quantum consciousness (2023 Update)

I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)

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It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.

Exploring the design solution space requires massive parallel cross-correlation processing. Quantum computing could do that.

Reply to
John Larkin
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I've actually read Penrose's paper on this (in a chapter in one of his books) and was not persuaded, mainly because we were then just beginning to figure out how mammalian brains work, without resort to quantum weirdness.

Yes, extreme parallelism.

Turns out that Linear Algebra in hyperdimensional manifolds also works.

And Linear Algebra can be implemented using lots of neurons, each with tens of thousands or more synapses to one another. The synapses (which come in strengths) are the values in the matrix elements.

It is estimated that the human brain contains 86 billion neurons, and ten times that many glia cells.

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With 125 trillion synapses, or 1453 synapses per neuron. This sounds far too low.

But take all these estimates with much salt.

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But one can make some pretty heroic matrixes from this.

There is already an immense literature, which is rapidly growing.

The big practical implementation problem now is that we have not found a technology that allows us to implement the math well enough to do anything mammal-level, never mind with anything like the size, weight, and power of a few pounds of brain tissue.

I have not found a suitable survey article yet. The primary literature is very heavy going.

Joe Gwinn

Reply to
Joe Gwinn

Yeah, but lots of word salad might 'make sense' without being productive.

Content-addressable memory is hard in computing hardware, but that's just exactly how human memory operates; every input 'reminds me of...' a memory record. Analogy with LASER operation seems appropriate, but the application of quantum computing doesn't. Rather, post a situation to a chat group of old experienced intelligences, and see what pops out of the memory warehouses.

Reply to
whit3rd

And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago - some people were claiming they had magical properties too.

It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for no particular reason.

The interconnectivity of the network is what stores all the information. Google are pretty much on the right track but the energy requirements to simulate it with conventional computing elements are very high.

If there is a classical analogue for the human brains configuration it is more like an N dimensional hypersphere projected into 3-space but maintaining most of the connections made possible in a higher dimension.

We (mammals) are not the pinnacle of performance per neuron/watt in the animal world either. An octopus with its highly distributed processing power is way more intelligent per neuron than any mammalian brain.

Some insect predators like dragon flies may also be well ahead of us per neuron/watt since they have to respond exceptionally quickly to visual input from non-ideal compound eyes if they are to take other insects on the wing. You seriously underestimate what chemical computing can do.

Reply to
Martin Brown

By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.

Was the topic word salad?

Please pass the vinaigrette.

Reply to
jlarkin

As if John Larkin had that kind of talent. Refuting bad ideas - in this case a half-baked and unnecessary hypothesis - doesn't take much talent at all, but John Larkin has even got that much talent

"Quantum Consciousness" does come up a lot in pretentious word salad. In fact the link explicitly refers back to Roger Penrose, so it's recycled word-salad.

Suzana Herculano-Houzel expicity makes the point that primate (including human) brains can include as many neurones as they do because they are less connected that most mammalian brains. They won't be maintaining most of the connections possible in higher dimensions. Mammalian brains are rather more two dimensional than bird brains anyway.

John Larkin doesn't know much, so he finds it difficult to understand a perfectly straightforward expositions. He limits the damage to his vanity by writing it off as word salad.

Reply to
Anthony William Sloman

That *is* how science progresses. You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.

Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with a strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest free parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.

No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.

There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable "theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.

That is the superstitious medieval mindset of "just so explanations". Right up your street...

Reply to
Martin Brown

Of course science works this way but at times we are just tempted to muse about this and that. And when it comes to how our brains work I am pretty sure we are not far enough to do much better than musing. We may even well be lacking some fundamental knowledge in physics to get any closer to reasonable hypotheses about that. Now whether we call the results of our musing "quantum consciousness" or some other synonym of "magic" is irrelevant, we will be tempted to try to grasp it until eventually we do (or do not...). Trying to understand "magic" is what drives us to hypothesize etc., nothing wrong coming up with the wildest of these as long as they are not obviously wrong/laughable.

Reply to
Dimiter_Popoff

Yes kill it off ASAP lest it inspire even more dangerous ideas.

Of course there's merit in ideas. Without ideas, there is no progress.

Some people riff on ideas. Some people murder them in infancy.

We're brainstorming with three different organizations now. Big stuff. Fortunately, none are idea hostile.

