Not at all.
QM states that predictions of positions and momentum must satisfy :
sigma_x X sigma_p >= hbar/2
sigma being the standard deviations.
Uncertainty is for ever present.
Kevin Aylward B.Sc.
If it were up to the free market, there would be few battery-powered cars in production. Government mandates and subsidies are pushing carmakers to go electric.
Again, government is actively working on closing power plants and deliberately making electricity more expensive.
Barack Obama: "Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."
Not much free market on any side of this issue.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation
Exactly. DNA is a linear double spiral periodically shunted by base pairs of a small number of atoms each. It functions as a (probably quantum) computer where each element is of atomic scale. The base pairs are close enough to have quantum interactions. All sorts of other things slide up and down the chromosone, turning things on and off, inspecting, repairing, with those interactions at the atomic level.
A neuron is prety big, but its critical mechanisms operate at atomic scale.
Someday people will understand this stuff, and there are going to be some big surprises along the way.
Trinary logic?
DNA does stuff by having other machines travel along the helix and perform operations. Even if quantum effects operate over only a few base pairs, longer-span interactions, sort of like cross-correlations of noisy functions, moire' effects, can happen too. Imagine a 10000-long protein sliding along the chromosome and doing a moving sum-of-products FIR type computation... but quantum parallel and much more complex.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation
That makes them fools. They probably came to that conclusion in the Fortran punched-card era, before qbits were even conceived.
Cargo-cult science again.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation
Proteins and DNA, which manage those neurons, are not.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation
You are missing the point. The reason that there are four of them in RNA and in DNA is that quantum mechanics gives you an "if" statement that branches four ways in one step. That is the wavefunction for a match of
1 from 4 possibilities collapses to a match in one notional clock tick (ie on first encounter with the right match).The same is true a for kettle on the stove.
But I don't have to work out the detailed movement of every water molecule to understand it's operation at a macroscopic level.
Undoubtedly there always are in science. But what we have so far looks quite promising. Self organising systems are remarkable in their complexity (but not very good for winning Noble prizes - the guy who first discovered one was dead before his paper was fully recognised for the remarkable contribution to non equilibrium chemistry that it was).
It is even simple and safe(ish) enough to be demonstrated in a school lab and very tolerant of a wide range of mixtures of the ingredients.
Nested "if" statements is one way of looking at it. Asking the question how many independent tests are needed to separate N objects.
BinaryLogic QbitLogic/Total if 2 4/4 if if 4 12?/16 if if if 8 23?/64
I am quoting from memory here because I can't immediately find the early Deutsch paper that shows these basics of quantum computation online. Essentially it means that certain encodings are much more efficient in quantum computing than in conventional classical binary.
The codon rules are well known:
There are error correcting codes in it and repair mechanisms. I am sure some of the classified as "Junk" DNA will eventually prove to be relevant but equally some looks like it is old retrovirus spam DNA that just got incorporated and is dutifully replicated but never switched on.
You are still thinking in a sequential serial logic fashion rather than the highly parallel world of wet chemistry computation in the brain.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
Boiling is a random, unstructured activity, which is why you don't see structures crawl out of the kettle. A cell is a complex machine with very specific functions, which is why kettles don't post to newsgroups but we do.
Am not.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation
Occam's razor => before we jump to the deux ex machina of the ever-mystical quantum effects, we should try normal biochemistry. No specific neural property has been shown to violate ordinary mechanisms - you're only conjecturing about broader phenomena. Sure, there's _lots_ to learn, and we are bound to be surprised by some of what we discover (hurrah!). The insistence that quantum effects are necessary is an entertaining sort of advocacy, but does little to advance our understanding. It is misleading to describe your advocacy as certainty.
Hi,
But what if there is no particle to be uncertain about? ie. What position and momentum are you applying the uncertainty to before reducing the system to a statistical position and momentum.
cheers, Jamie
Hi,
You actually pretty much do have to track every molecule of air to compute the windspeed if you really want a fairly accurate model that works, and still it will only be accurate for a limited time. You can get the overall general windspeed but this will be an average of all the microturbulences etc that are where the majority of detail is.
