Penrose’s vindication: In a broad philosophical sense. His intuition that quantum effects might play some role in cognition seems less far-fetched now than it did 30 years ago.
But vindication of Orch OR specifically (microtubule-based quantum gravity collapses driving consciousness) not yet.
The OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation:
Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells.
Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
In 1989, Penrose picked up Lucas' 1961 argument that no computer can possibly simulate intelligence. The argument rests on fundamental misunderstandings of logic, that are well-known among logicians. See, for example, https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1995-32-03/S0273-0979-1995... for an article explaining this, written some 30 years ago.
The fact that Penrose has maintained his misunderstandings for 30 years, demonstrates that, on this topic, he has been a crank for a long time. No matter his other accomplishments.
The fact that he repeated the same logic errors at book length doesn't change the fact that they are errors. And the question of whether they are logic errors is a question of mathematics, not philosophy. Dismissing the conclusions of logic on the basis of philosophy, is a mistake of the same type as dismissing the conclusions of science on the basis of theology. Logic cannot speak to the philosophy that Penrose pushes forth. But it can and does speak to the validity of the argument from logic that he puts forth in support.
Hilary Putnam did a good job of explaining the mistakes. I am not a logician, but my background in logic is good enough to verify the explanation. And every logician that I personally know has come to the same conclusion.
Like you, I find it absurd to claim that Penrose has been doubling down on a basic logic error. And yet we have the basic logic error, and Penrose has clearly been doubling down on it.
You don't even need to be an expert to understand that he can't be right. Penrose argues that the capacities of human reasoning is such that Gödel's theorem proves that a mathematician's brain cannot be replicated by any mechanical process. But the reasoning process that mathematicians use is fallible. The output most emphatically is not logically consistent. The appearance of consistency is only obtained after much reexamination of those errors which were discovered. Absolute certainty of lack of error is unachievable by any kind of human reasoning. The history of mathematics is filled with examples of errors that were not discovered for shockingly long periods.
So we do not have a proof of the consistency of human reasoning, or its products. Therefore Gödel doesn't apply. Human reasoning, including the outputs that Penrose cites, do not strictly follow first order logic. Therefore Gödel again doesn't apply. And Gödel is entirely silent on the potential prospects of a heuristic algorithm that can produce inconsistent results. Which is what our brains do.
The inapplicability of Gödel's theorem to our thinking process is an absolute barrier to Penrose's attempts to prove that our thinking process cannot be the result of a mechanical system. It may be that it is not. Personally I fail to see how a strictly mechanical process can create my experience of consciousness. But this is a question that Gödel's theorem cannot address.
The summary is that there is no requirement that human reasoning is infallible in his actual argument.
Again his proof may be faulty. But it is not because of a “basic logic error”. The disagreements people have with his actual argument are much much subtler than a basic logic error.
The mistake that you are making is to imagine that I must be making a mistake.
Let's take a few examples.
He claims that a robot which is able to engage in Gödelian reasoning, cannot possibly be computable. Logicians agree that this claim is false. Indeed https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10817-021-09599-8 shows a version of Gödel's theorem that has been fully checked via proof assistant. While we still lack AIs that are able to produce such proofs (other than by regurgitating such proofs in their input data), in principle a proof checker filtering the output of a brute force search through possible proof attempts will achieve any possible machine checked proofs. But proof checkers can proof check Gödelian reasoning. Thus we already know how to write a (rather impracticable) robot that does exactly what Penrose claims to be impossible.
Here's a whopper. Let's go to this passage from 4.2 of his rebuttal.
However, I had been disturbed by the possibility that there might be true mathematical propositions that were in principle inaccessible to human reason. Upon learning the true form of Gödel's theorem (in the way that Steen presented it), I was enormously gratified to hear that it asserted no such thing; for it established, instead, that the powers of human reason could not be limited to any accepted preassigned system of formalized rules. What Gödel showed was how to transcend any such system of rules, so long as those rules could themselves be trusted.
This is complete and utter bullshit. Gödel did not show that we could transcend any such system of rules. What Gödel demonstrated is what those rules can prove of themselves. Namely, "If this set of axioms proves itself consistent, then it is inconsistent." Which statement can be proven using nothing more than arithmetic. Our ability to prove this doesn't prove that our mathematical reasoning is somehow beyond what a mere formal system can prove. It is just a demonstration that we can follow a piece of arithmetic to its logical conclusion. Any other understanding of the result is simply a mistake.
He's also wrong about whether there are problems that, in principle, are beyond human reason. For example consider the BB(n) problem. Identifying which Turing machine gives us BB(643) is impossible from ZFC. (See https://github.com/CatsAreFluffy/metamath-turing-machines for more.) If you go to BB(1000), no set of axioms that mathematics has ever debated can suffice. Going beyond human comprehension doesn't take much more than that.
Of course those are weak estimates. In fact it is likely that BB(10) is going to be forever beyond us. And no, some magic quantum decoherence in the microtubules isn't going to fix that.
Let's move on. Section 4.5. He admits to the logical possibility that he is wrong, then asks whether unsoundness is plausible. How is it not plausible? The only form of intelligence that we have an existence proof for, us, thinks in notoriously unreliable ways. LLMs are our best attempt to replicate our verbal abilities by computers. They are likewise extremely unsound.
The burden of proof that soundness is possible here is on Penrose. And he needs to prove it soundly enough to overturn the generally accepted conclusion that the known laws of physics suffices, in principle, to explain the manner by which our brains operate. Because that is the conclusion that he is aiming to convince people of.
He doesn't even try. He waves his hands, declares absurdity, and moves on. That may be fine from the point of view of his philosophy. It is not fine from the point of view of a logician. It's a gap. And a mighty big one at that.
I could go on, but what's the point? If you refuse to believe what logicians say about logic, then no explanation of what logicians have to say will convince you. And if you do believe what logicians say about logic, then you should already know that Penrose is wrong.
yup and his book was reviewed as such at the time. mention of the rejection of his theory by professional philosophers however keeps getting edited out of the wikipedia page. See this exchange on the talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
>> "The book's thesis is considered erroneous by experts in the fields of philosophy, computer science, and robotics."
> Wooooah, there. That's a massive accusation to add, unsourced, and without any discussion. There needs to be a source for this statement, not to mention an opposing view. It seems unlikely the guy would win an award for a book no one thinks is right. I'm deleting it unless someone comes up with a pretty good source. Joker1189 (talk) 20:43, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
The Penrose–Lucas argument about the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem for computational theories of human intelligence was criticized by mathematicians,[16][17][18][19] computer scientists,[20] and philosophers,[21][22][23][24][25] and the consensus among experts[7] in these fields is that the argument fails,[26][27][28] with different authors attacking different aspects of the argument.[28][29]
so, rejected by consensus. someone should update the book page so this expert rejection is clearer.
Everyone is obvious hyperbole because I didn’t want to both copying and pasting the actual quote.
That is merely a compiled list of people who disagree with him without listing any of his supporters.
There are at least 5 philosophers who support his position if you follow those links and 5 who reject it.
Link 7 doesn’t support the statement “consensus among experts in these fields” because it only refers to a single field—philosophy.
Many of those sources are just links to lists that other people have compiled of arguments for and against Lucas’ argument. They aren’t even all critiques. And many of the ones that are, are already linked directly in the article.
There’s is nothing more to support the notion that there is widespread consensus against his argument.
I can't speak to the general opinion among philosophers about his argument. But my opinion about philosophy is such that their opinion would not sway mine in either way.
I can speak to the general opinion of his logical arguments among logicians. And it is not just widespread consensus against. It is a widespread consensus that the argument is filled with basic logic errors that render it absolutely wrong.
As Hilary Putnam points out, Penrose's arguments are even worse than Lucas'. In particularly Penrose argues that no program that we can know to be sound, can simulate all our human mathematical competence. But our brains do not use a sound thinking process. Therefore a sufficiently good simulation of our brains that it can do mathematics, would also not be sound. Gödel's theorem is entirely silent on the potential capabilities of such unsound systems.
Furthermore LLMs provide a convincing demonstration that unsound simulations of us can have surprising levels of competence. ChatGPT regularly demonstrates both its competence and unsoundness. Sometimes at the same time!
The potential for unsound systems to demonstrate competence far beyond what most expected, is demonstrated by LLMs. Admittedly the current error rate is unacceptably high. But it demonstrates that what Penrose claimed to be mathematically impossible, may plausibly become real within our lifetimes. (Though, given how old Penrose is, not his.)
But in section 4.5 of this "rebuttal", he admits to the flaw that I just pointed out, and dismisses it as logically possible but absurd. The fact that he grants that it is logically possible, demonstrates that his attempted logical demonstration is broken.
Also his opinion on absurdity has to be weighed against the unlikeliness of his conclusion that the known laws of physics will not suffice to explain the operation of the brain. Clearly that question is not as cut and dried as he believes.
That's the problem with Penrose's thinking though. He's absolutely convinced that consciousness cannot boil down to something computable. So he reaches for the quantum shelf, but not just the quantum shelf, the quantum processes we don't yet understand since otherwise it'd just be something computable, but with more steps.
I mean most AI researchers are utterly convinced that the human brain is a Turing machine. There’s not reason to presuppose that. And if everyone presupposes that and it isn’t true, we’ll be stuck spinning our wheels until someone questions it.
This isn't a viewpoint coming from AI, is been a view that's been around for quite some time. The standard model does an exquisite job of predicting the day to day physics we experience. To find search for new physics where we might find discrepancies, we have to build absolutely huge colliders, and even those don't really effect our "day to day" physics.
For consciousness to be based on some non computable function there would have to be some unknown physics occurring in the brain. Sure, that's hard to disprove, but it also strains credulity, hard.
Penrose picking "quantum" for being the element of physics that would have to change to allow this non computibility is just woo. Why not just say magic?
I agree with you that picking quantum was probably the fad of the time and it was an easy pick as quantum is everywhere. He cold have said "electrons". However the argument against unknown physics is not very sound IMHO.
There has been unknown physics at play inside brains since forever and it still is and always will be, by definition of science.
The point is that we don't even know how to define consciousness and humanity doesn't have a shared agreement about which living beings are conscious or are not. We're still like engineers building things millennia or centuries ago with only a shadow of a theory of why their creations worked. And yet we still walk on bridges from 2000 years ago and we had electric batteries and power plants before knowing how an electro magnetic wave moved.
It has always been related to AI. Shortly after Church and Turing formalized computability, people started squaring off into 2 camps. People who believed strong AI was possible and those who didn’t.
We know the standard model is incomplete. Penrose’s ideas come directly from his his explorations of the gaps he suspects exist.
It happens. It’s surely possible. But does it happen enough that anytime a Nobel laureate says something a little out there, this is the immediate explanation?
Especially if what he’s saying has lacks a major hallmark of crackpot theories. That is he is very open to his theory being wrong and he won’t even say that it’s probably correct. He just thinks it’s possible and would like to see more work done on it.
Yes in that when they something outside their field that’s ‘a little out there’ Nobel laureate’s aren’t as a group more useful than random noise. Similarly a crank can happen to say a true statement, but the issue is the process with which the statement is derived is flawed to the point of uselessness.
The derogatory aspect of calling someone a crank is obviously uncalled for, but as a shorthand it’s not unreasonable to use the term.
If a Nobel laureate says they have an interesting hypothesis that they’d like test and that idea isn’t obviously impossible, it’s probably best not to dismiss it as crank science.
Walter Alvarez is another Nobel laureate who proposed a theory that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Many people thought that was crank science.
And it’s important to note he had another out there idea that there were hidden chambers in the pyramids of Egypt. That one turned out to be wrong.
What distinguished his theories from crank science is that he was open to the idea that they were wrong and was interested in actually using the scientific method to investigate them.
> it’s probably best not to dismiss it as crank science
Why? There’s a lot of Nobel laureates over time who collectively made many such claims, so you can easily pick examples in both directions.
My point is more such ideas aren’t accurate enough for anything beyond preliminary testing by actual scientific investigation which sometimes does validate them but also commonly disproves them. There’s zero reason for the average person to consider their validity.
Your example is a perfect demonstration of why most people ignoring such things is a good idea, these things don’t simply disappear without investigation.
Who says you have to believe it or pay attention to it? What does an average person gain by paying attention to unproven theories in any discipline. If it interests you, pay attention, if it doesn’t, don’t.
I just said you shouldn’t dismiss it as crank science.
He has good relationships and is respected by experts in many fields. If he was dismissed as a crank he couldn’t have found 3 incredibly respected scientists to debate his theories in one of his books.
Plenty of people think his theories are wrong or unlikely. The only people “dismissing them as crank science” are people in that have unwavering faith in the idea that consciousness arises from computable processes.
Maybe it is, Nobel prize winners might be so hyper-specialized in their field that they have superficial at best understandings of others. Engineer’s Disease writ large.
He’s been writing on consciousness for 40 years now and he’s been studying the topic since undergrad. Also most of what he talks about is soundly within his field.
The only thing that’s really not is the microtuble thing and he collaborated with someone else on that.
That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.
Nothing that Penrose has talked about in re consciousness is "soundly within his field" other than "the microtubule thing" and his collaborator, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, is a crank among cranks.
Also, Penrose has not been "studying the topic since undergrad" ... he's been bothered by the notion that he is "just a computer" since then, but he didn't get into seriously addressing it until much later, and he's never studied it--he notoriously ignores the entirety of the literature of philosophy of mind and neuroscience.
> That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.
This is simply not accurate.
And the fact is that Penrose is completely irrelevant to the subject of consciousness other than via an argument from invalid authority.
