linear flow of deterministic states. Since you do not control the branch points or create them, this does not give you free will.

We don't actually know if quantum physics has real randomness or not. Quantum collapse is an unsolved problem.

> I could see early attempts at [introducing randomness] causing a form of LLM schizophrenia because the neural network wasn't resilient enough to the induced error.

1. This is actually already done. Temperature parameter controls amount of randomness.

2. Neural networks are quite noise resistant.

The temperature parameter doesn’t introduce any noise into the network evaluation.

Typically, what happens is that the network outputs a set of possible tokens with different probabilities, and a sampler picks from the top possibilities. Temperature determines how spiky its pick is; at zero it’ll always pick the top option.

Randomness does not give you free will, any more than determinism does.

What do you mean by free will?

Exactly. If determinism is incompatible with somebody's personal meaning of free will, quantum dice rolls are hardly a solution. What they really need is to either find a religion or just shrug off philosophy and get on with their life, behaving as if they have free will even if they can't rationally justify it.

Quantum dice roll is _the free will_ in this context. So your free will is what sets the dice; as it is extraphysical, it will look like randomness in the physical world.

That's not quantum physics, that's just some sort of new-age religion. A new variation on the "brains are antenna for the soul" idea.

This is possibly one way to solve it, but I think there is a simpler way, following causal chains and the laws of thermodynamics.

We clearly have systems that can absorb energy for later use - creating a natural "pause" in the causal chain. Each of these pauses create a possible future that is not yet realized. The longer this energy is held, the larger this possibility space becomes.

Free will becomes that ability to hold the pause with intention, and then select from the different possible futures that have been created.

Determinism does not interfere with this in any way. The causal chains all follow the basic deterministic laws of physics. There is space for choice created by holding energy instead of immediately dissipating it.

No quantum mechanics required at all.

> how you square free-will and determinism (and subsequently consciousness)

I've never seen this as an issue. Even if something is fated, it's still you making that choice.

You ate whatever you ate for lunch yesterday. It's already happened. You still made the choice.

> free will exists somewhere/in a form we cannot directly observe

John Conway has a rather neat explanation of this in the Strong Free Will Theorem.

https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf

Being neat doesn't necessarily mean it's correct, but it's compatible with what we know about physical reality, and solves some otherwise rather tough and paradoxical facts about experienced reality, so I'm a fan.

> But, we know there exists places that we cannot directly observe or perceive, aka quantum uncertainty, represented by σxσp ≥ ℏ/2 [1].

> So based completely in theory, I figure the only way we square FW & determinism, is that free will exists somewhere/in a form we cannot directly observe, and it manifests as tiny influences that add up, in the complex system that is a brain.

These two things not only don't follow from each other, the first one actually all but refutes the second.

First of all, Heisenberg uncertainty affects all physical systems, but clearly not all physical systems are conscious.

Second of all, there is no pattern allowed to exist below Heisenberg uncertainty. That is, if you could determine exactly the momentum of a particle, the particle could literally be anywhere in the universe, with equal probability: there is no bias, it wouldn't be more likely to be here or there. So this is pure randomness, there is no "consciousness signal" you could extract from it.

Or, to put it another way, if our consciousness was a result of Heisenberg uncertainty, that would mean it's a purely random phenomenon, and every human at every time would be exactly as likely to type the next word in this comment, start running in a random direction, gouge out one eye, or any other thing they are capable of doing. There is, in a very fundamental sense, no way to get patterns or intention out of Heisenberg uncertainty.

Besides, the best way to square "free will" with determinism is Compatibilism. Every human is an automaton whose behavior is fully determined by genetic and epigenetic make-up and by everything they've ever learned and otherwise experienced. In a fundamental sense, my whole life's course was determined the moment I was conceived; but still, in any given situation, what I will do is different from someone else might do, because they have a different history and thus different values and biases. There is no magic that allows some "fundamental me" to "choose" how some electro-chemical processes will fire in my brain, any more than I could "choose" to emit electrons from the tips of my fingers. But that doesn't mean that I (the adult I am today) would do the same things Hitler did if I were somehow catapulted into his shoes today.

What does it matter why you can't predict the future state of a brain?

If you can't, we have free will. If we can, we don't have free will.

I didn't say "whether", I said "why".

At the moment, you can't predict the future state of my brain for more than one reason, one of which is that you don't have much information about the current state (precise information anyway, you may have an opinion about the average state).

>At the moment, you can't predict the future state of my brain for more than one reason, one of which is that you don't have much information about the current state

Do we not literally predicate our friendships and relationships on being able to predict the future states of minds? How long do you stay friends with the person who randomly shows up or doesn't, to any event you invite them to? Or whose tastes vary unpredictably from day to day, giving you no framework to contextualize them?

It's always very entertaining to nitpick a statement that has a caveat by quoting it without the caveat.

(No it isn't)

If why means because there is a real randomness: we have free will. If its just because of current complexlity, we don't have free will.

It also implies that we might life this life over and over forever.

This is a very common error people make when considering "free will". They mix in "predictability" to the concept. But predictability is not "free will".

If I give you a choice between a million dollars or a painful lingering tortuous death, you will with for-the-sake-of-argument 100% choose the million dollars, of your own free will. It is no less what you will for the fact that anybody can predict it; it is certainly what you will. Will you deny that is what you will?

Predictability also brings in a lot of contingency that people do not generally realize they are bringing in. If the universe is entirely material and there is no external reality, then good news! Your actions are already unpredictable. No conceivable machine built within the real physical universe could possibly fully predict your actions; you can prove this with some information theory considerations (the amount of information your actions leak about your internal state is not sufficient to nail down that internal state fully). So you have free will! Yet... if the universe is entirely material and there is no external reality, the universe may still be fully deterministic. Contrary to somewhat popular opinion, quantum mechanics is not intrinsically nondeterministic. It means you can't determine the outcome of certain events with any process we know from the inside, but the entire universe can absolutely have some sort of PRNG or something to determine everything that is going on and it could all be deterministic in ways that still work for QM. In which case, oops, no free will for you. So by this definition, the question is unanswerable from the inside.

Unpredictability is not free will either. If by some amazing, but physically possible, set of circumstances, the decision about whether to turn left or right came down to one 50/50 outcome decided by a quantum waveform collapse, that still doesn't give you "free will" about the outcome. You don't get to pick the outcome. It was undecided and unpredictable, but it wasn't decided by your "will" either.

If you're still not having enough fun yet, suppose "quantum" does "solve" free will. Which quantum outcomes make the difference? Suppose I build a perfectly-feasible quantum device[1] to flip a random coin, quantumly. Compare to a supposed quantum decision made "in" my "brain". How exactly is it that the latter is my "quantum free will" whereas the former is just a random decision made out in the universe?

