Brain Really Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds 

Hi. What do you think about this video? How is this research gonna impact neuroscience??

😮

Me neither! In fact she still hasn’t. But 🥳

Way to go.

Did your microtube get a little bit bigger?

Shhh! You're supposed to close one eye and squint.

... on a suitably chosen macroscopic level, of course.

There is already an interesting paper out there regarding a quantum piston engine, so it’s relevant 😉

It had dual overhead cams, 'overhead' cams. Coincidence? I think not.

My brain is probably more like an inline-3...

Why do you want to learn to bullshit like an old man? Isn't it bad enough that you are bullshitting like a young one? ;-)

Still waiting for the scientific community to investigate YOGA. It works, the best universities in the world use it. Should we give a little peak into what they are doing, even though that method doesn't use the scientific method?? Shall we? We are so fixated with the brain, and we leave aside the rest of the body. Other cultures have developed a very precise knowledge of what consciousness might be. Do we want to have a look to what happens to their brains and bodies? Can we? Is it too hard to accept that someone else was right, even though they weren't using the scientific method? It's never gonna happen. So materialistic we are as a community. We need to "see", we need to touch, if these two things are not there, we say "it doesn't exist". There you go; yoga says the exact opposite: that what doesn't exist, also exists! Does it remind you of anything? I don't know... like the universe made mostly of nothingness??? They call it dark matter, dark energy etc... daaaahhh Can we please, just see, explore, what they have done, just to see if they were just lucky in predicting EVERYTHING we are proving today.... after thousands of years that they have been saying the SAME EXACT THINGS. Is it too hard to explore? No, better to destroy their cultures and countries, and then define them as religions...... OMG... so stupid, so narrow minded. If you say to someone who practices yoga that that is a religion, they might spit you in the face. They normally wouldn't, because differently from "uncoscious" people, they can control their emotions, knowing what consciousness is.... GOODNIGHT WESTERN WORLD. When you'll come up with the solutions for your existential problems, that someone has already probably solved, but doesn't have any of your attention, probably the world will be already over.

I really can't agree with you Science is all about method to demonstrate the result If the result is not found through a coherent, logical method, then the result doesn’t matter (even if it is shown as right later, as long as it's not proved it doesn’t have a real value) Your Yoga precepts might be true, but where is the logic behind ? If there's none, it doesn’t matter that it's true

@@Notnohenceforth it's not mine, yoga. It's of cultures that have obviously been completely destroyed. Including yoga itself (has been largely destroyed). However, try and compute and prove consciousness. Can you? Can we? It's just a question remember! I think not. And... I'll repeat it to you, these cultures are saying the exact same things science is saying. You just haven't read or tried anything about them. Can personal experience be proven by science? No. Can science prove consciousness? No. Can a human being experience things? Yes. Should we try experience instead of just numbers. This is a very logical argument for "my" yoga.

@@Notnohenceforth and however their methods work... The best universities in the world use it. Ask them why?

Gyatt

That honestly reminds me of Schrödinger’s cat. Your thoughts are undetermined until observed. The only question is, what’s observing them? Are they observing themselves? Does your consciousness observe them? Does God? We can’t know really.

@@simplymax2125 Not enough replies

@@simplymax2125 Maybe the "observer" is sort of a different substance 'induction' into the material world, kind of the way that Plotinus thought about it?

@@simplymax2125 that's a very good thought. None of which I could answer. Although I might add, not all of our observations actually make it into our consciousness, or even subconsciousness. As likewise, neither do all of our thoughts make it into our consciousness. Given all the possible permutations of synaptic firing in our brain's neural networks exceeds the number of stars in the universe (I read that and didn't actually calculate or count them myself), makes me muse that in our heads lies the theoretical possibility for our consciousness to become pretty much anything: a murderer, a saint, a zombie, or a physicist. But it only becomes our unique selves with a bit of molding from outside influences. And typically the more I think, the more lost I get. You raise some good thoughts and questions. Thanks. My questions. Can our consciousness control at least a part of our universe, or is it our consciousness is just a part of the larger universe's collective collapsing of the quantum probabilistic wave function and what we think is merely one slice, brane of the infinite multiverse?

They'd be really stupid if they didn't.

What do you mean "humor"? She's German. That's just honesty disguised by a rhetoric that can't possibly be put in either the irony or serious camp.

I swear that finding a totally sane Physicist is harder than finding dark matter. I study Physics in college btw.

@@biedl86 In Germany, humour is no laughing matter.

@@johannuys7914 My German spider senses detected an idiom I cannot just turn around and say that laughing in Germany is no humour matter.

Geez. Those ICE engines are getting so sophisticated, using quantum computing and all

But she s making an average of 200k view per video. She makes more money from yt than a quantum computer engineer or HPC engineer

I also was thrown out of the video for a moment by "that's not even close to the right kind of building a model".

Reminds me of the time scientists built a computer model to prove that 9/11 wasn't an inside job... Instead of doing actual forensics...

3:50

Can you help with the reliable source I would really appreciate it. Many people talk about mushrooms and psychedelics but nobody talks about where to get them. Very hard to get a reliable source here in Australia. Really need!

Yes, dr.porass. I have the same experience with anxiety, depression, PTSD and addiction and Mushrooms definitely made a huge huge difference to why am clean today.