P.S. The response is disingenuous and discrediting ... I won't respond to that person again, especially after seeing this comment: "I’m in the Penrose camp that Turing machines can’t be conscious which is required for true AGI" --- this is pure ideology. TMs are clearly adequate for AGI even if somehow "TMs can't be conscious" ... c.f. Chalmers' philosophical zombies.
It's a lie to claim that I said or even implied this.
OTOH, the "camp that Turing machines can't be conscious" is pure ideology and is based on repeatedly proven logic errors--Lucas was known to be wrong about Godel before Penrose came along and embraced his errors. And it's very common for people in that camp to project their own unsubstantiated baseless faith "that Turing machines can't be conscious" (which for Penrose, like many others in the camp, was a consequence of a semi-religious metaphysical notion that he wasn't "just a computer") onto rational informed people, with rhetoric like "people in that have unwavering faith in the idea that consciousness arises from computable processes" -- it's the logically default position, a consequence of intelligence and knowledge, not faith. The hilarious thing is that "consciousness arises from quantum effects" doesn't get the no-TM faithers what they want--they're still "just" machines, even if the machines use qubits rather than bits.
Man you’re replying all over the place, I’m having a hard time keeping up. You’re also spending a lot of time on arguing with someone who has been discredited over a theory that has been discredited.
Penrose and Lucas’ argument may or may not be correct, but that still doesn’t imply that consciousness can arise from computable processes. There is no reason that it should. There is absolutely nothing to suggest this should be the default position.
The only way to get to this position is through faith. Doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But it’s not a falsifiable position since you can’t prove consciousness.
You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse. Just the size of the structures involved, temperature, timescales, and distance between neurons alone is a serious problem with his theory here.
If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea, but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works. Which is always the hard part of science, you’re not just fitting a single curve but thousands of different datasets.
>You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse.
For biology he had a collaborator. You aren’t likely to find many biologist / quantum physicists.
The term neuroscience wasn’t even coined until after he finished his PhD. You could probably name many other relevant sub specialties that doesn’t have formal training in.
If any of his theories are correct, you wouldn’t expect a neuroscientist, or biologist to be equipped to come up with them.
>If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea
He is. His first book essentially had no proposed mechanism. Then an anesthesiologist and researcher read it and contacted him with the proposal that microtubules might provide an environment that is insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain.
His next book investigated that idea, but he’s repeatedly said that this is just an interesting place to investigate and he has no idea whether it’s true.
>but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works.
How does it fail? I’ve read quite a hit about it and plenty for people are skeptical but I’ve never seen anyone showing how it “utterly fails”.
Sure! Happy to. Here's an example of a circular argument: "Penrose could be a crank. We know that kind of thing is possible because, for instance, Penrose is a crank."
The argument made was nothing like that. The assertion made was
"You can be a genius in one field and a crank in another."
Supporting evidence was offered: "For example: Penrose."
One can dispute the evidence, but there's nothing circular about the argument--your version is a strawman created precisely in an attempt to turn a non-circular argument into a circular one. And even rejecting that evidence there's plenty of other evidence and others here gave examples. Not that examples are even needed, as the assertion is self-evident, and was offered as a counter to a textbook fallacious argument from authority: "he's easily done enough important science work to not be called a crank". There is no basis at all for such a claim. Perhaps Penrose is not a crank in re consciousness, but it certainly doesn't follow from the fact that he's done the highest caliber non-crank science ... that claim is fallacious, disingenuous, and intellectually dishonest.
There's no evidence that they couldn't pick a different person. There are quite a few other persons and some other commenters pointed out some of them.
His "speculation" is litereally: I think quantum is mysterious, and brains are mysterious, so there must be quantum in the brain. That's just silly - even if
only because his opinions about mysteriousity is of no importance.
By Occam's razor, it could be said that offering an alternative hypothesis that explains all facts equally well but is also simpler does "disprove" more complex hypotheses. For example, it is often said that Einstein's special theory of relativity disproved the idea of an aether - but special relativity is compatible with the existence of an aether with certain properties, it just is a completely unnecessary extra complication.
The common understanding is that at the molecular scale that your nervous system operates, quantum effects are averaged out and don't lead to instability of neuronal activity.
Again there, does the EMF/RF field created by the electrovolt wave function of the brain affect the electrovolt wave function of the brain? If so, isn't that a feed-forward feedback loop (where there may be quantum behavior)?
Does this paper also fail to assess other fields relevant to understanding nonlocal neuroactivation in disproving that there is any quantumness in cognition?
How do humans simulate digital and quantum circuits with the brain?
And, why do attempts to localize activations in the brain weeks apart fail; why is there representation drift?
What behavior precisely do you think is hiding in quantum region?
I'm on board with Hofstadter's strange loops but at most, quantum-level interaction should just amount to noise that is stabilized by the higher-order chemical region in which the brain operates. What even are we looking for at this point?
What aspect of my experience is not likely to just be a result of chemical interactions in the brain?
Wow, this is such an odd response. There’s plenty of research that link microtubules to consciousness. I don’t understand this pushback other than one being sped in a certain scientific dogma that doesn’t allow new thoughts or questioning to creep in.
Just say that Penrose is a crank is way off chart in my opinion
The word "consciousness" means at least 40 distinct things; some of those (e.g. brain being alive and functioning) are obviously connected to microtubles; others (e.g. qualia, which is what most understand Penrose invoked microtubles to explain) are so ill-defined as to be untestable and unfalsifiable.
That Penrose also seems to have a fundamental error in his understanding of the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, doesn't help.
He’s a neuroscientist that studies consciousness. I think that gives him more valid reasons to have this definition than someone who programs computers.
I believe you’re being disingenuous and hopes that no one reads the full article. Because what he said is more nuance than what you’re proposing that we should not appeal to authority. I’ll post what he said here just to be clear.
“ I fully admit that this is an appeal to authority! But saying you should rely on the framings of a scientific field, like literally just respecting how it defines terms, is extremely reasonable as an appeal. It’s also very different than saying you should blindly believe the conclusions of that field. While “trust the experts” is often too strong a claim, the much weaker ask of “use the agreed-upon vocabulary the experts use when discussing the field” is actually quite reasonable, and most people who want to have an opinion about a scientific (or philosophical) subject should respect the used terms. The same goes for consciousness.”
But that accepted definition is that it means everything... "What it means to be a bat" isn't a useful definition. I will accept that is what the word means and defend the viewpoint the word is thus useless.
This is the last paragraph of his article for people who aren’t going to read the whole article.
“ So yes, there is scientific confusion about what consciousness is! And there’s metaphysical confusion about what consciousness is! But there’s no definitional confusion about the word “consciousness” itself. People know what needs to be explained, it’s just that explaining the phenomenon is very hard, and no one fully has yet.“
To save everyone a click: this objective definition of consciousness is "the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism". This is quite obviously circular, even though it sounds fun initially.
He came up with his idea in collaboration with scientist to study consciousness. It’s not his idea really it’s a group of people’s ideas. His brilliance in his field contributed to the brilliance of other people’s fields. This is how collaborative science works.
If you seen any of Penrose’s talks or read any of his books, you know that this was not fundamentally his idea.
Paraphrasing here: The paper above was looking for energy given off during collapse, (which they did not find) on the Diosi side, where Penrose' idea is more in the retro-causal, you wouldn't find an energy signature. I am sure someone can call out a better representation, but similar to your response that Roger has these ideas and looks for collaborators, but still has his own ideas on things that may differ.
Interesting seeing this conversation going on, Roger / Stuarts work has been trashed over the years, Max Tegmark did the maths and said brain is too wet/warm for any quantum stuff, but we've been finding this in tubulin* and other places, never retracted the paper.
Either way, consciousness is amazing, and a mystery, anyone interested should come to Tucson in April for Towards a science of Consciousness, good conversations, interesting people, usually more questions than answers.
Finding isolated quantum effects is emphatically unsurprising: after all, everything is quantum. It's just limited in locality, which is basically what Tegmark is talking about (locality and decoherence time being somewhat dual).
There is no evidence for the kind of quantum effects that would involve multiple neurons. This is quite a block, since afaik, even the quantum-woo types (Penrose, emphatically) are not claiming that consciousness comes from the quantum behavior of a single neuron. (And that would be profoundly ignorant of basic neuroscience.)
That the brain uses electrical/chemical signals is crank science about subatomic particles messing with your aura in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
If that were not so, electrical/chemical engineers could upgrade our brains with their knowledge of electricity/chemistry.
Scientific progress is thinking about stuff. And my Occam's razor is leaning toward "if just arithmetic could yield consciousness we would have figured it out by now".
If you’ve listened to anything he’s said in the last few years he doesn’t hold very tightly to the microtublule explanation.
Paraphrasing what he said in a video from a year ago or so: it’s an interesting theory that he’d like to see tested, but he has no idea whether it’s correct or not.
No, nothing to do withPenrose’s idea. No quantum effects just the traditional use of microtubules for transport of cargo — in this case between adjacent dendrites.
I don't see why this idea is controversial at all; of course intelligence would evolve to leverage every possible physical mechanism and property inherent in matter, from classical structures like dendritic nanotubular networks facilitating intercellular communication, to potentially quantum effects that support intricate computation and the emergence of thought, since that's the nature of evolution: massively exploring the possibility space.
It's controversial because of how specific the hypothesis is, now novel the physical mechanism would be if it existed, and how little evidence there is that it exists. I don't think it's controversial because people that evolution couldn't possibly explore that possibility space. The fact that evolution explores a very large possibility space doesn't mean that anything you can conceive of must exist. I mean humans aren't even capable of biological flight, and we know that has evolved multiple times!
Penrose has 2 different theories really. 1 is that there are quantum effects involved in consciousness.
2 is that microtubles are directly involved. He feels fairly strongly about 1. He doesn’t feel strongly about 2. He is very open to it being incorrect and just thinks it’s an interesting theory to explore.
There is a question if there is actual physical possibility to do useful quantum computation with tools available to biological systems. Cells are very noisy environments and nonclasical states are very fragile.
Wheels and motors and jet engines and electrical transmission lines are also physically possible, but they are completely missing from the animal world (I believe there is one known unicellular organism that has a locomotion method that is similar to a motor or at least a propeller, but that is still completely unique).
sure. but there are very tangible bounds on the sorts of physical interactions that can cause any effect.
for instance, lots of people love the idea of "brain waves". in general, neurons are event-driven, not given to "waving". indeed, the mystique of brainwaves is counter-physical, in that when there is synchronized activity, it produces EM signals that are fairly hard to pick up (EEG, MEG have gains O(1e6)). a neuron simply lacks a physical mechanism to be affected by such a wave.
not unlike Tegmark pointing out that the brain is dense and warm and that means short/fast decoherence.
Because there's no evidence and the fundamental claim isn't boring "how it works", but the idea that this "quantum magic" is what binds a soul/consciousness to your body and gives rise to "free will" that deterministic physics very clearly does not allow for.
The same deterministic physics that says that the spot where an electron ends up in the double slit experiment is not only nondeterministic, but doesn't exist in principle until it's measured.
While fair to say, this is kind of pedantry looking past the actual point. So, to be clear what I'm saying:
Unless reasonably proven otherwise, quantum mechanics are not a magical land of souls and consciousness. It's a probabilistic space. Those probabilities obey things like wave interference, it's not total chaos. And with Bell's, any idea of a "grand plan" dictating outcomes is kinda moot, because there's no hidden variables that would imply any kind of long-term vision, or mechanism therefore, at play.
Then, when you scale up to classical physics, those probabilities amortize out to reasonably deterministic outcomes: The sun will continue burning for billions of years. Technically every QM interaction in the core could suddenly get unlucky and it instantly poofs out, but we don't seriously consider that a possibility. Just like technically virtual particles could spontaneously form a Mercedes in front of me with a title of ownership in my possession while solar rays bitflip the hard drives of government servers to register it for me.
In reality, if I drop a ball, it's going to fall and hit the ground. When something scares a human, they release hormones. Those hormones consistently affect mood and behavior. Pretty much all humans think like most other humans, and all other animals seem to think like their peers. Etc.
There has been no evidence of any kind to suggest that human brains are not deterministic (and plenty of examples of otherwise), despite the technicality that they have QM underlying the matter and signals. And the idea that the quadrillions of QM interactions each instant are working to some conscious goal, using secret physics that have never before been observed and fly in the face of what has, is voodoo magic nonsense that is not based on actual quantum physics in any way.
If you want to believe in religion, just do that! Don't try to misconstrue/miscommunicate actual science to justify it, just let it be magic. God or souls are no more justified by quantum mechanics than they are by just saying they alter reality in any other way. You're not getting away from them having a magic will-based being in an unmeasurable qualia-defined pocket dimension altering natural outcomes.
In fact, you've made it worse. Now every single person has an unbelievable supercomputer like no one has ever imagined hidden, doing the math needed to understand the exact quantum manipulations to enact their will on the brain physics of the person they are somehow bound to.
To put it another way: if the land of souls exist, it has something to do with QM.
As for the "no evidence brains are nondeterministic" we don't have much evidence about anything related to brains.
My point is that between the two extremes - the blind faith in whatever religions have come up with, and the wingless reptile way of thinking that's so prevalent in modern science - I'd rather choose the middle ground and stay open to various ideas unless they are proven wrong.
What? Again, quantum physics, as we have observed them, directly contradicts your first sentence. It does not have a ghost in the machine!
And how in the world does one argue we have no evidence of brains? They're studied constantly! And there's tons of animals we can poke and prod! We know what regions do what, we know tons of mechanisms of actions. We know what hormones do what, we have ideas on how concepts like "time tracking" are done. We observe brain damage changing the personalities of people. We can do surgeries with relative levels of success.
