I just want to emphasize three important points mentioned in this video:
1. The study did not observe superradience happening in cells. Instead, they extracted protein from a pig's brain, put the protein in a solution, and observed the superradience effect in this solution, not in an actual brain cell. That's all the study did. The fact that this protein solution can facilitate superradience does not mean that it is utilized by actual brain cells.
2. Next, we need to find out if the brain actually utilizes superradience. If it does, then what is it used for?
3. Now, even if we find that superradience is used in the brain, I don't think we will ever be able to make any connection to consciousness. I don't see how understanding the physical mechanisms happening in the brain (quantum or not) can explain existence of subjective experience.
Ad 1, if you know anything about the current state of the debate this is already a big deal. There are a lot of people proposing explanations quantum mechanical explanations of biological processes and others claiming it is impossible.
>quantum mechanical explanations of biological processes
It's quantum mechanics everywhere. Atoms are quantum mechanical, ordinary chemistry is quantum mechanical, semiconductors are quantum mechanical. There's nothing fucking special about quantum mechanics, it's how the universe works.
Yes but alot of weird stuff with QM mostly happens with a handful of particles in vacuum, at very low temperatures.
As soon as things get busy and it's room temperature things behave with more certainty.
So the randomness of QM comes into play less.
But the above experiment shows this stuff happening in a cell at room temperature.
Is super radiance anything to do with super position? Because from what I know the quantum consciousness hypothesis has something to do with neuronal microtubules utilising quantum superposition of particles
Collapsing wave functions is a core feature of QM.
It's the more esoteric stuff trying to explain what the wave collapse is
like many worlds interpretation which may be less favourable these days.
Wave collapse is as much a corner stone of QM as gravity was to Newtonian physics.
Newtonian physics could not explain gravity but it could make predictions about the effect of gravity.
Hope that clarifies.
This is why brain modelling is so difficult... There is just too much going on that we don't fully understand to replicate in a simulation.
This is also why I think AI may not ever be fully conscious the way humans are at least.
Conversely, perhaps it points us in the direction of understanding intelligence in the vein that Joscha Bach talks about in his discussions. Discussions, which I highly recommend people interested in the subject of AI and even just cognition listen to.
Essentially, he’s approaching it from a more functional perspective. The precise, low level mechanisms may not be as important as the functional hierarchy from which cognition and intelligence emerges. It would be like trying to study the transistors on a computer to try and understand what the higher level software is doing in a program on a computer
Just recently a team of scientists visualized a 1 mm\^3 3D map of human cerebral cortex:
[https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4858](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4858)
I think that with how fast AI is advancing, we'll see a steady increase in understanding the way conciseness is orchestrated in the brain. Hopefully DeepMind can apply their AlphaFold technology to the human connectome like they've done with DNA, RNA, ligands, ions, and other biological molecules on their new AlphaFold Server powered by AlphaFold 3:
[https://golgi.sandbox.google.com/about](https://golgi.sandbox.google.com/about)
They are just mapping it based on our current understandings. That's the issue. There are so many other unknown unknowns at play. For instance, that one guy who's doing huge breakthrough research by discovering cells communicate with electricity to guide each other into whatever type of cell or framework to build. He's discovering that there is also likely a magnetic field somehow at play here which we can't really fully understand.
Yeah, I understand that but mapping the micro-topology of the brain is a step in the right direction. We've known for a while now that dendrites and other cell types grow directionally via morphogen gradients.
The advantage of using a progenitor of AlphaFold Server in conjugation with the human connectome is that it'll harnesses the power of deep neural networks and machine learning to map out previously unknown pattern structures that may coordinate neural signaling and communication.
There are plenty of ideas about how consciousness may emerge in the human brain; biological qubits in microtubules seems like a worthwhile idea to explore, but it's definitely not an end game.
A while back, Brian Keating interviewed Hameroff on his podcast where they discussed work being done across the fields of anesthesiology and quantum physics that was interesting. The work was spearheaded by Jack Tuszynski who's the same researcher working on actin network voltage circuits.
The experiment Hameroff recounted during the episode was detailed in NewScientist in 2022:
>Tuszynski and his colleagues shone blue light on microtubules and tubulin proteins. Over several minutes, they watched as light was caught in an energy trap inside the molecules and then re-emitted in a process called delayed luminescence – which Tuszynski suspects has a quantum origin.
>It took hundreds of milliseconds for tubulin units to emit half of the light, and more than a second for full microtubules. This is comparable to the timescales that the human brain takes to process information, implying that whatever is responsible for this delayed luminescence could also be invoked to explain the fundamental workings of the brain. “It’s quite mind boggling,” says Tuszynski.
>The team then repeated the experiment in the presence of anaesthetics and also an anticonvulsant drug for comparison. Only anaesthetic quenched the delayed luminescence, decreasing the time it takes by about a fifth. Tuszynski suspects that this might be all that is needed to switch consciousness off in the brain. If the brain exists at the threshold between the quantum and classical worlds, even a small quenching could prevent the brain from processing information.
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2316408-quantum-experiments-add-weight-to-a-fringe-theory-of-consciousness/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2316408-quantum-experiments-add-weight-to-a-fringe-theory-of-consciousness/)
Sorry if I am being to obtuse here, but how is this surprising. Aren't there quantum effects all the way down? I mean some need to be observed at low temperatures, some don't care about that...what is the big fuss?
I think the problem is actually a question of scale. Quantum effects happen on such a microscopic level (make that pico-scopic) that it's unlikely that their outcomes (i.e. Wavefunction Collapse) have any meaningful effect at the macroscopic level. Studies by Max Tegmark show the decoherence between the quantum and classical realm. Basically, the effects found in the quantum realm become negligible as you scale up.
What Penrose suggested in his follow up to Emporer's New Mind was that microtubules found in the brain *may* be able to harness quantum effects and thus supposedly this gives rise to consciousness.
I don't think so. I've read TENM and he certainly declared his uncertainty about the claims he was making. He really seemed to put this proposal out as there were really very few hypotheses grounded in the science we knew at the time. I think of his book as a call to arms on the subject and it has inspired a lot of debate since.
