Context effects produced by question orders reveal,quantum nature of human judgments

Good one!

So it was alive at some point? Where did it go? It's one of those arguments that pretty much is pointless :D

Hi,

From the page:

function is. ...

equation and wavefunction collapse. In the oldest Copenhagen

wavefunction collapse, during which they behave entirely differently. The advent of quantum decoherence theory allowed alternative approaches (such as the Everett many-worlds interpretation and consistent

wavefunction collapse should be explained as a consequence of the

That makes it sound like the wave function is unknown as to what it really is.

From the same page:

differential equation called a wave equation. Therefore it is often said particles can exhibit behavior usually attributed to waves. In most modern interpretations this description is reversed ? the quantum state, i.e. wave, is the only genuine physical reality, and under the appropriate conditions it can show features of particle-like behavior."

So the old type of interpretation had it backwards, believing that particles could act like waves, and now the quantum wave state is considered the more fundamental entity rather than particles.

requoting:

the 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 there is no uncertainty in the probability distribution if the wave function is known exactly, but there is always uncertainty in where the particle will be measured.

The wave function is *estimated* if the Hamiltonian is known, since as you say there is uncertainty in the particles that have the PE and KE, therefore it is not possible to reconstruct an exact wave function going from a state of uncertainty.

The wave function itself "the only genuine physical reality" (excerpt from that same wikipedia page), has no uncertainty inherent to it. It is the particles only that have uncertainty, and anything built or reconstructed from them will have the same uncertainty.

The PE and KE and uncertainty don't come into play unless there are features of particle-like behaviour as they don't apply to the wave equation otherwise.

It boils down to a matter of perspective, particle based or wave based fundamental perspective.. (in my layman opinion!)

cheers, Jamie

wikipedia, in general, is written by laymen/laywoman with no qualifications in the subject matter.

QM is 5 or 6 basic postulates. Operators, Hilbert space, Eigen values, probability interpretation, SE as a postulate/axiom...

QM does not say what anything is. Its a procedure for calculating the results of measurements from knowing the Hamiltonian of the system. Period.

Anything more is all unsupported metaphysical waffle, e.g. two places at once nonsense.

...

The Copenhagen interpretation and physics says not a lot about particles before measurement, despite many alleged PhDs claiming otherwise.

The ensemble interpretation is the most sensible.

What it is, is a calculation machine. What it can't be is many. It certainly has nothing to do with the physical shape of a "particle".

Its all particles. Lots of particles can form high density's and low densities over a region, making it look wavey from a distance. Its an illusion. Its that simple.

From

"At least one physicist considers the "wave-duality" a misnomer, as L. Ballentine, Quantum Mechanics, A Modern Development, p. 4, explains:

When first discovered, particle diffraction was a source of great puzzlement. Are "particles" really "waves?" In the early experiments, the diffraction patterns were detected holistically by means of a photographic plate, which could not detect individual particles. As a result, the notion grew that particle and wave properties were mutually incompatible, or complementary, in the sense that different measurement apparatuses would be required to observe them. That idea, however, was only an unfortunate generalization from a technological limitation. Today it is possible to detect the arrival of individual electrons, and to see the diffraction pattern emerge as a statistical pattern made up of many small spots (Tonomura et al., 1989). Evidently, quantum particles are indeed particles, but whose behaviour is very different from classical physics would have us to expect."

This is a crucial fact that many fail to understand the significance of. Its hard to get rid of daft ideas held for many years.

No it isn't.

What is meant by real?

For example, people often attribute a "wave" to a particle and draw two little waves for each particle in a system of two particles. This idea is fundamentally incorrect. There is only one SE, and one psi "wave". Forming an equation by adding two separate "waves" gives the wrong equation. The de Broglie wavelenth of a molecule is given by the total mass and velocity of the combined particles. It is not some combination of the "waves" of the individual particles. This clearly has relevance to what the SE wave is able to mean.