If you want to accurately calculate the potential over the whole synapse membrane, and not assume it is all the same voltage, then the actual internal 3D chemical model of the synapse is probably going to be most accurate I wouldn't be surprised and still it is like the weather model, it may be enough to model the weather but it will diverge. In the neural network I guess the divergence may not matter for computation but that fact that it is a model implies that it will never be self aware.
thanks.
cheers, Jamie
>
Hi,
If you see the operations of the cells as state machines, computation is probably the best model I guess, but really it should be applied to all matter then even chemical reactions and electron orbitals since they can be seen as more basic state machines that the more complicated ones are built on. It can all be modeled as a state machine but it is still a model, and not true reality due to the uncertainty principle maybe. I think there is a more fundamental aspect than computation myself. No state machine is completely isolated so therefore unless the thing that keeps it from being isolated is also a state machine then that implies the state machine is not fundamental. I don't think you can ever model the "mystical quantum effect" you mention as a state machine, which I'm sure you are aware. Guess I'm splitting hairs here!
cheers, Jamie
a human brain will become possible (not necessarily in realtime) in under a decade. This will settle the question once and for all experimentally.
issue of a brain simulation a la Turing (or Beethoven) is another story.
r not they can compute like a brain does. Nor can we conclude that a suffic iently complex machine wouldn't have emergent consciousness. (I doubt it, j ust a gut opinion.)
oduce the exact same results every run.
brain isn't deterministic.
rministic.
le but it is far from clear that it affects macroscopically sized objects like neurons and synapses. They are big enough to behave like idealised classical components to a very good approximation.
quantum binary code since in QM a single compare matches one of four.
of a small number of atoms each. It functions as a (probably quantum) comp uter where each element is of atomic scale. The base pairs are close enough to have quantum interactions. All sorts of other things slide up and down the chromosome, turning things on and off, inspecting, repairing, with thos e interactions at the atomic level.
This is imaginative, but doesn't have much to do with what we know about wh at DNA does.
DNA doesn't compute anything. It's a linear storage mechanism, comparable w ith magnetic tape, and it's storing the operating system, not local variabl es. Proteins do walk along the chromosome, but what they are mostly doing i s reading the base-pair sequence, and converting it into chunks of RNA whic h move off into the cell and do stuff. Some of the proteins check the chrom osome for breaks and bad base-pair combinations, and fix them (mostly).
The nice thing about DNA is that the base-pair sequences are pretty stable. Half our olfactory genes are still more or less the same as those in the m ouse - and still work. Our last common ancestor dates back a few tens of mi llions of years. The mouse uses it's olfactory genes, so all of their's wor k, but only half of ours do, and evolution isn't culling out the people who 've got duff genes (as it does with mice with duff olfactory genes).
That makes DNA perfectly useless as a computing device.
le.
In John Larkin's less-than-expert opinion.
big surprises along the way.
Some are going to be a lot more surprised than others.
are 3 bases long for a library of ~20 amino acids because that is about the limit for a QM three step comparison (ISTR 23) and the two base limit (ISTR 12?) isn't quite enough to do anything interesting.
Never heard of this. It sounds like total nonsense.
Probably not.
m operations. Even if quantum effects operate over only a few base pairs, lon ger-span interactions, sort of like cross-correlations of noisy functions, moire' effects, can happen too.
Of course, if they did the mechanism wouldn't be reliable enough to work, l et alone reliable enough to preserve the sequences for millions of years - as they clearly do.
ing sum-of-products FIR type computation... but quantum parallel and much m ore complex.
Imagine anything you like - but don't imagine that it's any kind of realist ic idea. The chromosome is stable, so what would a FIR computation tell you about anything?
suitably energetic cosmic ray flips a bit in one of their memory locations although they tend not to recover so gracefully as a brain. More of a problem in space flight than for terrestrial computers.