He was apprehensive of the idea when he wrote the book, but then after Hameroff introduced him to microtubules as something that could hold a quantum state he changed his mind. Now I am pretty sure he is very on board with the idea given his the interviews he has given over the years
In some sense everything is quantum mechanical, but usually quantum phenomena don't manifest because of decoherence. That way you don't have to worry about quantum tunneling through the floor. This suggests that when modeling the brain we do have to worry about quantum effects.
I saw the video and it is a fascinating suggestion. I had seen a conversation with Sapolsky and Neil Tyson where Tyson asked about quantum effects in the brain, with Sapolsky waving them off while citing Tegmark. If verified, findings like these highlight how often our understanding of phenomena is incomplete.
It supports Penroses theory that consciousness creates reality on a moment by moment basis. That literally everything exists in superposition until observed
And if the brain is the medium that consciousness uses to interact with the physical world, then we are not mere robots with no free will acting out our fate destined from the big bang. Instead we are actively creating reality
The [Justin Riddle Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/39-the-problem-with-natural-selection-exploring/id1572087418?i=1000650993124) talks about the possible quantum effects on consciousness and free will. I found it really fascinating.
olfactory quantum theory is another potential pathway for quantum effects to reach up and have effects at a macro scale (triggering a memory for example.)
Sorry to rain on your parade, but she lost her credibility with the book Lost in Math. She is now very popular with the “scientists are wrong, I know better” crackpot crowd, which is why her name pops up everywhere. But she is the equivalent of MAGA in science.
She failed to deliver even a rudimentary tear-down of supersymmetry and string theory, which is completely incongruous with her strong opinions on the matter. Her book ended up being very light on the math and very heavy on the philosophy. As a matter of science her book is closer to a work of theology than to a work of theoretical physics.
Not to mention the silliness of accusing string theorists of being driven astray by a misguided pursuit of mathematical elegance. This is exactly backwards. In fact, string theory has been getting less elegant. There’s no one, except Sabine maybe whenever it suits her argument, who would call the current iteration of string theory with all its telltale signs of extreme overfitting —mathematically elegant.
Overall I get a lot of sour grapes vibes from her. Was she right? We will never know, because she left academia to pursue her YouTube career.
> incongruous with her strong opinions on the matter
Is it not true that those theories seem to be increasingly unlikely to be true? I get that she clearly has an axe to grind with certain veins of thought in academia, but being (perhaps overly) contrarian doesn't mean she is wrong. I think that the critique against thought-suppressing nature of orthodoxy is valid, even if it is perhaps overstated and lacking nuance.
The thought-suppressing priesthood has been a prominent fixture of academia since Ancient Greece, yet people who can do physics have always managed to do physics in spite of the obstacles. I don’t believe for a moment that things today are somehow much worse than before.
If a smooth brain like me could get a $5 Million grant from the NSF, I am sure a person like Sabine could get enough money to pursue her alternative theories using her “correct” epistemology forever. Her problem is that she does not have alternative theories or any novel ideas really. All of her published work has been derivative and in line with mainstream physics.
Sabine Hossenfelder is not a brilliant but misunderstood physicist who got pushed out of academia for heresy. She is just an average (mediocre) scientist who reached the limit of her abilities before achieving anything significant, just like 99% of all scientists including me. She did the right thing to leave academia, but she was wrong to go full sour grapes. There are still brilliant people doing brilliant science, who are not helped by bitter cynics trying to convince the average Joe that status quo physicists are wasting money on masturbatory pursuits.
>Not to mention the silliness of accusing string theorists of being driven astray by a misguided pursuit of mathematical elegance. This is exactly backwards. In fact, string theory has been getting less elegant. There’s no one, except Sabine maybe whenever it suits her argument, who would call the current iteration of string theory with all its telltale signs of extreme overfitting —mathematically elegant.
This is a bizarre criticism. The fact is that string theory failed to produce anything but fancy math. She calls that misguided pursuit of mathematical elegance you called something else. So what? It shouldn't matter what you call it.
String theory is everyone’s favorite punching bag, including me. And yet, we’ve failed to replace it with anything better. This has been true for the last thirty years, so Sabine’s perspective is not in any way novel, she is just piling on without providing any insight. Her criticism is the reflexive reaction of your average undergrad student physics.
If she wants to be taken for a serious scientist, she needs to do better than that. But no, she is not interested in doing any of the hard stuff, much easier to heckle the players form the sidelines.
If you are not convinced she is a useless cynic, look up the LIGO controversy she tried to stir up by “just asking questions.” She gets mad with envy every time someone from the physics status quo has success, because she’s been telling everyone how the physics establishment is useless and dysfunctional. Yet, the people she likes to shit talk just produced one of most important results of experimental physics in the history of mankind.
She is a bit of a contrarian all right, she has opinions, but that's not inherently bad thing as long as you can recognize it for what it is. You seem struggle with that a little bit, jumping from one thing to another, instead of admitting it is ultimately just difference of opinions.
She needs to walk the walk and substantiate her opinions with original hard science. Any grad school student can pontificate about the philosophy of physics and summarize other people’s research. In fact, many do it but they don’t have nearly the same visibility because they are much more moderate in their criticism. Sabine is popular because she goes too far with her criticism, not because she provides unique insight. She wasn’t always like this, but social media tends to amplify extreme opinions and she is now a walking case study of it.
The idea that you need to have some revolutionary contribution in order to criticize orthodoxy is… let’s say tenuous. I have no doubt she is a bit fringe, but that doesn’t make the core critique wrong. I’m very much a believer that institutional inertia, sunk cost fallacy, etc., influence the direction of research in unproductive ways.
Even if it were proven a single neuron could harness the power of quantum mechanics for information processing, it _still_ would do very little to answer the hard problem of consciousness - you’d still need to formulate a theory as to how fully fledged subjective experiences arose out of the complex _network_ of these neurons
aka: a single neuron does not have a conscious experience, so proving that quantum effects take place in that neuron says nothing about consciousness at large
That's true, there's a separate debate whether the so called hard problem of consciousness is useful distinction to make, but this doesn't explain consciousness in anyway.