The psi wave is just some of additional physics coding of the Hamiltonian of the system.

This makes no sense. The SE is:

H|psi> = E|psi>

The equation is meaningless without knowing the PE and KE of the system H=PE+KE. If H=0, so is |psi>, the wave function.

PE and KE and the SE applies even without actual particles. For example, a p type semiconductor is analysed by assuming a "hole" exists, i.e. the absence of particles.

It boils down to what can be measured and what makes sense. A physical wave means that an object is a disturbance in a medium. The Aether for light was rejected at the turn of the last century. A physical wave means that the wave can be measured. Where and what is this physical quantum wave? Many propose the wave is real, but no one can actually produce the slightest bit of evidence for this wave.

Kevin Aylward B.Sc.

comparable with magnetic tape, and it's storing the operating system, not local variables. Proteins do walk along the chromosome, but what they are mostly doing is reading the base-pair sequence, and converting it into chunks of RNA which move off into the cell and do stuff. Some of the proteins check the chromosome for breaks and bad base-pair combinations, and fix them (mostly).

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.

I don't think so. Methylation seems to irreversible - at least in an organi sms life-time, which makes it a little too inflexible to qualify as a "loca l variable".

environmental stresses and (shall we say) "life experiences" (e.g. exposure to certain foods or toxins, etc.). There's a feedback mecha nism there... it's self-modifying code of a sort.

It seems to be a one-shot modification - no feedback beyond the survival of the individual whose DNA got methylated.

stable. Half our olfactory genes are still more or less the same as those in the mouse - and still work. Our last common ancestor dates back a few tens of millions of years. The mouse uses it's olfactory genes, so all of their's work, 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).

species which have the same gene, modulation of that gene's activities and interactions (by other genes nearby, or by methylation or histone modificat ion) have a very great deal to do with the how the gene actually affects the organism.

Perhaps, but all that is at the RNA level, which is where the computation - such as it is - is going on.

then actively modified and modulated by epigenetic effects. I don't thin k I'd personally call DNA, by itself, a "computer", but to me it clearly p lays an active role as an element in a computing system.

The read-out process can be modified by methylation, but the base-pair orde ring is not affected.

on... beats me.

And it beats anybody who is trying to concoct any kind of evidence-based ar gument.

People who don't know what they are talking about are less constrained.

Environmental stresses can pop up suddenly. No organism can wait around for a threat, and then use random mutation and selection to adapt; critters with better algorithms will literally eat it alive. Organisms maintain vast collections of DNA sequences, available library routines, that they can select from in times of need. Some are borrowed from other species by various mechanisms, including viral transport, some were inherited millions of years ago, and may be of unknown function until experimentally activated.

Whether you want to call the mechanisms of a cell a "computer" is up to you. But it executes astonishing algorithms, in competition with other organisms with similarly astonishing algorithms, to survive. At this point, our science has a very limited understanding of how a cell actually works, so the natural computers are far more sophisticated (and faster) than anything we can make with silicon.

If a quantum computer is faster than a classical one, a cell must use it.

It could well operate by purely classical

Many, many surprises.

Stick some electrodes into an optic nerve and put the full-color, realtime, high-res, 3D image on to a screen.

Hi,

from that same wiki page:

in fact be derived from symmetry principles"

The equation is fundamental more than any description of particles on their own, and it can describe the quantization and uncertainty of particles. If you go the other way around starting with particles and try to explain the quantization and uncertainty of position and momentum there is no way to do this that I'm aware of. To me this shows a "one way street" with the starting point of the SE obviously being closer to some origin of description.

In other words if model A can describe model B but not in reverse, then it is not possible that model B is more descriptive than model A.

The QM Schrodinger equation says what matter is (model B!)

This is what Schrodinger intended as far as I know with the SE, it is inherently an ensemble interpretation of a universe wide SE.

This was my argument earlier that if theoretically this wave function was known, then there would be a deterministic path of the universe but still a uncertainty for describing particles position and momentum.

