voxleone
21 hours ago
Penrose’s vindication: In a broad philosophical sense. His intuition that quantum effects might play some role in cognition seems less far-fetched now than it did 30 years ago.
But vindication of Orch OR specifically (microtubule-based quantum gravity collapses driving consciousness) not yet.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.1998.025...
fair_enough
21 hours ago
The OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation:
Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells.
Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
sarchertech
19 hours ago
Penrose doesn’t hold the microtuble hypothesis strongly at all.
He’s very very careful to say that it’s just something he’d like to see tested and he has no idea whether it’s true or not.
That very much distinguishes it from Crank science.
btilly
19 hours ago
In 1989, Penrose picked up Lucas' 1961 argument that no computer can possibly simulate intelligence. The argument rests on fundamental misunderstandings of logic, that are well-known among logicians. See, for example, https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1995-32-03/S0273-0979-1995... for an article explaining this, written some 30 years ago.
The fact that Penrose has maintained his misunderstandings for 30 years, demonstrates that, on this topic, he has been a crank for a long time. No matter his other accomplishments.
sarchertech
19 hours ago
Penrose essentially wrote an entire book responding to that critique.
Which side you support largely comes down to a philosophical question. The notion that he just made a stupid mistake and doubled down on it is absurd.
Having a different opinion about the soundness of a proof could make him wrong but it hardly makes him a crank.
btilly
13 hours ago
The fact that he repeated the same logic errors at book length doesn't change the fact that they are errors. And the question of whether they are logic errors is a question of mathematics, not philosophy. Dismissing the conclusions of logic on the basis of philosophy, is a mistake of the same type as dismissing the conclusions of science on the basis of theology. Logic cannot speak to the philosophy that Penrose pushes forth. But it can and does speak to the validity of the argument from logic that he puts forth in support.
Hilary Putnam did a good job of explaining the mistakes. I am not a logician, but my background in logic is good enough to verify the explanation. And every logician that I personally know has come to the same conclusion.
Like you, I find it absurd to claim that Penrose has been doubling down on a basic logic error. And yet we have the basic logic error, and Penrose has clearly been doubling down on it.
You don't even need to be an expert to understand that he can't be right. Penrose argues that the capacities of human reasoning is such that Gödel's theorem proves that a mathematician's brain cannot be replicated by any mechanical process. But the reasoning process that mathematicians use is fallible. The output most emphatically is not logically consistent. The appearance of consistency is only obtained after much reexamination of those errors which were discovered. Absolute certainty of lack of error is unachievable by any kind of human reasoning. The history of mathematics is filled with examples of errors that were not discovered for shockingly long periods.
So we do not have a proof of the consistency of human reasoning, or its products. Therefore Gödel doesn't apply. Human reasoning, including the outputs that Penrose cites, do not strictly follow first order logic. Therefore Gödel again doesn't apply. And Gödel is entirely silent on the potential prospects of a heuristic algorithm that can produce inconsistent results. Which is what our brains do.
The inapplicability of Gödel's theorem to our thinking process is an absolute barrier to Penrose's attempts to prove that our thinking process cannot be the result of a mechanical system. It may be that it is not. Personally I fail to see how a strictly mechanical process can create my experience of consciousness. But this is a question that Gödel's theorem cannot address.
sarchertech
11 hours ago
The mistake you are making is the same that I think a lot of people who dismiss his argument make.
You aren’t reading his actual argument. You are reading a characterization of his argument by a critic.
You can read his rebuttal of those critiques here:
https://calculemus.org/MathUniversalis/NS/10/01penrose.html
The summary is that there is no requirement that human reasoning is infallible in his actual argument.
Again his proof may be faulty. But it is not because of a “basic logic error”. The disagreements people have with his actual argument are much much subtler than a basic logic error.
btilly
8 hours ago
The mistake that you are making is to imagine that I must be making a mistake.
Let's take a few examples.
He claims that a robot which is able to engage in Gödelian reasoning, cannot possibly be computable. Logicians agree that this claim is false. Indeed https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10817-021-09599-8 shows a version of Gödel's theorem that has been fully checked via proof assistant. While we still lack AIs that are able to produce such proofs (other than by regurgitating such proofs in their input data), in principle a proof checker filtering the output of a brute force search through possible proof attempts will achieve any possible machine checked proofs. But proof checkers can proof check Gödelian reasoning. Thus we already know how to write a (rather impracticable) robot that does exactly what Penrose claims to be impossible.
Here's a whopper. Let's go to this passage from 4.2 of his rebuttal.
However, I had been disturbed by the possibility that there might be true mathematical propositions that were in principle inaccessible to human reason. Upon learning the true form of Gödel's theorem (in the way that Steen presented it), I was enormously gratified to hear that it asserted no such thing; for it established, instead, that the powers of human reason could not be limited to any accepted preassigned system of formalized rules. What Gödel showed was how to transcend any such system of rules, so long as those rules could themselves be trusted.
This is complete and utter bullshit. Gödel did not show that we could transcend any such system of rules. What Gödel demonstrated is what those rules can prove of themselves. Namely, "If this set of axioms proves itself consistent, then it is inconsistent." Which statement can be proven using nothing more than arithmetic. Our ability to prove this doesn't prove that our mathematical reasoning is somehow beyond what a mere formal system can prove. It is just a demonstration that we can follow a piece of arithmetic to its logical conclusion. Any other understanding of the result is simply a mistake.
He's also wrong about whether there are problems that, in principle, are beyond human reason. For example consider the BB(n) problem. Identifying which Turing machine gives us BB(643) is impossible from ZFC. (See https://github.com/CatsAreFluffy/metamath-turing-machines for more.) If you go to BB(1000), no set of axioms that mathematics has ever debated can suffice. Going beyond human comprehension doesn't take much more than that.
Of course those are weak estimates. In fact it is likely that BB(10) is going to be forever beyond us. And no, some magic quantum decoherence in the microtubules isn't going to fix that.
Let's move on. Section 4.5. He admits to the logical possibility that he is wrong, then asks whether unsoundness is plausible. How is it not plausible? The only form of intelligence that we have an existence proof for, us, thinks in notoriously unreliable ways. LLMs are our best attempt to replicate our verbal abilities by computers. They are likewise extremely unsound.
The burden of proof that soundness is possible here is on Penrose. And he needs to prove it soundly enough to overturn the generally accepted conclusion that the known laws of physics suffices, in principle, to explain the manner by which our brains operate. Because that is the conclusion that he is aiming to convince people of.