Like: you don't even need all that. Do you get sleepy at night? Do you get grouchy when you get sleepy? Wonderful: that's hormones. Direct, experienced evidence that your thoughts and behaviors and actions are driven by hormonal states!
I didn't say I wasn't a materialist :). It's important for consciousness philosophers to have a sense of humour, I think (and remember the shortcomings of their own arguments).
But of course there is a physical one, that at some point appears. Or, it is a kind of gradation that at its highest peak is a human, and at its deepest depths is...
I agree. I'm pretty sure both photosynthesis (superposition) and our sense of smell (quantum tunneling) involve quantum effects, so it's not that wild to think that quantum effects are at play in the mechanistic operation of the brain and therefore contribute to the phenomenon of consciousness.
everything is quantum. it's just convenient to deal with the emergent behavior instead (like "chemistry").
yes, photosynthesis is quantum. so is vision, smell, etc. heck, metabolism is quantum!
but these are fast and local, because most of the world is decoherence-friendly. the quantum effects of a photon in your rod cell is not going to cause any quantum weirdness in a smell receptor in your nose.
Well yes, what I meant was that there are phenomena within these procesess that work because they leverage quantum effects that are not available in the newtonian regime of physics.
that seems kind of pointless to speculate about? unless you were into reading this sort of thing a long time ago and it is interesting to you? aren't there more convincing modern models of consciousness that don't rely on spookiness?
Would do a lot to explain many's understanding of the brain as a non-deterministic machine (or, their reasonable resistance to the idea that it is a deterministic one)
How does this vindicate Penrose in any slight sense?? This is using "nanotubular" in the sense of "ultrathin membrane bridges" that serve as "long-range intercellular transport" for macro objects in the um range, NOT "polymers of tubulin" that "provide platforms for intracellular transport" with an inner diameter in the low nm range. (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule)
More importantly, these are transporting things that can plausibly impact other neurons, instead of possibly interacting with things that are far too small to ever impact a neuron in any way we've ever seen before (AKA without magic).
IMHO, this vindicates Penrose and Hamerhoff in no way whatsoever; nonetheless, I'm sure there will be a flood of YouTube videos subtly conflating the two senses of the term "nanotube" in order to promote the idea of a universal noosphere that ties us all together through the magic of quantum entanglement and positive vibes. Fun...
(More on topic: anyone with access to Science know why these are called "nanotubes" if they transport things in the micrometer range? Microtubules are named for their length, but it doesn't really make sense in reverse to have a tube 1000 times as wide as it is long... Maybe they're elastic? Or does "nano" just mean "really small" here?)
And you’re talking about transporting “things” and microtubules are not about transporting things in Penrose theory, but rather serving as quantum machines that are linked across the brain.
yes, it's microtubules, but there's no sign of any weirdness here. and Penrose's whole theory is "quantum is weird and I think brains are weird, so brains must be quantum. so where can we find some quantum stuff?"
I agree, and I was about to post the same thing. The idea of quantum processes fueling consciousness is my latest obsession. Specifically because I have genetic polymorphisms in the DNM3 gene that help maintain the functionality of these microtubules.
And let’s just say my experience of reality, or my consciousness, is quite unusual. My gene polymorphisms in DNM3 are linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have.
Like Penrose said, I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field, and not anything solid, but rather a femoral and affected by electromagnetic forces inside and outside of our brain
> I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field
Well, this is almost certainly true in some very vague sense - I mean, it seems much more unlikely to meaningfully categorize it as a gravitational phenomenon, or a strong interaction phenomenon or a weak interaction phenomenon. Though it would be cool if somehow it turned out our minds had color charge.
Of course, this is only the same sense in which Linux and McDonalds and potatoes are also electromagnetic fields, or phenomena related to it.
I think sometimes people forget that when we think of "chemistry", we're talking about an approximation based on behavior that ultimately emerges from quantum effects. It's just that you don't often need to model the full wavefunction to talk about an iron atom's ionization state in that cuvette where you're testing your pool water.
We don't see a lot of macro-scale quantum weirdness because big and warm directly implies vast amounts of interaction - decoherence.
Note that decoherence is only part of the answer. It explains why we don't see constructive interference, but it doesn't explain other effects that are missing from the classical world, such as why all classical objects have definite properties in the same measurment basis.
I've had a weird thought that it might be that consciousness is the result of a quantum field that collapses to instantiate a consciousness when enough feedback mechanisms are present to allow for its function. Of course, this is likely not true, but it would explain a few things.
Interesting. I don't know that it's a literal electromagnetic field, but it does seem to be a dynamic pattern. I don't personally think I have enough information yet to guess at what medium that pattern is encoded in (I mean, except, broadly, "Brain stuff").
Not long ago, I suffered the first bout of unexpected unconsciousness I'd ever experienced; a series of unfortunate events caused me to pass out from pain (which I didn't quite understand was really a thing before then... Haha no that's real, you can get your brain shorted out from too much pain signal). The experience was a little... Cosmologically-reframing. It wasn't like sleep; it was a missing-time experience. Like, post-event me is acutely aware of a lack of me in that period of time; the body was there (I assume; I couldn't see it but there's nowhere for it to have gone), the thing I'd call myself seems to have completely 404'd for about a half hour.
Put lots of thoughts of my own mortality in my head. Not sure I'd recommend it.
It does, we actually use Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to treat Major Depressive Disorder and a few other things. Precisely because electromagnetic waves can alter our perceptions and behavior.
Your use of "is" here is problematic (and that's what triggered the other responses).
I guess you mean "like". That would be accurate: TMS is disrupting normal brain activity a little like ECT does. It alters consciousness because it causes a partial reboot - an altered state. Drugs (and sleep and love and anger and meditation) also cause altered states. (Not to imply that any of these altered states are the same!)
The “is” I meant is that it induces an electric current in the brain. I’m sure there’s some subtlety (in the temporal and spatial patterns) but whether current is flowing between electrodes or is induced from a changing magnetic field, it’s still current, the effects of which are what we’re seeing.
Crucially, there is no special magnetic interaction with the brain beyond Faraday’s law, as people seem to be implying.
A changing magnetic field induces an electric field; this is how asynchronous motors work.
Having been in the room with a patient undergoing TMS a couple dozen times, I can assure you that the electromagnet will induce a muscle twitch from the electric field it creates. What it doesn't do is cause a seizure, which is the typical desired result of ECT.
This is just 100% false. To say that TMS is electric shock therapy because it changed electrical signals in the brain is totally misleading, if not, totally misunderstanding the science of the relationship between electricity and magnetism.
The fact that both electricity and magnetism can affect neurotransmission does not mean that TMS and ECT are the same thing. When they give people ECT they’re giving them controlled seizures. In TMS this is not the case at all.
I want to say in light of all the down votes you’re getting on this, that I agree with you.
I believe everything is a field and a probability. That objects have no defined borders, but our brains create these borders to reconcile with the probability of a thing being in a certain area. I think the proof this comes when we understand that we never really touch anything, it’s only the electromagnetic field that we are experiencing from another object.
Cheers mate. Also, I’m sorry to read you are homeless according to your description. We have family that suffer from schizophrenia and would be otherwise homeless without our support. I hope you have such a network.
Oh, please don’t be silly. I think this is one of these comments that serve no purpose here. Most Magnets are too weak to possibly affect consciousness.
> But I might want to continue and ask you a question, and this is just out of curiosity, do you think consciousness is made of matter?
You might want to stop calling people silly if you want them to answer your random questions. You'd have to define consciousness to ask that question because every person that overthinks these topics has their own personal definition and they are 100% sure they are right.
> Synaptic connections mediate classical intercellular communication in the brain. However, recent data have demonstrated the existence of noncanonical routes of interneuronal communication mediating the transport of materials including calcium, mitochondria, and pathogenic proteins such as amyloid beta (Aβ). Using super-resolution and electron microscopy, Chang et al. identified and characterized structures called nanotubular bridges that connect dendrites in the brain (see the Perspective by Budinger and Heneka). These bridges mediate the transport of calcium ions, small molecules, and Aβ peptides, and may contribute to the spreading and accumulation of pathological Aβ in Alzheimer’s disease. —Mattia Maroso
does super-resolution refer to the image processing technique of interpolating/hallucinating higher resolutions? if so, is this a common/respected part of evidence gathering?
Super resolution refers to imaging below the refraction limit, more or less by having the receiving sensor within a wavelength or two of the material being imaged, allowing you to use the nearfield (which doesn't have a diffraction limit, but which also doesn't propagate beyond a couple wavelengths) instead of the farfield (which does, and does).
It's unrelated to the nvidia marketing term for ai filtering of images.
Nvidia's DLSS Super Resolution doesn't do anything with bypassing the diffraction limit, but does go beyond the single image nyquist limit by undersampling the input render, jittering the projection matrix each frame, and reconstructing higher resolution with frame history. It's reconstructing real extra detail. Some parts of it like handling disocclusion areas between frames etc. are fully hallucinated though.
With camera movement and things like gaps between camera sensor elements acting as the undersampling, their video super resolution may be learning similar ways of legitimately reconstructing at a higher res from temporal data, though it also hallucinates some in and is dealing with already compressed video where a lot of that might be lost.
I'm not sure if their video super resolution actually does this kind of temporal stuff though or it is just a repeated image upscale, but some of the AI video upscalers do and get much better upscaling on longer windows of frames than when run frame by frame without context.
But they say they used ML analysis too in the abstract
> Using super-resolution microscopy,25
we characterized their unique molecular composition and dynamics in dissociated neurons,26
enabling Ca 2+ propagation over distances. Utilizing imaging and machine-learning-based27
analysis, we confirmed the in situ presence of DNTs connecting dendrites to other dendrites28
whose anatomical features are distinguished from synaptic dendritic spines
Of course, that's specifically about human anatomy. In this case we're talking about a feature that I'd bet is present in other animals too, so the factors discussed here don't all apply. In this case though there seems to be a straightforward answer -- the structures involved are very small! The post I linked is largely talking about larger structures we failed to find...
Don't call it that. He didn't make it up. Descriptive names are better than memorial names anyway. Call it the known-unknown matrix, or known-unknown risk classification system.
It's a fine name, because everyone (in the USA) knows what is being referred to in only 2 words. AND we get to remember a feeling of amusement mixed with horror that we had at the time that man who said something so intelligent was simultaneously making decisions so catastrophically stupid and impactful to all of us.
They are things that you know, that you don't know you know. For example, uncovering links between existing knowledge that uncovers something that then feels obvious.
This happens occasionally where two previously thought seperate fields of study discover a common link with each being able to explain the questions the other had struggled with.
Lots of people know things deeply in their subconscious that they are fully ignorant of in their conscious thinking. These can manifest as gut feelings, or anxieties, and with therapy, can be identified. Things like "you should leave him", or whatever.
Until we both discover everything down to the Planck length, and then prove somehow that the Planck length is truly the smallest "unit", then we have not discovered everything. And we have probably hardly discovered anything, relatively.
To paraphrase the great Noam Chomsky: cognitive science is in a pre-Gallilean stage.
Many thousands of incredible scientists have done amazing work over the past ~century, but cutting-edge neuroscience still doesn't have the conceptual tools to go much farther than "when you look at apples this part of your cortex is more active, so we'll call this the Apple Zone".
Sadly/happily, I personally think there's good reason to think that this will change in our lifetime, which mean's we can all find out if trading the medicalization of mental health treatment (i.e. progressing beyond symptom-based guess-and-check) for governmental access to actual lie detecting helmets (i.e. dystopia) is worth it...
There's a new theory that we might actually gain a greater understanding of the human mind by studying the AI systems we create, because we can basically get a perfect X-ray of their neural nets at any particular state.
When we look at the "apple zone" part of an AI model that lights up, we see it in way higher resolution than our best scans of the human brain, and this might tell us something about how apples are perceived by both systems, or how language is represented neurally, or any number of other things.
And we can barely figure out how the modern LLMs work.
That doesn't bode well for minds being human-interpretable, not at all.
I used to think that the biggest bottleneck to understanding the workings of the human brain was that it defies instrumentation. Which could be solved by better imaging techniques, high throughput direct neural interfaces, etc. But looking at the state of AI now?
If we had full read/write access to the state of every single neuron in the brain, what would we be able to learn? Maybe not that much.
I think this is more or less exactly what Chomsky hoped (hopes?) AI research would eventually become, rather than the purely pragmatic pursuit of tool making it has typically been.
One of the neat and mindnumbing things about the brain is the number of information passing pathways. There are so many and as this discovery evidences, we're still finding new ones.
Not sure our ANNs will ever be able to model them all.
Our ANNs have abandoned any similarity with brain neural networks basically right after they appeared. As we've learned more about neuro-biology, the gap has simply grown larger.
The Big question is: WHERE is the Complexity? If Complexity is Fixed in a System, it must be Somewhere. (you can see this at play any time you look at a large software system.) Do you have simple 'blocks' and many of them? OR, do you have more complicated blocks (requiring more computons), but fewer of them? I think this is an exciting research area right now.
Biological neurons are not easily modeled as any neat mathematical system. They seem to perform significant computational tasks even when alone - as do many other cells in the body, btw. Neuron linking is also more complex than the simplistic weighted connection model. Also, in biological neural networks, you have multiple kinds of neurotransmitters, not just a single signal, and beyond the quantity of neurotransmitters and their electrical properties being transmitted, the frequency of neuron firing is also known to be a significant factor that affects computation; and beyond neurotransmitters, hormones secreted in the brain and other places have some clear effects on cognition. And these are just pieces we know - there are certainly all sorts of other effects that we don't know, some chemical, some structural, some even physical perhaps (consider how all of the moving charges in one part of the brain might interact with other parts through electromagnetic fields).