The SE "describes how the quantum state of some physical system changes with time" so whether you consider it all particles or a quantum equation, you still have to use the SE (a wave equation) to calculate their futures correctly, again that seems to imply model A (SE) is more fundamental than model B (particles).

I was just summarizing wikipedia for what it is worth.

I think you are referring to the wave function wikipedia quote "the only genuine physical reality" whoever wrote that must believe that they didn't find any more fundamental description of reality and decided to assume that one is correct/real.

Philosophically I think real is open to interpretation, therefore it sometimes is attached to the fundamental ideas to try to find a basis, but whether it is any more real is debatable!

If you think particles are the only real thing, described by the SE or whatever that is perfectly valid I think. Some people obviously disagree which may also be valid, implying reality is subjective too.

This sounds like the Ensemble interpretation you mentioned before somewhat, and also seems to shows that you can't go from model B (particles) to model A (SE) correctly and reconstruct the original wave equation. Therefore for your "particles are the only reality" view to be valid, you have to assume they are all entangled via a universal SE, otherwise as you say the individual particle wave equations produce a fundamentally incorrect result. So it is either universal entangled particles or else a universal wave equation maybe. In either case it is the same resultant answers just a different interpretation.

That isn't exactly the absense of particles, as the hole is defined by the matter around it. :)

Well the uncertainty is only in the probability of where matter will be detected, and there is no uncertainty in the SE starting from a model SE if you don't try to find where the matter will be detected. I think for the PE and KE, it is implicit that the SE has them applied to its overall structure? But once you try to find the matter position and momentum then the PE and KE are applied (with uncertainty) to the matter. For a model SE, the overall PE and KE should have no uncertainty until they are applied to matter.

Matter is the evidence for the wave according to the Schrodinger equation, that's my model A interpretation anyway. Both waves and particles are elusive in different ways! :)

cheers, Jamie

The brain already makes 2D projection maps of the visual field (from the eyes and from dreaming or internal visual imagery) in different areas of the brain!

Quite astounding, the explanation typically is that the neural wiring is more efficient rather than a random jumble or neurons that don't correlate the the visual field would be. It has the side effect though that there is a real physical 2D movie screen effect on the surface of the brain in different areas that has already been imaged in studies.

cheers, Jamie

or a threat, and then use random mutation and selection to adapt; critters with better algorithms will literally eat it alive.

It has been suggested that humans invented language and culture - not neces sarily in that order - to allow for faster and more flexible adaptation tha n inherited mechanisms can offer, when confronted with the alternations be tween ice ages and inter-glacials that have characterised the last few mill ion years.

utines, that they can select from in times of need. Some are borrowed from other species by various mechanisms, including viral transport, some were i nherited millions of years ago, and may be of unknown function until experi mentally activated.

ou. But it executes astonishing algorithms, in competition with other organ isms with similarly astonishing algorithms, to survive. At this point, our science ha s very limited understanding of how a cell actually works, so the natural co mputers are far more sophisticated (and faster) than anything we can make w ith silicon.

The cell as a whole can perhaps be equated with a computer. It's DNA can't be - it's just the Read-Only-Memory. Methylation can change what is read du ring one individual's life-time (and that life-time can start remarkably ea rly - egg-cells laid down in a female foetus during the Dutch hunger winter 1944-45 produced an under-weight infant who wasn't actually born until a c ouple of decades later) but it doesn't change the base-pair sequence.

operation... beats me.

Nonsense. By the same argument, the chromosome would include extra bits of information to allow error-detecting/error-correcting hardware to work. It doesn't, even though this would be a cheaper way of controlling the inter-g eneration error rate. The cell is stuck with using more reliable hardware t o get the desired error/mutation rate without error correction.

Even if the cell could do quantum computing, there's no guarantee that it d oes. Evolution is piece-wise continuous, which may be why no multi-celled a nimal has yet evolved the wheel.

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?