He doesn't even try. He waves his hands, declares absurdity, and moves on. That may be fine from the point of view of his philosophy. It is not fine from the point of view of a logician. It's a gap. And a mighty big one at that.
I could go on, but what's the point? If you refuse to believe what logicians say about logic, then no explanation of what logicians have to say will convince you. And if you do believe what logicians say about logic, then you should already know that Penrose is wrong.
spot
19 hours ago
yup and his book was reviewed as such at the time. mention of the rejection of his theory by professional philosophers however keeps getting edited out of the wikipedia page. See this exchange on the talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
>> "The book's thesis is considered erroneous by experts in the fields of philosophy, computer science, and robotics."
> Wooooah, there. That's a massive accusation to add, unsourced, and without any discussion. There needs to be a source for this statement, not to mention an opposing view. It seems unlikely the guy would win an award for a book no one thinks is right. I'm deleting it unless someone comes up with a pretty good source. Joker1189 (talk) 20:43, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
The source was provided with the edit: L.J.Landau (1997) "Penrose's Philosophical Error" ISBN 3-540-76163-2 http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~llandau/Homepage/Math/penrose.html Spot (talk) 03:08, 31 July 2010 (UTC)
sarchertech
19 hours ago
You say keeps getting edited out but I see one instance of that happening 15 years ago.
The talk is unavailable, but that and a chapter in Landau’s book hardly seem like appropriate sources for “everyone disagrees with him”.
The vast majority of critiques of his argument that I’ve read are by people who are actively working in AI not professional logicians.
spot
18 hours ago
who said "everyone" or did you make a strawman?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument
this actually puts it better:
The Penrose–Lucas argument about the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem for computational theories of human intelligence was criticized by mathematicians,[16][17][18][19] computer scientists,[20] and philosophers,[21][22][23][24][25] and the consensus among experts[7] in these fields is that the argument fails,[26][27][28] with different authors attacking different aspects of the argument.[28][29]
so, rejected by consensus. someone should update the book page so this expert rejection is clearer.
sarchertech
17 hours ago
Everyone is obvious hyperbole because I didn’t want to both copying and pasting the actual quote.
That is merely a compiled list of people who disagree with him without listing any of his supporters.
There are at least 5 philosophers who support his position if you follow those links and 5 who reject it.
Link 7 doesn’t support the statement “consensus among experts in these fields” because it only refers to a single field—philosophy.
Many of those sources are just links to lists that other people have compiled of arguments for and against Lucas’ argument. They aren’t even all critiques. And many of the ones that are, are already linked directly in the article.
There’s is nothing more to support the notion that there is widespread consensus against his argument.
There may be. But this isn’t good evidence of it.
btilly
13 hours ago
I can't speak to the general opinion among philosophers about his argument. But my opinion about philosophy is such that their opinion would not sway mine in either way.
I can speak to the general opinion of his logical arguments among logicians. And it is not just widespread consensus against. It is a widespread consensus that the argument is filled with basic logic errors that render it absolutely wrong.
As Hilary Putnam points out, Penrose's arguments are even worse than Lucas'. In particularly Penrose argues that no program that we can know to be sound, can simulate all our human mathematical competence. But our brains do not use a sound thinking process. Therefore a sufficiently good simulation of our brains that it can do mathematics, would also not be sound. Gödel's theorem is entirely silent on the potential capabilities of such unsound systems.
Furthermore LLMs provide a convincing demonstration that unsound simulations of us can have surprising levels of competence. ChatGPT regularly demonstrates both its competence and unsoundness. Sometimes at the same time!
The potential for unsound systems to demonstrate competence far beyond what most expected, is demonstrated by LLMs. Admittedly the current error rate is unacceptably high. But it demonstrates that what Penrose claimed to be mathematically impossible, may plausibly become real within our lifetimes. (Though, given how old Penrose is, not his.)
sarchertech
11 hours ago
I replied to your other post. His proof is much subtler than that and if it has flaws that isn’t it.
btilly
8 hours ago
I replied to you there.
But in section 4.5 of this "rebuttal", he admits to the flaw that I just pointed out, and dismisses it as logically possible but absurd. The fact that he grants that it is logically possible, demonstrates that his attempted logical demonstration is broken.
Also his opinion on absurdity has to be weighed against the unlikeliness of his conclusion that the known laws of physics will not suffice to explain the operation of the brain. Clearly that question is not as cut and dried as he believes.
btilly
13 hours ago
I am amused that my unintended repetition in the last two paragraphs demonstrates how unsound my absolutely human brain is.
(Unless I'm an LLM. I'm certainly unfunny enough to be one.)
russdill
14 hours ago
That's the problem with Penrose's thinking though. He's absolutely convinced that consciousness cannot boil down to something computable. So he reaches for the quantum shelf, but not just the quantum shelf, the quantum processes we don't yet understand since otherwise it'd just be something computable, but with more steps.
sarchertech
14 hours ago
I mean most AI researchers are utterly convinced that the human brain is a Turing machine. There’s not reason to presuppose that. And if everyone presupposes that and it isn’t true, we’ll be stuck spinning our wheels until someone questions it.
russdill
13 hours ago
This isn't a viewpoint coming from AI, is been a view that's been around for quite some time. The standard model does an exquisite job of predicting the day to day physics we experience. To find search for new physics where we might find discrepancies, we have to build absolutely huge colliders, and even those don't really effect our "day to day" physics.
For consciousness to be based on some non computable function there would have to be some unknown physics occurring in the brain. Sure, that's hard to disprove, but it also strains credulity, hard.
Penrose picking "quantum" for being the element of physics that would have to change to allow this non computibility is just woo. Why not just say magic?
pmontra
10 hours ago
I agree with you that picking quantum was probably the fad of the time and it was an easy pick as quantum is everywhere. He cold have said "electrons". However the argument against unknown physics is not very sound IMHO.
There has been unknown physics at play inside brains since forever and it still is and always will be, by definition of science.
The point is that we don't even know how to define consciousness and humanity doesn't have a shared agreement about which living beings are conscious or are not. We're still like engineers building things millennia or centuries ago with only a shadow of a theory of why their creations worked. And yet we still walk on bridges from 2000 years ago and we had electric batteries and power plants before knowing how an electro magnetic wave moved.
sarchertech
10 hours ago
> This isn't a viewpoint coming from AI
It has always been related to AI. Shortly after Church and Turing formalized computability, people started squaring off into 2 camps. People who believed strong AI was possible and those who didn’t.
