yes!

Back when Penrose made this proposal, nobody had the slightest idea how brains worked. We now know a far bit more, and while the whole story is not yet known, entanglement may be happening, but is simply unneeded.

Joe Gwinn

Consciousness needs a lot of explaining.

Perhaps you should attend this:

Two great mysteries are quantum mechanics and consciousness. Maybe they are the same thing.

It's hilarorious that one big argument against our brains being quantum mechanical is that QM only happens at liquid helium temperatures.

And pigs might fly.

Quantum mechanics happens at all temperatures. The argument actually is that entanglement does too, but it doesn't last long at temperatures higher than the boiling point of liquid helium.

It pays to understand what going on before you declare it to be "hilarious".

You can find as many great mysteries as you want here:

I think you'll find that quantum mechanics happens at any temperature.

Anything for which we do not have an adequate explanation needs to be quantum entangled these days. It's mostly nonsense.

Jeroen Belleman

Popular Mechanics is *such* a reputable source of cutting edge QM theory.

When they publish it in Nature or somewhere reputable I'll take note. They already seem to have grumbled to New Scientist about being dissed.

A hypothesis has to survive experimental testing to be at all credible. If they are right then you should be able to alter consciousness by flooding the interior of the brain with incoherent IR photons. Somehow I can't see that working at all.

Quantum entanglement may be all the rage now but it is likely to be just another variant of the "action at a distance" in Newtonian gravity that will disappear once we have a complete grand unified theory of physics.

So far it looks like consciousness is an emergent property of any sufficiently complex computational network. The big super computer networks are now getting close to the threshold where that might happen.

Human brains and octopus distributed leg processing are wired entirely differently but both show high intelligence and self awareness.

It's a news site. It links to a physics journal article.

Is Physics Review E contaminated by a link from PM?

It's just code.

Well, they do cite a reputable rag: "The study, published this month in the journal Physics Review E, suggests...".

We'd already know if this were true for sure - direct sunlight (a kilowatt per square meter) would knock us out, and critters whose brain worked some other way would have had us for lunch while we were out cold, well warm.

Isn't this circular?

Not just _any_ really complex network, but OK.

My favorite story is when it was discovered that an enterprising octopus was clambering out of its own tank, crawling across the floor to another tank, catching and eating some fish there, and then returning to its home tank. The mystery of the vanishing fish was eventually solved by a hidden camera.

It turned out to have been known far earlier, like Lee 1873:

.

Parrots. Bird brains are yet another model.

All three kinds of critter seem to be conscious, but their brains are built rather differently, so there is likely some common mathematical and/or algorithmic structure from which consciousness arises.

On the matter of defining consciousness, while no widely accepted definition has arisen, people seem to know it when they see it, and everybody comes to more or less the same ranking of critters. So there is a unifying principle, even if we don't know what it is.

Joe Gwinn

What are you going to say when a conversation you can have with a computer is indistinguishable from a human? That it's just code and therefore behaves like a conscious entity but isn't really??

In a word *YES*. I'm not sure what Physics Review E thought it was doing accepting an article making wild claims about consciousness on the basis of predicted entangled photon emission from myelin sheaths.

OTOH I was visiting my tame biochemist friend today and he is interested in it as he has always suspected that there was a lot more to myelin sheaths on nerves than they are usually given credit for. A QM mediated higher transmission efficiency of signals *might* just be plausible.

He thanks you for me bringing it to his attention.

The good thing about the scientific method it that it is ultimately self correcting since the experimentalists and nature will have the final say. An elegant or pleasing theory that makes incorrect predictions is toast once an experimental refutation has been found.

QM certainly plays a big role in making rhodopsin and chlorophyll work. The former being way more archaic and is still present in our eyes.

Not any more it isn't. Your lack of understanding is a handicap. -- Martin Brown

I can remember when this guy told us why we couldn't do it back then.

There must be over 10 billion smartphones and computers all networked now. Be very afraid.

If it's a state machine, a cpu running code, it can only pretend to be conscious.

But that's no reason to outright dismiss interesting conjectures. Most science started with wild, unpopular ideas, so small but important fraction of which turned out to work.

Those giant computer networks don't run code?

Your lack of imagination ditto.

Cool. I can set up a trashy lunatic web site and link to a scientific journal, or to wikipedia or to the BBC, and ruin them.

That's called "science."

My theory is that the electrical pulses we see in long nerves are just chemical refreshes, not the data carriers themselves.

OK, simplify science by immediately rejecting all speculation. That simplifies electronic design too. We don't need no stinkin' ideas.

But you are talking to me over a digital communication channel which requires a pattern of bits. How do you know I'm conscious and not just a state machine with n bits and an n bit memory?

John Larkin's imagination is given free reign by his restricted knowledge base. It's not constrained by much real world knowledge - not than he realises this - which lets him imagine that he is rather more creative than he appears to be be to other, better-informed, people.

It's called speculation.

"Science" is the business of relating speculation to experimental evidence that can support some speculations and reject others.

Philopsophers have been speculating for a few thousand years. Science developed a few hundred years ago to weed out the less useful speculations.

It might be a hypothesis. Dignifying it by calling it a "theory" is a considerable stretch. In this case it's a more a pretentious assertion.

Science necessarily rejects a lot of speculations. That is what it was set up to do. You may feel hurt because your speculation has been treated as half-baked, but asserting that this means that every speculation would be rejected is an unrealistic over-reaction.