But nowhere near as many as there are ignorant speculations.

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.

e, high-res, 3D image on to a screen.

Neat trick. The retina already includes a layer of signal processing cells, and what gets sent to the brain is stuff that can be decoded by the brain into the sort of data we can process. The fovea is tiny, and we form our "s creen-sized" images by integrating the outputs from a long succession of sm all snap-shots - search on "saccades"

Some of the 3D content of the images we create is from binocular vision, bu t that only works out to about five feet away from the eyes - we get more o f it from head movement, and even more from relative sizes of familiar obje cts, though even that can be subverted by other clues.

Hi,

Single celled animals evolved the wheel for flagellum a long time ago:

from the page: "The flagellum rotates at 20,000 rpm, rivaling a Formula One race car engine, and it does this while consuming the equivalent of just one ten-quadrillionth of a watt. ... An influx of hydrogen and sodium ions provides the motive force for this biological motor. The structure is composed of 26 proteins forming a disk, interspersed with 11 ion channels. Each ion that passes into the cell turns the disk one notch, like a toothed gear. "That much we understand from observations of the rotation of flagella, but the structure of the core-component proteins is still unclear," ... It took roughly 20 years to develop the methods used to analyze the structure of the flagellum. But with technology now advancing rapidly, tasks that took six years in the 1990s can be completed in three days.

I'm not sure about multi-celled animals, but they probably have something that could be called a wheel or motor too.

cheers, Jamie

wheel.

Not that I've heard of - the fuss about the flagellum mechanism, when it wa s finally worked out, did mention that multi-cellular organisms didn't have anything equivalent. Quite how you'd feed a cell in a wheel rotating on an axle poses some interesting questions, and imagining the transition form p oses a few more.

Evolution is a continuous progress, and while one can imagine a pair of blo od-pressurised bearing on the outside edges of a wheel with a return channe l in the centre, intermediate forms take more ingenuity.

Hi,

The flagellum mechanism is apparently still not completely worked out.

You can imagine anything you want but it is unlikely you will be as creative as the natural mechanisms already discovered, and many of which are not understood how they work or even how they evolved.

cheers, Jamie

nimal has yet evolved the wheel.

is

t was finally worked out, did mention that multi-cellular organisms didn't have anything equivalent. Quite how you'd feed a cell in a wheel rotating o n an axle poses some interesting questions, and imagining the transition fo rm poses a few more.

blood-pressurised bearing on the outside edges of a wheel with a return ch annel in the centre, intermediate forms take more ingenuity.

tive as the natural mechanisms already discovered, and many of which are n ot understood how they work or even how they evolved.

True, but nobody has found a multicellular wheel yet, so putting any effort into imagining how it might have evolved, if it had, isn't all that useful .

Explaining to you why it might be difficult to evolve one is probably the s ame sort of waste of time, but I'm jet-lagged at the moment, so it isn't a serious waste of effort.

As for working out how something evolved, you really do have to work out ho w it works before you start thinking about it's evolution. An early evoluti onist got egg all over his face by trying to argue that the similarities of the mammalian eye and the octopus eye were evidence for evolution - in fac t the detailed differences indicated that they evolved quite independently, as a more expert biologist was able to demonstrate without difficulty.

In fact the common ancestor of the vertebrates and the molluscs did have a light-sensitive spot, and the human and octopus genomes show that some of t he genes involved in the development of the eye have been conserved from th at common ancestor, but not many.

If you haven't got a working example to look at, imaging how something migh t have evolved into something that doesn't exist can only be a waste of ing enuity.

I chose boiling water advisedly. The trimer, tetramer and pentamer cluster structures of water molecules in vapour phase are an area of active research. Computational modelling the dynamical properties is seriously non-trivial and still an area of active research.

I am content to let others be the judge of that.

Hi,

from that same wiki page:

To date, no it can't. Period.

You missed the bit about wikipedia, in general, is written by laymen/laywoman with no qualifications in the subject matter.