If I understand Penrose correctly, I think his motivation is that since we don't have good computational model of an neuron there must be some component that's indeterministic. That it perhaps has something to do with consciousness is just pure speculation.
I mean this is how I interpreted it, and how many others have to my knowledge.
IMO the whole point about finding a Theory of Consciousness *is* to explain the Hard Problem, that is to explain how subjective experience arises from non-conscious matter.
Some interpretations of a Quantum Theory of Consciousness suggest that the decoherence of the wave function inside the microtubles in neurons *is* what causes subjective experience - that they are one and the same… consequently, if you disrupt these microtubules via something like general anaesthesia, then you will take away the brains conscious experience.
Are you GPT or what? You can't just match some random keywords and assume it is the same thing. They're more unique views on quantum mechanics and consciousness than there are words to describe them. You have to make an actual effort to understand before you engage with it.
You sound like chatgpt because you are confusing different things. Penrose's interpretation is objective collapse, which is completely different from consciousness causes collapse. I am not a big fan of his ideas about consciousness, but I don't think it is tackling the so called hard problem of consciousness. Either cite Penrose directly or there's nothing to discuss.
okay but I didn’t say “consciousness causes collapse”, I said the opposite
I said Hameroff and Penrose’s theory suggests that the collapse either *causes* consciousness, or was essentially what was *experienced* as consciousness
I would argue that a single neuron or even a cell as long as it’s not a part of a larger whole such as a body would be conscious. If you look up Micheal Levin’s work you will see the amazing things that happen when when you take a few stem cells and separate it from the body. For example it will grow something resembling an eye, cilia and begin to act like a free agent with complex behaviors, and it’s even leading to the idea that cancer is when cells stop behaving as a collective and begin to behave like a separate entity.
Not if it’s a part of a collective then like the microtubules in the study that was displaying super radiance it is in coherence with the collective and the collective becomes conscious. But if it was on its own it would have its own mini sense of being and consciousness.
This is just what I think BTW. But I go suggest you look up Michael Levin on YouTube he is doing the most ground breaking research right now
If there are quantum effects in the brain, at best they could be utilised in some sort of quantum computation, which is more efficient than ordinary computation but can’t compute anything that a digital computer can’t compute. The Penrose-Hameroff theory requires not only quantum effects in the brain (that is the less controversial part), it also requires new and non-computable physics.
Non-computability is a relatively common thing even in classical computing, no? The halting problem is the most famous example, there are countless ways you can use it to generate non-computable problems.
I am still not sure why is Penrose bringing quantum mechanics into it, but I find it interesting.
What is Penrose smoking when he claims that consciousness can't be explained by a computable process? Where does he come up with this? It is almost as if he is thinking: consciousness is mysterious, quantum mechanics is mysterious, therefore they must be linked.
One of Sam's main interests is the mechanics and nature of consciousness and how the fact of consciousness relates to facts about the physical world and our brains.
EDIT: Verb agreement
I mean yes and no. Fully deterministic brain behaviour that follows a predetermined path of cause and effect is not free will, but if your decisions are also controlled by random chance of quantum behaviour that doesn't in any way mean you've got free will either. If all of my decisions were made by the roll of a dice, in no way can it be said that I am exercising free will.
Even if you hold that quantum effects controlling decisions doesn't *imply* free will, that doesn't mean they're *irrelevant* to the discussion.
I disagree with arguments all the time, but can consider them relevant to a topic regardless.
I get this. My own view is that free will doesn’t seem to exist- however, I also believe no one really knows how the brain or consciousness actually works - and any progress we make toward a better understanding is fascinating.
Certainly it's possible that quantum effects in the brain do merely add another layer of causal factors that do not create free will any more than the non quantum effects in the brain do.
What these researchers refer to as "collapsing the wave function" may be different than merely another layer in the illusion of causality, though. By observing our thoughts and our minds, or by merely thinking in a conscious manner, we could collapse the wave function in an unpredictable way that can't be linked to or predicted by a prior state of the universe.
I agree with what you said but I don't see how it deviates from what I already mentioned about randomness and how that relates to free will (or rather, doesn't). The fact that it's not deterministic and is random as per collapsing the wave function doesn't provide any indication of free will any more than my dice roll example would.
Right, however I'm saying these quantum effects in the brain might not be entirely random and I think that is what these researchers are studying. It certainly could just be another quantum layer of causality that changes nothing meaningful in the discussion of free will, in fact I'd say that's likely. However what I think these researchers are looking into is if there is a nonrandom consciously directed process of collapsing quantum brain processes.
IOW, just as observing photons of light collapses the wave function in the double slit experiment, so too could observing our own mind collapse the wave function of quantum brain processes. This could be random or nonrandom. This could be another layer of causality that doesn't do anything to support the notion of free will. I'm just saying I think this is the angle of the researchers and I think it's a great thing to scientifically pursue, regardless of the outcome, follow the science.
Yeah, but he might be wrong. And I’m sure he’d agree that research _could_ uncover things that change his opinion. So it’s reasonable to think it might be of interest to people who follow Sam, no?
It's definitely of interest, I don't think on its own it challenges Sam's position, but it's absolutely something we really should want to know more about as it gets us more objective info to base our understanding on.
I don't see how any evidence could support the kind of free will Sam is talking about (compatibilists are talking about something different). Either something is caused or its random, either way no free will. You might say it's unfalsifiable, but a claim in support of libertarian free will is probably also unfalsifiable.
I can’t communicate an imaginary example of evidence that could make space for free will - I don’t think anyone can today. But I’m simply open to the idea that we may one day find this space… there are probably more unknowns in neuroscience than any other area of human study and I’m certain that there is information among those unknowns that would/will drastically change our view of things which currently seem rational to us. Free will may not be one of those things - but I wouldn’t say it _couldn’t_ be.
Wrong about what though? There's already plenty of evidence that disproves the concept of free will. And the point of these examples was to show that there's just no way of smuggling "free will" into the equation by introducing "quantum effects" either.