Just labeling a process "quantum" doesn't do anything. It's just wordplay in the end, substituting one undefinable term for another and calling it progress. There's still a crapton of work to show that the "quantum" provides the mechanism for "something else" to meaningfully interact with the world[2]. My "will" is not "randomness". And boy-oh-boy is that "something else" a can of worms of its own.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwIGnATzBTg

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41079700

I have to think through this take tbh :)

I liked the explanation of kurzgesagt around this topic but it feels weird if our unverse is not random.

Like moving the goal post to 'what would a real random source look like' 'would that source be called god'.

We have free will in either case. Whether or not our choices can be predicated is irrelevant.

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are we really citing ChatGPT in comments now

Sorry, I must be missing something, what's the problem here? I don't see OP citing ChatGPT, just that they were explaining their own belief system to GPT-4 and it responded by "simplifying" OP's beliefs into "orchestrated objective reduction". This is exactly the type of usage I would expect from an LLM; OP didn't use it to inform their decision, but to further examine the belief from another perspective or broaden their questioning around it.

There is a damn army of people doing this and I have no idea what they think they're contributing.

My personal conspiracy theory is it's ground work to set conditions for disinformation campaigns: the "I used an LLM/I used ChatGPT" people are there to make you look less critically at the other comments by giving a small queue that since they don't include those terms they just be more genuine.

> I have no idea what they think they're contributing.

I assume they are just young and see no harm in sharing something they thought was interesting.

This fad will die out eventually since it's redundant and provides no real value.

If it wasn't too old to be the case I'd think that article was just A.I. Slop or charitably something like technobabble from the Sternbach and Okuda era of Star Trek. "I can do math because I'm a thetan" shows that emotionally true stories can beat out factually true stories in science as well as politics.

[flagged]

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

* edited.

This only shows the mechanism that impairs the brain enough for it to become unconscious is related to the microtubules.

Absolutely everything in the real world is quantum-related because that’s the very structure of reality.

  > Absolutely everything in the real world is quantum-related because that’s the very structure of reality.

The idea that Penrose posited is intrinsically HARD to measure. Moreover, consciousness itself is not well defined to begin with.

If anything, it appears that neural networks are far further along than any quantum mechanism for approximating whatever "consciousness" actually is? And neural networks are absolutely not quantum mechanical.

> If anything, it appears that neural networks are far further along than any quantum mechanism for approximating whatever "consciousness" actually is? And neural networks are absolutely not quantum mechanical.

I know next to nothing about either, but I wanna try to disagree with that.

LLMs fool people into believing they‘re conscious, because they‘ve been trained on extraordinary amounts of thoughts and data outputted by the world‘s top conscious creature. They appear conscious because consciousness is in the training data.

To me, neural networks more closely mimic the brain in what I would (poorly) call „bodily functions“. I include language processing and speech in this definition.

There are people that don‘t have an inner monologue - which is totally fascinating to me - who are perfectly conscious like everyone else. Simon Roper, who doesn‘t, has fascinating YouTube videos on these topics.

How are people that do not have inner monologue able to write? And if they are capable of writing how does whatever they output as writing differ from inner monologue?

They write just like everyone else, there‘s no apparent difference. The parts of their brain responsible for speech works just fine, but it doesn‘t vocalize their thoughts „back to them“.

But then they must have a stream of thoughts that they can't "hear" in their mind themselves that only gets activated or becomes visible when they talk or write?

There's no speech or invisible speech normally, that only appears when writing or talking?

But if they were to talk out loud they could simulate the same thing? Could they simulate it if they just moved their mouth? What about if they imagined they were to move the mouth and what they would say?

I have a hard time grasping this. Because if they can talk they probably should at least be able to simulate this in their mind.

In which case - another topic - I guess if some people don't have it at all, then other people can also turn it on and off. I wonder if then when someone is supposed to meditate is it a very different experience and expectations for different people? So some guidance for some people would sound really weird or impossible? Because e.g. if somebody advices to let go of your thoughts or something, I have no idea what it means, because my thoughts are just coming, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Then some people will say "You should not stop thinking or trying to control them, but instead just notice them, but don't get carried away by them" - which also doesn't make sense to me, because my thoughts are my thoughts, they keep coming, how do I not get carried away by them? They are just there in a continuous flow with me whereever I go.

> There are people that don‘t have an inner monologue -

I think it's more likely they do and just don't 'hear' it or 'verbalize' it.

I guess that‘s more or less the definition. They don‘t hear a voice in their head when they think, but their thinking is completely „normal“ otherwise.

I believe in a video, Simon mentions some examples where people with an inner monologue can experience a lack thereof. I think one is the moment _right_ after you wake up. You‘re able to think, but usually without a voice in your head. I could be misremembering that though.

> LLMs fool people into believing they‘re conscious

I can't prove I'm conscious either. I might just be fooling everyone around me.

> Yes but AFAIK, reality is "quantum" in the sense that something like the scale of Avogadro's number (N=10^23) quantum processes interact and average out to typical classical behavior. It's only in limited situations where the actual quantum mechanical nature pops up in the macro world, right? (eg Bose-Einstein condensate, the ultraviolet catastrophe, energy bands of semiconductors, emission spectra, etc).

This is not very clear at the moment. Of course, observations make it obvious that classical objects don't behave like quantum objects, and all quantum objects we know of are small, and all classical objects are big.

We even know of one mechanism that prevents certain quantum effects from influencing large systems - decoherence. Decoherence explains why, when a quantum system that is all in the same phase interacts with a large system where everything is out of phase, the various parts of the quantum system also quickly go out of phase, and thus can't constructively or destructively interfere with each other any more. This explains for example why, if you repeat the double-slit experiment with ping pong balls instead of atoms, or if you repeat it in a dense gas at high temperature, you won't see the interference patterns form.

However, we don't understand at a high level why it is that quantum experiments only have "a single result". Basically the schrodinger equation applied for the double slit experiment, even taking decoherence into account, still predicts that the particle-wave will move through both slits to some extent. And yet, with or without decoherence, we only ever see a single photon or tennis ball hit the screen, with some probability that can be deduced from the square of the amplitude of the Schrodinger function. And even worse, this single measurement outcome only happens if the quantum particle has hit a classical screen. If instead at the same distance we only have other quantum particles, then it can actually hit several of them, and change all of their positions and momenta. This despite the fact that, of course, even the classical wall itself is made of particles which should obey the same laws of quantum mechanics.

> all quantum objects we know of are small

There are quantum effects that manifest at macroscopic scale. For instance, superconductivity and superfluidity occur on bulk volumes but are due to quantum effects.

One might even say emergent behaviour.

> If anything, it appears that neural networks are far further along than any quantum mechanism for approximating whatever "consciousness" actually is? And neural networks are absolutely not quantum mechanical.

Neural networks are also way less power efficient. Quantum computing allows us to calculate things that would take a lot of power or time to calculate (not calculate things that are impossible). If one could create consciousness with classical physics it wouldn't prove anything about how the human brain works. In fact if it was wildly less power efficient it might even suggest non-classical physics in the brain.