We have no idea how much of this complexity is fundamental and how much is incidental, of course. But it is certain that every part of the brain is way more complex than the ultra-simplistic ANNs, and replacing the sigmoid function with some ODE will not move that needle significantly.
Good reminder... Presumably, the lab phases were completed before 2025. In February of this year, a neuroscientist at John Hopkins said of the political spending cuts “This is simply the end.” https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/trumps-nih-budg...
The same thing is hypothesized for most tissue in the body and a source of how cancer seems to spread without direct connectivity. It's been classified so often as just background curioso that it never was investigated further.
Hopefully finer grained imaging will elludicdate this stuff.
And then you have AI “specialist “ like Hinton doing thought experiments saying if we replaced a neuron with ones we made we would still be conscious exactly the same way
I still think there's a good chance that evolution has figured out some way to leverage quantum computation, probably in a very different way from the way we're trying to do it with ultra-cold low noise quantum digital circuits. If this is the case it's going to be some kind of high temperature noisy analog stochastic way of harnessing QC. The phrase "stochastic analog quantum computer" comes to mind.
It's how little energy the brain uses, especially for learning. The brain seems to be hundreds of thousands to millions of times more energy efficient than any kind of current AI on a classical computer, not to mention still beating it in terms of performance and versatility. Transistors do not use millions of times more energy than synapses, and processor feature sizes are not millions of times larger. Something else is going on.
Either the brain is leveraging QC or our AI training algorithms are just really really horrible compared to whatever is happening in biology. Maybe biology found learning methods that work thousands of times better than differential backpropagation.
I like the possibility of QC in brain. However, explaining why brain is much more efficient that computers does not need QC. Computers and Brain evolved in two completely different ways. For the brain, simple cognitive functions emerge first, supporting more complex life behaviours, starting with very simple multi celular life forms. Logical reasoning emerges much later, and is pretty expensive. Then we made computers to do logical computation and they are incredibly efficient at it: a modern low power processor is much more efficient than human brain in this kind of workload, by orders of magnitude.
Now we are trying to implement what the mind is naturally good at with systems designed to do logic well. This is the main reason it's so inefficient. Emulation is costly. It is costly when brain does logic, and is costly when computers do AI.
In theory, we should be able to build computing devices designed for AI workloads, and they can be as efficient as brain or even much better.
> The [human] brain seems to be hundreds of thousands to millions of times more energy efficient than any kind of current AI
I don't know about that... I've consumed quite a few calories in my lifetime directly, plus there is all the energy needed for me to live in a modern civilization and make the source material available to me for learning (schools, libraries, internet) and I still only have a minuscule fraction of the information in my head that a modern LLM does after a few months of training.
Translated into KWh, I've used very roughly 50,000 KWh just in terms of food calories... but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4... GPT5 itself needing about 25x to 30x as much energy to train... certainly not 100s of thousands to millions of times as much. And again, these LLMs have a lot more information encoded into them available for nearly instant response than even the smartest human does, so we're not really comparing apples with apples here.
In short, while I wouldn't rule out that the brain uses quantum effects somehow, I don't think there's any spectacular energy-efficiency there to bolster that argument.
> plus there is all the energy needed for me to live in a modern civilization and make the source material available to me for learning (schools, libraries, internet)
To be fair, this is true of LLMs too, and arguably more true for them than it is for humans. LLMs would've been pretty much impossible to achieve w/o massive amounts of digitized human-written text (though now ofc they could be bootstrapped with synthetic data).
> but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4
But if we're including all the energy for supporting infrastructure for humans, shouldn't we also include it for GPT? Mining metals, constructing the chips, etc.? Also, the "modern" is carrying a lot of the weight here. Pre-modern humans were still pretty smart and presumably nearly as efficient in their learning, despite using much less energy.
FYI Penrose is a cautionary tale in the physicist community. He is/was once a competent academic, but his quantum consciousness ideas are viewed similarly to tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. It is technobabble word salad; quantum woo driven more by a personal objection to the implications of Newtonian determinism to the philosophy of the mind, not reason.
We understand quantum interactions more than sufficiently enough to know that the thread of hope he clings to, the soul of the gaps via quantum woo, is not in any way plausible. It is comparable to a perpetual motion machine.
You’re not providing me enough evidence other than saying it was just “woo” science. This is how a lot of new science is rejected.
If you can provide me with scientist objecting to the claim or writing negative papers about his theories I will gladly absorb them.
At best scientists are divided on his opinions, but this is far from calling them woo woo. I mean, bad scientist will call that but good ones will have honest disagreements and discussions.
> We understand quantum interactions more than sufficiently enough
Yes, we do understand quantum mechanics very, very well. It is a profoundly reliable theory, and fully describes all phenomena that could plausibly have causal effects on biochemistry. You have to get to black holes, galaxy formation, or femtokelvin above absolute zero to encounter regions where the standard model breaks down / new physics becomes possible.
Regarding critical evaluations of Penrose, this is the first that pops up: https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-theory-of-consciousness-p... Like most published accounts, it is respectful towards Penrose and less inflammatory than what I wrote, at least on the surface. I'd draw your attention to this bit towards the end though:
> Still, they say, the overall requirements seem daunting – the brain needing to maintain a mass of 10−16 kg in a coherent state for 25 ms over a length scale of about 10 nm. “This vastly exceeds any of the coherent superposition states achieved with state-of-the-art optomechanics or macromolecular interference experiments,” they note.
This is a devastating statement hidden in technical terminology. Basically he's saying: "Even with the most sophisticated physics laboratories, under ideal conditions & with highly sensitive instrumentation, we're unable to achieve the superpositions that Roger Penrose is claiming is going on in the absolutely hostile thermal bath of the brain."
The brain too learns from scratch. From birth through death, it's acquiring information, integrating that information, and using it. LLMs do this in a shorter time period.
Knew we would have a quantum woo comment in the first 10 comments on this. Unless you can show a coherent quantum state at human body temp then please stop with this nonsense.
I read Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind when I was younger. It suggested quantum processes as a last ditch effort for a non-deterministic brain. At the time, I thought it was a fascinating prediction of how our minds might work and that reading it made me a smarter person.
I have since come to view it more as an interesting lesson in the pitfalls of hypothesis formation, popular non-fiction, and vanity.
Even so, as a layperson, it's entirely understandable to perk up whenever someone discovers 'tubules' in the brain, even if none of that sufficiently supports any of the collapse requirements of the Penrose/Hammeroff quantum microtubes.
Should be noted that none of these papers addresses computation via qubits in the neuronal tubes which is central to the OrchOR theory of quantum woo consciousness.
Being of scientific mind, I keep in mind that scientific discoveries existed the whole time until they were discovered as well.
The research on what we can see and learn in the brain is remarkable in the last 10 years. fMRI alone is staggering.
Your question seems to be one of enough resolution. The brain continues to get more attention in greater and greater resolution.
There seems to me more research in the area which is encouraging too.
I don't get the feeling your'e really interested in it other than looking at where the research is occurring and building from where and how you want to see it. Time will tell either way.
There's nothing necessarily interesting about quantum effects in the brain. Hard drives and other parts of a computer use quantum effects too, but it doesn't make them quantum computers.
Penrose is just another person who thinks "quantum" means "magic".
Penrose’s vindication: In a broad philosophical sense. His intuition that quantum effects might play some role in cognition seems less far-fetched now than it did 30 years ago.
But vindication of Orch OR specifically (microtubule-based quantum gravity collapses driving consciousness) not yet.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.1998.025...
The OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation:
Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells.
Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
Penrose doesn’t hold the microtuble hypothesis strongly at all.
He’s very very careful to say that it’s just something he’d like to see tested and he has no idea whether it’s true or not.
That very much distinguishes it from Crank science.
In 1989, Penrose picked up Lucas' 1961 argument that no computer can possibly simulate intelligence. The argument rests on fundamental misunderstandings of logic, that are well-known among logicians. See, for example, https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1995-32-03/S0273-0979-1995... for an article explaining this, written some 30 years ago.
The fact that Penrose has maintained his misunderstandings for 30 years, demonstrates that, on this topic, he has been a crank for a long time. No matter his other accomplishments.
Penrose essentially wrote an entire book responding to that critique.
Which side you support largely comes down to a philosophical question. The notion that he just made a stupid mistake and doubled down on it is absurd.
Having a different opinion about the soundness of a proof could make him wrong but it hardly makes him a crank.
The fact that he repeated the same logic errors at book length doesn't change the fact that they are errors. And the question of whether they are logic errors is a question of mathematics, not philosophy. Dismissing the conclusions of logic on the basis of philosophy, is a mistake of the same type as dismissing the conclusions of science on the basis of theology. Logic cannot speak to the philosophy that Penrose pushes forth. But it can and does speak to the validity of the argument from logic that he puts forth in support.
Hilary Putnam did a good job of explaining the mistakes. I am not a logician, but my background in logic is good enough to verify the explanation. And every logician that I personally know has come to the same conclusion.
Like you, I find it absurd to claim that Penrose has been doubling down on a basic logic error. And yet we have the basic logic error, and Penrose has clearly been doubling down on it.
You don't even need to be an expert to understand that he can't be right. Penrose argues that the capacities of human reasoning is such that Gödel's theorem proves that a mathematician's brain cannot be replicated by any mechanical process. But the reasoning process that mathematicians use is fallible. The output most emphatically is not logically consistent. The appearance of consistency is only obtained after much reexamination of those errors which were discovered. Absolute certainty of lack of error is unachievable by any kind of human reasoning. The history of mathematics is filled with examples of errors that were not discovered for shockingly long periods.
So we do not have a proof of the consistency of human reasoning, or its products. Therefore Gödel doesn't apply. Human reasoning, including the outputs that Penrose cites, do not strictly follow first order logic. Therefore Gödel again doesn't apply. And Gödel is entirely silent on the potential prospects of a heuristic algorithm that can produce inconsistent results. Which is what our brains do.
The inapplicability of Gödel's theorem to our thinking process is an absolute barrier to Penrose's attempts to prove that our thinking process cannot be the result of a mechanical system. It may be that it is not. Personally I fail to see how a strictly mechanical process can create my experience of consciousness. But this is a question that Gödel's theorem cannot address.
The mistake you are making is the same that I think a lot of people who dismiss his argument make.
You aren’t reading his actual argument. You are reading a characterization of his argument by a critic.
You can read his rebuttal of those critiques here:
https://calculemus.org/MathUniversalis/NS/10/01penrose.html
The summary is that there is no requirement that human reasoning is infallible in his actual argument.
Again his proof may be faulty. But it is not because of a “basic logic error”. The disagreements people have with his actual argument are much much subtler than a basic logic error.
The mistake that you are making is to imagine that I must be making a mistake.
Let's take a few examples.
He claims that a robot which is able to engage in Gödelian reasoning, cannot possibly be computable. Logicians agree that this claim is false. Indeed https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10817-021-09599-8 shows a version of Gödel's theorem that has been fully checked via proof assistant. While we still lack AIs that are able to produce such proofs (other than by regurgitating such proofs in their input data), in principle a proof checker filtering the output of a brute force search through possible proof attempts will achieve any possible machine checked proofs. But proof checkers can proof check Gödelian reasoning. Thus we already know how to write a (rather impracticable) robot that does exactly what Penrose claims to be impossible.
Here's a whopper. Let's go to this passage from 4.2 of his rebuttal.
However, I had been disturbed by the possibility that there might be true mathematical propositions that were in principle inaccessible to human reason. Upon learning the true form of Gödel's theorem (in the way that Steen presented it), I was enormously gratified to hear that it asserted no such thing; for it established, instead, that the powers of human reason could not be limited to any accepted preassigned system of formalized rules. What Gödel showed was how to transcend any such system of rules, so long as those rules could themselves be trusted.
This is complete and utter bullshit. Gödel did not show that we could transcend any such system of rules. What Gödel demonstrated is what those rules can prove of themselves. Namely, "If this set of axioms proves itself consistent, then it is inconsistent." Which statement can be proven using nothing more than arithmetic. Our ability to prove this doesn't prove that our mathematical reasoning is somehow beyond what a mere formal system can prove. It is just a demonstration that we can follow a piece of arithmetic to its logical conclusion. Any other understanding of the result is simply a mistake.
He's also wrong about whether there are problems that, in principle, are beyond human reason. For example consider the BB(n) problem. Identifying which Turing machine gives us BB(643) is impossible from ZFC. (See https://github.com/CatsAreFluffy/metamath-turing-machines for more.) If you go to BB(1000), no set of axioms that mathematics has ever debated can suffice. Going beyond human comprehension doesn't take much more than that.
Of course those are weak estimates. In fact it is likely that BB(10) is going to be forever beyond us. And no, some magic quantum decoherence in the microtubules isn't going to fix that.
Let's move on. Section 4.5. He admits to the logical possibility that he is wrong, then asks whether unsoundness is plausible. How is it not plausible? The only form of intelligence that we have an existence proof for, us, thinks in notoriously unreliable ways. LLMs are our best attempt to replicate our verbal abilities by computers. They are likewise extremely unsound.
The burden of proof that soundness is possible here is on Penrose. And he needs to prove it soundly enough to overturn the generally accepted conclusion that the known laws of physics suffices, in principle, to explain the manner by which our brains operate. Because that is the conclusion that he is aiming to convince people of.
He doesn't even try. He waves his hands, declares absurdity, and moves on. That may be fine from the point of view of his philosophy. It is not fine from the point of view of a logician. It's a gap. And a mighty big one at that.