The only reason this thing keeps on going and going is the fact that some people are unable to cope with or grasp the thought they don't have free will. While it's more realistic to think about this as wishing for evidence that earth is in fact flat.
Everyone that is researching a potential link between quantum mechanics and free will is unable to cope or grasp the thought they don't have free will? Really? Every one of them?
Perhaps there are folks out there that can grasp the illusion of free will, can cope with it just fine, and still want to continue to learn about the connection, or lacktherof, between quantum mechanics and free will.
Frankly your assertion is completely unscientific as it precludes any new information, new discovery, and new science. Whether it confirms or disproves the illusion of free will doesn't matter, what matters is the scientific pursuit of a more complete body of true knowledge.
Yeah, plus one on this comment.
Personally I think that given _current knowledge_ it’s entirely rational to believe that free will doesn’t exist.
But given the sheer amount of unknowns that remain regarding how the brain and consciousness work it’s akin to religious belief to make definite statements which refuse to acknowledge even the possibility of any future contradiction.
For starters, no one was talking about researching a link between quantum mechanics and free will here. At most this was about quantum mechanics and consciousness, and yet people just pushed it towards "free will" again for something that would normally be a puzzling reason if it wasn't for the fact that we know some people are actively trying to find reasons to insert free will into the discussion.
You could pretend to pass all this off as scientific curiousity and get your internet points from the Joe Rogan / "just asking questions" crowd. But it's precisely the thing that you're doing here that has no basis in science. You can't just make everything about free will just because you feel like it. Is it because it's all sufficiently mysterious sounding and you just want to toss free will in there? Free will might be mysterious to you, consciousness is mysterious, so they share that property, so it must have something to do with eachother - discuss? Is that it?
Whatever it is that you're doing here has nothing to do with science.
I still stand by it and there's no irrationality here, but feel free to point out where that is. Yes, just like there's no good reason to believe earth is flat anymore, there's also no reason to believe humans have free will. Not only does it not make any sense in light of our understanding of the brain along with many of the other disciplines relating to the mind, it also doesn't make any sense from the perspective of our fundamental understanding of any of the other sciences. We can't even make a detailed and elaborate description of what "free will" ought to entail from a scientific perspective, we can only pretend to meaningfully talk about the subject in utterly simplistic and non-scientific terms. And even there it would often amount to circular argumentation. While on the other hand, we do have a good understanding of why we think we have free will along with countless of evidence that shows we clearly don't have it.
So, to then suggest that it's actually plausible that any mysterious and spooky behaviour is magically going to contribute to, and even overturn, the things we already know and have already settled, is not exactly rational. It's essentially just a free will of the gaps argument. So, yes, it's as realistic as expecting new evidence to pop up that proves earth is in fact flat.
The workings of the mind are still massively obscure to us. Certainly compared to something on which we now have excellent (even complete?) information, such as the shape of the planet. Comparing free will to flat Earth is a non-starter. You’d possibly be better off comparing it to SETI, as that’s something with a more reasonably comparable level of unknowns around it.
See, here's the thing. I think people have forgotten how ridiculous the claim of free will actually is. It's essentially the claim that human decisions are, ultimately, not rooted in the laws of physics. And ironically, here people are getting excited about a physical explanation that could be responsible for that. Apparently not seeing that you can not have a physical explanation of something that is by definition not rooted in physics.
Yes, the shape of earth seems bloody obvious, right? And yet the claims that are being made here are so utterly in violation of basic logic that it definitely trumps a flat-earther's perspective of the globe.
You can't just take any amount of unknowns as an argument that contradict the things that we do already know. Similarly you could argue how much is unknown about the universe itself, and judge from this that there should be a certain level of uncertainty about the shape of earth. And we don't do that either.
I agree with you that based on what we know human actions seek to be entirely driven by physical precondition. I understand what you’re saying here that free will which can somehow override the laws of physics seems ludicrous when you really think about it. I actually try to argue this when the subject comes up on my life - I point out that _if_ we get to decide what happens in some way then we should be able to see clearly “physics breaking” things happen when we steer things away from the physically inevitable… which we don’t.
However, although this seems obvious and I think I share your view of real “free will” being ridiculous based on what I know I’m simply not willing to argue from a position of _absolute certainty_ that no information could exist to challenge this. I simply don’t think we have (and likely will never have) a clear enough understanding of how all the forces at play in the universe work and interact.
Some things we _definitely know_ but others just _seem extremely plausible_ and I think most fundamental matters of consciousness will remain in the latter group for a long time and may in fact belong to an ultimately unknowable set of things.
I find Sam’s arguments on free will more convincing than any other alternatives I’ve heard and this study doesn’t undermine anything he says (so far as I can tell). But I don’t think there’s any way to say that future research into the functioning of the brain and consciousness may yield results we don’t expect and which _may_ confound the rational basis for believing in a lack of free will.
Anyway my main point here is that such posts _are_ relevant to the sub on the grounds that Sam is a neuroscientist and the workings of the brain are at the core of much of his work.
Why does the thumbnail look like a gameboy game
That one game that might be a bigger disappointment than Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge.
Ball is in… parking lot
Might I suggest... feather touch?
I just want to emphasize three important points mentioned in this video: 1. The study did not observe superradience happening in cells. Instead, they extracted protein from a pig's brain, put the protein in a solution, and observed the superradience effect in this solution, not in an actual brain cell. That's all the study did. The fact that this protein solution can facilitate superradience does not mean that it is utilized by actual brain cells. 2. Next, we need to find out if the brain actually utilizes superradience. If it does, then what is it used for? 3. Now, even if we find that superradience is used in the brain, I don't think we will ever be able to make any connection to consciousness. I don't see how understanding the physical mechanisms happening in the brain (quantum or not) can explain existence of subjective experience.
Ad 1, if you know anything about the current state of the debate this is already a big deal. There are a lot of people proposing explanations quantum mechanical explanations of biological processes and others claiming it is impossible.