We know the standard model is incomplete. Penrose’s ideas come directly from his his explorations of the gaps he suspects exist.
BurningFrog
20 hours ago
Penrose may well be completely wrong about this, but I think he's easily done enough important science work to not be called a crank.
Marazan
20 hours ago
You can be a genius in one field and a crank in another.
For example: Penrose.
NegativeLatency
19 hours ago
example: Shockley was a eugenicist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
And plenty more: https://archive.is/2021.06.21-140221/https://www.nationalgeo...
oh_my_goodness
19 hours ago
This feels a bit like a circular argument.
r2_pilot
19 hours ago
How about Linus Pauling and vitamin C then?
sarchertech
19 hours ago
It happens. It’s surely possible. But does it happen enough that anytime a Nobel laureate says something a little out there, this is the immediate explanation?
Especially if what he’s saying has lacks a major hallmark of crackpot theories. That is he is very open to his theory being wrong and he won’t even say that it’s probably correct. He just thinks it’s possible and would like to see more work done on it.
Retric
19 hours ago
Yes in that when they something outside their field that’s ‘a little out there’ Nobel laureate’s aren’t as a group more useful than random noise. Similarly a crank can happen to say a true statement, but the issue is the process with which the statement is derived is flawed to the point of uselessness.
The derogatory aspect of calling someone a crank is obviously uncalled for, but as a shorthand it’s not unreasonable to use the term.
sarchertech
19 hours ago
If a Nobel laureate says they have an interesting hypothesis that they’d like test and that idea isn’t obviously impossible, it’s probably best not to dismiss it as crank science.
Walter Alvarez is another Nobel laureate who proposed a theory that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Many people thought that was crank science.
And it’s important to note he had another out there idea that there were hidden chambers in the pyramids of Egypt. That one turned out to be wrong.
What distinguished his theories from crank science is that he was open to the idea that they were wrong and was interested in actually using the scientific method to investigate them.
Retric
19 hours ago
> it’s probably best not to dismiss it as crank science
Why? There’s a lot of Nobel laureates over time who collectively made many such claims, so you can easily pick examples in both directions.
My point is more such ideas aren’t accurate enough for anything beyond preliminary testing by actual scientific investigation which sometimes does validate them but also commonly disproves them. There’s zero reason for the average person to consider their validity.
Your example is a perfect demonstration of why most people ignoring such things is a good idea, these things don’t simply disappear without investigation.
sarchertech
18 hours ago
I mean sure you shouldn’t go out and by vitamin C supplements because a Nobel Prize winning chemists tell you to.
But you also shouldn’t go around immediately dismissing any theories they have as crank science.
Retric
18 hours ago
Ok if you believe that way what exactly do you gain by doing so?
Paying attention has a cost so what’s the payoff?
sarchertech
18 hours ago
Who says you have to believe it or pay attention to it? What does an average person gain by paying attention to unproven theories in any discipline. If it interests you, pay attention, if it doesn’t, don’t.
I just said you shouldn’t dismiss it as crank science.
Retric
17 hours ago
Ahh, I was agreeing with ignoring it / dismissal not the label.
jibal
18 hours ago
No one did that. Penrose's theories have been dismissed as crank science for good reasons given.
sarchertech
14 hours ago
He has good relationships and is respected by experts in many fields. If he was dismissed as a crank he couldn’t have found 3 incredibly respected scientists to debate his theories in one of his books.
Plenty of people think his theories are wrong or unlikely. The only people “dismissing them as crank science” are people in that have unwavering faith in the idea that consciousness arises from computable processes.
Apocryphon
19 hours ago
Maybe it is, Nobel prize winners might be so hyper-specialized in their field that they have superficial at best understandings of others. Engineer’s Disease writ large.
sarchertech
18 hours ago
He’s been writing on consciousness for 40 years now and he’s been studying the topic since undergrad. Also most of what he talks about is soundly within his field.
The only thing that’s really not is the microtuble thing and he collaborated with someone else on that.
That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.
jibal
17 hours ago
Nothing that Penrose has talked about in re consciousness is "soundly within his field" other than "the microtubule thing" and his collaborator, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, is a crank among cranks.
Also, Penrose has not been "studying the topic since undergrad" ... he's been bothered by the notion that he is "just a computer" since then, but he didn't get into seriously addressing it until much later, and he's never studied it--he notoriously ignores the entirety of the literature of philosophy of mind and neuroscience.
> That’s also the least interesting thing he says I think because he admits it’s just an interesting place to look for quantum effects and he has no idea if he’s right.
This is simply not accurate.
And the fact is that Penrose is completely irrelevant to the subject of consciousness other than via an argument from invalid authority.
P.S. The response is disingenuous and discrediting ... I won't respond to that person again, especially after seeing this comment: "I’m in the Penrose camp that Turing machines can’t be conscious which is required for true AGI" --- this is pure ideology. TMs are clearly adequate for AGI even if somehow "TMs can't be conscious" ... c.f. Chalmers' philosophical zombies.
jibal
12 hours ago
>Clearly TMs can be conscious
It's a lie to claim that I said or even implied this.
OTOH, the "camp that Turing machines can't be conscious" is pure ideology and is based on repeatedly proven logic errors--Lucas was known to be wrong about Godel before Penrose came along and embraced his errors. And it's very common for people in that camp to project their own unsubstantiated baseless faith "that Turing machines can't be conscious" (which for Penrose, like many others in the camp, was a consequence of a semi-religious metaphysical notion that he wasn't "just a computer") onto rational informed people, with rhetoric like "people in that have unwavering faith in the idea that consciousness arises from computable processes" -- it's the logically default position, a consequence of intelligence and knowledge, not faith. The hilarious thing is that "consciousness arises from quantum effects" doesn't get the no-TM faithers what they want--they're still "just" machines, even if the machines use qubits rather than bits.
sarchertech
11 hours ago
Man you’re replying all over the place, I’m having a hard time keeping up. You’re also spending a lot of time on arguing with someone who has been discredited over a theory that has been discredited.
Penrose and Lucas’ argument may or may not be correct, but that still doesn’t imply that consciousness can arise from computable processes. There is no reason that it should. There is absolutely nothing to suggest this should be the default position.