Wouldn't the scaling of time be a more reliable tell of quantum computing? If humans can marginally solve problems with a slower increase over time than conventional algorithms that would hint at a quantum algorithm being in use. It certainly wouldn't be faster compared to clocked silicon, and there would probably be a lot of noise and overhead involved.

Thermodynamic analysis would actually be a really useful way to attack this problem, but unfortunately (though fortunately for stability) the brain and our computers are no where near the Landauer limit of computation.

I actually wonder if the Landauer limit applies to quantum computing.

> The idea that Penrose posited is intrinsically HARD to measure. Moreover, consciousness itself is not well defined to begin with.

Indeed. Penrose's hypothesis is very much in the untestable realm. Until there is some way to test it, it deserves little consideration. If there is something like an ad hominem praise, taking this seriously might be a good example.

The two great miracles of quantum entanglement are:

(1) Solid matter. Solid matter is impossible in classical physics but possible in the real world because of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics

(2) The laser. Unlike 1/2-spin particles that can't be in the same quantum state, spin 1 particles want to dogpile in the same state

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_statisti...

---

I could care less about EPR (real but not so profound) and speculations about quantum mechanics in consciousness. My first instinct is to think that quantum entanglement around black holes is the same kind of woo but I could be wrong about that.

While the behaviors of fermions and of bosons are indeed responsible for what you consider miracles, I fail to see which is the special relationship between the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics and "quantum entanglement" that you have in mind.

Like so. Using the Schrodinger formulation it is invalid to talk about two particles having separate wavefunctions like ψ(x₁) and ψ(x₂) but rather you have a single wavefunction written ψ(x₁,x₂) and in the case of Fermions you have ψ(x₁,x₂) = -ψ(x₂,x₁) and for Bosons you have ψ(x₁,x₂) = ψ(x₂,x₁).

People get confused about EPR because they think the world is ψ(x₁) and ψ(x₂) when it is really ψ(x₁,x₂).

Having a single wavefunction just corresponds to the normal rule for the probabilities of events that are not independent.

I still do not see any connection with "quantum entanglement".

Quantum entanglement is a very special case of the single wavefunction, not frequently encountered at large scales.

In the general case that is valid for almost everything around us that single wavefunction differs only slightly from the product of many simpler wavefunctions that correspond to parts of the environment between which the interactions are non-existent or minimal.

It would be just a probability of the wavefunction were real valued. Because it is complex valued it's a lot more than a probability, e.g., entanglement is possible.

> Wiest and his research team found that when they gave rats a drug that binds to microtubules, it took the rats significantly longer to fall unconscious under an anesthetic gas.

This seems to be confounding wakefulness and consciousness.

While we do use the term unconscious to refer to the state induced by general anesthesia, and conscious to its opposite, to me that is different from and much less interesting than the experience of consciousness.

How about starting with a decent objective definition?

So far, there doesn't seem to be any good definitions that include humans, don't include ChatGPT, and offer clear boundaries on which animals, insects, and bacteria experience "consciousness".

Well, that's because consciousness is an overloaded general term, we just need to use more specifics words.

For example:

> there doesn't seem to be any good definitions that include humans,

Self-awareness with a theory of mind. The opening paragraph on the wiki page for self-awareness is pretty much perfect.

> don't include ChatGPT,

LLMs are not aware in any sense, just intelligent in the same way a slime mold or plant can be.

> and offer clear boundaries on which animals, insects, and bacteria experience "consciousness".

Bacteria are likely just cellular automata, but animals (which includes insects btw) are all sentient due to having the ability to sense, due to having at a minimum body self-awareness.

From Wikipedia's 1st paragraph: "While consciousness is being aware of one's body and environment, self-awareness is the recognition of that consciousness."

From that, I think it's clear that defining self-awareness relies on the definition of consciousness as opposed to the other way around. I don't think it moves us any closer to a definition of consciousness.

I would completely agree that current LLMs are not conscious, but it seems problematic to defining consciousness that (unless trained not to, as public facing ones have been) they will tell you all about how they are.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/3/15/24101088/anthro...

> From that, I think it's clear that defining self-awareness relies on the definition of consciousness as opposed to the other way around. I don't think it moves us any closer to a definition of consciousness.

The problem is consciousness being an overloaded term. In this case it means base awareness, i.e. sentience, as opposed to higher level consciousness, such as what humans have.

"Self-awareness with a theory of mind" doesn't account for qualia, which IMO are the most important part of consciousness discourse. What people mean when they say "consciousness" has more to do with a certain ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness that I think is closely tied with qualia. If you limit your definition to "self-awareness with a theory of mind," I think you're going to mostly talk past people who are trying to engage with the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness.

> "Self-awareness with a theory of mind" doesn't account for qualia,

Sure it does. "Self-awareness with a theory of mind" has sentience, i.e. the ability to process external stimuli via senses, as a base prerequisite.

> which IMO are the most important part of consciousness discourse.

I've never understood why some people think so. I think it's the least interesting. It's basic biological machinery.

The only difference between how you, a worm, and in the not too distant future a successor to the robot that implements the 300 neuron connectome of that same worm experience qualia, is that you have self-awareness. You have the ability to reflect on your experiences. That's what's special and interesting IMO.

> a certain ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness that I think is closely tied with qualia.

I don't think it's tied to qualia at all. I think it's basically irrelevant aside from sentience being a necessary prerequisite.

The here-ness and me-ness you refer to is a function of self-awareness, not qualia. "I think, therefore I am".

> I think you're going to mostly talk past people who are trying to engage with the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness.

One of the problems in discussing this stuff is agreeing on terms so everyone can be sure to understand everyone else's point, but personally I don't think the so called "hard problem" of consciousness is the hard problem at all.

> the ability to process external stimuli via senses

A camera does this.

> You have the ability to reflect on your experiences.

So does a camera pointed at a mirror. It captures sensory data about its own activity and then processes that data. Big whoop.

Simply processing data related to your own experiences is completely mundane. Any program which ingests its own logs is, by your logic, conscious.

> [Qualia are] basic biological machinery.

You may have misunderstood qualia. When you see a red object, the sensory data reflecting the colour of the object is not a quale. The platonic thing, the redness that you feel on the level of conscious awareness, is a quale.

The "inverted qualia" thought experiment can help make this distinction clear: Imagine a person who sees every red object as green and every green object as red. Their behaviour is still the exact same as it would otherwise be—to them, green means stop and red means go. They respond identically to the same wavelength, yet something is different. That something, as the thought experiment goes, is their qualia.

Strictly speaking, I don't think qualia exist, but it certainly feels as if they do. That extra layer of perceived experience—the feeling that I exist in a world of vivid reds and greens and warmths and chills and touch and emotion and all these feelings that feel discrete, feel like they're happening to me—that's what people mean when they talk about consciousness. I think that's all downstream from the illusion of qualia.