I could go on, but what's the point? If you refuse to believe what logicians say about logic, then no explanation of what logicians have to say will convince you. And if you do believe what logicians say about logic, then you should already know that Penrose is wrong.
yup and his book was reviewed as such at the time. mention of the rejection of his theory by professional philosophers however keeps getting edited out of the wikipedia page. See this exchange on the talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
>> "The book's thesis is considered erroneous by experts in the fields of philosophy, computer science, and robotics."
> Wooooah, there. That's a massive accusation to add, unsourced, and without any discussion. There needs to be a source for this statement, not to mention an opposing view. It seems unlikely the guy would win an award for a book no one thinks is right. I'm deleting it unless someone comes up with a pretty good source. Joker1189 (talk) 20:43, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
The source was provided with the edit: L.J.Landau (1997) "Penrose's Philosophical Error" ISBN 3-540-76163-2 http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~llandau/Homepage/Math/penrose.html Spot (talk) 03:08, 31 July 2010 (UTC)
You say keeps getting edited out but I see one instance of that happening 15 years ago.
The talk is unavailable, but that and a chapter in Landau’s book hardly seem like appropriate sources for “everyone disagrees with him”.
The vast majority of critiques of his argument that I’ve read are by people who are actively working in AI not professional logicians.
who said "everyone" or did you make a strawman?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument
this actually puts it better:
The Penrose–Lucas argument about the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem for computational theories of human intelligence was criticized by mathematicians,[16][17][18][19] computer scientists,[20] and philosophers,[21][22][23][24][25] and the consensus among experts[7] in these fields is that the argument fails,[26][27][28] with different authors attacking different aspects of the argument.[28][29]
so, rejected by consensus. someone should update the book page so this expert rejection is clearer.
Everyone is obvious hyperbole because I didn’t want to both copying and pasting the actual quote.
That is merely a compiled list of people who disagree with him without listing any of his supporters.
There are at least 5 philosophers who support his position if you follow those links and 5 who reject it.
Link 7 doesn’t support the statement “consensus among experts in these fields” because it only refers to a single field—philosophy.
Many of those sources are just links to lists that other people have compiled of arguments for and against Lucas’ argument. They aren’t even all critiques. And many of the ones that are, are already linked directly in the article.
There’s is nothing more to support the notion that there is widespread consensus against his argument.
There may be. But this isn’t good evidence of it.
I can't speak to the general opinion among philosophers about his argument. But my opinion about philosophy is such that their opinion would not sway mine in either way.
I can speak to the general opinion of his logical arguments among logicians. And it is not just widespread consensus against. It is a widespread consensus that the argument is filled with basic logic errors that render it absolutely wrong.
As Hilary Putnam points out, Penrose's arguments are even worse than Lucas'. In particularly Penrose argues that no program that we can know to be sound, can simulate all our human mathematical competence. But our brains do not use a sound thinking process. Therefore a sufficiently good simulation of our brains that it can do mathematics, would also not be sound. Gödel's theorem is entirely silent on the potential capabilities of such unsound systems.
Furthermore LLMs provide a convincing demonstration that unsound simulations of us can have surprising levels of competence. ChatGPT regularly demonstrates both its competence and unsoundness. Sometimes at the same time!
The potential for unsound systems to demonstrate competence far beyond what most expected, is demonstrated by LLMs. Admittedly the current error rate is unacceptably high. But it demonstrates that what Penrose claimed to be mathematically impossible, may plausibly become real within our lifetimes. (Though, given how old Penrose is, not his.)
I replied to your other post. His proof is much subtler than that and if it has flaws that isn’t it.
https://calculemus.org/MathUniversalis/NS/10/01penrose.html
I replied to you there.
But in section 4.5 of this "rebuttal", he admits to the flaw that I just pointed out, and dismisses it as logically possible but absurd. The fact that he grants that it is logically possible, demonstrates that his attempted logical demonstration is broken.
Also his opinion on absurdity has to be weighed against the unlikeliness of his conclusion that the known laws of physics will not suffice to explain the operation of the brain. Clearly that question is not as cut and dried as he believes.
I am amused that my unintended repetition in the last two paragraphs demonstrates how unsound my absolutely human brain is.
(Unless I'm an LLM. I'm certainly unfunny enough to be one.)
That's the problem with Penrose's thinking though. He's absolutely convinced that consciousness cannot boil down to something computable. So he reaches for the quantum shelf, but not just the quantum shelf, the quantum processes we don't yet understand since otherwise it'd just be something computable, but with more steps.
I mean most AI researchers are utterly convinced that the human brain is a Turing machine. There’s not reason to presuppose that. And if everyone presupposes that and it isn’t true, we’ll be stuck spinning our wheels until someone questions it.
This isn't a viewpoint coming from AI, is been a view that's been around for quite some time. The standard model does an exquisite job of predicting the day to day physics we experience. To find search for new physics where we might find discrepancies, we have to build absolutely huge colliders, and even those don't really effect our "day to day" physics.
For consciousness to be based on some non computable function there would have to be some unknown physics occurring in the brain. Sure, that's hard to disprove, but it also strains credulity, hard.
Penrose picking "quantum" for being the element of physics that would have to change to allow this non computibility is just woo. Why not just say magic?
I agree with you that picking quantum was probably the fad of the time and it was an easy pick as quantum is everywhere. He cold have said "electrons". However the argument against unknown physics is not very sound IMHO.
There has been unknown physics at play inside brains since forever and it still is and always will be, by definition of science.
The point is that we don't even know how to define consciousness and humanity doesn't have a shared agreement about which living beings are conscious or are not. We're still like engineers building things millennia or centuries ago with only a shadow of a theory of why their creations worked. And yet we still walk on bridges from 2000 years ago and we had electric batteries and power plants before knowing how an electro magnetic wave moved.
> This isn't a viewpoint coming from AI
It has always been related to AI. Shortly after Church and Turing formalized computability, people started squaring off into 2 camps. People who believed strong AI was possible and those who didn’t.
We know the standard model is incomplete. Penrose’s ideas come directly from his his explorations of the gaps he suspects exist.
Penrose may well be completely wrong about this, but I think he's easily done enough important science work to not be called a crank.
You can be a genius in one field and a crank in another.
For example: Penrose.
example: Shockley was a eugenicist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
And plenty more: https://archive.is/2021.06.21-140221/https://www.nationalgeo...
or even within the same field! Further examples: Newton, Chomsky
This feels a bit like a circular argument.
How about Linus Pauling and vitamin C then?
It happens. It’s surely possible. But does it happen enough that anytime a Nobel laureate says something a little out there, this is the immediate explanation?
Especially if what he’s saying has lacks a major hallmark of crackpot theories. That is he is very open to his theory being wrong and he won’t even say that it’s probably correct. He just thinks it’s possible and would like to see more work done on it.
Yes in that when they something outside their field that’s ‘a little out there’ Nobel laureate’s aren’t as a group more useful than random noise. Similarly a crank can happen to say a true statement, but the issue is the process with which the statement is derived is flawed to the point of uselessness.
The derogatory aspect of calling someone a crank is obviously uncalled for, but as a shorthand it’s not unreasonable to use the term.
If a Nobel laureate says they have an interesting hypothesis that they’d like test and that idea isn’t obviously impossible, it’s probably best not to dismiss it as crank science.
Walter Alvarez is another Nobel laureate who proposed a theory that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Many people thought that was crank science.
And it’s important to note he had another out there idea that there were hidden chambers in the pyramids of Egypt. That one turned out to be wrong.
What distinguished his theories from crank science is that he was open to the idea that they were wrong and was interested in actually using the scientific method to investigate them.
> it’s probably best not to dismiss it as crank science
Why? There’s a lot of Nobel laureates over time who collectively made many such claims, so you can easily pick examples in both directions.
My point is more such ideas aren’t accurate enough for anything beyond preliminary testing by actual scientific investigation which sometimes does validate them but also commonly disproves them. There’s zero reason for the average person to consider their validity.
Your example is a perfect demonstration of why most people ignoring such things is a good idea, these things don’t simply disappear without investigation.
I mean sure you shouldn’t go out and by vitamin C supplements because a Nobel Prize winning chemists tell you to.
But you also shouldn’t go around immediately dismissing any theories they have as crank science.
Ok if you believe that way what exactly do you gain by doing so?
Paying attention has a cost so what’s the payoff?
Who says you have to believe it or pay attention to it? What does an average person gain by paying attention to unproven theories in any discipline. If it interests you, pay attention, if it doesn’t, don’t.
I just said you shouldn’t dismiss it as crank science.
Ahh, I was agreeing with ignoring it / dismissal not the label.
No one did that. Penrose's theories have been dismissed as crank science for good reasons given.
He has good relationships and is respected by experts in many fields. If he was dismissed as a crank he couldn’t have found 3 incredibly respected scientists to debate his theories in one of his books.
Plenty of people think his theories are wrong or unlikely. The only people “dismissing them as crank science” are people in that have unwavering faith in the idea that consciousness arises from computable processes.
Maybe it is, Nobel prize winners might be so hyper-specialized in their field that they have superficial at best understandings of others. Engineer’s Disease writ large.
He’s been writing on consciousness for 40 years now and he’s been studying the topic since undergrad. Also most of what he talks about is soundly within his field.
The only thing that’s really not is the microtuble thing and he collaborated with someone else on that.
That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.
Nothing that Penrose has talked about in re consciousness is "soundly within his field" other than "the microtubule thing" and his collaborator, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, is a crank among cranks.
Also, Penrose has not been "studying the topic since undergrad" ... he's been bothered by the notion that he is "just a computer" since then, but he didn't get into seriously addressing it until much later, and he's never studied it--he notoriously ignores the entirety of the literature of philosophy of mind and neuroscience.
> That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.
This is simply not accurate.
And the fact is that Penrose is completely irrelevant to the subject of consciousness other than via an argument from invalid authority.
P.S. The response is disingenuous and discrediting ... I won't respond to that person again, especially after seeing this comment: "I’m in the Penrose camp that Turing machines can’t be conscious which is required for true AGI" --- this is pure ideology. TMs are clearly adequate for AGI even if somehow "TMs can't be conscious" ... c.f. Chalmers' philosophical zombies.
>Clearly TMs can be conscious
It's a lie to claim that I said or even implied this.
OTOH, the "camp that Turing machines can't be conscious" is pure ideology and is based on repeatedly proven logic errors--Lucas was known to be wrong about Godel before Penrose came along and embraced his errors. And it's very common for people in that camp to project their own unsubstantiated baseless faith "that Turing machines can't be conscious" (which for Penrose, like many others in the camp, was a consequence of a semi-religious metaphysical notion that he wasn't "just a computer") onto rational informed people, with rhetoric like "people in that have unwavering faith in the idea that consciousness arises from computable processes" -- it's the logically default position, a consequence of intelligence and knowledge, not faith. The hilarious thing is that "consciousness arises from quantum effects" doesn't get the no-TM faithers what they want--they're still "just" machines, even if the machines use qubits rather than bits.
Man you’re replying all over the place, I’m having a hard time keeping up. You’re also spending a lot of time on arguing with someone who has been discredited over a theory that has been discredited.
Penrose and Lucas’ argument may or may not be correct, but that still doesn’t imply that consciousness can arise from computable processes. There is no reason that it should. There is absolutely nothing to suggest this should be the default position.
The only way to get to this position is through faith. Doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But it’s not a falsifiable position since you can’t prove consciousness.
None of this is accurate.
P.S. this response was merely a condensed version of he response to my reply. Here’s a longer one.
>Nothing that Penrose has talked about in re consciousness is "soundly within his field"
Quantum gravity, physics, and mathematical logic are clearly within his field. He’s a physicist, mathematician, and logician
>Also, Penrose has not been "studying the topic since undergrad" ..
He says that he has.
>he notoriously ignores the entirety of the literature of philosophy of mind and neuroscience.
Disagreement with some members of a field isn’t the same as ignoring it.
>This is simply not accurate.
It is. I heard it from the horses mouth.
>And the fact is that Penrose is completely irrelevant to the subject of consciousness other than via an argument from invalid authority.
It’s a field that has never produced anything concrete or beneficial to anyone outside the field. I’m unsure what relevance even means there.
>P.S. The response is disingenuous and discrediting ... I won't respond to that person again,
Yet you did. I saw your edit.
>Clearly TMs can be conscious
I guess that’s that then.
> He’s a physicist, mathematician, and logician
You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse. Just the size of the structures involved, temperature, timescales, and distance between neurons alone is a serious problem with his theory here.
If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea, but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works. Which is always the hard part of science, you’re not just fitting a single curve but thousands of different datasets.
>You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse.
For biology he had a collaborator. You aren’t likely to find many biologist / quantum physicists.
The term neuroscience wasn’t even coined until after he finished his PhD. You could probably name many other relevant sub specialties that doesn’t have formal training in.
If any of his theories are correct, you wouldn’t expect a neuroscientist, or biologist to be equipped to come up with them.
>If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea
He is. His first book essentially had no proposed mechanism. Then an anesthesiologist and researcher read it and contacted him with the proposal that microtubules might provide an environment that is insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain.
His next book investigated that idea, but he’s repeatedly said that this is just an interesting place to investigate and he has no idea whether it’s true.
>but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works.
How does it fail? I’ve read quite a hit about it and plenty for people are skeptical but I’ve never seen anyone showing how it “utterly fails”.
Maybe review what a circular argument is, because that isn't one.
Sure! Happy to. Here's an example of a circular argument: "Penrose could be a crank. We know that kind of thing is possible because, for instance, Penrose is a crank."
The argument made was nothing like that. The assertion made was
"You can be a genius in one field and a crank in another."