The only way to get to this position is through faith. Doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But it’s not a falsifiable position since you can’t prove consciousness.
Retric
a few seconds ago
There’s nothing to suggest it shouldn’t.
Keeping consciousness undefined means the requirements to form it are also undefined. There’s no way kizzip can arise from computers, there’s no way kizzip can arise from anything other than computers.
sarchertech
17 hours ago
None of this is accurate.
P.S. this response was merely a condensed version of he response to my reply. Here’s a longer one.
>Nothing that Penrose has talked about in re consciousness is "soundly within his field"
Quantum gravity, physics, and mathematical logic are clearly within his field. He’s a physicist, mathematician, and logician
>Also, Penrose has not been "studying the topic since undergrad" ..
He says that he has.
>he notoriously ignores the entirety of the literature of philosophy of mind and neuroscience.
Disagreement with some members of a field isn’t the same as ignoring it.
>This is simply not accurate.
It is. I heard it from the horses mouth.
>And the fact is that Penrose is completely irrelevant to the subject of consciousness other than via an argument from invalid authority.
It’s a field that has never produced anything concrete or beneficial to anyone outside the field. I’m unsure what relevance even means there.
>P.S. The response is disingenuous and discrediting ... I won't respond to that person again,
Yet you did. I saw your edit.
>Clearly TMs can be conscious
I guess that’s that then.
Retric
16 hours ago
> He’s a physicist, mathematician, and logician
You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse. Just the size of the structures involved, temperature, timescales, and distance between neurons alone is a serious problem with his theory here.
If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea, but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works. Which is always the hard part of science, you’re not just fitting a single curve but thousands of different datasets.
sarchertech
14 hours ago
>You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse.
For biology he had a collaborator. You aren’t likely to find many biologist / quantum physicists.
The term neuroscience wasn’t even coined until after he finished his PhD. You could probably name many other relevant sub specialties that doesn’t have formal training in.
If any of his theories are correct, you wouldn’t expect a neuroscientist, or biologist to be equipped to come up with them.
>If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea
He is. His first book essentially had no proposed mechanism. Then an anesthesiologist and researcher read it and contacted him with the proposal that microtubules might provide an environment that is insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain.
His next book investigated that idea, but he’s repeatedly said that this is just an interesting place to investigate and he has no idea whether it’s true.
>but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works.
How does it fail? I’ve read quite a hit about it and plenty for people are skeptical but I’ve never seen anyone showing how it “utterly fails”.
Retric
2 hours ago
> The term neuroscience wasn’t even coined
The first car wasn’t called a car by the people who built it, but we back date terms. He’s not a neuroscientist because he’s not studied the brain’s physical structures.
> insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain
? The tube is made of atoms at the same temperature as what’s outside the tube, there’s no isolation here.
> How does it fail?
It fails in many many ways. Individual neurons are vastly too small for consensus to occur on that scale you need something involving millions of them at body temperature at the very low end. Local quantum effects are obviously going on but they don’t scale.
sarchertech
2 hours ago
The first car wasn’t built by an “automotive engineer” either. But by someone from another discipline who decided they were interested in applying the knowledge from other disciplines to the this new one.
Penrose has certainly studied the brains physical structures. He has 40 years of books and papers published on the subject.
>same temperature
No one is proposing that they are literally thermally insulating.
> on that scale you need something involving millions of them at body temperature at the very low end. Local quantum effects are obviously going on but they don’t scale.
That sounds like a good problem for a Nobel Prize winning physicist to investigate. If a neuroscientist were investigating it, I’d expect them to bring in a physicist.
jibal
18 hours ago
Maybe review what a circular argument is, because that isn't one.
oh_my_goodness
16 hours ago
Sure! Happy to. Here's an example of a circular argument: "Penrose could be a crank. We know that kind of thing is possible because, for instance, Penrose is a crank."
jibal
13 hours ago
The argument made was nothing like that. The assertion made was
"You can be a genius in one field and a crank in another."
Supporting evidence was offered: "For example: Penrose."
One can dispute the evidence, but there's nothing circular about the argument--your version is a strawman created precisely in an attempt to turn a non-circular argument into a circular one. And even rejecting that evidence there's plenty of other evidence and others here gave examples. Not that examples are even needed, as the assertion is self-evident, and was offered as a counter to a textbook fallacious argument from authority: "he's easily done enough important science work to not be called a crank". There is no basis at all for such a claim. Perhaps Penrose is not a crank in re consciousness, but it certainly doesn't follow from the fact that he's done the highest caliber non-crank science ... that claim is fallacious, disingenuous, and intellectually dishonest.
oh_my_goodness
2 hours ago
If any one cares about this, please hit "parent" a few times to see what everybody said.
nrml_amnt
19 hours ago
I think of Linus Pauling
joquarky
18 hours ago
The fact that you couldn't pick a different person as an example makes for a very weak assertion.
rf15
7 hours ago
or even within the same field! Further examples: Newton, Chomsky
chvid
18 hours ago
Why is it crank science? He clearly states that it is hypothetical, speculative and open research.
markhahn
18 hours ago
The main reason is because it's arbitrary.
His "speculation" is litereally: I think quantum is mysterious, and brains are mysterious, so there must be quantum in the brain. That's just silly - even if only because his opinions about mysteriousity is of no importance.
halifaxbeard
15 hours ago
If the universe is closed and knowable, free will can't exist. Fortunately, Heisenberg left the door open.
drdeca
10 hours ago
I don’t think non-commuting observables really helps much in the “free will existing” department.
oh_my_goodness
20 hours ago
I don't see that offering an alternative hypothesis disproves anything.
tsimionescu
19 hours ago
By Occam's razor, it could be said that offering an alternative hypothesis that explains all facts equally well but is also simpler does "disprove" more complex hypotheses. For example, it is often said that Einstein's special theory of relativity disproved the idea of an aether - but special relativity is compatible with the existence of an aether with certain properties, it just is a completely unnecessary extra complication.
oh_my_goodness
16 hours ago
Special relativity is a lot more than a hypothesis at this point. I think the ideas in this paper may be a little bit more speculative than that.
Apocryphon
19 hours ago
Someone oughta notify Peter Watts
westurner
20 hours ago
But does this help explain Representational drift?