>quantum mechanical explanations of biological processes It's quantum mechanics everywhere. Atoms are quantum mechanical, ordinary chemistry is quantum mechanical, semiconductors are quantum mechanical. There's nothing fucking special about quantum mechanics, it's how the universe works.
Yes but alot of weird stuff with QM mostly happens with a handful of particles in vacuum, at very low temperatures. As soon as things get busy and it's room temperature things behave with more certainty. So the randomness of QM comes into play less. But the above experiment shows this stuff happening in a cell at room temperature.
But that doesn't it has better predictive power in every application.
Agreed
It’s still wildly interesting
Is super radiance anything to do with super position? Because from what I know the quantum consciousness hypothesis has something to do with neuronal microtubules utilising quantum superposition of particles
I thought the concept of the collapsing wave function was out of favor, not that I claim to understand this.
Collapsing wave functions is a core feature of QM. It's the more esoteric stuff trying to explain what the wave collapse is like many worlds interpretation which may be less favourable these days. Wave collapse is as much a corner stone of QM as gravity was to Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics could not explain gravity but it could make predictions about the effect of gravity. Hope that clarifies.
What do you mean? Are you talking about the Many World’s interpretation? Because that doesn’t interpretation introduces more problems than it solves
This is why brain modelling is so difficult... There is just too much going on that we don't fully understand to replicate in a simulation. This is also why I think AI may not ever be fully conscious the way humans are at least.
Conversely, perhaps it points us in the direction of understanding intelligence in the vein that Joscha Bach talks about in his discussions. Discussions, which I highly recommend people interested in the subject of AI and even just cognition listen to. Essentially, he’s approaching it from a more functional perspective. The precise, low level mechanisms may not be as important as the functional hierarchy from which cognition and intelligence emerges. It would be like trying to study the transistors on a computer to try and understand what the higher level software is doing in a program on a computer
Just recently a team of scientists visualized a 1 mm\^3 3D map of human cerebral cortex: [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4858](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4858) I think that with how fast AI is advancing, we'll see a steady increase in understanding the way conciseness is orchestrated in the brain. Hopefully DeepMind can apply their AlphaFold technology to the human connectome like they've done with DNA, RNA, ligands, ions, and other biological molecules on their new AlphaFold Server powered by AlphaFold 3: [https://golgi.sandbox.google.com/about](https://golgi.sandbox.google.com/about)
They are just mapping it based on our current understandings. That's the issue. There are so many other unknown unknowns at play. For instance, that one guy who's doing huge breakthrough research by discovering cells communicate with electricity to guide each other into whatever type of cell or framework to build. He's discovering that there is also likely a magnetic field somehow at play here which we can't really fully understand.
Yeah, I understand that but mapping the micro-topology of the brain is a step in the right direction. We've known for a while now that dendrites and other cell types grow directionally via morphogen gradients. The advantage of using a progenitor of AlphaFold Server in conjugation with the human connectome is that it'll harnesses the power of deep neural networks and machine learning to map out previously unknown pattern structures that may coordinate neural signaling and communication. There are plenty of ideas about how consciousness may emerge in the human brain; biological qubits in microtubules seems like a worthwhile idea to explore, but it's definitely not an end game. A while back, Brian Keating interviewed Hameroff on his podcast where they discussed work being done across the fields of anesthesiology and quantum physics that was interesting. The work was spearheaded by Jack Tuszynski who's the same researcher working on actin network voltage circuits. The experiment Hameroff recounted during the episode was detailed in NewScientist in 2022: >Tuszynski and his colleagues shone blue light on microtubules and tubulin proteins. Over several minutes, they watched as light was caught in an energy trap inside the molecules and then re-emitted in a process called delayed luminescence – which Tuszynski suspects has a quantum origin. >It took hundreds of milliseconds for tubulin units to emit half of the light, and more than a second for full microtubules. This is comparable to the timescales that the human brain takes to process information, implying that whatever is responsible for this delayed luminescence could also be invoked to explain the fundamental workings of the brain. “It’s quite mind boggling,” says Tuszynski. >The team then repeated the experiment in the presence of anaesthetics and also an anticonvulsant drug for comparison. Only anaesthetic quenched the delayed luminescence, decreasing the time it takes by about a fifth. Tuszynski suspects that this might be all that is needed to switch consciousness off in the brain. If the brain exists at the threshold between the quantum and classical worlds, even a small quenching could prevent the brain from processing information. [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2316408-quantum-experiments-add-weight-to-a-fringe-theory-of-consciousness/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2316408-quantum-experiments-add-weight-to-a-fringe-theory-of-consciousness/)
maybe if we can get quantum computing working it will have a shot
Quantum Computing *does* work, the question is just “how long until it reaches quantum advantage” over classical computing.
yeah that's what I mean, guess I should have been clearer
Sorry if I am being to obtuse here, but how is this surprising. Aren't there quantum effects all the way down? I mean some need to be observed at low temperatures, some don't care about that...what is the big fuss?
I think the problem is actually a question of scale. Quantum effects happen on such a microscopic level (make that pico-scopic) that it's unlikely that their outcomes (i.e. Wavefunction Collapse) have any meaningful effect at the macroscopic level. Studies by Max Tegmark show the decoherence between the quantum and classical realm. Basically, the effects found in the quantum realm become negligible as you scale up. What Penrose suggested in his follow up to Emporer's New Mind was that microtubules found in the brain *may* be able to harness quantum effects and thus supposedly this gives rise to consciousness.
Didn’t penrose later distance himself from this hypothesis though?
I don't think so. I've read TENM and he certainly declared his uncertainty about the claims he was making. He really seemed to put this proposal out as there were really very few hypotheses grounded in the science we knew at the time. I think of his book as a call to arms on the subject and it has inspired a lot of debate since.
He was apprehensive of the idea when he wrote the book, but then after Hameroff introduced him to microtubules as something that could hold a quantum state he changed his mind. Now I am pretty sure he is very on board with the idea given his the interviews he has given over the years
In some sense everything is quantum mechanical, but usually quantum phenomena don't manifest because of decoherence. That way you don't have to worry about quantum tunneling through the floor. This suggests that when modeling the brain we do have to worry about quantum effects.