I wish they were readily available in my place. Microdosing was my next plan of care for my husband. He is 59 & has so many mental health issues plus probable CTE & a TBI that left him in a coma 8 days. It's too late now I had to get a TPO as he's 6'6 300+ pound homicidal maniac. He's constantly talking about killing someone. He's violent. Anyone reading this Familiar w/ BPD know if it is common for an obsession with violence.

Is he on instagram?

Yes he is dr.porass.

I don't like it, and won't even call that science, at least not yet. For the moment, this idea is still at the stage of a hazardous hypothesis, for at least three reasons: * the premises, namely that consciousness would not be a computable process in the sense of Turing, remains to be proven. * the mechanism which would give rise to the consciousness of a quantum phenomenon, and how it would be articulated with the known mechanisms of the brain, is not at all specified. * the observations made are very far from the theory to be constructed. We have shown that a phenomenon exists, we know nothing about its usefulness. Just because my washing machine makes noise doesn't mean it's the noise that washes the clothes, or even that it's useful for anything. Of course, hazardous hypothesis can lead eventually to good science. But in that case, I'm very dubious. There are much more elements lately showing how machines can be more creative than we thought, and that consciousness is just a computable process.

For sink rate read solubility

Try Justin Riddle who is very long winded but takes the hypothesis of consciousness to an even more fundamental level. The origin of life.

@@wipe3100 And who are you exactly?

@@Astrodicted I don't think knowing who I am would help you understand the points I've made. And which are easy to verify.

You can't improve on a classic 😂

That explains a lot - all car enthusiasts know that V6 engines sound terrible and there are very few exceptions - I figure that my brain must have lots of tiny Busso V6 engines

Haahahhaha There it is! Thx for typing my comment too! 😂😂😂👌

Yep, that's a V6 engine!

probably stock footage

I was about to write the same comment. Gold

I appreciate the callback. Good stuff.

string theorists malding right now

This MUST have to do with Robert Sapolsky's book Determined (Oct 2023), where in chapter one, he anecdotes a joke that goes "It's turtles, all the way down"

Good stuff right thurr.

Penrose's main point is that something which is not computational has to play an important role in consciousness which lead him to believe that quantum effects in microtubules play an important role in consciousness. It is important to note that he said this before it was shown that quantum effects exist in microtubules and before it was shown that anesthetics mess with quantum effects in microtubules.

Perhaps you won't see an image of a racecar in your computer, but we can track and locate exactly where and how the data that becomes the image moves from the hard drive/SSD/The Internet, to CPU, to RAM, to GPU/CPU, to the screen. The issue with consciousness at the moment is that there is not even a theoretical framework for how it comes to be. Unlike an image on your computer, which has a clearly trackable process of getting to your screen.

@@THVEssays what I mean is, if anyone has any chance whatsoever of working it out, first you have to make sure you don't get stuck in that heuristic. And of course, it's easier with a computer because we built them from scratch and have the history of the processes that went into the development of it all the way back to Jaquard machines. With a brain, it's like reverse engineering a machine that was never even designed by an original designer. Then we have the complexity of emergent phenomena, and to top it all off the Buddhist-like possibility that consciousness might just be a kind of smoke and mirrors trick.

Except anesthesiologists who specialize in making conscious animals and people experience a dampening of consciousness, just might be exactly the scientists to say where consciousness originates in the brain. And they say their anesthetics work on the microtubules. Perhaps specialists talking about their own field should be taken seriously. Just a thought.

@@ronalddecker8498 I don't know much about anesthesia generally. I'm presuming though that when you flood a system with anesthetic it's not like flicking off specific switches, as far as I'm aware it affects many different things in the body and consciousness luckily for us happens to be one of those things. I mean, asking a boxer proficient at knocking unconscious his opponents about the origin of consciousness would seem silly right? I'm not certain this is too far from that. You can take pieces of a computer apart bit by bit and then note when the desktop image no longer works, but you'd still wouldn't understand how it does work from that.

@@Xanaduum “Anesthetics bind to tubulin, causing microtubules to destabilize” from The Biology of General Anesthesia from Paramecium to Primate by Max B. Kelz and George A. Mashour