Not exactly true. For a while there was enough potassium in the glass packa ging to produce terrestrial memory bit-flips. At one point we were planning on a adding 8-bits of error-detecting and correcting data to every one of our 64-bit words of memory to get the error rate down to something tolerabl e - the machine got cancelled before we got around to building anything, bu t not before we'd published a fairly detailed description.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
or symbols, it used to be a bit popular to see biological processes as form s of computation, but I think the computer science people shot it down.
Probably not.
ore qbits were even conceived.
Seems unlikely. We didn't know very much about molecular biology back in th e Fortran punched-card era, and claiming that biological process were a for m of computation back then would have been total hand-waving snake-oil pedd ling.
Francis Crick hypothesised the central dogma in 1956, but wasn't in a posit ion to advance it seriously until 1970.
Since John Larkin's grasp of science doesn't even reach cargo-cult levels t his is extremely amusing.
In fact is does look as if some of - possibly most of - the decoded RNA seq uences do do some kind of computational work in the cell, modifying gene ex pression as a function of environment. About 80% of the chromosome content does seem to get decoded, though only about 1% of it codes for proteins - s till good for about 100,000 different proteins from some 20,000 genes. Spec ulating on what might be going on can be fun, but it's probably a good deal less sensible than trying to work out what a single-chip processor is doin g by looking at the voltages on the top of the device.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
DNA doesn't manage the neurons. It stores the operating system, but the inf ormation has to be decoded into RNA before it can do anything, and nobody h as demonstrated any necessity to move beyond regular biochemistry to explai n what we know to be going on. What we don't know is remarkably extensive, but that's not really a good reason to imagine that it might involve quant um effects like tunnelling or coherence.
Proteins are more like structural elements - they put active side-chains in the right relative locations for thinks to happen - not so much the rotati ng cog-wheels in an adding machine as the frames and the shafts that keep t he cog-wheels engaged.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
I think one could make a reasonable case that methylation of specific bases in the DNA is quite analogous to local variables. It modifies the state of the DNA (without requiring changes to the DNA-pair coding itself) and can have a big effect on how the genes are actually utilized.
These methylation events are clearly induced, in at least some cases, by environmental stresses and (shall we say) "life experiences" (e.g. exposure to certain foods or toxins, etc.). There's a feedback mechanism there... it's self-modifying code of a sort.
However, it's becoming apparent that even among (widely-separated) species which have the same gene, modulation of that gene's activities and interactions (by other genes nearby, or by methylation or histone modification) have a very great deal to do with the how the gene actually affects the organism.
The DNA itself provides a structured information-storage system, which is then actively modified and modulated by epigenetic effects. I don't think I'd personally call DNA, by itself, a "computer", but to me it clearly plays an active role as an element in a computing system.
To what extent quantum effects do, or do not play a part in DNA's operation... beats me. It could well operate by purely classical mechanisms... but that's what was thought about photosynthesis until fairly recently, and it's now apparent that quantum effects can be in play there as a way of boosting photosynthesis's energy efficiency. So, there may still be surprises as far as DNA goes... maybe in the transcription or repair mechanisms that have evolved?
Ditto for quantum effects in the neurons, nervous system and brain. Maybe so, maybe no - I'm not aware of any that have been demonstrated convincingly, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if someone succeeds in doing so some day.
I have no idea what you mean.
Kevin Aylward B.Sc.
Hi,
From:
wave function of a particle. However, even if the wave function is known exactly, the result of a specific measurement on the wave function is uncertain."
So even if the wave function was known exactly (no uncertainty) then still the particle will have uncertainty in the measurement. This implies that the uncertainty is not inherent to the wave function itself but is due to the attempt to turn the wave function into a statistical position and momentum.
I know it isn't possible to know the wave function exactly, but that doesn't mean it isn't deterministic, the only thing that is known to be uncertain is measuring particles.
cheers, Jamie
I believe in free will and not determinism still, even if I am arguing against it!
You can't help yourself.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation
Free will is dead. Period.
Kevin Aylward B.Sc.
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