> The here-ness and me-ness you refer to is a function of self-awareness, not qualia. "I think, therefore I am".

The camera or the log-ingesting program don't have any emotional sense of vivid lived experience, though. In fact, though they process sensory data, they can hardly be said to feel at all. I'd argue that qualia are what distinguishes mere sensing from feeling, at least on an intuitive level. Consciousness is a deeply intuitive notion, after all.

> personally I don't think the so called "hard problem" of consciousness is the hard problem at all

If it isn't hard, then why do so many people struggle with it? I don't think "hard-problem"-style consciousness is really an extant phenomenon, but we certainly feel as if it is on a deep intuitive level. That's significant.

The non-existence of "real" consciousness raises the question of why we believe we are conscious so strongly to begin with. I think if you slip away from the concept of qualia, you lose the ability to understand why we care so much about consciousness in the first place.

> A camera does this.

No, it doesn't.

> So does a camera pointed at a mirror.

No, there is no 'reflecting' going on here.

> You may have misunderstood qualia.

Not at all. Been debating this stuff with vegans for years now.

> The platonic thing, the redness that you feel on the level of conscious awareness, is a quale.

You're assuming there is a 'redness' to feel at all. What yo describe is only possible with self-awareness. Otherwise, it's just sensory data.

> feel like they're happening to me—that's what people mean when they talk about consciousness. I think that's all downstream from the illusion of qualia.

I think it's the opposite. Qualia as you describe it is only possible as a result of self-awareness, not as a building block for it.

> The camera or the log-ingesting program don't have any emotional sense of vivid lived experience, though.

That and other reasons is why it's a poor analogy. The camera is not sensing, and is not reflecting on anything. Processing data is not reflecting.

> If it isn't hard, then why do so many people struggle with it?

It's a particular theory/view of conciseness that not everyone adapts. It's like asking why people struggle with any other philosophical idea.

> The non-existence of "real" consciousness raises the question of why we believe we are conscious so strongly to begin with. I think if you slip away from the concept of qualia, you lose the ability to understand why we care so much about consciousness in the first place.

I maintain qualia isn't at all important here. The hierarchy goes sensory data i.e. sentience, then self-awareness, then qualia. Basic sentience is a solved problem, and the more insight to qualia that you want will become clear once we have more insight into self-awareness.

> The camera is not sensing, and is not reflecting on anything.

What is sensing, if not ingesting data from sensors? What is reflecting upon something, if not processing data related to that thing? What is self-awareness, if not processing data related to yourself?

The camera which processes its own image is not truly conscious, even if there's an image recognition algorithm onboard which identifies its reflection as an image of itself, even if the image goes through extensive processing. But if the camera feels something about seeing itself, then it's certainly conscious. You say "the camera is not sensing,"—I would argue that it's trivially sensing, but I suspect that what you mean by "sensing" is similar to what I've been calling "feeling."

I argued that qualia are the distinction between inanimate sensing (the thing a camera does) and sentient feeling, but you rejected that. How do you construct this relationship, then, between inanimate data processing and your sentient sensing? You said sentience is upstream of self-awareness ("The hierarchy goes sensory data i.e. sentience, then self-awareness"), so self-awareness can't play a role.

> What you describe is only possible with self-awareness.

It's not myself I'm aware of in that situation, though. It's the "redness." Why is awareness of "red" necessarily mediated by awareness of the self?

> It's like asking why people struggle with any other philosophical idea.

Yeah, it is. The philosophies we intuitively gravitate towards tell us a lot about ourselves. "Hard-problem"-ism in particular is deeply compelling to (I think) most people, even though there is no objective evidence in support of it. That's really interesting.

> Not at all. Been debating this stuff with vegans for years now.

I'm curious why this would come up in a discussion on veganism.

> What is sensing, if not ingesting data from sensors?

Ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness.

> What is reflecting upon something, if not processing data related to that thing?

You really don't think reflection via higher level cognition is equivalent to processing data at the lowest level, do you? That's like saying a digital representation of the mona lisa is no different from the output of /dev/urandom because "it's all just bits". Nuance and context matter.

In this case, reflecting again requires a level of awareness, not just base processing. A camera is closer to a rube goldberg machine than even a gnat.

> The camera which processes its own image is not truly conscious, even if there's an image recognition algorithm onboard which identifies its reflection as an image of itself, even if the image goes through extensive processing.

The camera isn't conscious at all, but semantics aside I think we agree on this point.

> But if the camera feels something about seeing itself, then it's certainly conscious.

This would be self-awareness though.

> You say "the camera is not sensing,"—I would argue that it's trivially sensing, but I suspect that what you mean by "sensing" is similar to what I've been calling "feeling."

Perhaps. What I'm calling sensing is what happens when an organism senses something via one of it's senses - so I think 'sensing' is a perfectly apt term here.

'Feeling' is fine as well, but I would say it is less accurate. I would not say a worm sensing food is 'feeling' there is food out there - I would limit feeling to emotional or physical sensation as opposed to any kind of stimuli.

> Why is awareness of "red" necessarily mediated by awareness of the self?

If you can't reflect to any extent on the 'red', then all you are doing is sensing data like the camera as you suggest. The self-awareness is what separates a conscious being from a non-conscious organism or device.

> I'm curious why this would come up in a discussion on veganism.

The level of consciousness of a being has a direct relationship of to ethical considerations of how that being should be treated which comes up in some vegan arguments.

> [Sensing is] ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness.

What does "awareness" mean to you? How can we tell whether one thing is aware of another?

I would consider "x is aware of y" to only mean (fundamentally) that x is responsive to the state of y, but your notion of awareness clearly goes beyond that.

> What I'm calling sensing is what happens when an organism senses something via one of it's senses.

Well, no, because you've got this idea of "awareness" in there too. A camera can sense things with its sensors, but you don't consider that "true sensing" because there's no awareness going on.

> You really don't think reflection via higher level cognition is equivalent to processing data at the lowest level, do you?

I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be, beyond one being more complicated than the other. If a machine takes input from a sensor and runs an analytical algorithm on it, how complex does that algorithm need to be before it's considered an act of reflection? Does "awareness" involve a specific process that the algorithm may or may not perform, or is it an emergent property of any sufficiently complex algorithm?

> I would consider "x is aware of y" to only mean (fundamentally) that x is responsive to the state of y, but your notion of awareness clearly goes beyond that.

Well, surely you can agree what you've described isn't awareness in any sense?

A plant creeping toward sunlight isn't aware of the sunlight.

> Well, no, because you've got this idea of "awareness" in there too.

Yes, that's a necessary requirement for sentience.

You want to try and equate organisms processing stimuli to a camera, but you can only do so when you omit the key thing that differentiates them.

What's the point of that?

> A camera can sense things with its sensors, but you don't consider that "true sensing" because there's no awareness going on.