I dunno, I think it's someone who is really smart from a family of people who are all really smart struggling with the idea that the one thing they're good at might not be that complex or difficult after all. It's perhaps the only thing we have too - as human beings there are plenty of things faster, stronger etc. But we've always overestimated our smarts relative to everything else we have around us. At first other species, and now our own machines. So it's got to be difficult to come to terms with the, increasingly likely possibility that normal, turing based computation is going to outsmart people. You can see that when the microcomputer revolution started a lot of the media was almost like "well soon we'll have robot slaves doing everything" - they really had little or no clue just how difficult and complex the problem was. We knew that computers could out calculate people but intellectuals rested safe that fast computation is not intelligence. The computer isn't "thinking" it just follows a simple set of instructions that loop or repeat. And making a statement that it's not possible to make a computer "think" with a set of simple instructions wasn't difficult to believe when computer scientists were first trying to write algorithms to do things that didn't really require a smart human being. Along the way some problems we manage to solve by brute force out number crunching people - like the first computers that beat humans at chess. Very few people fretted that this was "intelligence" coming. We can separate that from the notion of AI as just being another example where computers can look at millions more positions and evaluate them compared with a human. But what we're left with still is puzzling. Humans play chess to a high standard and if they're not doing millions and millions of calculations then what is the process? Is it still just simple calculation? - Penrose doesn't want that to be true. He needs there to be something more to a brain than simple calculation. But I think as we now develop machine learning we come up with a program that can win at chess or go that isn't simply number crunching - because Go cannot easily be solved that brute force way - and the algorithm is : we've given it the basic rules of chess and then set the computer playing itself over and over millions and millions of times. So there's still a number crunching element (no human player has played millions and millions of games of chess) but there's a sense where the computer plays well without having to blindly number crunch every potential move and counter move. But we still don't think of this as some kind of sentience or consciousness. So Penrose can still hope that human brains are doing something that silicon cannot. After Stephen Hawking got rich and popular talking about black holes in layman terms Roger probably figured he could write a popular book that would sell outside of academia. He pretty much doesn't like the idea that there's a computer program I can potential run on a suitably powerful computer written in C or python, i.e normal computer architecture stuff that would have consciousness, intelligence, sentience or whatever you want to call it. Perhaps the first problem you encounter when trying to talk about this, especially in layman terms, is there's no real clear definition of a lot of these terms, what sentience, intelligence or consciousness even are. Since it's only ever layman discussion anyway we might decide to suggest that : ever since the microcomputer revolution (and perhaps even before), we've been waiting for and expecting the computers from our science fiction shows to become a reality. That definitely was a thing when the first chatbots appeared - and even now these 'alexa' type things are people who wish you could just say "Hey computer book me some tickets at the theatre on Wednesday night" and have it do it. Data from star trek, Orac from Blake's seven, the computer you say "Hey computer..." and chat to it that gives the TV show some exposition. These computers are all smarter than us, and often a bit arrogant - which is very like some human smart people. Occasionally, to avoid a plot hole, it has to resort to some "Insufficient data captain - cannot compute" thing - and, of course, always in science fiction some aspect of humanity outwits the computer and shows its limitations - and I feel this is where Penrose comes from - that fear writers have about technology in everything from 1984, Brave new world, the matrix et al - as well as shows like Black mirror - people fear what they don't understand and no matter how smart we think Penrose is I picture him struggling to turn on his laptop because he has the kind of smarts that existed before computers were everywhere. Data, for example, in ST:TNG, switches from scene to scene from being the most intelligent thing in existence to a complete and total turnip - it makes no sense but that's how we want to see AI, as a intellectual powerhouse but completely naive and, of course, typically there's a scene later in the movie where the AI starts harming people and we have to destroy it - and, as I said, it's always the case the writers have something the computer lacks that humans have which makes us prevail - that's where Penrose hope is. Because without that hope what is he? He's a guy whose entire life and family is really premised on being really smart. If I can buy a computer that's as smart as Penrose it's game over. It's no different to the creative people who desperately cling to the hope that you can't write a simple algorithm that will churn out something we usually associate with human creativity - a book, a poem, a piece of music - and there's lot of waffling and hand-waving about how to write a piece of music that moves people I need life experience to feel these emotions and the idea a computer can't feel anything so it's output will always be lacking that human element - but, increasingly machine learning is making it look like music, art etc will be produced to a very high standard by computers anon. So I do think there's an element in his thinking out loud that is really no different to a skilled computer programmer seeing that in the future it seems undoubtedly the case that a computer program will write better code than a human. And where does that leave them? You know people who couldn't knit as a fast a loom might have lost jobs, but we never felt threatened intellectually by machines - and Roger tried to write a book explaining why we'll never be threatened, but the chances are that he was wrong and as time moves on he's added to his argument some of the holes he left because he openly didn't really understand neuroscience etc at a deep enough level (and its a layman book) AI and machine learning have moved on too. Roger is still safe in the fact that it's highly likely that the machine learning we're using now to create impressive things like chatgpt are a long way short of consciousness or sentience - and that we need some other technique that no one knows yet to create a general intelligence - that he can still argue that it will never happen and no one can show he's wrong, because chatgpt may well be as good as its ever going to be. Even if you give it a bigger and bigger data set and more and more parameters, it's not like one day you'll add enough data that it hits sentience as in the terminator movie. We have no idea how to write computer software that's as intelligent as a human yet or even if its possible - but it seems likely that Penrose's hope it isn't possible is going to be wrong.

@@michael1 I won't argue point-by-point, but my argument is simple: if Penrose is so afraid of such scenario, why would he try to advance knowledge in this area? After all the simplest way to replicate something is to fully understand it first. We can't replicate consciousness because we don't really grasp it; but such researches could bring us way closer than any large language model ever could: you study the source directly, instead of trying to making sense of what it produced. In a way, it's like trying to find what disease is causing the problem, instead of curing every symptom separately hoping it would somehow work the same. As for science fiction, it's still fiction. They have to write a story out of it, and "AI is good, can solve everything and everything goes fine" doesn't make for a good story. And those stories say something about us, not about AI: they're relatable because they talk about our fears and hopes about something we don't know (fear of being replaced as the dominant species, or hope we have that "magic little something" that will make us still superior even with less raw computing intelligence). But it in the end those are all stories and they're all about us: as of now, AI and computing aren't really anything but number-crunchers that work on a set of instructions and mimic whatever they saw us doing. And nothing will be any different until we ourselves understand what consciousness really is.