Supporting evidence was offered: "For example: Penrose."
One can dispute the evidence, but there's nothing circular about the argument--your version is a strawman created precisely in an attempt to turn a non-circular argument into a circular one. And even rejecting that evidence there's plenty of other evidence and others here gave examples. Not that examples are even needed, as the assertion is self-evident, and was offered as a counter to a textbook fallacious argument from authority: "he's easily done enough important science work to not be called a crank". There is no basis at all for such a claim. Perhaps Penrose is not a crank in re consciousness, but it certainly doesn't follow from the fact that he's done the highest caliber non-crank science ... that claim is fallacious, disingenuous, and intellectually dishonest.
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I think of Linus Pauling
The fact that you couldn't pick a different person as an example makes for a very weak assertion.
There's no evidence that they couldn't pick a different person. There are quite a few other persons and some other commenters pointed out some of them.
Newton.
Why is it crank science? He clearly states that it is hypothetical, speculative and open research.
The main reason is because it's arbitrary.
His "speculation" is litereally: I think quantum is mysterious, and brains are mysterious, so there must be quantum in the brain. That's just silly - even if only because his opinions about mysteriousity is of no importance.
If the universe is closed and knowable, free will can't exist. Fortunately, Heisenberg left the door open.
I don’t think non-commuting observables really helps much in the “free will existing” department.
I don't see that offering an alternative hypothesis disproves anything.
By Occam's razor, it could be said that offering an alternative hypothesis that explains all facts equally well but is also simpler does "disprove" more complex hypotheses. For example, it is often said that Einstein's special theory of relativity disproved the idea of an aether - but special relativity is compatible with the existence of an aether with certain properties, it just is a completely unnecessary extra complication.
Special relativity is a lot more than a hypothesis at this point. I think the ideas in this paper may be a little bit more speculative than that.
Someone oughta notify Peter Watts
https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references
But does this help explain Representational drift?
From "Concept cells help your brain abstract information and build memories" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42784396 :
> the regions of the brain that activate for a given cue vary over time
"Representational drift: Emerging theories for continual learning and experimental future directions" (2022) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943882...
>> Future work should characterize drift across brain regions, cell types, and learning.
How do nanotubules in the brain affect representation drift?
There is EMF to cognition given that, for example, "Neuroscience study shows the brain emits light through the skull" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697995
Aren't there certainly quantum effects in the EMF wavefield of and around the brain?
The common understanding is that at the molecular scale that your nervous system operates, quantum effects are averaged out and don't lead to instability of neuronal activity.
Tegmark has used actual, you know, numbers and stuff to show that quantum effects in the brain are pretty implausible.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11088215/
Again there, does the EMF/RF field created by the electrovolt wave function of the brain affect the electrovolt wave function of the brain? If so, isn't that a feed-forward feedback loop (where there may be quantum behavior)?
Does this paper also fail to assess other fields relevant to understanding nonlocal neuroactivation in disproving that there is any quantumness in cognition?
How do humans simulate digital and quantum circuits with the brain?
And, why do attempts to localize activations in the brain weeks apart fail; why is there representation drift?
Actual evidence of:
/? quantum in the brain: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=qua...
/? quantum cognition: https://www.google.com/search?q=quantum+cognition
gh topic: quantum-cognition: https://github.com/topics/quantum-cognition (2025: 7 results; all Julia)
2000: the referenced Tegmark paper
From https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:-mGt9tzYwSUJ:sc... :
- 1998: "Quantum computation in brain microtubules? The Penrose–Hameroff 'Orch OR 'model of consciousness" (1998)
- 2002: "Quantum computation in brain microtubules: Decoherence and biological feasibility" (2002)
Quantum cognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition
What behavior precisely do you think is hiding in quantum region?
I'm on board with Hofstadter's strange loops but at most, quantum-level interaction should just amount to noise that is stabilized by the higher-order chemical region in which the brain operates. What even are we looking for at this point?
What aspect of my experience is not likely to just be a result of chemical interactions in the brain?
Wow, this is such an odd response. There’s plenty of research that link microtubules to consciousness. I don’t understand this pushback other than one being sped in a certain scientific dogma that doesn’t allow new thoughts or questioning to creep in.
Just say that Penrose is a crank is way off chart in my opinion
The word "consciousness" means at least 40 distinct things; some of those (e.g. brain being alive and functioning) are obviously connected to microtubles; others (e.g. qualia, which is what most understand Penrose invoked microtubles to explain) are so ill-defined as to be untestable and unfalsifiable.
That Penrose also seems to have a fundamental error in his understanding of the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, doesn't help.
I love his thoughts on connecting the halting problem to understanding ala Gödel.
It means one thing to people who study consciousness.
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/consciousness-is-a...
That linked page is just a long-winded assertion that only their own definition counts.
It's also a definition which is completely untestable and presently unfalsifiable.
He’s a neuroscientist that studies consciousness. I think that gives him more valid reasons to have this definition than someone who programs computers.
He himself would criticise you for doing so, even just on the basis of what he put in that blog post, as you're using an argument from authority.
I believe you’re being disingenuous and hopes that no one reads the full article. Because what he said is more nuance than what you’re proposing that we should not appeal to authority. I’ll post what he said here just to be clear.
“ I fully admit that this is an appeal to authority! But saying you should rely on the framings of a scientific field, like literally just respecting how it defines terms, is extremely reasonable as an appeal. It’s also very different than saying you should blindly believe the conclusions of that field. While “trust the experts” is often too strong a claim, the much weaker ask of “use the agreed-upon vocabulary the experts use when discussing the field” is actually quite reasonable, and most people who want to have an opinion about a scientific (or philosophical) subject should respect the used terms. The same goes for consciousness.”
I think we can do better than to have this level of argumentation. Regardless if the pretending comment had a merit to it or not
But that accepted definition is that it means everything... "What it means to be a bat" isn't a useful definition. I will accept that is what the word means and defend the viewpoint the word is thus useless.
This is the last paragraph of his article for people who aren’t going to read the whole article.
“ So yes, there is scientific confusion about what consciousness is! And there’s metaphysical confusion about what consciousness is! But there’s no definitional confusion about the word “consciousness” itself. People know what needs to be explained, it’s just that explaining the phenomenon is very hard, and no one fully has yet.“
/anything I don’t understand is useless/
To save everyone a click: this objective definition of consciousness is "the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism". This is quite obviously circular, even though it sounds fun initially.
that is NOT what the article says. read the article, it's a pretty good survey.
What he refers to is more specifically called phenomological consciousness afaik (just skimmed through tho)
Also microtubules with quantum…
Penrose's theory is this: consciousness is really weird. quantum is really weird. there's got to be a connection.
Just because he is brilliant in one field doesn't mean he's remotely competent in every field.
Nah. He postulated that mathematicians don't make errors and proposed a hypothetical physical mechanism to make it work.
He came up with his idea in collaboration with scientist to study consciousness. It’s not his idea really it’s a group of people’s ideas. His brilliance in his field contributed to the brilliance of other people’s fields. This is how collaborative science works.
If you seen any of Penrose’s talks or read any of his books, you know that this was not fundamentally his idea.
Yup, even the Dioso-Penrose limit has two sides. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13490
Paraphrasing here: The paper above was looking for energy given off during collapse, (which they did not find) on the Diosi side, where Penrose' idea is more in the retro-causal, you wouldn't find an energy signature. I am sure someone can call out a better representation, but similar to your response that Roger has these ideas and looks for collaborators, but still has his own ideas on things that may differ.
Interesting seeing this conversation going on, Roger / Stuarts work has been trashed over the years, Max Tegmark did the maths and said brain is too wet/warm for any quantum stuff, but we've been finding this in tubulin* and other places, never retracted the paper.
Either way, consciousness is amazing, and a mystery, anyone interested should come to Tucson in April for Towards a science of Consciousness, good conversations, interesting people, usually more questions than answers.
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-9321/4/2/19 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
No, there's no evidence against Tegmark's math.
Finding isolated quantum effects is emphatically unsurprising: after all, everything is quantum. It's just limited in locality, which is basically what Tegmark is talking about (locality and decoherence time being somewhat dual).
There is no evidence for the kind of quantum effects that would involve multiple neurons. This is quite a block, since afaik, even the quantum-woo types (Penrose, emphatically) are not claiming that consciousness comes from the quantum behavior of a single neuron. (And that would be profoundly ignorant of basic neuroscience.)
There is this from Max - https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.61.41...
And response
https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.65.06...
> in collaboration with scientist
If you mean Stuart Hameroff, he's no scientist.
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This seems like a straw man argument.
That the brain uses electrical/chemical signals is crank science about subatomic particles messing with your aura in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
If that were not so, electrical/chemical engineers could upgrade our brains with their knowledge of electricity/chemistry.
Scientific progress is thinking about stuff. And my Occam's razor is leaning toward "if just arithmetic could yield consciousness we would have figured it out by now".
If you’ve listened to anything he’s said in the last few years he doesn’t hold very tightly to the microtublule explanation.
Paraphrasing what he said in a video from a year ago or so: it’s an interesting theory that he’d like to see tested, but he has no idea whether it’s correct or not.
No, nothing to do withPenrose’s idea. No quantum effects just the traditional use of microtubules for transport of cargo — in this case between adjacent dendrites.
I don't see why this idea is controversial at all; of course intelligence would evolve to leverage every possible physical mechanism and property inherent in matter, from classical structures like dendritic nanotubular networks facilitating intercellular communication, to potentially quantum effects that support intricate computation and the emergence of thought, since that's the nature of evolution: massively exploring the possibility space.
It's controversial because of how specific the hypothesis is, now novel the physical mechanism would be if it existed, and how little evidence there is that it exists. I don't think it's controversial because people that evolution couldn't possibly explore that possibility space. The fact that evolution explores a very large possibility space doesn't mean that anything you can conceive of must exist. I mean humans aren't even capable of biological flight, and we know that has evolved multiple times!
Penrose has 2 different theories really. 1 is that there are quantum effects involved in consciousness.
2 is that microtubles are directly involved. He feels fairly strongly about 1. He doesn’t feel strongly about 2. He is very open to it being incorrect and just thinks it’s an interesting theory to explore.
There is a question if there is actual physical possibility to do useful quantum computation with tools available to biological systems. Cells are very noisy environments and nonclasical states are very fragile.
Wheels and motors and jet engines and electrical transmission lines are also physically possible, but they are completely missing from the animal world (I believe there is one known unicellular organism that has a locomotion method that is similar to a motor or at least a propeller, but that is still completely unique).
ATP synthase is pretty much a micro-mechanical turbine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATP_synthase
This type of animal has evolved a gear mechanism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issus_(planthopper)
sure. but there are very tangible bounds on the sorts of physical interactions that can cause any effect.
for instance, lots of people love the idea of "brain waves". in general, neurons are event-driven, not given to "waving". indeed, the mystique of brainwaves is counter-physical, in that when there is synchronized activity, it produces EM signals that are fairly hard to pick up (EEG, MEG have gains O(1e6)). a neuron simply lacks a physical mechanism to be affected by such a wave.
not unlike Tegmark pointing out that the brain is dense and warm and that means short/fast decoherence.
Because there's no evidence and the fundamental claim isn't boring "how it works", but the idea that this "quantum magic" is what binds a soul/consciousness to your body and gives rise to "free will" that deterministic physics very clearly does not allow for.
Oh i see now
The same deterministic physics that says that the spot where an electron ends up in the double slit experiment is not only nondeterministic, but doesn't exist in principle until it's measured.
While fair to say, this is kind of pedantry looking past the actual point. So, to be clear what I'm saying:
Unless reasonably proven otherwise, quantum mechanics are not a magical land of souls and consciousness. It's a probabilistic space. Those probabilities obey things like wave interference, it's not total chaos. And with Bell's, any idea of a "grand plan" dictating outcomes is kinda moot, because there's no hidden variables that would imply any kind of long-term vision, or mechanism therefore, at play.
Then, when you scale up to classical physics, those probabilities amortize out to reasonably deterministic outcomes: The sun will continue burning for billions of years. Technically every QM interaction in the core could suddenly get unlucky and it instantly poofs out, but we don't seriously consider that a possibility. Just like technically virtual particles could spontaneously form a Mercedes in front of me with a title of ownership in my possession while solar rays bitflip the hard drives of government servers to register it for me.
In reality, if I drop a ball, it's going to fall and hit the ground. When something scares a human, they release hormones. Those hormones consistently affect mood and behavior. Pretty much all humans think like most other humans, and all other animals seem to think like their peers. Etc.
There has been no evidence of any kind to suggest that human brains are not deterministic (and plenty of examples of otherwise), despite the technicality that they have QM underlying the matter and signals. And the idea that the quadrillions of QM interactions each instant are working to some conscious goal, using secret physics that have never before been observed and fly in the face of what has, is voodoo magic nonsense that is not based on actual quantum physics in any way.
If you want to believe in religion, just do that! Don't try to misconstrue/miscommunicate actual science to justify it, just let it be magic. God or souls are no more justified by quantum mechanics than they are by just saying they alter reality in any other way. You're not getting away from them having a magic will-based being in an unmeasurable qualia-defined pocket dimension altering natural outcomes.
In fact, you've made it worse. Now every single person has an unbelievable supercomputer like no one has ever imagined hidden, doing the math needed to understand the exact quantum manipulations to enact their will on the brain physics of the person they are somehow bound to.
To put it another way: if the land of souls exist, it has something to do with QM.
As for the "no evidence brains are nondeterministic" we don't have much evidence about anything related to brains.