It's not sensing anything more than a rube Goldberg machine makes decisions.

If you wanted to make a comparison to technology, a roomba would work much better.

> I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be, beyond one being more complicated than the other.

Self-awareness.

> If a machine takes input from a sensor and runs an analytical algorithm on it, how complex does that algorithm need to be before it's considered an act of reflection?

Well, we're not even close to programming anything resembling human consciousness, so that's pretty much impossible to answer at the moment. It's basically fantasy.

> Does "awareness" involve a specific process that the algorithm may or may not perform, or is it an emergent property of any sufficiently complex algorithm?

I'm going to go ahead and guess your the type of person that insists the universe is entirely deterministic, yes?

You realize no one can answer these questions right now, right? Consciousness is still very poorly understood. Even if it is just the result of hardware and algorithms, it's hardware and algorithms we are a long way from understanding or re-implementing.

So frankly, trying to think of it in the terms that you are here, isn't helpful to any sort of argument or discussion trying to understand it better.

> A plant creeping toward sunlight isn't aware of the sunlight.

Why not? Because the plant isn't conscious? Awareness can't be defined in terms of consciousness if consciousness itself is defined in terms of awareness—that's circular.

How do you define awareness?

>> I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be

> Self-awareness.

Yeah but what is that? That's my big stumbling block here—what is "awareness"? What distinguishes things that are aware from things that are not?

> Why not? Because the plant isn't conscious? Awareness can't be defined in terms of consciousness if consciousness itself is defined in terms of awareness—that's circular.

The problem is we are using the same word to mean different things - all these words are terribly overloaded.

> Awareness, in philosophy and psychology, is a perception or knowledge of something.[1] The concept is often synonymous to consciousness.[2] However, one can be aware of something without being explicitly conscious of it, such as in the case of blindsight.

This is what the wiki says:

Awareness, in philosophy and psychology, is a perception or knowledge of something. The concept is often synonymous to consciousness. However, one can be aware of something without being explicitly conscious of it, such as in the case of blindsight.

For sentience:

Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes.

So the way I see it, you have 'bodily self-awareness'/sentience, which is basically the minimal amount of some kind of mental OS running. processing stimuli, making decisions and reacting to events. These simple beings, like worms, are conscious in the sense they are aware/awake, but they do not have a higher level consciousness, or I would argue any consciousness at all.

On top of that you can have base consciousness, which allows for simple wants and needs, some basic decision making, but there is no inner monologue, no awareness of ones own thoughts. Consider something like a fish to be at this level.

On top of that you now have higher consciousness and self-awareness. A sense of ones selves as distinct from heir environment. A recognition of the fact that you had a thought and can now have thoughts about that thought. This is largely what separates humans from other animals, with only a few animals being close to humans in this regard (crows, elephants, chimps, dolphins, etc).

So the plant, as far as we know, has no kind of 'mental OS' running, so it has no type of awareness. It's just base chemical reactions without that, likely because they never evolved the need for it.

The camera as well doesn't have any equivalent. It's a set of actions that happen when a button is pressed. A roomba could be said to have a level of awareness though.

> Yeah but what is that? That's my big stumbling block here—what is "awareness"? What distinguishes things that are aware from things that are not?

Hopefully I've clarified this above.

It's remarkable how far consciousness discourse can progress without a substantive definition.

The closest we can really get to an objective definition is to point at a certain set of feelings relating to the perceived "realness" of our sensations. "Consciousness is what makes red objects be red to me, rather than my eyes simply informing my brain that they emit a certain wavelength of light.

But by putting it so plainly, we raise a much more urgent question: Is consciousness even real, or is it just a feeling? And I've never heard a satisfactory argument that it is real. So I can't help but roll my eyes when I see an article arguing that "maybe quantum effects in neuronal microtubules do it." Do what? Give you a feeling? You don't need quantum anything for that.

> Is consciousness even real, or is it just a feeling? And I've never heard a satisfactory argument that it is real.

That you wrote this comment is ample evidence it is real, unless you are using a very non-standard definition of consciousness.

By consciousness, I mean my ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness; the feeling that all the subjective experiences of my senses, redness and coldness and pleasure and longing are all "real things" happening to a "real self" that exists to experience the world in a way that a mere robot with the same behaviour might not.

When I ask, "is consciousness real," I'm asking whether these feelings and intuitions represent some actual metaphysical reality about the human mind, or whether they are simply an artifact of how we perceive the world that manifests itself in the beliefs we espouse about ourselves.

I certainly don't think that the existence of those feelings means anything about how our minds actually function. No belief or impression is, in and of itself, proof of anything when we might be naturally programmed to believe it.

> By consciousness, I mean my ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness; the feeling that all the subjective experiences of my senses, redness and coldness and pleasure and longing are all "real things" happening to a "real self" that exists to experience the world in a way that a mere robot with the same behaviour might not.

Sure. And you have that sense of here-ness and me-ness because you have self-awareness. You're able to reflect and ponder on your thoughts and experiences, as opposed to just somewhat blindly reacting to them. This is the difference between you and the robot you speak of.

You can do that because you have self-awareness and meta-cognition, the same things required for you to write these replies that you have been writing.

So I think my point stands, that the fact that you can write these messages and engage in these conversations should be more than sufficient proof that you are conscious and that consciousness is real.

Surprising that anyone still thinks the Penrose model could work. Microtubules do not exhibit harmonic motion like violin strings. The reason is that all motion at the length scale of cells or smaller is heavily overdamped.

The environment within a cell is nonintuitive. To find out more about this, read “Life at low Reynolds number” or “Mechanics of Motor Proteins and the Cytoskeleton” by Joe Howard.

For Penrose on microtubules see Shadows of the Mind - Quantum theory of the Mind.

original paper: https://www.eneuro.org/content/11/8/ENEURO.0291-24.2024

Popular write-up: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a62373322/quantum-t...

Understanding unconsciousness is quite different from understanding consciousness...

Not as long as you only define consciousness as the opposite of unconsciousness. /s

Interesting result, but it seems doubtful that we’ll ever understand consciousness without some huge new theoretical framework.

https://dynomight.net/consciousness/

Can anyone recommend a good book on the subject of microtubules and consciousness?

It's a highly speculative subject, but one source is Roger Penrose's book from the early 90's: "The Emperor's New Mind". Not sure if that's where the hypothesis originated about quantum mechanics and microtubules... I think there's another work by Bohm and the guy who invented holograms that predates Penrose's thinking (but doesn't mention microtubules).

Penrose speculated about the source, but was Stuart Hameroff that brought the idea it could be the tubules to Penrose's attention. Hameroff thought anesthesia nerfed the tubules properties, which then caused loss of consciousness.

Then there's the recent articles on how the tubes might be able to entangle signals, which was from experimental research on meta materials.