@@MattJDylan He's not advancing anything in the field of computer science or AI so far as I'm aware. And I've seen really no strong argument from Penrose's articles with clickbait titles like "Consciousness must be beyond computable physics" other than he doesn't really like the idea that consciousness might be computable. I think deGrasse Tyson's take on why he doesn't do drugs is better - paraphrasing him he basically points out just how crap the brain is. How poor it functions. How easily with a few optical or aural illusions we can both experience and demonstrate its flaws in recognising objects and its perception of the world - and that makes him reticent to throw other drugs or chemicals into the mix. As I say I think Penrose's problem is he has a significant overestimation of how good the brain is because he's smart and his family are smart. In their experience applying the brain has yielded much success in many different endeavours. Chess, music, maths, physics. The idea that to discover your brain is complex but not actually nearly functioning anywhere near as well as you perceive and if it seems technology may well one day not only equal it but surpass it wouldn't be an attractive idea. Not unlike the simpler minds who, in the past, didn't want to entertain the idea that the universe is a vast place in which we are completely insignificant. It was important to them to not only make the Earth the centre of the universe but to grasp at any possible alternative explanation as more evidence came along suggesting that world view made no sense. Now I'm not suggesting RP is going to start nailing people to church doors or anything but I still believe his arguments are arguments from the same egotistical human viewpoint that we must be special. In the Earth centric view it's the flaw that we're special in the eyes of some deity. In Penrose's case he thinks his brain must be special rather than what I believe is the far more likely thing - it's just an organic computer. We're just machines made of meat. Complex ones - far more complex than any machine we have yet built ourselves, but machines nevertheless.

Penrose is thought of as a "super-genius" in the funding world. His ideas, no matter how absurd, stimulates funding for others.

@@michael1 I don't see how your view and the view you're abscribing to penrose are antithetical: yes, our brain and senses work like a machine (or more like the other way around, since we built machines to mimic the work of nature). But (his point) there's clearly something missing that we haven't figured out: if computing brute force was all it took, well, computers have way more than us already. And we don't know if we'll ever find out what that something is, since... well... we don't know what we are even looking for...

Well, all cells (nerve cells or otherwise) have microtubuli. If consciousness emerges from them, then all cells have a capacity for producing elements of consciousness, which really only means consciousness is a phenomenon tied to living organisms. Basically, we're back to square one.

that would explain, at least, why nobody can explain how our brain works 😇

I mean he’s not really. This is the general idea that literally hundreds for at this point probably millions of people have understood that there is definitely some role of quantum mechanics going on with our brain body functioning, because quantum effects are happening all the time. So when you have a bunch of neurons packed in a bunch of different orientations, with different connections and activation potentials and varying specializations, different purposes, with random amounts of activation potential, randomness in frequency, and you have all these systems tied together, constantly unregulating and downregulating, and exciting or inhibiting things around them and thus cascading down through all the layers and paths and it’s more like a bunch of noise until you have everything looping together and slowly filtering out the noise from other systems. And all this additional randomness in how much of a neurotransmitter is going to be released, or how different systems are going to interact with hormones or really any chemical or electrical activity in the brain Clearly there has to be some quantum effects when you have so much activity packed into one place with the ability to interact with multiple cells or molecules at the same time It’s just a question of whether or not these quantum effects do anything and whether or not it has anything to do with what we humans want to naturally think of as ‘consciousness’

Ah, the old God of the Gaps. Or Quantum Pablum of the Gaps.

There's nothing here suggesting he might be onto something related to consciousness. Sabine herself says so in this very video, yet you and many others claim otherwise.

As Steve Miller once sang, "Woke up in arms of a big ole cop Police station, next stop"

Creepy

I drive mostly subconsciously. And when I talk while driving, I always miss the exit.

That's why blue light filter exists

But when they measured your speed they didnt know where you were

If memory serves, Penrose's colleague Hameroff is the one who studied the effect of general anaesthesia on microtubules, and he found that it interferes with their quantum coherence.

This only works if it's true that the brain generates conscious, rather than being mainly a filter of it (for evolutionary survival purposes). After all, if you cut an electrical wire in two, an electric current can no longer flow along it, but we do not thereby conclude that the unbroken wire is itself generating the electric current that it carries. Nor do we conclude that a radio station has stopped transmitting if a component in our radio stops working and so prevents us from hearing the radio transmission.

@@richardoldfield6714 I liken it to a radio tranceiver that is no longer able to receive a signal.

It interrupts the remote control tubules which qnnoys our supradimensional players.

from what i know anesthesia work by inhibiting neuron firing inside the brain resulting in less brain activity which results in being unconscious.

Lucky you… that’s boasting rights for eternity in my book…

I have been wanting to meet Sir Penrose for a long time!

Just out of curiosity, which book was it that you had him sign?

actually finishing Road to Reality is on my bucket list.

@@ScramJett Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

I agree. What made it so smooth was that I agreed with what she was saying about the benefits of language learning. If you know two languages, you have two different ways of looking at the world. That’s why learning a foreign language should never be supplanted with translation apps on your phone.

IMO her transitions are about that smooth more often than not. Quite impressive really

I smelled the trick, and I stopped the video immediately.