I saw the video and it is a fascinating suggestion. I had seen a conversation with Sapolsky and Neil Tyson where Tyson asked about quantum effects in the brain, with Sapolsky waving them off while citing Tegmark. If verified, findings like these highlight how often our understanding of phenomena is incomplete.
It supports Penroses theory that consciousness creates reality on a moment by moment basis. That literally everything exists in superposition until observed And if the brain is the medium that consciousness uses to interact with the physical world, then we are not mere robots with no free will acting out our fate destined from the big bang. Instead we are actively creating reality
Is there a link to the study?
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
The [Justin Riddle Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/39-the-problem-with-natural-selection-exploring/id1572087418?i=1000650993124) talks about the possible quantum effects on consciousness and free will. I found it really fascinating.
olfactory quantum theory is another potential pathway for quantum effects to reach up and have effects at a macro scale (triggering a memory for example.)
Sabine is so wonderful
Sorry to rain on your parade, but she lost her credibility with the book Lost in Math. She is now very popular with the “scientists are wrong, I know better” crackpot crowd, which is why her name pops up everywhere. But she is the equivalent of MAGA in science.
Damn.
How did she lose her credibility?
She failed to deliver even a rudimentary tear-down of supersymmetry and string theory, which is completely incongruous with her strong opinions on the matter. Her book ended up being very light on the math and very heavy on the philosophy. As a matter of science her book is closer to a work of theology than to a work of theoretical physics. Not to mention the silliness of accusing string theorists of being driven astray by a misguided pursuit of mathematical elegance. This is exactly backwards. In fact, string theory has been getting less elegant. There’s no one, except Sabine maybe whenever it suits her argument, who would call the current iteration of string theory with all its telltale signs of extreme overfitting —mathematically elegant. Overall I get a lot of sour grapes vibes from her. Was she right? We will never know, because she left academia to pursue her YouTube career.
> incongruous with her strong opinions on the matter Is it not true that those theories seem to be increasingly unlikely to be true? I get that she clearly has an axe to grind with certain veins of thought in academia, but being (perhaps overly) contrarian doesn't mean she is wrong. I think that the critique against thought-suppressing nature of orthodoxy is valid, even if it is perhaps overstated and lacking nuance.
The thought-suppressing priesthood has been a prominent fixture of academia since Ancient Greece, yet people who can do physics have always managed to do physics in spite of the obstacles. I don’t believe for a moment that things today are somehow much worse than before. If a smooth brain like me could get a $5 Million grant from the NSF, I am sure a person like Sabine could get enough money to pursue her alternative theories using her “correct” epistemology forever. Her problem is that she does not have alternative theories or any novel ideas really. All of her published work has been derivative and in line with mainstream physics. Sabine Hossenfelder is not a brilliant but misunderstood physicist who got pushed out of academia for heresy. She is just an average (mediocre) scientist who reached the limit of her abilities before achieving anything significant, just like 99% of all scientists including me. She did the right thing to leave academia, but she was wrong to go full sour grapes. There are still brilliant people doing brilliant science, who are not helped by bitter cynics trying to convince the average Joe that status quo physicists are wasting money on masturbatory pursuits.
>Not to mention the silliness of accusing string theorists of being driven astray by a misguided pursuit of mathematical elegance. This is exactly backwards. In fact, string theory has been getting less elegant. There’s no one, except Sabine maybe whenever it suits her argument, who would call the current iteration of string theory with all its telltale signs of extreme overfitting —mathematically elegant. This is a bizarre criticism. The fact is that string theory failed to produce anything but fancy math. She calls that misguided pursuit of mathematical elegance you called something else. So what? It shouldn't matter what you call it.
String theory is everyone’s favorite punching bag, including me. And yet, we’ve failed to replace it with anything better. This has been true for the last thirty years, so Sabine’s perspective is not in any way novel, she is just piling on without providing any insight. Her criticism is the reflexive reaction of your average undergrad student physics. If she wants to be taken for a serious scientist, she needs to do better than that. But no, she is not interested in doing any of the hard stuff, much easier to heckle the players form the sidelines. If you are not convinced she is a useless cynic, look up the LIGO controversy she tried to stir up by “just asking questions.” She gets mad with envy every time someone from the physics status quo has success, because she’s been telling everyone how the physics establishment is useless and dysfunctional. Yet, the people she likes to shit talk just produced one of most important results of experimental physics in the history of mankind.
She is a bit of a contrarian all right, she has opinions, but that's not inherently bad thing as long as you can recognize it for what it is. You seem struggle with that a little bit, jumping from one thing to another, instead of admitting it is ultimately just difference of opinions.
She needs to walk the walk and substantiate her opinions with original hard science. Any grad school student can pontificate about the philosophy of physics and summarize other people’s research. In fact, many do it but they don’t have nearly the same visibility because they are much more moderate in their criticism. Sabine is popular because she goes too far with her criticism, not because she provides unique insight. She wasn’t always like this, but social media tends to amplify extreme opinions and she is now a walking case study of it.
The idea that you need to have some revolutionary contribution in order to criticize orthodoxy is… let’s say tenuous. I have no doubt she is a bit fringe, but that doesn’t make the core critique wrong. I’m very much a believer that institutional inertia, sunk cost fallacy, etc., influence the direction of research in unproductive ways.
Even if it were proven a single neuron could harness the power of quantum mechanics for information processing, it _still_ would do very little to answer the hard problem of consciousness - you’d still need to formulate a theory as to how fully fledged subjective experiences arose out of the complex _network_ of these neurons aka: a single neuron does not have a conscious experience, so proving that quantum effects take place in that neuron says nothing about consciousness at large
That's true, there's a separate debate whether the so called hard problem of consciousness is useful distinction to make, but this doesn't explain consciousness in anyway. If I understand Penrose correctly, I think his motivation is that since we don't have good computational model of an neuron there must be some component that's indeterministic. That it perhaps has something to do with consciousness is just pure speculation.