I realize all of this is speculative at this point, and nobody is trying to say YES this is how it works. It's simply exploring one possibility, in a positive way, that allows us to think further outside the box.

It’s a very interesting hypothesis. And I guess research is difficult given the size of these structures and lack of tools available to monitor them with a high level of granularity.

Makes me think of this discussion which is going on right now

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41694025

Since it's not a good idea, I'd dispute the idea that there are any properly good books about it. It's Roger Penrose's idea, though—he calls it "orchestrated objective reduction" [1]—and his main book about it is called Shadows of the Mind.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

This is all very new science. No one has written the kind of book you are talking about yet. There have been theories about the quantum nature of of consciousness for a while but the microtubule theory is pretty new.

Is it really that new? Hameroff and Penrose have been making wild claims about microtubules since at least 1996: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/037847...

As suggested in another comment: Shadows of the Mind" by Roger Penrose in his chapter Quantum theory and the brain*.

For anyone interested in the phenomenon of consciousness who finds this microtubules idea suspiciously impenetrable like I do, I suggest to look into the Reticular Activation System in the human brain, which acts as its on-off switch and could well be its seat too.

The actual research paper:

https://www.eneuro.org/content/11/8/ENEURO.0291-24.2024

The language of the research paper is much better than that of the parent article, but it still uses the word "quantum" spuriously, without defining what they mean by that.

As others posters have also noticed, the only experimental result is a confirmation of the older hypothesis that the microtubules must have some role in the normal operation of a neuron and when that role is impaired consciousness is lost.

The mechanism of how the microtubules work is determined by quantum physics as for anything else of molecular sizes and it is neither more quantum nor less quantum than how other cellular organelles work.

The research paper appears to use "quantum" with a special meaning, which however is not explained clearly. The protein molecules that compose a microtubule have various vibrational states, like any other molecules.

Normally, the vibrational state of a certain molecule is one of the possible vibrational states, chosen at random with a probability distribution that is a function of temperature.

What the authors appear to believe is that the vibrational states of the microtubules are not random, but many microtubules, including from different neurons, might be in the same vibrational state.

However any such theory needs to be described with a great amount of detail, in order to be falsifiable.

A microtubule is composed from many molecules of proteins, of several different kinds of proteins. The different protein molecules have different kinds of vibrational states. They do not say if in their theory all the protein molecules of a microtubule must be in the same state and which will be the correspondence between the vibrational states of different protein molecules, which cannot be the same.

Normally, any molecule remains in a given vibrational state only for an extremely short duration, because at normal temperatures it interacts with the neighboring molecules, exchanging energy with them and transitioning to a different vibrational state, chosen at random.

The paper does not give any explanation about what would prevent a microtubule to transition to another vibrational state, or if the transitions are acknowledged to happen, what would make any other microtubule to transition in the same way.

Even supposing that the vibrational states of distant microtubules would somehow be synchronized at a given time moment, the paper does not mention any mechanism by which such a synchronization could affect in any way the functions of the neurons.

So all the references to "quantum" in the paper are just some kind of mumbo-jumbo that does not provide any information about what they mean by it.

What remains is that the microtubules must indeed have a crucial role inside a neuron, which is not yet understood.

The paper itself mentions the most plausible role of the microtubules. The microtubules, which are molecular motors capable of contraction, are normally used for the transport inside a cell of various cell components. They might be involved in the transport towards the synapses of the neurotransmitters.

I sometimes wonder what’s more likely, that a towering intellect like Penrose is really advocating such weak conjectures or that he’s messing with us.

Fear of mortality is a really strong motivator even for towering intellects.

The whole microtubules hypothesis is based on flimsy reasoning. Correct me if I've gotten any of this terribly wrong:

The premise of Gödel's incompleteness theorems applying to his own brain hurt Penrose's feelings, so he decided there must be a way around that. Quantum woo was such a way, a least he believes, so he decided that must be what's going on. Later, microtubules were determined to be the most plausible quantum woo found in brains so far. The reason microtubules being a keystone of consciousness is considered in the first place is because people are fishing for quantum stuff to protect their egos from the implications of brains being having classical computation equivalence.

Your first sentence is wrong…

You sure showed me.

Warning.......conclusion wrong....microtubyles cannot do quantum anything as they do not hold a state long enough to do so due to the temp of human body....given that basic fact is questionable how such a clear conclusion mistake could be made in such a lab based research paper..

Now, no one has asked the question about the field effect outside the microtubule, hint its a brief magnetic field perpendicular to the microtubule....

What's odd about the current moment is that in the very same era in which it seems there is conclusive evidence (LLMs) that quantum explanations are not necessary to explain at the very least linguistic intelligence as advanced linguistic intelligence is possible in a purely classical computing domain, there is at the same time an insistence elsewhere that consciousness must be a quantum phenemonon. Frankly I am increasingly skeptical that this is the case. LLMs show that intelligence is at least mostly algorithmic, and the brain is far too warm and wet for quantum effects to dominate. Why should intelligence be purely classical but consciousness (another brain phenemenon) be quantum? It lacks parsimony.

> it seems there is conclusive evidence (LLMs) that quantum explanations are not necessary to explain at the very least linguistic intelligence as advanced linguistic intelligence is possible in a purely classical computing domain

Any reference explaining this? It isn't clear to me that LLMs have proven advanced linguistic intelligence

Have you used one?

In just 2-3 years we've gone from primitive LLMs to LLMs reaching Graduate PhD-level knowledge and intelligence in multiple domains. LLMs can complete almost any code I write with high accuracy given sufficient context. I can have a naturalistic dialog with an LLM that goes on for hours in multiple languages. Frankly (and humblingly, and frighteningly) they have already surpassed my own knowledge and intelligence in many, probably most, domains. Obviously they aren't perfect and make a lot of errors - but so do most humans.

If LLMs are capable of writing code and code is what they are created with, what's keeping LLMs right now from entering into a loop where they are themselves creating new AI with more advanced concepts than we've ever known?

You are delusional. Each and every LLM (by design) is uncapable of having arbitrary long conversation as it has finite context window, and hallucinate left and right. But that is all irrelevant, as Penroses point is not about that.

In fact what Penrose saying is that LLMs are Searles Chinese rooms, as they lack qualia, and he offers quantum processes as basis for the qualia, however vagues it sounds.

So the point is not intelligence, not consciosness; cats arguably has less intelligence than LLM, but they clearly have emotions and are conscious.

Just for the sake of discussion, how do you know they lack qualia?

I don't want to say they have an internal experience, but the whole point of the question of consciousness and qualia is that we still don't know what causes them and how they are represented in the world.