From "Concept cells help your brain abstract information and build memories" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42784396 :
> the regions of the brain that activate for a given cue vary over time
"Representational drift: Emerging theories for continual learning and experimental future directions" (2022) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943882...
>> Future work should characterize drift across brain regions, cell types, and learning.
How do nanotubules in the brain affect representation drift?
There is EMF to cognition given that, for example, "Neuroscience study shows the brain emits light through the skull" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697995
Aren't there certainly quantum effects in the EMF wavefield of and around the brain?
soulofmischief
19 hours ago
The common understanding is that at the molecular scale that your nervous system operates, quantum effects are averaged out and don't lead to instability of neuronal activity.
markhahn
18 hours ago
Tegmark has used actual, you know, numbers and stuff to show that quantum effects in the brain are pretty implausible.
westurner
17 hours ago
Again there, does the EMF/RF field created by the electrovolt wave function of the brain affect the electrovolt wave function of the brain? If so, isn't that a feed-forward feedback loop (where there may be quantum behavior)?
Does this paper also fail to assess other fields relevant to understanding nonlocal neuroactivation in disproving that there is any quantumness in cognition?
How do humans simulate digital and quantum circuits with the brain?
And, why do attempts to localize activations in the brain weeks apart fail; why is there representation drift?
westurner
16 hours ago
Actual evidence of:
/? quantum in the brain: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=qua...
/? quantum cognition: https://www.google.com/search?q=quantum+cognition
gh topic: quantum-cognition: https://github.com/topics/quantum-cognition (2025: 7 results; all Julia)
2000: the referenced Tegmark paper
From https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:-mGt9tzYwSUJ:sc... :
- 1998: "Quantum computation in brain microtubules? The Penrose–Hameroff 'Orch OR 'model of consciousness" (1998)
- 2002: "Quantum computation in brain microtubules: Decoherence and biological feasibility" (2002)
Quantum cognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition
soulofmischief
15 hours ago
What behavior precisely do you think is hiding in quantum region?
I'm on board with Hofstadter's strange loops but at most, quantum-level interaction should just amount to noise that is stabilized by the higher-order chemical region in which the brain operates. What even are we looking for at this point?
What aspect of my experience is not likely to just be a result of chemical interactions in the brain?
Noaidi
21 hours ago
Wow, this is such an odd response. There’s plenty of research that link microtubules to consciousness. I don’t understand this pushback other than one being sped in a certain scientific dogma that doesn’t allow new thoughts or questioning to creep in.
Just say that Penrose is a crank is way off chart in my opinion
ben_w
20 hours ago
The word "consciousness" means at least 40 distinct things; some of those (e.g. brain being alive and functioning) are obviously connected to microtubles; others (e.g. qualia, which is what most understand Penrose invoked microtubles to explain) are so ill-defined as to be untestable and unfalsifiable.
That Penrose also seems to have a fundamental error in his understanding of the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, doesn't help.
mensetmanusman
19 hours ago
I love his thoughts on connecting the halting problem to understanding ala Gödel.
Noaidi
20 hours ago
It means one thing to people who study consciousness.
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/consciousness-is-a...
ben_w
20 hours ago
That linked page is just a long-winded assertion that only their own definition counts.
It's also a definition which is completely untestable and presently unfalsifiable.
Noaidi
20 hours ago
He’s a neuroscientist that studies consciousness. I think that gives him more valid reasons to have this definition than someone who programs computers.
ben_w
20 hours ago
He himself would criticise you for doing so, even just on the basis of what he put in that blog post, as you're using an argument from authority.
Noaidi
19 hours ago
I believe you’re being disingenuous and hopes that no one reads the full article. Because what he said is more nuance than what you’re proposing that we should not appeal to authority. I’ll post what he said here just to be clear.
“ I fully admit that this is an appeal to authority! But saying you should rely on the framings of a scientific field, like literally just respecting how it defines terms, is extremely reasonable as an appeal. It’s also very different than saying you should blindly believe the conclusions of that field. While “trust the experts” is often too strong a claim, the much weaker ask of “use the agreed-upon vocabulary the experts use when discussing the field” is actually quite reasonable, and most people who want to have an opinion about a scientific (or philosophical) subject should respect the used terms. The same goes for consciousness.”
Byamarro
19 hours ago
I think we can do better than to have this level of argumentation. Regardless if the pretending comment had a merit to it or not
galangalalgol
20 hours ago
But that accepted definition is that it means everything... "What it means to be a bat" isn't a useful definition. I will accept that is what the word means and defend the viewpoint the word is thus useless.
Noaidi
19 hours ago
This is the last paragraph of his article for people who aren’t going to read the whole article.
“ So yes, there is scientific confusion about what consciousness is! And there’s metaphysical confusion about what consciousness is! But there’s no definitional confusion about the word “consciousness” itself. People know what needs to be explained, it’s just that explaining the phenomenon is very hard, and no one fully has yet.“
mensetmanusman
19 hours ago
/anything I don’t understand is useless/
tsimionescu
19 hours ago
To save everyone a click: this objective definition of consciousness is "the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism". This is quite obviously circular, even though it sounds fun initially.
markhahn
18 hours ago
that is NOT what the article says. read the article, it's a pretty good survey.
Byamarro
19 hours ago
What he refers to is more specifically called phenomological consciousness afaik (just skimmed through tho)
ljlolel
20 hours ago
Also microtubules with quantum…
exe34
20 hours ago
Penrose's theory is this: consciousness is really weird. quantum is really weird. there's got to be a connection.
Just because he is brilliant in one field doesn't mean he's remotely competent in every field.
red75prime
20 hours ago
Nah. He postulated that mathematicians don't make errors and proposed a hypothetical physical mechanism to make it work.
Noaidi
20 hours ago
He came up with his idea in collaboration with scientist to study consciousness. It’s not his idea really it’s a group of people’s ideas. His brilliance in his field contributed to the brilliance of other people’s fields. This is how collaborative science works.
If you seen any of Penrose’s talks or read any of his books, you know that this was not fundamentally his idea.
KingFelix
19 hours ago
Yup, even the Dioso-Penrose limit has two sides. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13490
Paraphrasing here: The paper above was looking for energy given off during collapse, (which they did not find) on the Diosi side, where Penrose' idea is more in the retro-causal, you wouldn't find an energy signature. I am sure someone can call out a better representation, but similar to your response that Roger has these ideas and looks for collaborators, but still has his own ideas on things that may differ.