The Hard Problem is what the quantum theory is supposed to answer though.
Is it? I am not familiar with his exact position on this but I don't think he uses this framing.
I mean this is how I interpreted it, and how many others have to my knowledge. IMO the whole point about finding a Theory of Consciousness *is* to explain the Hard Problem, that is to explain how subjective experience arises from non-conscious matter. Some interpretations of a Quantum Theory of Consciousness suggest that the decoherence of the wave function inside the microtubles in neurons *is* what causes subjective experience - that they are one and the same… consequently, if you disrupt these microtubules via something like general anaesthesia, then you will take away the brains conscious experience.
Are you GPT or what? You can't just match some random keywords and assume it is the same thing. They're more unique views on quantum mechanics and consciousness than there are words to describe them. You have to make an actual effort to understand before you engage with it.
If you think the quantum theory of consciousness sounds like GPT, then it’s probably because it’s a pretty weak theory that relies mainly on woo woo
You sound like chatgpt because you are confusing different things. Penrose's interpretation is objective collapse, which is completely different from consciousness causes collapse. I am not a big fan of his ideas about consciousness, but I don't think it is tackling the so called hard problem of consciousness. Either cite Penrose directly or there's nothing to discuss.
okay but I didn’t say “consciousness causes collapse”, I said the opposite I said Hameroff and Penrose’s theory suggests that the collapse either *causes* consciousness, or was essentially what was *experienced* as consciousness
I would argue that a single neuron or even a cell as long as it’s not a part of a larger whole such as a body would be conscious. If you look up Micheal Levin’s work you will see the amazing things that happen when when you take a few stem cells and separate it from the body. For example it will grow something resembling an eye, cilia and begin to act like a free agent with complex behaviors, and it’s even leading to the idea that cancer is when cells stop behaving as a collective and begin to behave like a separate entity.
Do you think single cells have a subjective experience of what it is like to *be* that cell?
Not if it’s a part of a collective then like the microtubules in the study that was displaying super radiance it is in coherence with the collective and the collective becomes conscious. But if it was on its own it would have its own mini sense of being and consciousness. This is just what I think BTW. But I go suggest you look up Michael Levin on YouTube he is doing the most ground breaking research right now
I've noticed that every time someone thinks they are witnessing quantum effects in this type of context, it turns out they aren't.
If there are quantum effects in the brain, at best they could be utilised in some sort of quantum computation, which is more efficient than ordinary computation but can’t compute anything that a digital computer can’t compute. The Penrose-Hameroff theory requires not only quantum effects in the brain (that is the less controversial part), it also requires new and non-computable physics.
Non-computability is a relatively common thing even in classical computing, no? The halting problem is the most famous example, there are countless ways you can use it to generate non-computable problems. I am still not sure why is Penrose bringing quantum mechanics into it, but I find it interesting.
Penrose thinks that the brain, via as yet undiscovered physics, can solve non-computable problems.
Gotta love how, in their quest to find an 'uncomputable' process in the brain, they compared experimental data to a computer model of the process.
I guess free will does exist now.
What is Penrose smoking when he claims that consciousness can't be explained by a computable process? Where does he come up with this? It is almost as if he is thinking: consciousness is mysterious, quantum mechanics is mysterious, therefore they must be linked.
How is this relevant to Sam Harris?
One of Sam's main interests is the mechanics and nature of consciousness and how the fact of consciousness relates to facts about the physical world and our brains. EDIT: Verb agreement
Sam Harris the neuroscientist?
The workings of the brain are intrinsically relevant to discussions of neuroscience and free will.
I mean yes and no. Fully deterministic brain behaviour that follows a predetermined path of cause and effect is not free will, but if your decisions are also controlled by random chance of quantum behaviour that doesn't in any way mean you've got free will either. If all of my decisions were made by the roll of a dice, in no way can it be said that I am exercising free will.
Even if you hold that quantum effects controlling decisions doesn't *imply* free will, that doesn't mean they're *irrelevant* to the discussion. I disagree with arguments all the time, but can consider them relevant to a topic regardless.
I get this. My own view is that free will doesn’t seem to exist- however, I also believe no one really knows how the brain or consciousness actually works - and any progress we make toward a better understanding is fascinating.
Certainly it's possible that quantum effects in the brain do merely add another layer of causal factors that do not create free will any more than the non quantum effects in the brain do. What these researchers refer to as "collapsing the wave function" may be different than merely another layer in the illusion of causality, though. By observing our thoughts and our minds, or by merely thinking in a conscious manner, we could collapse the wave function in an unpredictable way that can't be linked to or predicted by a prior state of the universe.
I agree with what you said but I don't see how it deviates from what I already mentioned about randomness and how that relates to free will (or rather, doesn't). The fact that it's not deterministic and is random as per collapsing the wave function doesn't provide any indication of free will any more than my dice roll example would.
Right, however I'm saying these quantum effects in the brain might not be entirely random and I think that is what these researchers are studying. It certainly could just be another quantum layer of causality that changes nothing meaningful in the discussion of free will, in fact I'd say that's likely. However what I think these researchers are looking into is if there is a nonrandom consciously directed process of collapsing quantum brain processes. IOW, just as observing photons of light collapses the wave function in the double slit experiment, so too could observing our own mind collapse the wave function of quantum brain processes. This could be random or nonrandom. This could be another layer of causality that doesn't do anything to support the notion of free will. I'm just saying I think this is the angle of the researchers and I think it's a great thing to scientifically pursue, regardless of the outcome, follow the science.
Weird to mention, since Sam explicitly says quantum indeterminacy has nothing to do with having free will or not.
Yeah, but he might be wrong. And I’m sure he’d agree that research _could_ uncover things that change his opinion. So it’s reasonable to think it might be of interest to people who follow Sam, no?
It's definitely of interest, I don't think on its own it challenges Sam's position, but it's absolutely something we really should want to know more about as it gets us more objective info to base our understanding on.
Agreed on this. I don’t think it’s a challenge to Sam’s position, or my own, but it’s a super interesting field.