The two main hypotheses seem to be that either, they are emergent phenomena which occur on top of the brain's neural and hormonal architecture (along with memories, outside experiences, etc) or that they are some sort of separate entity that exists independent of biology and even known physics and the brain is merely a "receiver" of some sort. (In earlier times, people were calling this entity a soul. My personal impression is that theories wanting to explain consciousness through Unexplainable Quantum Stuff are mostly continuing this very old worldview and dress it up in modern scientific terminology)

If consciousness was "just" an emergent result of certain neural interactions and memories - with no physical "secret sauce" needed - then there is no known fundamental reason (yet) why that same kind of emergence couldn't take place inside an LLM.

First of all, just for sake of discussion, it is not normal to try prove negative statements. In any case it is hard to make definitive arguments about phenomena observable internally, such as qualia.

Now, we can make reasonable claims that

1. we are conscious systems,

2. we are very complex physical systems, far exceeding complexity of LLMs.

3. LLM only very superficially resemble real human itelligence, not even close, hallucinate left and right, get easily off the track.

3. Higher animals, primate and espercially very low IQ people, anything that have neural networks resembling all show obvious signs of consciousness.

Emergent properties by the way do not cut, because if you squint enough you'll see that emergent properties do not exist without an intelligent observer, without intepretation. Say, emergent property of bird flocks; well the whole idea of bird flock is figment of human imagination, physical world does not have birds, let alone flocks. So consciousness can be "emergent" in typical sense of the word, it can be the result of working neural network, but it will be forever closed to analysis, as it is by definition outside of externally observable world.

Anyone who thinks LLMs have not come a long way in approximating human linguistic capabilities (and associated thinking) are in fact, engaging in (delusional) wishful thinking regarding human exceptionalism.

With respect to consciousness, you are doing nothing more than asserting a special domain inside the brain that, unlike the rest of the mechanisms of the brain, has special "magic" that creates qualia where classical mechanisms cannot. You are saying that there is possibly a different explanation for intelligence as consciousness, when it would be much simpler to say the same mechanisms explain both. Furthermore, you have no explanation for why this quantum "magic", even if it was there, would solve the hard problem of consciousness - you are just saying that it does. Why should quanta lend themselves anymore to the possibility of subjective experience/qualia than classical systems? Finally, a brain operates at 98.6° and we can't even create verifiable quantum computing effects at near absolute zero, the only place where theory and experiment both agree is the place quantum effects start to dominate. The burden of proof is on you and Penrose as what you are both saying is wildly at odds with both physics, experimental and theoretical, and recent advancements in computing. Penrose is a very smart guy but I fear on these questions he's gone pretty rogue scientifically.

Very verbose, could you please tldr?

sorry you can’t keep up

It's the old fight between materialists and spiritualists. The majority is still undecided and maybe now is yet another pivotal moment in history when we must make a choice. Supporters of the mechanical consciousness idea will join the materialists, and those who favor the quantum interpretation will join the spiritualists.

I’m a molecular biologist and this reads like pseudo science to me. Be incredibly sceptical whenever you read quantum and consciousness in one abstract. It’s all Deepak Chopra style mysticism.

Thank God we have scientists rallying against Wolfram, Penrose, et al. It would be great if next-up, you guys actually had the guts to challenge your _actual_ peers, who are turning tricks of mainstream scientific literature at the highest levels of academia. Bread and butter. Western blot party for everyone!

Those scandals are an absolute disgrace indeed, but please remember it's a very small percentage of scientists involved (I hope!).

I have to say it makes me feel bad that as soon as I identify as a biologist, I get smacked in the face with western blot scandals. My god, the damage these frauds have done to our reputation. I'm so sorry for it.

Penrose is a scientist gone crackpot in the tradition of Josephson. His "I can do math because I am a thetan" shtick is based on a ridiculous misunderstanding of Godel since Godel's theorems don't apply to a piece of wetware which is by no means consistent or complete. (e.g. if he does math by being a thetan why can't he solve Collatz?)

Wolfram is something else. A New Kind of Science isn't really wrong yet it's not really right. It's sad to see him spend decades looking for more systems like Rule 30 and finding systems that are similar but not so simple, not so pretty, and he never gets an insight out of it that really applies to anything else. He's like a crackpot in that he works tirelessly on a research program that's unconnected to anything else anyone else is working on, however. Maybe that comes out of being rich and not having to apply for grants. On the other hand, there are major fields of physics, such as string theory, which very well be based on a delusion, yet in that case it is a shared delusion.

In the pandemic he went on a vainglorious and grandiose quest for a "theory of everything" yet he has the good judgement to base it on causal networks which I think is one of the best grounded approaches to quantum gravity (e.g. given two points in space-time aren't they spacelike or timelike or lightlike and in the last two cases isn't one of them in the future or past of the other?)

This take is less than generous to Penrose. In a recent debate (which was less than fruitful as debates go), Penrose said this regarding this paper:

> Moderator: ... saying that these effects are now experimentally established, so I thought Sir Roger must now be triumphant, the experiments are now in favour, so I'm very curious where you now are with your theory.

> Penrose: Well, as far as experiments are concerned, I think one has to be a bit cautious about it all, so I'm not an expert on experiments, but I certainly have a colleague who, although the recent experiments to refer to seem to be supportive of the point of view, I'm putting forward, he was a bit skeptical, thinking it might be a bit wishful thinking experiments, so I just have a neutral position on this, I can't really judge the experiments.

> And exactly how one might make experimental observations to see whether the argument would have to be that one has quantum effects in microtubules, these little tiny parts of cells, and this has been the argument for quite a long time, ever since I had a communication from Stuart Hammeroff.

Source: Quantum Consciousness Debate: Does the Wave Function Actually Exist? | Penrose, Faggin & Kastrup @ 5m55s (https://youtu.be/0nOtLj8UYCw?t=347)

If you find the time, could you clarify what you mean by the "thetan" comment? Isn't that the Scientology demon analogue? If you Kagi "penrose thetan" the only real result is this thread (the internet is amazing...) and neither "thetan" nor "scientolog" appear on his Wikipedia page.

EDIT: I think the comment is discussing this weird take on Godel, but I'm not sure on the "thetan" reference, still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument

You're downvoted but Penrose has really deteriorated indeed, he's way out of his field of expertise nowadays. It's not science, the people downvoting you are probably not scientists and need to think again about who they trust.

The original article makes huge leaps from quantum effects in Microtubuli to consciousness with no real science in between.

Here is a real scientist on this mumbo jumbo [0]. Please don't take any of that "medicine should interact with your body on a quantum vibration level, a rock can be medicine"-crap, which is the category that TFA we are discussing falls into.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1wqUCATYUA

"My brain tells me my brain is special, and my brain is an excellent measurement device of specialness! Now all we need is science to prove my brain was right about my brain! After all: Quantum mechanics is weird. Consciousness is weird. There must be a relation!"

I'm sure Wolfram is for real; it's just funny how supposed scientists would jump out of their trousers to criticise him, all the while happily ignoring fraud in their immediately field, their own faculties, etc. Talk spineless. Then the next big fraud is revealed, and they suddenly go back to the usual pikachu face routine.