My point is that between the two extremes - the blind faith in whatever religions have come up with, and the wingless reptile way of thinking that's so prevalent in modern science - I'd rather choose the middle ground and stay open to various ideas unless they are proven wrong.
What? Again, quantum physics, as we have observed them, directly contradicts your first sentence. It does not have a ghost in the machine!
And how in the world does one argue we have no evidence of brains? They're studied constantly! And there's tons of animals we can poke and prod! We know what regions do what, we know tons of mechanisms of actions. We know what hormones do what, we have ideas on how concepts like "time tracking" are done. We observe brain damage changing the personalities of people. We can do surgeries with relative levels of success.
Like: you don't even need all that. Do you get sleepy at night? Do you get grouchy when you get sleepy? Wonderful: that's hormones. Direct, experienced evidence that your thoughts and behaviors and actions are driven by hormonal states!
the "conscious emerges from quantum superposition" idea is controversial because it's thinly veiled mysticism
Materialists always seem to forget that they're kicking the can down the road.
Penrose is very much a materialist. He thinks that humans could someday create machines that can tap into whatever quantum effects the brain uses.
I didn't say I wasn't a materialist :). It's important for consciousness philosophers to have a sense of humour, I think (and remember the shortcomings of their own arguments).
There's no non-physical "ghost in the machine," and I don't even see the value in probing consciousness down to its most fundamental essence.
So, we know enough now, and it's time to quit sciencing about it? Weird response.
> There's no non-physical "ghost in the machine"
But of course there is a physical one, that at some point appears. Or, it is a kind of gradation that at its highest peak is a human, and at its deepest depths is...
I agree. I'm pretty sure both photosynthesis (superposition) and our sense of smell (quantum tunneling) involve quantum effects, so it's not that wild to think that quantum effects are at play in the mechanistic operation of the brain and therefore contribute to the phenomenon of consciousness.
everything is quantum. it's just convenient to deal with the emergent behavior instead (like "chemistry").
yes, photosynthesis is quantum. so is vision, smell, etc. heck, metabolism is quantum!
but these are fast and local, because most of the world is decoherence-friendly. the quantum effects of a photon in your rod cell is not going to cause any quantum weirdness in a smell receptor in your nose.
Well yes, what I meant was that there are phenomena within these procesess that work because they leverage quantum effects that are not available in the newtonian regime of physics.
that seems kind of pointless to speculate about? unless you were into reading this sort of thing a long time ago and it is interesting to you? aren't there more convincing modern models of consciousness that don't rely on spookiness?
But chemistry is basically impossible without quantum effects ...
Would do a lot to explain many's understanding of the brain as a non-deterministic machine (or, their reasonable resistance to the idea that it is a deterministic one)
How does this vindicate Penrose in any slight sense?? This is using "nanotubular" in the sense of "ultrathin membrane bridges" that serve as "long-range intercellular transport" for macro objects in the um range, NOT "polymers of tubulin" that "provide platforms for intracellular transport" with an inner diameter in the low nm range. (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule)
More importantly, these are transporting things that can plausibly impact other neurons, instead of possibly interacting with things that are far too small to ever impact a neuron in any way we've ever seen before (AKA without magic).
IMHO, this vindicates Penrose and Hamerhoff in no way whatsoever; nonetheless, I'm sure there will be a flood of YouTube videos subtly conflating the two senses of the term "nanotube" in order to promote the idea of a universal noosphere that ties us all together through the magic of quantum entanglement and positive vibes. Fun...
(More on topic: anyone with access to Science know why these are called "nanotubes" if they transport things in the micrometer range? Microtubules are named for their length, but it doesn't really make sense in reverse to have a tube 1000 times as wide as it is long... Maybe they're elastic? Or does "nano" just mean "really small" here?)
to understand that nano tubules interact with microtubules is part of the answer to your question.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221137971...
And you’re talking about transporting “things” and microtubules are not about transporting things in Penrose theory, but rather serving as quantum machines that are linked across the brain.
no, this does not validate quantum mysticism.
yes, it's microtubules, but there's no sign of any weirdness here. and Penrose's whole theory is "quantum is weird and I think brains are weird, so brains must be quantum. so where can we find some quantum stuff?"
I agree, and I was about to post the same thing. The idea of quantum processes fueling consciousness is my latest obsession. Specifically because I have genetic polymorphisms in the DNM3 gene that help maintain the functionality of these microtubules.
https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q9UQ16/entry
And let’s just say my experience of reality, or my consciousness, is quite unusual. My gene polymorphisms in DNM3 are linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have.
Like Penrose said, I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field, and not anything solid, but rather a femoral and affected by electromagnetic forces inside and outside of our brain
> I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field
Well, this is almost certainly true in some very vague sense - I mean, it seems much more unlikely to meaningfully categorize it as a gravitational phenomenon, or a strong interaction phenomenon or a weak interaction phenomenon. Though it would be cool if somehow it turned out our minds had color charge.
Of course, this is only the same sense in which Linux and McDonalds and potatoes are also electromagnetic fields, or phenomena related to it.
I think sometimes people forget that when we think of "chemistry", we're talking about an approximation based on behavior that ultimately emerges from quantum effects. It's just that you don't often need to model the full wavefunction to talk about an iron atom's ionization state in that cuvette where you're testing your pool water.
We don't see a lot of macro-scale quantum weirdness because big and warm directly implies vast amounts of interaction - decoherence.
Note that decoherence is only part of the answer. It explains why we don't see constructive interference, but it doesn't explain other effects that are missing from the classical world, such as why all classical objects have definite properties in the same measurment basis.
I've had a weird thought that it might be that consciousness is the result of a quantum field that collapses to instantiate a consciousness when enough feedback mechanisms are present to allow for its function. Of course, this is likely not true, but it would explain a few things.
I too am emotionally sensitive to the electromagnetic field. My phone is the transducer.
Interesting. I don't know that it's a literal electromagnetic field, but it does seem to be a dynamic pattern. I don't personally think I have enough information yet to guess at what medium that pattern is encoded in (I mean, except, broadly, "Brain stuff").
Not long ago, I suffered the first bout of unexpected unconsciousness I'd ever experienced; a series of unfortunate events caused me to pass out from pain (which I didn't quite understand was really a thing before then... Haha no that's real, you can get your brain shorted out from too much pain signal). The experience was a little... Cosmologically-reframing. It wasn't like sleep; it was a missing-time experience. Like, post-event me is acutely aware of a lack of me in that period of time; the body was there (I assume; I couldn't see it but there's nowhere for it to have gone), the thing I'd call myself seems to have completely 404'd for about a half hour.
Put lots of thoughts of my own mortality in my head. Not sure I'd recommend it.
> Like Penrose said, I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field,
Careful around magnets my friend, your consciousness will change a lot if you're right.
It does, we actually use Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to treat Major Depressive Disorder and a few other things. Precisely because electromagnetic waves can alter our perceptions and behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...
No, TMS is electric shock therapy, the magnetic field induces electrical currents in the brain and that is the mechanism for the effect.
EM waves can “alter our perceptions and behavior” in the sense that electric shocking the brain can, not through some special interaction.
Your use of "is" here is problematic (and that's what triggered the other responses).
I guess you mean "like". That would be accurate: TMS is disrupting normal brain activity a little like ECT does. It alters consciousness because it causes a partial reboot - an altered state. Drugs (and sleep and love and anger and meditation) also cause altered states. (Not to imply that any of these altered states are the same!)
The “is” I meant is that it induces an electric current in the brain. I’m sure there’s some subtlety (in the temporal and spatial patterns) but whether current is flowing between electrodes or is induced from a changing magnetic field, it’s still current, the effects of which are what we’re seeing.
Crucially, there is no special magnetic interaction with the brain beyond Faraday’s law, as people seem to be implying.
There's no shock. There's also no direct contact. It's literally magnetic.
A changing magnetic field induces an electric field; this is how asynchronous motors work.
Having been in the room with a patient undergoing TMS a couple dozen times, I can assure you that the electromagnet will induce a muscle twitch from the electric field it creates. What it doesn't do is cause a seizure, which is the typical desired result of ECT.
> No, TMS is electric shock therapy,
This is just 100% false. To say that TMS is electric shock therapy because it changed electrical signals in the brain is totally misleading, if not, totally misunderstanding the science of the relationship between electricity and magnetism.
The fact that both electricity and magnetism can affect neurotransmission does not mean that TMS and ECT are the same thing. When they give people ECT they’re giving them controlled seizures. In TMS this is not the case at all.
This is a mis-quote. Consciousness is more like a field than a particle. It just turns out that everything is a field.
I want to say in light of all the down votes you’re getting on this, that I agree with you.
I believe everything is a field and a probability. That objects have no defined borders, but our brains create these borders to reconcile with the probability of a thing being in a certain area. I think the proof this comes when we understand that we never really touch anything, it’s only the electromagnetic field that we are experiencing from another object.
Cheers mate. Also, I’m sorry to read you are homeless according to your description. We have family that suffer from schizophrenia and would be otherwise homeless without our support. I hope you have such a network.
You might appreciate this discussion on fields: https://youtu.be/dU0NIU5d4BI
Oh, please don’t be silly. I think this is one of these comments that serve no purpose here. Most Magnets are too weak to possibly affect consciousness.
But the earths magnetic field….
https://www.science.org/content/article/humans-other-animals...
https://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0483-18.2019
And Transcranial magnetic stimulation….
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/transcranial-mag...
What is depression other than a change in the state of consciousness?
But I might want to continue and ask you a question, and this is just out of curiosity, do you think consciousness is made of matter?
> But I might want to continue and ask you a question, and this is just out of curiosity, do you think consciousness is made of matter?
You might want to stop calling people silly if you want them to answer your random questions. You'd have to define consciousness to ask that question because every person that overthinks these topics has their own personal definition and they are 100% sure they are right.
Editor's summary:
> Synaptic connections mediate classical intercellular communication in the brain. However, recent data have demonstrated the existence of noncanonical routes of interneuronal communication mediating the transport of materials including calcium, mitochondria, and pathogenic proteins such as amyloid beta (Aβ). Using super-resolution and electron microscopy, Chang et al. identified and characterized structures called nanotubular bridges that connect dendrites in the brain (see the Perspective by Budinger and Heneka). These bridges mediate the transport of calcium ions, small molecules, and Aβ peptides, and may contribute to the spreading and accumulation of pathological Aβ in Alzheimer’s disease. —Mattia Maroso
does super-resolution refer to the image processing technique of interpolating/hallucinating higher resolutions? if so, is this a common/respected part of evidence gathering?
Super resolution refers to imaging below the refraction limit, more or less by having the receiving sensor within a wavelength or two of the material being imaged, allowing you to use the nearfield (which doesn't have a diffraction limit, but which also doesn't propagate beyond a couple wavelengths) instead of the farfield (which does, and does).
It's unrelated to the nvidia marketing term for ai filtering of images.
Nvidia's DLSS Super Resolution doesn't do anything with bypassing the diffraction limit, but does go beyond the single image nyquist limit by undersampling the input render, jittering the projection matrix each frame, and reconstructing higher resolution with frame history. It's reconstructing real extra detail. Some parts of it like handling disocclusion areas between frames etc. are fully hallucinated though.
With camera movement and things like gaps between camera sensor elements acting as the undersampling, their video super resolution may be learning similar ways of legitimately reconstructing at a higher res from temporal data, though it also hallucinates some in and is dealing with already compressed video where a lot of that might be lost.
I'm not sure if their video super resolution actually does this kind of temporal stuff though or it is just a repeated image upscale, but some of the AI video upscalers do and get much better upscaling on longer windows of frames than when run frame by frame without context.
Usually methods that get past the diffraction limit but not through hallucination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution_microscopy
But they say they used ML analysis too in the abstract
> Using super-resolution microscopy,25 we characterized their unique molecular composition and dynamics in dissociated neurons,26 enabling Ca 2+ propagation over distances. Utilizing imaging and machine-learning-based27 analysis, we confirmed the in situ presence of DNTs connecting dendrites to other dendrites28 whose anatomical features are distinguished from synaptic dendritic spines
it’s amazing to me how we’re still discovering new pieces of the human body every year. you would have thought by now we’d have discovered everything
An interesting post I read recently about why we haven't: https://svpow.com/2024/09/07/were-not-going-to-run-out-of-ne...
Of course, that's specifically about human anatomy. In this case we're talking about a feature that I'd bet is present in other animals too, so the factors discussed here don't all apply. In this case though there seems to be a straightforward answer -- the structures involved are very small! The post I linked is largely talking about larger structures we failed to find...
Science teachers in schools and TV documentaries play a large part in driving this perception.
Yup. You teach only 1/4th of the Rumsfeld matrix (known knowns). And TV shows are there for a good story, not philosophy of knowledge.
Don't call it that. He didn't make it up. Descriptive names are better than memorial names anyway. Call it the known-unknown matrix, or known-unknown risk classification system.
It's a fine name, because everyone (in the USA) knows what is being referred to in only 2 words. AND we get to remember a feeling of amusement mixed with horror that we had at the time that man who said something so intelligent was simultaneously making decisions so catastrophically stupid and impactful to all of us.
Wait, what's the fourth? Unknown knowns? How's that work?
They are things that you know, that you don't know you know. For example, uncovering links between existing knowledge that uncovers something that then feels obvious.
This happens occasionally where two previously thought seperate fields of study discover a common link with each being able to explain the questions the other had struggled with.
Lots of people know things deeply in their subconscious that they are fully ignorant of in their conscious thinking. These can manifest as gut feelings, or anxieties, and with therapy, can be identified. Things like "you should leave him", or whatever.
Tacit knowledge
Find me one science teacher who says that we literally know everything about the human body there is to know. Just one.