Anyone that derives the SE from first principles will get a Nobel prize.

Its valid for ALL interpretations. Its how the SE and the mathematics work. Period.

I don't have a personal believe of reality in the sense that I absolutely believe its all particles, I am stating what is not debatable for the correct, standard, formal meaning of the SE and its mathematics.

The axioms of QM states that the SE gives the probability of parameters such as position, momentum, energy and spin of an entity deemed to be a "particle". The SE may be named or described as a "wave", but it says no such thing about the entity that it is describing. In the standard formulation, the wave is not the particle.

It may well be that "particles" are indeed some sort of disturbance of an aether sea of zero point energy, connected to all other localised aether "particles". This, on its face, is actually not an unreasonable proposition. However, such an idea is not part of the standard formulation of QM.

Kevin Aylward B.Sc.

This begs the question about qualia, though. I don't think any scientist has a theory of qualia that is taken seriously. And yes, one philosophical stance about Q is that it should not be even discussed since there is no solid description of it. And that's not just philosophers - Buddha said that the self, the feeling of the self, is an illusion. Not real in some sense. Nevertheless, "The Feeling of What Is" (the title of a book by Da Masio) is a persistent feeling that much of humanity has.

Sometimes it's better to admit your ignorance that deny it. An interesting question is: Can you perceive your own awareness? Your own self being conscious? Ranting not acceptable as an answer. :)

Approaching it from the other side of the problem insects with a hive mind like ants, wasps and bees communicate between individuals by a combination of pheromones and glorified hand signals and yet the colony as a whole can perform some very sophisticated reasoning. The insects are far too large for quantum effects to be dominant (even though the sense of smell itself *is* mediated by quantum matching on receptors).

Qualia is more the domain of philosophers. Naming something that can be neither measured nor observed isn't noticeably helpful. A just so story.

Unless and until it can provide a testable hypothesis we can test using fMRI or PET brain scanning it is pointless to just give it a name.

And if he is right then the self organising CA model of the brain is likely to be pretty close to reality. If we can build one that is complex enough to be self aware then we will be able to test our understanding. NB. Human babies are born blind and not self aware.

The short answer is yes, but only a handful of people have done so with enough clarity to shed any light into what it means to be conscious.

Shamans and others that have played with alters states of perception tend to have instersting insights (but are also inclined to rant).

This is slick:

So if an algae performs simultaneous path (multiple universe) quantum computation to solve a problem, why wouldn't a human neuron do so too?

The consciousness/free-will dilemma is solved if we are quantum computers; we are part of the incomprehensible mystery of the quantum universe. Some people might say that God made physics the way it is, so that we could be conscious critters.

quantum" conventional statistics, but it is explained when applyingthe quan tum principle of

that trapped energy to the reaction centre in the cell as quickly as possib le, where the energy is converted into chemical energy for the organism.

on, like a drunk staggering home. But quantum coherence would allow the ene rgy to test every possible pathway simultaneously before travelling via the quickest route."

mputation to solve a problem, why wouldn't a human neuron do so too?

Perhaps because the quantum coherence involved in photosynthesis is all emb edded inside one protein molecule, which I was once told held several sever al transition metal atoms remarkably close together - close enough that the ir outer electron orbitals over-lapped to a significant extent.

The neurone seems to be a transition-metal-free area.

; we are part of the incomprehensible mystery of the quantum universe. Some people might say that God made physics the way it is, so that we could be conscious critters.

There are other solutions to the consciousness/free-will dilemma. Probably the simplest is to note that we have have to have a reliable way of being u npredictable to survive in the real world - always reacting the same way to the presence of a predator does make life much easier for the predator, an d decreases your chances of passing on your genes to the next generation.

You can generate a tolerably good approximation to random numbers without i nvoking quantum uncertainty.

The weather does it every day, and the solar system is chaotic - if looked at over a sufficiently long time span. Try to explain that on the basis of quantum uncertainty.