Our "superstitious medieval mindset" products work and sell! We enjoy selling magyck.

Reply to
John Larkin

Disagree; you are baking inhibitions into invention. In a brainstorm session, laughable ideas are welcome as jokes. But those jokes, played with, often lead to good stuff. Great fun when sneering is not allowed.

We do point out, say, violations of conservation of energy. Not much else.

There are many paths through the solution space, to find the good stuff. Some pass through goofy neighborhoods.

Brainstorming, or any imaginative activity, is probably quantum computing, posing a question as an un-collapsed wave function that blankets the solution space in parallel, looking for a match. How else could wet-stuff logic gates explore so many possibilities so fast?

Memory must be similar quantum searching. A person stores millions of images and smells and sounds and can match one in milliseconds. I wonder how images are stored.

Reply to
John Larkin

I don't think there is much of a disagreement here, we just seem to put different meaning to "laughable". But yes, even the most laughable (whichever version of it) thought/suggestion can trigger a chain of thoughts leading to something interesting. It rarely happens but well, we don't come up with an idea for an experiment of the Michelson-Morley magnitude every year or every century, for that. Make that a millennium, still feels right :). There is plenty to do until enough has been put on the heap so the next big breakthrough can be made (tomorrow? next millennium? who knows). I personally don't like "brainstorming" by a group of people much but I know what amount of sheer garbage goes through my head while designing/programming something new.

I am not familiar with how quantum searching works, someone mentioned "content addressable memory", if it is that then yes, it might come into play. But we don't know. Me, I am not so sure we even

*know* where memory is located.... do we have some sort of backup, perhaps remote.... We just don't know. If we have "quantum memory" why not have zero delay comms... We are complex creatures and we don't have conscious access to everything inside us, we don't know why we exist, are our experiences worth backing up to anyone/anything (I know my designs do have parts which are worth it to me and parts I don't care about)... For the time being I tend to do what I can, mostly silicon based :). Which is not to say I don't try to break my head into questions like these above quite frequently - only to discover I know too little to be able to get to any results.
Reply to
Dimiter_Popoff

Indeed but unless it makes something by way of testable predictions it is just so much hot air. I did give this one some credit for possibly being testable although I also indicated the result I expected.

Any scientist knows that breakthroughs pretty much occur either by serendipity or new mathematics or a hunch that leads to a creative new way of looking at things that bypasses a previous impasse.

Sqrt(-1) is a classic which opened up all of signal processing and a lot more besides.

In some ways science and art are more closely linked that we might care to admit - both involve creative leaps that in the case of science are back filled as logical deduction from known methods to gain acceptance. Newton set the scene by using his method of fluxions (calculus) to solve problems and then back constructing weird geometrical proofs. (we should all give thanks that Leibnitz's notation mostly prevailed)

Though f'(x) and f"(x) live on.

Radical new ideas that don't fit with the orthodoxy do have a hard time.

Big Bang cosmology vs Hoyle's Steady State universe being one of the most bitterly fought scientific battles in the last century.

The guy I feel most sorry for was Belousov whose work on chemical clocks was completely ignored in his lifetime and is one of a handful of Turing complete computational chemistry reactions. The BZ reaction became a sensation when it finally reached the West in the late 60's.

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However, most unorthodox ideas are just batwing crazy.

But this one is pretty much laughable.

Consciousness is probably an emergent behaviour in any sufficiently complex network of computing elements. We haven't yet been able to build one big enough to get close to human capabilities but they are getting there. ISTR IBM's cat brain simulation appeared to have dreams.

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NB it is past 2019 and they are not on target any more...

Google might be though.

I would never have expected the world human Go champion to be defeated by a computer in my lifetime but it has already happened. Now Google has a deep learning engine that can bootstrap up from a set of rules to better than their original programmed Go machine in under a month.

It has also found several novel set piece winning positions that have never arisen (or rather been recorded) in millennia of human play.

Reply to
Martin Brown

The advantage non-organic intelligence has is that we can improve on it in a rather predictable way. You KNOW how to get more MIPS, more state, etc.

With organic intelligence, you have to hope the "right" two individuals copulate; their offspring survives; is recognized as a prodigy; and given opportunities to learn/apply its talents.

Cranking out more/faster silicon seems to be the winning strategy. Esp as you can then make *more* of "whatever you get" -- instead of hoping biology repeats itself (on demand!).