The amount of anti-education/anti-school rhetoric on HN these days is worrying.
> by now we’d have discovered everything
Until we both discover everything down to the Planck length, and then prove somehow that the Planck length is truly the smallest "unit", then we have not discovered everything. And we have probably hardly discovered anything, relatively.
The one thing we're discovering is how little we've discovered.
I always think about this when alien technology gets reverse-engineered in a remarkably short time in SF novels.
To paraphrase the great Noam Chomsky: cognitive science is in a pre-Gallilean stage.
Many thousands of incredible scientists have done amazing work over the past ~century, but cutting-edge neuroscience still doesn't have the conceptual tools to go much farther than "when you look at apples this part of your cortex is more active, so we'll call this the Apple Zone".
Sadly/happily, I personally think there's good reason to think that this will change in our lifetime, which mean's we can all find out if trading the medicalization of mental health treatment (i.e. progressing beyond symptom-based guess-and-check) for governmental access to actual lie detecting helmets (i.e. dystopia) is worth it...
There's a new theory that we might actually gain a greater understanding of the human mind by studying the AI systems we create, because we can basically get a perfect X-ray of their neural nets at any particular state.
When we look at the "apple zone" part of an AI model that lights up, we see it in way higher resolution than our best scans of the human brain, and this might tell us something about how apples are perceived by both systems, or how language is represented neurally, or any number of other things.
And we can barely figure out how the modern LLMs work.
That doesn't bode well for minds being human-interpretable, not at all.
I used to think that the biggest bottleneck to understanding the workings of the human brain was that it defies instrumentation. Which could be solved by better imaging techniques, high throughput direct neural interfaces, etc. But looking at the state of AI now?
If we had full read/write access to the state of every single neuron in the brain, what would we be able to learn? Maybe not that much.
I think this is more or less exactly what Chomsky hoped (hopes?) AI research would eventually become, rather than the purely pragmatic pursuit of tool making it has typically been.
Given that we're basically in the stone age still as far as the brain is concerned, we've got a long long way before that could be remotely true.
But we said the same about GenAI.
>you would have thought by now we’d have discovered everything
I genuinely wouldn't.
preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.20.655147v1....
Time to re-designed our artificial neural networks
One of the neat and mindnumbing things about the brain is the number of information passing pathways. There are so many and as this discovery evidences, we're still finding new ones.
Not sure our ANNs will ever be able to model them all.
Communication here seems to refer more to the passing of proteins and ions than information. Critically the amyloid proteins studied in Alzheimer's.
Our ANNs have abandoned any similarity with brain neural networks basically right after they appeared. As we've learned more about neuro-biology, the gap has simply grown larger.
I've been impressed with CfCs --- and the stuff Liquid https://www.liquid.ai/research/liquid-neural-networks-resear... is trying to do: model neurons as differential equations, and use CfC methods to alleviate runtime ODE solving, using approximations (or tight integral bounds), so there’s often a tradeoff between approximation error and speed. https://chatgpt.com/share/68f2ada8-06ac-8002-9191-269b0cbba4...
The Big question is: WHERE is the Complexity? If Complexity is Fixed in a System, it must be Somewhere. (you can see this at play any time you look at a large software system.) Do you have simple 'blocks' and many of them? OR, do you have more complicated blocks (requiring more computons), but fewer of them? I think this is an exciting research area right now.
Biological neurons are not easily modeled as any neat mathematical system. They seem to perform significant computational tasks even when alone - as do many other cells in the body, btw. Neuron linking is also more complex than the simplistic weighted connection model. Also, in biological neural networks, you have multiple kinds of neurotransmitters, not just a single signal, and beyond the quantity of neurotransmitters and their electrical properties being transmitted, the frequency of neuron firing is also known to be a significant factor that affects computation; and beyond neurotransmitters, hormones secreted in the brain and other places have some clear effects on cognition. And these are just pieces we know - there are certainly all sorts of other effects that we don't know, some chemical, some structural, some even physical perhaps (consider how all of the moving charges in one part of the brain might interact with other parts through electromagnetic fields).
We have no idea how much of this complexity is fundamental and how much is incidental, of course. But it is certain that every part of the brain is way more complex than the ultra-simplistic ANNs, and replacing the sigmoid function with some ODE will not move that needle significantly.
how? Also, is this any different than 'merely' providing more bits of I/O to neurons via this different 'channel'?
Bananuler, interactivodular…
ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring …
I've got my hunches
This research was primarily done at John's Hopkins in Baltimore and funded by NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Good reminder... Presumably, the lab phases were completed before 2025. In February of this year, a neuroscientist at John Hopkins said of the political spending cuts “This is simply the end.” https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/trumps-nih-budg...
:(
I dont think there is nearly enough attention on how much of our great science in the US has come to a complete halt.
There has been a lot of attention. But not enough, yes.
Sadly, thanks to Democracy, we have a plurality of voters who do not value research, or understand how it will one day be themselves who are patients.
China will pick up the slack.......
Totally tubular, man!
The same thing is hypothesized for most tissue in the body and a source of how cancer seems to spread without direct connectivity. It's been classified so often as just background curioso that it never was investigated further.
Hopefully finer grained imaging will elludicdate this stuff.
And then you have AI “specialist “ like Hinton doing thought experiments saying if we replaced a neuron with ones we made we would still be conscious exactly the same way
I still think there's a good chance that evolution has figured out some way to leverage quantum computation, probably in a very different way from the way we're trying to do it with ultra-cold low noise quantum digital circuits. If this is the case it's going to be some kind of high temperature noisy analog stochastic way of harnessing QC. The phrase "stochastic analog quantum computer" comes to mind.
It's how little energy the brain uses, especially for learning. The brain seems to be hundreds of thousands to millions of times more energy efficient than any kind of current AI on a classical computer, not to mention still beating it in terms of performance and versatility. Transistors do not use millions of times more energy than synapses, and processor feature sizes are not millions of times larger. Something else is going on.
Either the brain is leveraging QC or our AI training algorithms are just really really horrible compared to whatever is happening in biology. Maybe biology found learning methods that work thousands of times better than differential backpropagation.
I like the possibility of QC in brain. However, explaining why brain is much more efficient that computers does not need QC. Computers and Brain evolved in two completely different ways. For the brain, simple cognitive functions emerge first, supporting more complex life behaviours, starting with very simple multi celular life forms. Logical reasoning emerges much later, and is pretty expensive. Then we made computers to do logical computation and they are incredibly efficient at it: a modern low power processor is much more efficient than human brain in this kind of workload, by orders of magnitude.
Now we are trying to implement what the mind is naturally good at with systems designed to do logic well. This is the main reason it's so inefficient. Emulation is costly. It is costly when brain does logic, and is costly when computers do AI.
In theory, we should be able to build computing devices designed for AI workloads, and they can be as efficient as brain or even much better.
> The [human] brain seems to be hundreds of thousands to millions of times more energy efficient than any kind of current AI
I don't know about that... I've consumed quite a few calories in my lifetime directly, plus there is all the energy needed for me to live in a modern civilization and make the source material available to me for learning (schools, libraries, internet) and I still only have a minuscule fraction of the information in my head that a modern LLM does after a few months of training.
Translated into KWh, I've used very roughly 50,000 KWh just in terms of food calories... but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4... GPT5 itself needing about 25x to 30x as much energy to train... certainly not 100s of thousands to millions of times as much. And again, these LLMs have a lot more information encoded into them available for nearly instant response than even the smartest human does, so we're not really comparing apples with apples here.
In short, while I wouldn't rule out that the brain uses quantum effects somehow, I don't think there's any spectacular energy-efficiency there to bolster that argument.
> plus there is all the energy needed for me to live in a modern civilization and make the source material available to me for learning (schools, libraries, internet)
To be fair, this is true of LLMs too, and arguably more true for them than it is for humans. LLMs would've been pretty much impossible to achieve w/o massive amounts of digitized human-written text (though now ofc they could be bootstrapped with synthetic data).
> but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4
But if we're including all the energy for supporting infrastructure for humans, shouldn't we also include it for GPT? Mining metals, constructing the chips, etc.? Also, the "modern" is carrying a lot of the weight here. Pre-modern humans were still pretty smart and presumably nearly as efficient in their learning, despite using much less energy.
That seems incredibly unlikely given the impossibility of maintaining coherent quantum state in a noisy thermal environment like the brain.
On a semi-related note, it is interesting to see some of the fledgling evidence for quantum processes existing in metabolism[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology (on a phone so can't link the exact section, but it's the section on mitochondria under energy transfer).
Penrose and other talk about this and how it’s possible in the noisy wet messy environment of the human brain.
https://www.pbs.org/video/was-penrose-right-new-evidence-for...
Just cause we don’t understand it yet does not mean it’s not possible.
FYI Penrose is a cautionary tale in the physicist community. He is/was once a competent academic, but his quantum consciousness ideas are viewed similarly to tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. It is technobabble word salad; quantum woo driven more by a personal objection to the implications of Newtonian determinism to the philosophy of the mind, not reason.
We understand quantum interactions more than sufficiently enough to know that the thread of hope he clings to, the soul of the gaps via quantum woo, is not in any way plausible. It is comparable to a perpetual motion machine.
You’re not providing me enough evidence other than saying it was just “woo” science. This is how a lot of new science is rejected.
If you can provide me with scientist objecting to the claim or writing negative papers about his theories I will gladly absorb them.
At best scientists are divided on his opinions, but this is far from calling them woo woo. I mean, bad scientist will call that but good ones will have honest disagreements and discussions.
> We understand quantum interactions more than sufficiently enough
Do we really?
Yes, we do understand quantum mechanics very, very well. It is a profoundly reliable theory, and fully describes all phenomena that could plausibly have causal effects on biochemistry. You have to get to black holes, galaxy formation, or femtokelvin above absolute zero to encounter regions where the standard model breaks down / new physics becomes possible.
Regarding critical evaluations of Penrose, this is the first that pops up: https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-theory-of-consciousness-p... Like most published accounts, it is respectful towards Penrose and less inflammatory than what I wrote, at least on the surface. I'd draw your attention to this bit towards the end though:
> Still, they say, the overall requirements seem daunting – the brain needing to maintain a mass of 10−16 kg in a coherent state for 25 ms over a length scale of about 10 nm. “This vastly exceeds any of the coherent superposition states achieved with state-of-the-art optomechanics or macromolecular interference experiments,” they note.
This is a devastating statement hidden in technical terminology. Basically he's saying: "Even with the most sophisticated physics laboratories, under ideal conditions & with highly sensitive instrumentation, we're unable to achieve the superpositions that Roger Penrose is claiming is going on in the absolutely hostile thermal bath of the brain."
LLMs process everything from scratch. The brain is doing virtually everything from memory.
Well, it's more like temporal compression.
The brain too learns from scratch. From birth through death, it's acquiring information, integrating that information, and using it. LLMs do this in a shorter time period.
So, there IS a series of tubes?
This reminded me about this study from 2014 referencing quantum vibrations in the brain:
"Discovery of quantum vibrations in 'microtubules' inside brain neurons supports controversial theory of consciousness"
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116085105.h...
Knew we would have a quantum woo comment in the first 10 comments on this. Unless you can show a coherent quantum state at human body temp then please stop with this nonsense.
I read Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind when I was younger. It suggested quantum processes as a last ditch effort for a non-deterministic brain. At the time, I thought it was a fascinating prediction of how our minds might work and that reading it made me a smarter person.
I have since come to view it more as an interesting lesson in the pitfalls of hypothesis formation, popular non-fiction, and vanity.
Even so, as a layperson, it's entirely understandable to perk up whenever someone discovers 'tubules' in the brain, even if none of that sufficiently supports any of the collapse requirements of the Penrose/Hammeroff quantum microtubes.
Irrespective, it's interesting to see a different reference to small tubular structures from some time ago.
This was my feeling too.
Maybe it's just the timing by coincidence, but the greater amount of study in/around the brain during and since the pandemic has been encouraging.
Just in case anyone is interested: There is good research into microtubules being related to neurodiversity, the research is specifically in the direction of ASD. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33526823/ - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3728923/
On the second point of QM in biology more generally tho, this research is interesting: https://arxiv.org/html/2409.03497v1
I am one of these people. I have polymorphisms in the DNM1 and DNM3 gene which I believe causes my OCD and Asperger’s.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37132416/
Should be noted that none of these papers addresses computation via qubits in the neuronal tubes which is central to the OrchOR theory of quantum woo consciousness.
Being of scientific mind, I keep in mind that scientific discoveries existed the whole time until they were discovered as well.
The research on what we can see and learn in the brain is remarkable in the last 10 years. fMRI alone is staggering.
Your question seems to be one of enough resolution. The brain continues to get more attention in greater and greater resolution.
There seems to me more research in the area which is encouraging too.
I don't get the feeling your'e really interested in it other than looking at where the research is occurring and building from where and how you want to see it. Time will tell either way.
There's nothing necessarily interesting about quantum effects in the brain. Hard drives and other parts of a computer use quantum effects too, but it doesn't make them quantum computers.
Penrose is just another person who thinks "quantum" means "magic".
Quantum qubits in neuronal tubes is explanatorily equivalent to Pixie Dust in the Brain. Its not scientific or explanatory for consciousness.
Tomorrow's headline: New AI model uses nanotubular-like communication just like the human brain and achieves 100% SWE-Bench score.
You mean:
Altman Gave GPT Alzheimer's Disease to Spread Awareness
From my experience GPT already exhibits symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
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A "micro" tubule is smaller than a "nano" tubule? How did they get that backwards?
They didn't. noaidi did.
Sorry, I did.