@@tristanotear3059 I love your idea that each language is a different way of viewing the world - or of being in another world. I've been learning Spanish then just for fun added Russian and French. It seems we have a universal language learning mechanism that just gets better the more it's used.

​@@marcjames3487It also works better the younger you are when you learn languages. Have schools start in kindergarten?

Yes, but under the tubes is still a turtle.

👍 sure thing.

What's so funny about that? Not trolling, serious question.

Turtles. MikeMondano’s comment. There was a Speaker talking about Earth and what was beneath it and someone said, “A turtle.” The Speaker asked, “What’s the turtle standing on?” The person replied, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

You tube!

That's indeed true for photosynthesis, for the proton-gradient "mills" and many many other cellular processes, which work at the near-atomic scale of things. So no wonder there's still so much to learn at this junction of biology and physics.

" not easily apparent to us" this phrase bears repeating!! How many times.......

Nothing "evolves to" anything. Evolution is a completely random and purposeless process.

@@captcruel Hossenfelder needs to absorb the meaning of that phrase as much as anybody.

Right on! “Life is water’s quantum jazz.!” Wonderful, eye-opening book.

Nope, gotta use wire mesh, as shown by Allan H. Frey in 1969. Aluminium foil actually makes it worse, as some MIT people have shown a few years ago

@@sageinit You need the reflecting surface to be a fully encapsulating suit. Even mesh will reflect waves larger than the spacing, and its the reflection of waves entering from the "open" side that creates that increased intensity.

One of the best comments ever! ❤

Headwear/crowns are clearly important when you look at ancient cultures (such as Buddhist and Hindu) who had this quantum knowledge thousands of years ago. The people are often depicted wearing headwear that looks very technological some with wires even coning out.

@@sageinit Why not both? 😁

Yes, I remember that one, too.

Our sense of smell needs quantum effects to work. Photosynthesis needs quantum effects and the magnetic navigation in birds does need quantum effects to work...

@@0ooTheMAXXoo0 It's almost as if quantum effects are real and can be exploited by evolution just like the other properties of matter!

Exactly

Thank you for bringing this up. It is more evidence of quantum effects in cognition. I don't know why supposed "science hardliners" are so quick to dismiss the basic idea or evidence of quantum effects in cognition so quickly out of hand altogether. It is NOT actually a "way far out there crazy 'unscientific'" way of thinking or looking into consciousness as they seem to be trying to make it out to be.

Wow, never heard of that. Do you have a source I can read about this?

@@zagyex pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38187634/

@@zagyex sorry it appears that I'll need to paste it after a carriage return let's see if this works... pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38187634/

That sounds very interesting. Would really love to learn more about that.

I have a few questions for you if you don't mind. You mentioned having synesthesia - can you describe what that experience is like for you? What specific senses get crossed or combined? You also said you have "a few savant skills" - what specific skills are you referring to? Skills in what domains? thanks.

Entanglement?

Beat me by 7 minutes.

@@digitalnomad9985 Superradiance

Room temperature...hmm

Spontaneous synchronization?

White Punks on Dope are so... quantum. lol!

"And why is there more than one?"

@@nsbd90now I can't clean up, but I know I should.

"We ain't got tube one."

Microtubule? “She’s a Beauty…” 🎶🎵

It's qualia.

Also like free will right?

.. yes but you would first have to show that a language based definition is appropriate. There are premises in the language process that require the assumption of subject-object which is fine for describing a chair for example but may be entirely inappropriate for other observed or experienced phenomena. This problem reminds me of Godel’s ideas where a system of consistent logic cannot prove it’s own consistency. So is it possible to observe without splitting into subject-object. The answer is YES. You will have to read up on Jiddhu Krishnamurti’s writings on the process of thought. He had some dialogues with David Bohm the physicist, very interesting!

consciousness: the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.

And what does "aware" mean?​@@Fr00stee

Although studies have shown that decisions are taken in the brain before we are consciously aware of having taken them. So our consciousness is justifying the decisions already taken. OFC the decisions may have been made in a 'quantum uncertainty' type way before we post justify them.

Penrose wrote a follow-up or sequel to TENM called Shadows of The Mind, and there he delves more deeply into the issues left just barely sketched in the previous book.

Followed yet again by another book titled _Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow_ (1996)

I think Hameroff read that book and wrote to Penrose saying, I know where the quantum effects happen!

@@dnrcstr Did not know about that one. What shows that his research about this question was a very carefully and extensively thougth-out one. Still, as he himself surely knows, everything in the end boils down to the results of testing the predictions of the Orch-OR model through microtubulinic decoherential proto-conscious pulses.

I’m not sure it really matters (well ok it does but bear with me…) if the effects are quantum or some as yet undiscovered anything, nor if it is in micro tubules or elsewhere (though I would be as happy as anyone to see him proven right). The really big point is the incomputability of consciousness, and the implications of that for AI in particular. Consider, if you will, that there are some AI scientists now claiming that they “think” parts of the brain “might” behave like transformers. Anyone who mocked Penrose should give that evidence-free nonsense a good hard look. To give someone in the field of AI their credit, at least the Google guys say straight out “we aren’t trying to copy the brain, we are just trying to mimic what the brain produces”. Or words to that effect. To be more specific re AI - Skynet isn’t coming any time soon. So relax, unless you work in writing advertising copy because those guys are f*%^ed.