Reply to
Don Y

A valid refutation is better than an invalid premise. Danger, and inspiration, are not relevant concepts, but progress is.

Many ideas are progress, and many are regress. No human individual or group is "without ideas", so I'm not seeing any real relevance in that observation.

Reply to
whit3rd

Hah, Don, how sure are you about that :-) Last two days I spent writing a script which "only" had to collect the latest versions of things from various directories on my disk and thus put together a "latest" version of a boot drive disk image to ship to customers; it *did* cost me two days until I got it working and I had thought I'd manage it in minutes... Just having a laugh about it, obviously I see your point.

However the more complex a system we built becomes the less we are able to know everything it does... Even when it is a one man's child (like in my case), I just cannot remember it all (done over >25 years). Then wait until it begins to learn on its own... There was a story by Lem, "Golem 14", perhaps not his greatest literary achievement but he played with the idea of AI becoming so much smarter than us that it treated us like children - sometimes it would feel like explaining this or that and other times would simply want us go away. One of his sentences - written decades ago - said nobody knew when simple computers gained consciousness, it just became gradually... I read it perhaps 30 years ago - in Russian, there was no Bulgarian translation and looking for an English one back then was a waste of time (and I am not sure which one I'd have preferred, I had just managed a few Asimov books in English but he is perhaps the easiest to read and I was pretty good at reading in Russian).

Reply to
Dimiter_Popoff

That's science; this group is presumably about electronic design. We don't have to prove anything except that it ultimately works. And the cost of exploring unorthodox ideas is usually small... especially when you let them ferment overnight.

Engineering academia wants to be "scientific" so teaches the kids to be analytical and follow rules. Papers are graded according to their conformance with the theory and the course material, no credit for new ideas.

That Penrose guy is a notorious fool. Nobody would ever believe anything he says.

Reply to
John Larkin

No, that is NOT probable, It seems you think 'quantum computing' is merely some word-salad term that's fun to use. Searching in memory, one will always find errors/uninitialized storage/noise. There's only your common sense to act as error-detect-and-correct, so you come up with a plausible record out of storage, that in turn reminds you of related info...

I'd say not 'similar', but 'the same', and hardly 'quantum' in any but the broadest sense.

Reply to
whit3rd

Not at all. I think that extraordinary stuff is going on in our heads, and there will be corresponding extraordinary discoveries why.

People keep saying that quantum effects happen only at cryo temperatures, so biological systems can't use quantum effects. That's crazy.

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"When this happens electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom are jointly and transiently in a superposition of quantum states, a feature that can never be predicted with classical physics."

Quantum Biology has met with a lot of hostility. I don't understand why.

Reply to
John Larkin

There's merit in some ideas. Good ideas do contribute to progress. Bad idea don't. John does get enthusiastic about a lot of bad ideas.

Some people are quicker to realise that particular ideas happen to be rubbish, and wipe them off the table. This is merely evolution in action.

John Larkin has endorsed enough truly silly ideas here - about the nonexistence of climate change, amongst others to make perfectly clear that he isn't good at separating the wheat from the chaff, and he does get emotionally attached to his own chaff.

If they are brain-storming with you, they'd have to be actively gullible.

Except that it isn't magic. John Larkin doesn't seem to understand how his products work, and has an exaggerated idea of their performance and their novelty.

This may have a magical effect on sales, but it isn't making the world a better place.

Reply to
Anthony William Sloman

That''s not "thinking". It's merely fantasising.

Nobody has observed that kind of quantum indeterminacy in material objects at anything but cryo temperatures, and it does go away rapidly at slightly higher cryo temperatures. Ignoring that experimental fact would be crazy.

The guy I went through primary school with in Tasmania (and who is now a professor of chemistry in Melbourne) did a lot of work on this. The photosynthetic path seems to involve some ten transition metal atoms tied together by a remarkably complicated organic molecule and involves a complicated interaction between all of them.

Classical physics is useless at that scale, and simple chemical bonding theory (which does involve quantised states) isn't all that helpful either. Happily there is more sophisticated theory, which doesn't happen to involve prolonged periods of quantum indeterminacy.

You don't understand what quantum biology is talking about, and get jeered at for getting it wrong. The hostility is directed at your imperfect comprehension of what is known to be going on and you don't know enough to realise this.

Reply to
Anthony William Sloman

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