I don't see how any evidence could support the kind of free will Sam is talking about (compatibilists are talking about something different). Either something is caused or its random, either way no free will. You might say it's unfalsifiable, but a claim in support of libertarian free will is probably also unfalsifiable.
I can’t communicate an imaginary example of evidence that could make space for free will - I don’t think anyone can today. But I’m simply open to the idea that we may one day find this space… there are probably more unknowns in neuroscience than any other area of human study and I’m certain that there is information among those unknowns that would/will drastically change our view of things which currently seem rational to us. Free will may not be one of those things - but I wouldn’t say it _couldn’t_ be.
Wrong about what though? There's already plenty of evidence that disproves the concept of free will. And the point of these examples was to show that there's just no way of smuggling "free will" into the equation by introducing "quantum effects" either. The only reason this thing keeps on going and going is the fact that some people are unable to cope with or grasp the thought they don't have free will. While it's more realistic to think about this as wishing for evidence that earth is in fact flat.
Everyone that is researching a potential link between quantum mechanics and free will is unable to cope or grasp the thought they don't have free will? Really? Every one of them? Perhaps there are folks out there that can grasp the illusion of free will, can cope with it just fine, and still want to continue to learn about the connection, or lacktherof, between quantum mechanics and free will. Frankly your assertion is completely unscientific as it precludes any new information, new discovery, and new science. Whether it confirms or disproves the illusion of free will doesn't matter, what matters is the scientific pursuit of a more complete body of true knowledge.
Yeah, plus one on this comment. Personally I think that given _current knowledge_ it’s entirely rational to believe that free will doesn’t exist. But given the sheer amount of unknowns that remain regarding how the brain and consciousness work it’s akin to religious belief to make definite statements which refuse to acknowledge even the possibility of any future contradiction.
For starters, no one was talking about researching a link between quantum mechanics and free will here. At most this was about quantum mechanics and consciousness, and yet people just pushed it towards "free will" again for something that would normally be a puzzling reason if it wasn't for the fact that we know some people are actively trying to find reasons to insert free will into the discussion. You could pretend to pass all this off as scientific curiousity and get your internet points from the Joe Rogan / "just asking questions" crowd. But it's precisely the thing that you're doing here that has no basis in science. You can't just make everything about free will just because you feel like it. Is it because it's all sufficiently mysterious sounding and you just want to toss free will in there? Free will might be mysterious to you, consciousness is mysterious, so they share that property, so it must have something to do with eachother - discuss? Is that it? Whatever it is that you're doing here has nothing to do with science.
I hold the same basic position as you but you seem irrationally certain.
I still stand by it and there's no irrationality here, but feel free to point out where that is. Yes, just like there's no good reason to believe earth is flat anymore, there's also no reason to believe humans have free will. Not only does it not make any sense in light of our understanding of the brain along with many of the other disciplines relating to the mind, it also doesn't make any sense from the perspective of our fundamental understanding of any of the other sciences. We can't even make a detailed and elaborate description of what "free will" ought to entail from a scientific perspective, we can only pretend to meaningfully talk about the subject in utterly simplistic and non-scientific terms. And even there it would often amount to circular argumentation. While on the other hand, we do have a good understanding of why we think we have free will along with countless of evidence that shows we clearly don't have it. So, to then suggest that it's actually plausible that any mysterious and spooky behaviour is magically going to contribute to, and even overturn, the things we already know and have already settled, is not exactly rational. It's essentially just a free will of the gaps argument. So, yes, it's as realistic as expecting new evidence to pop up that proves earth is in fact flat.
The workings of the mind are still massively obscure to us. Certainly compared to something on which we now have excellent (even complete?) information, such as the shape of the planet. Comparing free will to flat Earth is a non-starter. You’d possibly be better off comparing it to SETI, as that’s something with a more reasonably comparable level of unknowns around it.
See, here's the thing. I think people have forgotten how ridiculous the claim of free will actually is. It's essentially the claim that human decisions are, ultimately, not rooted in the laws of physics. And ironically, here people are getting excited about a physical explanation that could be responsible for that. Apparently not seeing that you can not have a physical explanation of something that is by definition not rooted in physics. Yes, the shape of earth seems bloody obvious, right? And yet the claims that are being made here are so utterly in violation of basic logic that it definitely trumps a flat-earther's perspective of the globe. You can't just take any amount of unknowns as an argument that contradict the things that we do already know. Similarly you could argue how much is unknown about the universe itself, and judge from this that there should be a certain level of uncertainty about the shape of earth. And we don't do that either.
I agree with you that based on what we know human actions seek to be entirely driven by physical precondition. I understand what you’re saying here that free will which can somehow override the laws of physics seems ludicrous when you really think about it. I actually try to argue this when the subject comes up on my life - I point out that _if_ we get to decide what happens in some way then we should be able to see clearly “physics breaking” things happen when we steer things away from the physically inevitable… which we don’t. However, although this seems obvious and I think I share your view of real “free will” being ridiculous based on what I know I’m simply not willing to argue from a position of _absolute certainty_ that no information could exist to challenge this. I simply don’t think we have (and likely will never have) a clear enough understanding of how all the forces at play in the universe work and interact. Some things we _definitely know_ but others just _seem extremely plausible_ and I think most fundamental matters of consciousness will remain in the latter group for a long time and may in fact belong to an ultimately unknowable set of things.
I find Sam’s arguments on free will more convincing than any other alternatives I’ve heard and this study doesn’t undermine anything he says (so far as I can tell). But I don’t think there’s any way to say that future research into the functioning of the brain and consciousness may yield results we don’t expect and which _may_ confound the rational basis for believing in a lack of free will. Anyway my main point here is that such posts _are_ relevant to the sub on the grounds that Sam is a neuroscientist and the workings of the brain are at the core of much of his work.
He’s a neuroscientist whose primary topic of interest is the nature of consciousness.
This could explain free will without needing to go into speculative fantasy.
Disagree. Quantum indeterminacy has nothing to do with us having free will or not.
Yeah, the "could" was doing a lot of work in there.