Interesting seeing this conversation going on, Roger / Stuarts work has been trashed over the years, Max Tegmark did the maths and said brain is too wet/warm for any quantum stuff, but we've been finding this in tubulin* and other places, never retracted the paper.
Either way, consciousness is amazing, and a mystery, anyone interested should come to Tucson in April for Towards a science of Consciousness, good conversations, interesting people, usually more questions than answers.
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-9321/4/2/19 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
markhahn
18 hours ago
No, there's no evidence against Tegmark's math.
Finding isolated quantum effects is emphatically unsurprising: after all, everything is quantum. It's just limited in locality, which is basically what Tegmark is talking about (locality and decoherence time being somewhat dual).
There is no evidence for the kind of quantum effects that would involve multiple neurons. This is quite a block, since afaik, even the quantum-woo types (Penrose, emphatically) are not claiming that consciousness comes from the quantum behavior of a single neuron. (And that would be profoundly ignorant of basic neuroscience.)
KingFelix
16 hours ago
There is this from Max - https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.61.41...
And response
https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.65.06...
jibal
17 hours ago
> in collaboration with scientist
If you mean Stuart Hameroff, he's no scientist.
IdSayThatllDoIt
18 hours ago
This seems like a straw man argument.
That the brain uses electrical/chemical signals is crank science about subatomic particles messing with your aura in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
If that were not so, electrical/chemical engineers could upgrade our brains with their knowledge of electricity/chemistry.
Scientific progress is thinking about stuff. And my Occam's razor is leaning toward "if just arithmetic could yield consciousness we would have figured it out by now".
sarchertech
19 hours ago
If you’ve listened to anything he’s said in the last few years he doesn’t hold very tightly to the microtublule explanation.
Paraphrasing what he said in a video from a year ago or so: it’s an interesting theory that he’d like to see tested, but he has no idea whether it’s correct or not.
robwwilliams
18 hours ago
No, nothing to do withPenrose’s idea. No quantum effects just the traditional use of microtubules for transport of cargo — in this case between adjacent dendrites.
sim04ful
20 hours ago
I don't see why this idea is controversial at all; of course intelligence would evolve to leverage every possible physical mechanism and property inherent in matter, from classical structures like dendritic nanotubular networks facilitating intercellular communication, to potentially quantum effects that support intricate computation and the emergence of thought, since that's the nature of evolution: massively exploring the possibility space.
tshaddox
20 hours ago
It's controversial because of how specific the hypothesis is, now novel the physical mechanism would be if it existed, and how little evidence there is that it exists. I don't think it's controversial because people that evolution couldn't possibly explore that possibility space. The fact that evolution explores a very large possibility space doesn't mean that anything you can conceive of must exist. I mean humans aren't even capable of biological flight, and we know that has evolved multiple times!
sarchertech
19 hours ago
Penrose has 2 different theories really. 1 is that there are quantum effects involved in consciousness.
2 is that microtubles are directly involved. He feels fairly strongly about 1. He doesn’t feel strongly about 2. He is very open to it being incorrect and just thinks it’s an interesting theory to explore.
IsTom
20 hours ago
There is a question if there is actual physical possibility to do useful quantum computation with tools available to biological systems. Cells are very noisy environments and nonclasical states are very fragile.
tsimionescu
19 hours ago
Wheels and motors and jet engines and electrical transmission lines are also physically possible, but they are completely missing from the animal world (I believe there is one known unicellular organism that has a locomotion method that is similar to a motor or at least a propeller, but that is still completely unique).
joquarky
18 hours ago
ATP synthase is pretty much a micro-mechanical turbine.
supportengineer
15 hours ago
This type of animal has evolved a gear mechanism.
markhahn
18 hours ago
sure. but there are very tangible bounds on the sorts of physical interactions that can cause any effect.
for instance, lots of people love the idea of "brain waves". in general, neurons are event-driven, not given to "waving". indeed, the mystique of brainwaves is counter-physical, in that when there is synchronized activity, it produces EM signals that are fairly hard to pick up (EEG, MEG have gains O(1e6)). a neuron simply lacks a physical mechanism to be affected by such a wave.
not unlike Tegmark pointing out that the brain is dense and warm and that means short/fast decoherence.
Tadpole9181
20 hours ago
Because there's no evidence and the fundamental claim isn't boring "how it works", but the idea that this "quantum magic" is what binds a soul/consciousness to your body and gives rise to "free will" that deterministic physics very clearly does not allow for.
sim04ful
20 hours ago
Oh i see now
akomtu
18 hours ago
The same deterministic physics that says that the spot where an electron ends up in the double slit experiment is not only nondeterministic, but doesn't exist in principle until it's measured.
Tadpole9181
17 hours ago
While fair to say, this is kind of pedantry looking past the actual point. So, to be clear what I'm saying:
Unless reasonably proven otherwise, quantum mechanics are not a magical land of souls and consciousness. It's a probabilistic space. Those probabilities obey things like wave interference, it's not total chaos. And with Bell's, any idea of a "grand plan" dictating outcomes is kinda moot, because there's no hidden variables that would imply any kind of long-term vision, or mechanism therefore, at play.
Then, when you scale up to classical physics, those probabilities amortize out to reasonably deterministic outcomes: The sun will continue burning for billions of years. Technically every QM interaction in the core could suddenly get unlucky and it instantly poofs out, but we don't seriously consider that a possibility. Just like technically virtual particles could spontaneously form a Mercedes in front of me with a title of ownership in my possession while solar rays bitflip the hard drives of government servers to register it for me.
In reality, if I drop a ball, it's going to fall and hit the ground. When something scares a human, they release hormones. Those hormones consistently affect mood and behavior. Pretty much all humans think like most other humans, and all other animals seem to think like their peers. Etc.
There has been no evidence of any kind to suggest that human brains are not deterministic (and plenty of examples of otherwise), despite the technicality that they have QM underlying the matter and signals. And the idea that the quadrillions of QM interactions each instant are working to some conscious goal, using secret physics that have never before been observed and fly in the face of what has, is voodoo magic nonsense that is not based on actual quantum physics in any way.
If you want to believe in religion, just do that! Don't try to misconstrue/miscommunicate actual science to justify it, just let it be magic. God or souls are no more justified by quantum mechanics than they are by just saying they alter reality in any other way. You're not getting away from them having a magic will-based being in an unmeasurable qualia-defined pocket dimension altering natural outcomes.