Precisely

yes!

There are probably a whole host of biological processes that take advantage of quantum effects were not even aware of yet. It's probably just the tip of the iceberg. Kind of like when they found one extraterrestrial planet decades ago and now they're finding billions. In time we'll likely uncover a whole universe of things going on, especially in neural cells.

Because that's too personal and asks questions about our own identity, and that's scary.

All chemical reactions work by quantum effects. Semiconductors work by quantum effects. We are trying to build quantum computers that use quantum effects. They problem is actually the fear that nature made quantum computers first. Yes, that’s how nuts we are as a species.

Penrose is called a genius even by his critics. He's probably one of the smartest people alive. He basically kick-started the modern field of consciousness studies with The Emperor's New Mind in 1989.

@@squamish4244 Great book.

Until it is

He's not immune from a bit of magical thinking from time to time. He promotes a hypothesis in cosmology (cyclical universe) which is every bit as unverifiable and unfalsifiable as string theory. Still, his contributions to physics in general are unassailable.

Never bet against Roger Penrose. Brilliant in physics and in mathematics. As for a cyclic universe, a system that cycles is easier to create than a system that goes through one cycle and stops.

Agreed.

Do we know what gravity is ? People use gravity and its effects although we don't even know what it is....

@@ari1234atime dilation occurs due to relativistic effects of an object traveling at high velocity. Time dilation is a characteristic of gravitational fields. So, it stands to reason that space itself is in motion when in a gravitational “field”. Just in case you were curious

@@atari7001 Hmmm yes that is true, but.... We do not have unifying theory of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. We lack the understanding of how to predict gravity's behavior under certain conditions: at high energies, on tiny scales, near singularities, or when dealing with the inherent quantum nature of particles. Similarly, our comprehension is limited when it comes to the behavior of any potential quantum field underlying gravity, under any circumstances.

THIS - 100% As in, it's not even defined well. Every definition I read is mostly about 'being aware.' Then my mind goes to thought experiments where I imagine when a baby becomes conscious (if that is even a real thing). Or if we have an AI at some point and is far passes the Turing test. Is that conscious? Then I go the other extreme and get all new-agey and say everything, every particle has a degree of consciousness (or other BS). Is it even a real thing or just a phycological construct, or language construct that we can't seem to get along without? This is when I give up and mostly fall back into the "it's not even a real thing" mode...

Agreed. It is presumptuous of Sabine to impute a "logical gap" to Sir Roger's hypothesis simply because she cannot perceive the connection between non-computability and the emergent phenomenon we call consciousness. It's typical, really; she's coming from physics, the science of simple systems, whose behavior can be modeled by finite algorithms. Complex systems don't work that way, and Sir Roger gets that. Evidently, Sabine doesn't. That became clear to me when she became alarmed by the predictions of the climate catastrophists. They insist that "The Science" is settled, and will brook no questioning of their self-proclaimed authority. But the truth is that predictions made by the models are completely unreliable. They don't agree with each other, because they can't agree with reality. They're epistemologically bankrupt. Climate is a complex system; it can't be accurately modeled by finite algorithms. The same is true for consciousness, the defining function of the human mind. *_Of course_* it's non-computable. Physics can't explain it because it's not what physics does. We need a genuine theory of complex systems, and at present we're a long way from an integrated knowledge structure of that kind.

It has to be incomplete. The incompleteness is the probability and redundancy built into reality that gives rise to the phenomenon of Emergence. I highly recommend Terrance Deacon's book (Incomplete Nature) for a detailed account of the counter-intuitive process of Emergence.

​@@coolmagoolsnexus what do you like about emergence?

​​@@Vito_Tuxedo That's a lot of points but I feel like you're missing the most crucial issue. We have two observed facts about reality 1) humans are conscious and 2) the human mind is not computable. Until you can establish a causal link between the two you can't draw any conclusions on whether or not one causes the other. In effect, you are the one trying to ignore possibilities because it's entirely possible consciousness could have nothing to do with quantum effects with our current data. It can be hard to sit back and admit that we are as of yet unsure. It could be that quantum effects create consciousness but we don't know that yet. Also, complexity does not equate to unpredictability. How chaotic a system is is separate from complexity. A double pendulum can be extremely chaotic with a simple system and yet the movement of the bodies of the solar system can be predicted hundreds of thousands of years into the future despite being unarguably a more complex system. Another good example are weather forecasts. The 7 day prediction is proof that we can (to some degree) predict the likely weather patterns. The climate of a whole planet for decades to come is in some sense more complicated but, it's less chaotic than weather since we're taking averages. We certainly need more study to produce more accurate models but they aren't inherently less predictable than whether it will rain in a month.

@@blizzard1198 I like it's explanatory and predictive power.

Penrose is a mind I admire so much, and to me this microtubules idea was always extremely intriguing. I love that there 'should' be the collapse of the wave function as a base for the theory, as odd as it overall sounds it's the one that always seemed the most 'likely' to me

@@raimo7310 I think the two should read a bit of biology before making sweeping statements about how the brain works.

@@p.bckman2997 Care to elaborate?

​@@p.bckman2997 Wild statement.

@@p.bckman2997 Dumb thing to say.