Surprise!

Yeah, but talking about grand unification of any kind in 2024 seems to be besides the point.

Newton postulated a relationship between physics on Earth and the cosmos, specifically that a single theory of gravity explains objects falling here and the moon orbiting around the Earth, planets going around the Sun, etc.

Astronomical measurements show quite clearly that there either (1) there is a sector of hidden particles and fields responsible for most of the mass of the universe or (2) gravity and/or inertia (two sides of the same coin?) don't behave the same way at the galaxy scale as the solar system scale.

Either way Newton's connection has broken down, so the physics we know is not the physics of the real world. The microphysics of MOND are baffling; it's not hard to imagine some particles and fields that explain dark matter but impossible to prove that any of them are for real unless we get a breakthrough in experiment that can rule some of them out.

Thank you, it's always interesting to hear physicists talk about this stuff :-)

So it's a case of 'Take it from me, I'm an expert and it's nonsense' is it? Presumably no one needs to read any further on this topic. A relief to many no doubt.

Basically… yes.

I mean I have an internal model in the making since I started my biochemistry bachelor in 1999, I moved through a molecular biology master into a biophysics PhD (where I also disrupted microtubules to investigate molecular processes of GPCRs), then into a professional career as a bioinformatician in the genomics field.

And when I read this:

“Wiest and his research team found that when they gave rats a drug that binds to microtubules, it took the rats significantly longer to fall unconscious under an anesthetic gas. The research team's microtubule-binding drug interfered with the anesthetic action, thus supporting the idea that the anesthetic acts on microtubules to cause unconsciousness.”

It certainly sounds probable microtubule disruption would do that but there are so insanely many ways that this could be explained using classical, non-quantum hypotheses (that need testing!), and microtubules serve so many different functions in cells, that the quantum theory falls completely outside of the possibilities of my internal models. I have no need of such an outlandish hypothesis.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this paper is not it. Sure there is a small chance I’m going to be wrong but Bayes would agree with me it’s an exceedingly small chance given all priors.

Just the scale difference between microtubules and whatever gives our brain that sense of consciousness is so unimaginably vast and complex that simple statements such as in TFA are really hinting at (feigned for attention?) ignorance.

Trust me.

I like your take here, but I just want to say, that I'm not sure claiming that consciousness has a quantum basia is that extraordinary.

We deal with lots of things that are quantum in nature on a daily basis. Once you get down to a certain size, it's essentially a guarantee, and nature has taken advantage of quantum effects before, like photo synthesis.

My take is that there isn't good evidence yet. One result doesn't make it.

Once I can plug my brain into a super conscious-net like the matrix with technology engineered on top of the theory, THAT'S when we have it figured out.

Consciousness must be much more high level than microtubules and quantum effects. I think the split brain "experiments" (not really experiments [0, 1]) are much more useful than the experiments presented in tfa.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8

I like the perspective shift that consciousness is the only thing that we know, from direct experience is real, the existence of the physical world is something we only infer via conscious experience. what I like about this is that when trying to understand how consciousness arises from matter, we need to keep in mind we don’t really know what matter is, we only know some things about how it behaves, we have a mental model of matter, we only know that model. So ideas that seem woo woo nonsense, is a rock conscious?, does matter arise from consciousness not the other way around, are in-fact no less woo woo than the bold assumption that consciousness must arise from matter

pan psychism tells you a lot about consciousness that our self obsessed grandiosity numbs ourselves to seeing.

"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics", Richard Feynman.

Quantum indeterminism is negative free will: if free will is based on random events then it's not free will.

It is not "negative free will". Quantum Randomness allows us to move the force behind the outcomes into non-physical world; you can call it soul, if you inclined so.

Shocking

  "Since we don't know of another (i.e,. classical) way that anesthetic binding to microtubules would generally reduce brain activity and cause unconsciousness," Wiest says, "this finding supports the quantum model of consciousness."… "When it becomes accepted that the mind is a quantum phenomenon, we will have entered a new era in our understanding of what we are," he says.

Take this summary, for example:

  Cytoskeletal microtubules (MTs) have been considered as a candidate target of anesthetic action for over 50 years (Allison and Nunn, 1968; S. Hameroff, 1998). Other membrane receptor and ion channel proteins were ruled out as possible unitary targets by exhaustive studies culminating in Eger et al. (2008). However, MTs (composed of tubulin subunits) were not ruled out and remain a candidate for a unitary site of anesthetic action. 

  The essay continues with an examination of the potential contributions of specific ligand-gated channels, concluding that one or two such channels (e.g., glycine) might play a role, but that present evidence suggests that no one channel can explain more than a portion of anesthetic-induced immobility. Voltage-gated potassium channels seem unable to explain the production of immobility, but the voltage-gated sodium channels remain a plausible candidate. How inhaled anesthetics act to block this and other sites remains a mystery, but some new concepts are proposed.

The other big paper in the intro is this one from Hammerhoff n co:

  We found that these gases alter collective terahertz dipole oscillations in a manner that is correlated with their anesthetic potency. 

I would consider this study — and today’s, really - as confirming that we can’t say for sure that it’s not related to microtubules. Which, hey, that’s useful science! But the way they described it to this science journalist is just intellectually disrespectful, and incredibly misleading. IMO, as someone with a PhD in DoingMyOwnResearch ;)

They casually drop this then move on never to mention it again, which I feel like is a fantastical example of scientific bias via burying the lede:

  Isoflurane directly activates sleep-promoting neurons of the hypothalamic ventrolateral preoptic nucleus, and this contributes to causing unconsciousness. 

  It is conceivable that binding to MTs by volatile anesthetics could impair intracellular transport, which might disrupt synaptic transmission, which might reduce neural activity generally. 

They then, briefly, repeat my exact criticism from above. Somehow this didnt seem important enough for the journalist to quote, tho? Namely:

  Our results are potentially consistent with classical models of consciousness, but they represent a more stringent test of these MT-based models

  Overall the Orch OR theory, in which MTs mediate anesthetic action, has more explanatory power, biological connection, and experimental validation than the classical theories.

And then, wow, it ends. I really really want to support these folks as a fellow brain/consciousness crank, but they make it hard. If you’re on the fence on whether they’re fairly framing the results of this (n=8!!) study or not, just read the last sentence:

  These recent technical developments support the hope that “some who are standing here will not taste death before they see” conclusive experimental tests of the quantum consciousness hypothesis.

You're absolutely right to point out all the methological errors their chain of thought shows.

Honestly after many years, I've learned it's best to simply ignore the entire "brains run on quantum woo" crowd. It's unlikely they will be able to conjure up a convincing experiment that shows anything stupendous. You will just exhaust yourself arguing with folks who want to believe in quantum woo.

To me the biggest issue is the obsessive focus on a mechanism; instead, any experiments should be focused on demonstrating that some QM property is necessary (through association), then looking for mechanistic causality.

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