In fact, you've made it worse. Now every single person has an unbelievable supercomputer like no one has ever imagined hidden, doing the math needed to understand the exact quantum manipulations to enact their will on the brain physics of the person they are somehow bound to.
akomtu
17 hours ago
To put it another way: if the land of souls exist, it has something to do with QM.
As for the "no evidence brains are nondeterministic" we don't have much evidence about anything related to brains.
My point is that between the two extremes - the blind faith in whatever religions have come up with, and the wingless reptile way of thinking that's so prevalent in modern science - I'd rather choose the middle ground and stay open to various ideas unless they are proven wrong.
Tadpole9181
17 hours ago
What? Again, quantum physics, as we have observed them, directly contradicts your first sentence. It does not have a ghost in the machine!
And how in the world does one argue we have no evidence of brains? They're studied constantly! And there's tons of animals we can poke and prod! We know what regions do what, we know tons of mechanisms of actions. We know what hormones do what, we have ideas on how concepts like "time tracking" are done. We observe brain damage changing the personalities of people. We can do surgeries with relative levels of success.
Like: you don't even need all that. Do you get sleepy at night? Do you get grouchy when you get sleepy? Wonderful: that's hormones. Direct, experienced evidence that your thoughts and behaviors and actions are driven by hormonal states!
make3
18 hours ago
the "conscious emerges from quantum superposition" idea is controversial because it's thinly veiled mysticism
cnity
20 hours ago
Materialists always seem to forget that they're kicking the can down the road.
sim04ful
20 hours ago
There's no non-physical "ghost in the machine," and I don't even see the value in probing consciousness down to its most fundamental essence.
IAmBroom
20 hours ago
So, we know enough now, and it's time to quit sciencing about it? Weird response.
cnity
19 hours ago
> There's no non-physical "ghost in the machine"
But of course there is a physical one, that at some point appears. Or, it is a kind of gradation that at its highest peak is a human, and at its deepest depths is...
sarchertech
19 hours ago
Penrose is very much a materialist. He thinks that humans could someday create machines that can tap into whatever quantum effects the brain uses.
cnity
19 hours ago
I didn't say I wasn't a materialist :). It's important for consciousness philosophers to have a sense of humour, I think (and remember the shortcomings of their own arguments).
Bjartr
20 hours ago
I agree. I'm pretty sure both photosynthesis (superposition) and our sense of smell (quantum tunneling) involve quantum effects, so it's not that wild to think that quantum effects are at play in the mechanistic operation of the brain and therefore contribute to the phenomenon of consciousness.
markhahn
18 hours ago
everything is quantum. it's just convenient to deal with the emergent behavior instead (like "chemistry").
yes, photosynthesis is quantum. so is vision, smell, etc. heck, metabolism is quantum!
but these are fast and local, because most of the world is decoherence-friendly. the quantum effects of a photon in your rod cell is not going to cause any quantum weirdness in a smell receptor in your nose.
Bjartr
17 hours ago
Well yes, what I meant was that there are phenomena within these procesess that work because they leverage quantum effects that are not available in the newtonian regime of physics.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
19 hours ago
that seems kind of pointless to speculate about? unless you were into reading this sort of thing a long time ago and it is interesting to you? aren't there more convincing modern models of consciousness that don't rely on spookiness?
bbor
21 hours ago
How does this vindicate Penrose in any slight sense?? This is using "nanotubular" in the sense of "ultrathin membrane bridges" that serve as "long-range intercellular transport" for macro objects in the um range, NOT "polymers of tubulin" that "provide platforms for intracellular transport" with an inner diameter in the low nm range. (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule)
More importantly, these are transporting things that can plausibly impact other neurons, instead of possibly interacting with things that are far too small to ever impact a neuron in any way we've ever seen before (AKA without magic).
IMHO, this vindicates Penrose and Hamerhoff in no way whatsoever; nonetheless, I'm sure there will be a flood of YouTube videos subtly conflating the two senses of the term "nanotube" in order to promote the idea of a universal noosphere that ties us all together through the magic of quantum entanglement and positive vibes. Fun...
(More on topic: anyone with access to Science know why these are called "nanotubes" if they transport things in the micrometer range? Microtubules are named for their length, but it doesn't really make sense in reverse to have a tube 1000 times as wide as it is long... Maybe they're elastic? Or does "nano" just mean "really small" here?)
Noaidi
21 hours ago
to understand that nano tubules interact with microtubules is part of the answer to your question.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221137971...
And you’re talking about transporting “things” and microtubules are not about transporting things in Penrose theory, but rather serving as quantum machines that are linked across the brain.
amelius
19 hours ago
But chemistry is basically impossible without quantum effects ...
CGMthrowaway
19 hours ago
Would do a lot to explain many's understanding of the brain as a non-deterministic machine (or, their reasonable resistance to the idea that it is a deterministic one)
markhahn
18 hours ago
no, this does not validate quantum mysticism.
yes, it's microtubules, but there's no sign of any weirdness here. and Penrose's whole theory is "quantum is weird and I think brains are weird, so brains must be quantum. so where can we find some quantum stuff?"
Noaidi
21 hours ago
I agree, and I was about to post the same thing. The idea of quantum processes fueling consciousness is my latest obsession. Specifically because I have genetic polymorphisms in the DNM3 gene that help maintain the functionality of these microtubules.
https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q9UQ16/entry
And let’s just say my experience of reality, or my consciousness, is quite unusual. My gene polymorphisms in DNM3 are linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have.
Like Penrose said, I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field, and not anything solid, but rather a femoral and affected by electromagnetic forces inside and outside of our brain
tsimionescu
19 hours ago
> I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field
Well, this is almost certainly true in some very vague sense - I mean, it seems much more unlikely to meaningfully categorize it as a gravitational phenomenon, or a strong interaction phenomenon or a weak interaction phenomenon. Though it would be cool if somehow it turned out our minds had color charge.
Of course, this is only the same sense in which Linux and McDonalds and potatoes are also electromagnetic fields, or phenomena related to it.
markhahn
18 hours ago
I think sometimes people forget that when we think of "chemistry", we're talking about an approximation based on behavior that ultimately emerges from quantum effects. It's just that you don't often need to model the full wavefunction to talk about an iron atom's ionization state in that cuvette where you're testing your pool water.