I agree with you, but I am not sure wether or not it is okay, bias can make you develop a closed mindedness that is unbecoming of a scientist

@juimymary9951 there is no way to be free of bias, there are only ways to be aware and compensate for them.

@@alieninmybeverage good point actually, I wholeheartedly agree

​@@juimymary9951 it's not closemindedness. Remember that the topic at hand is when you are researching new science. It's just that if you are focused on researching one specific theory, you should give it your all in order to see what happens, instead of suddenly swapping to working on a new theory when someone suggests it💜hope that makes sense

My bias is to think linking two things just because they are both mysterious is retarded.

That's precisely what she said in the video (except without name dropping Orchestrated Objective Reduction)

As of now, there's nothing favorable to the hypothesis of afterlife. So, live your life!

segue

@@Blaisem ty, I don't remember this being a big problem, but suddenly, this is the third time in the past two weeks. The word was segue, the scooter people wanted to spell their brand differently

It wasn't

@@QUBIQUBED It appears our OP may have fallen off one as well.

Hahahah that really sounds like him!

One of my biggest gripes with Orch OR was that quantum effects inside microtubules were not even possible due to the way the tubulin lattice was arranged.

@@JohnDoe-sp6wrBut then, it was.

“BING, motherfuckers! Hahahahahaha...” -Stu

Behold the sound of one hand clapping

@@breakeverychain7 Man's facepalming quite vigorously

Oh , no, I have gasses, will he stop my consciousness?

No, he's merely performing his part in the sea of dominoes.

Has anybody done experiments on the interaction of tubulin with known anaesthetics?

@@XCSme Please forgive me, I speak and write immigrant English.

@@andrewharvey4958 Listening to Hameroff's various talks (on youtube), I can't but think all anesthesia is is exactly that.

I didn't realize that the turtle story was so well-known.

@@mikemondano3624 I never read it; there's a movie too. But it is pretty big.

As a physicist I believe that Quantum Mechanics is real. I lot of people don't, but that's their problem, not mine. I admit that I know very little about how the brain functions but to me it would be an absurd notion to think that quantum mechanics would have nothing to do with it.

Try it.

Without physics, neuroscience is merely near-a-science...

You wish, you just sound dull, likely.

Yes, you are correct. Here is the conclusion from a recent paper about 1cubic millimetre of temporal cortex tissue. Citation - Alexander Shapson-Coe et al. ,A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution.Science384,eadk4858(2024). To fully understand how the human brain works, knowledge of its structure at high resolution is needed. Presented here is a computationally intensive reconstruction of the ultrastructure of a cubic millimeter of human temporal cortex that was surgically removed to gain access to an underlying epileptic focus. It contains about 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and about 150 million synapses and comprises 1.4 petabytes. Our analysis showed that glia outnumber neurons 2:1, oligodendrocytes were the most common cell, deep layer excitatory neurons could be classified on the basis of dendritic orientation, and among thousands of weak connections to each neuron, there exist rare powerful axonal inputs of up to 50 synapses. Further studies using this resource may bring valuable insights into the mysteries of the human brain. Before we invoke universal consciousness theory, as does Donald Hoffman et al. or the Quantum affects as Penrose et al. do, we must understand the physical stuff between our ears. When we are in that position and still looking for answers, then we can justify a look at this fringe material.

Penrose claim that the orchestrated collapses of quantum states of the tubulins in the microtubules are pulses of proto-consciousness. What the brain does with these pulses, through interactions among parts of the tubules and through the neuronal synapses they feed, and through recording memory etc., that is what still very mysteriously produce consciousness. The tubulins and their quantum pulses are just like the sparkplugs of it!

Can you elaborate on that thought?

I had imagined much more of a light saber-y sound, myself.

It comes down to Determinism vs. Free Will. At a higher level of abstraction - Game Theory necessitates random strategies in Nash Equilibrium, i.e. indeterminism. Game Theory is the basis of Evolutionary Biology, so a priori, it is reasonable to think that all life should have the ability to generate randomness. Random strategies, are not computable. If you were able to compute the evolutionary strategy in non-cooperative games, then you would no longer have Nash Equilibrium in Mixed-Strategies. A reasonable counter-argument is that pseudo-randomness would only need to be sufficiently expensive to deter computation (e.g. traditional cryptography). Although I would argue it would be more bizarre for a snake to have a cryptographic hashing function in its brain than to just rely on the randomness all around us. When you start dealing with sufficiently sophisticated actors, they have the freedom to choose to entangle their strategies in exogenous, genuinely random, quantum effects. Thus when you start to consider financial markets, there is no reason to doubt the random-walk hypothesis. Casinos, for example, rely on genuine random number generation.

Good point. Of course the research goes deeper. A claim by Hameroff is that single cell organisms with no synapses perform purposeful intelligent functions using their cytoskeletal microtubules (mating, learning, etc) Another claim, and prob the main one is that general anesthetic drugs that switch off consciousness act on microtubules. Hameroff is an anesthesiologist.

@@paulc285 Game theory has been denounced by its author. Who cares what a failed theory says? Every talk about game theory is about how nonsensical of a theory it is and how crazy that people used to place faith in it in the past...

yeah they refuse to give a practical definition on purpose so they can cling to their spooks and haunts and ghosts. There is absolutely zero reason to say consciousness cannot or should not be computable unless you can bring a solid definition of consciousness to back it up.