We don't see a lot of macro-scale quantum weirdness because big and warm directly implies vast amounts of interaction - decoherence.
tsimionescu
17 hours ago
Note that decoherence is only part of the answer. It explains why we don't see constructive interference, but it doesn't explain other effects that are missing from the classical world, such as why all classical objects have definite properties in the same measurment basis.
BirAdam
20 hours ago
I've had a weird thought that it might be that consciousness is the result of a quantum field that collapses to instantiate a consciousness when enough feedback mechanisms are present to allow for its function. Of course, this is likely not true, but it would explain a few things.
exe34
20 hours ago
I too am emotionally sensitive to the electromagnetic field. My phone is the transducer.
shadowgovt
20 hours ago
Interesting. I don't know that it's a literal electromagnetic field, but it does seem to be a dynamic pattern. I don't personally think I have enough information yet to guess at what medium that pattern is encoded in (I mean, except, broadly, "Brain stuff").
Not long ago, I suffered the first bout of unexpected unconsciousness I'd ever experienced; a series of unfortunate events caused me to pass out from pain (which I didn't quite understand was really a thing before then... Haha no that's real, you can get your brain shorted out from too much pain signal). The experience was a little... Cosmologically-reframing. It wasn't like sleep; it was a missing-time experience. Like, post-event me is acutely aware of a lack of me in that period of time; the body was there (I assume; I couldn't see it but there's nowhere for it to have gone), the thing I'd call myself seems to have completely 404'd for about a half hour.
Put lots of thoughts of my own mortality in my head. Not sure I'd recommend it.
vasco
20 hours ago
> Like Penrose said, I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field,
Careful around magnets my friend, your consciousness will change a lot if you're right.
TehCorwiz
20 hours ago
It does, we actually use Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to treat Major Depressive Disorder and a few other things. Precisely because electromagnetic waves can alter our perceptions and behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...
andy99
20 hours ago
No, TMS is electric shock therapy, the magnetic field induces electrical currents in the brain and that is the mechanism for the effect.
EM waves can “alter our perceptions and behavior” in the sense that electric shocking the brain can, not through some special interaction.
markhahn
18 hours ago
Your use of "is" here is problematic (and that's what triggered the other responses).
I guess you mean "like". That would be accurate: TMS is disrupting normal brain activity a little like ECT does. It alters consciousness because it causes a partial reboot - an altered state. Drugs (and sleep and love and anger and meditation) also cause altered states. (Not to imply that any of these altered states are the same!)
andy99
17 hours ago
The “is” I meant is that it induces an electric current in the brain. I’m sure there’s some subtlety (in the temporal and spatial patterns) but whether current is flowing between electrodes or is induced from a changing magnetic field, it’s still current, the effects of which are what we’re seeing.
Crucially, there is no special magnetic interaction with the brain beyond Faraday’s law, as people seem to be implying.
TehCorwiz
20 hours ago
There's no shock. There's also no direct contact. It's literally magnetic.
cwillu
19 hours ago
A changing magnetic field induces an electric field; this is how asynchronous motors work.
Having been in the room with a patient undergoing TMS a couple dozen times, I can assure you that the electromagnet will induce a muscle twitch from the electric field it creates. What it doesn't do is cause a seizure, which is the typical desired result of ECT.
Noaidi
19 hours ago
> No, TMS is electric shock therapy,
This is just 100% false. To say that TMS is electric shock therapy because it changed electrical signals in the brain is totally misleading, if not, totally misunderstanding the science of the relationship between electricity and magnetism.
The fact that both electricity and magnetism can affect neurotransmission does not mean that TMS and ECT are the same thing. When they give people ECT they’re giving them controlled seizures. In TMS this is not the case at all.
mensetmanusman
19 hours ago
This is a mis-quote. Consciousness is more like a field than a particle. It just turns out that everything is a field.
Noaidi
18 hours ago
I want to say in light of all the down votes you’re getting on this, that I agree with you.
I believe everything is a field and a probability. That objects have no defined borders, but our brains create these borders to reconcile with the probability of a thing being in a certain area. I think the proof this comes when we understand that we never really touch anything, it’s only the electromagnetic field that we are experiencing from another object.
mensetmanusman
11 hours ago
Cheers mate. Also, I’m sorry to read you are homeless according to your description. We have family that suffer from schizophrenia and would be otherwise homeless without our support. I hope you have such a network.
You might appreciate this discussion on fields: https://youtu.be/dU0NIU5d4BI
Noaidi
an hour ago
Thank you, unfortunately, I don’t have such a network. And I actually have schizoaffective disorder, not schizophrenia. I often say schizophrenia to make it simple for people. But my family the ones who were not ill were not really helpful to those who were ill. And hence my current position.
And can I just say that YouTube video and the demonstration with the magnets? Wow. I don’t see how any physicist can look at that and not have a total change of mind. That it’s the fields that are the formative function of what we call the universe well when you see it, so much more seems to make sense. I knew when I was in ninth grade that materialism had its end because the infinite aspect of cutting something into just did not sit right in my mind and therefore, I just intuitively thought that everything was really made up of nothing.
Thank you for that and now I have a whole new series of videos to watch!
Noaidi
20 hours ago
Oh, please don’t be silly. I think this is one of these comments that serve no purpose here. Most Magnets are too weak to possibly affect consciousness.
But the earths magnetic field….
https://www.science.org/content/article/humans-other-animals...
https://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0483-18.2019
And Transcranial magnetic stimulation….
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/transcranial-mag...
What is depression other than a change in the state of consciousness?
But I might want to continue and ask you a question, and this is just out of curiosity, do you think consciousness is made of matter?
vasco
10 hours ago
> But I might want to continue and ask you a question, and this is just out of curiosity, do you think consciousness is made of matter?
You might want to stop calling people silly if you want them to answer your random questions. You'd have to define consciousness to ask that question because every person that overthinks these topics has their own personal definition and they are 100% sure they are right.
Noaidi
an hour ago
I didn’t say you were silly, I said you were being silly. And I was actually being nice because what you said was actually demeaning.
“Careful around magnets my friend, your consciousness will change a lot if you're right.”
That was just flat out ridicule with no scientific or philosophical rationale and was not useful to the conversation whatsoever.
As I pointed out before consciousness as well defined. I’m not defining consciousness. I’m explaining how consciousness arises. Or what consciousness is. Consciousness does not arrive from matter, but instead matter arises from consciousness. Consciousness, or fields, are the driving force of the formation of matter.