As far as we know, quantum effects are governed by probablility. So they are not computable as Penrose described it. This is the first proof that brain is not deterministic. And that's huge. Regardless of how we describe consciousness.

Even a lot. It's called Schizophrenia and some very intelligent scientists have had it. Such as John Nash. It's not an intellectual disorder, intelligence has nothing to do with mental disorders or personality disorders. Psychopaths for example are often highly intelligent. It's a misunderstanding of how intelligence works to assume a "crazy" person is unintelligent, by default.

😊

Love that channel

I honestly fail to see what makes you think he "appears to be right" in this case. Sounded far fetched when he came up with it and really nothing has changed. You would think he'd have come up with something more solid by now. The only new stuff presented here seems entirely unrelated to consciousness, other than it is "quantum effects" and happens in the brain.

He is right about microtubules displaying quantum properties, but it was Stuart Hameroff who suggested to Penrose that the microtubules can synchronize due to quantum effects. Penrose's theory about microtubules creating consciousness remains a theory with little scientific backing, as that is a leap away from finding quantum effects in the brain. I do like out of the box thinkers as well though, even if they are only partly right (as of yet).

Sometimes they might get lucky

He still doesn't appear to be right, and his idea is pseudoscientific.

​@@DeVibe.It's not pseudoscience, it's a hypothesis.

Before we can figure out a connection between consciousness and quantum effects, we need to do two things: Figure out what quantum effects are present in the brain, which this study apparently did a bit of, and, the hard thing, figure out what the hell consciousness even is, and how it even could possibly form, because it simply CANT with classical physics alone. Filling the gap will take decades, and is gonna be a wild ride.

@@BastiVC Why can't consciousness form with classical physics?

​@@BastiVCyou say we don't know what consciousness is and you also say it can't be explained by classical physics. This is contradictory. 'Consciousness' has no meaning in physics. It's the modern word for 'soul'. Living beings don't need any of these two to exist.

Questions about the nature of consciousness are fundamentally beyond the scope of science, and more in the realm of philosophy. This is because consciousness is inherently a subjective thing (or really, consciousness is subjectivity itself), and the scientific method is all about what can be objectively measured in an experiment. Scientific knowledge about the workings of the brain is useful for questions of consciousness, by putting bounds on what's philosophically plausible for how consciousness interacts with the physical world, but the nature of consciousness itself is ultimately a philosophical question and not a scientific one.

@@renedekker9806 I think it is because classical physics is deterministic. Meaning everything going on in the brain is predetermined at the start of the universe. The concept of consciousness is better described as "the mind" problem. The mind is the part of us that makes us, well, us. It is supposed to mean that you are aware of the universe, but self-determinant within the confines of the physics of your body. That is "you are more than the sum of your atoms". If you are self-determinant, one cannot use classical physics to observe every atom in the universe and 'know' what you will do when confronted with the choice between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. The choice is something we can't calculate, because of true randomness within your brain allowing your mind to collapse the right wave functions to "choose". If one does not have true randomness in the brain, then you do not truly have consciousness (or a mind). You are just atoms doing physics in a deterministic way. If you include quantum effects, then there is randomness to the mind. One can observe every atom in the universe and still be uncertain whether you will choose chocolate or vanilla. One can use the exploit of randomness to engage in the possibility that our choices are actually "our" choices. Not merely the product of the state of the atoms in our physical bodies. Before this research, most physicists would agree that the quantum effects of randomness would have no noticeable effects on your "mind". Ergo, everything you are and will do is deterministic to someone who could observe every atom. They could know everything you will do right at the time of conception. You never had any choices, everything is predetermined. What you think of your best friend would be known to them. Which hand you place on the steering wheel tomorrow morning. Everything. It's all predetermined. And that upsets some folks to think about. That if they have a crappy life, it was always going to be. They had no control, ever, at any point. Right from the start of the universe, their life would be crap. The quantum effects idea helps nudge the needle toward "your mind is real, it's more than classical physics, you are not predetermined". Which would be neat. Humans have long believed we are self-determining creatures. It's only recently that humans have started to think we are not. If this research pans out, we may yet be.

If true this would counter the argument that the brain is to hot and noisy to allow for quantum effects.

@@jasonkinzie8835 I think there have been enough studies and observations of quantum effects in living systems to say that quantum is not automatically a no-go simply because an environment is warm and noisy - and that realization is itself a breakthrough.

By "too effective" you mean, for the number of chemical bonds and the number of photons available, photosynthesis produces more interactions then would be predicted by standard quantum mechanics?

@Uhlbelk No, I looked into this from the electromagnetic radiation point of view. If you want to model the very high absorption of chlorophyll and how it scatters nonabsorbed light using Maxwell theory, you would need insane values of both real and imaginary refractive index (the latter is responsible for scattering). Almost like metal but absorbing instead of scattering. Many people tried that and failed. This suggests to me this is no classical electromagnetic phenomenon.

@@arctic_haze I would guess that you are using simplified models that don't accurately represent the chlorophlasts. Do you have the appropriate lipid crystal latice of the membranes? The secondary and tertiary confirmational changes of all enzymes? I doubt it. Nature has had 2.4 bllion year to maximize the functionality of modern chloroplasts.