> They will engage skeptics in a debate on the nature of consciousness, and Bandyopadhyay and his team will couple microtubule vibrations from active neurons to play Indian musical instruments. “Consciousness depends on anharmonic vibrations of microtubules inside neurons, similar to certain kinds of Indian music, but unlike Western music, which is harmonic,” Hameroff explains.
Did they really posit a connection between quantum and sonic vibrations (a huge and "woo-woo-y" leap) in the context of consciousness?
> “The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review.
And they're suggesting that consciousness is intrinsic to quantum systems? I think I missed some of the connections between the two.
For that matter, I'm still of a position that the very idea of "consciousness" is an artifact of the brain's anthropocentric and self-image-preserving post ergo hoc systems, as opposed to anything concrete. Compare it to software: we "see" operating systems, drivers, apps, and the like, but those are all labels of our invention. It's ultimately nothing but ones and zeros.
Really, raags as molecular vibrations? Now I've heard it all. Which wavelength is thumri?
At the risk of a terrible pun, as they say in Hindi, "Whose raag are they chanting to (alaapna)"?
Anharmonic in this sense does not mean "pentatonic scale" (or 6 or 12 tones). Anharmonic means I add a perturbation term to the harmonic oscillator and my sums over oscillator strengths end up evaluating differently. It is a common beginning exercise in QM and QFT to calculate anharmonic corrections for simple cases like phi^4 [1][2]
I don't always cite "tl;dr". But when I do, it's in regards to over 300 pages of half-century-old metaphysical text.
But on a more serious note, is a more concise counter-argument available, one that takes the latest discoveries of neuroscience into account? And if I see any appeals to consequences in the explanation, I won't bother reading more of it.
Anytime you hear the word "consciousness" in the field of neuroscience, expect a barrage of pseudo-scientific sloppy reasoning to follow.
Even if there are quantum effects involved in the operation of the brain, or any other organ of the body, the idea that they are responsible for this thing called "consciousness" anymore than action potentials or chemical messengers is a gigantic, unsupported assumption.
More likely the words "quantum" and "microtubule vibrations" sounds sufficiently mysterious to appeal to the casual reader's dualist bias. A proper scientific study into "X", whether X be consciousness or anything else, would begin by defining it concretely.
Penrose has for years been advocating against strong AI, instead arguing that there "magic stuff" in the brain that prevents conciousness from arising in a machine. Great mathematician, but totally off his rocker here, which is outside his field. His arguments make no sense. Someone spewing his quackery without his credentials would be laughed out of the room.
The only scientific viewpoint is that we do not know whether or not strong AI is possible. Materialists think it probably is, since they can't see any reason why not. But we don't understand intelligence so we don't know if we are missing something. Meanwhile, there are plenty of reasonable reasons not to be a materialist.
As a meta-comment, I find the condescension in your comment unnecessary. Why is he "spewing" and why is it "quackery"? Did he not publish a testable, falsifiable theory? Isn't that what science is?
"Strong AI" is completely meaningless. Strong AI = whatever isn't human basically. The actual argument that "Strong AI" is meant to support is this: You can't create a Strong AI because Strong AIs can only exist in intelligent beings and computers aren't intelligent, therefore computer scientists are wasting their time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
I don't get it. Strong AI is just a model of the mind that is indistinguishable or better than the original model.
Think of it this way. If you were to do a double scale, full 3D model of earth, with all pieces intact wouldn't it just be a bigger earth on which you could live and do stuff?
I don't necessarily agree with Penrose's views on consciousness, but I'd personally wait on laughing him out of the room until I had a conscious machine that could laugh along with me.
yes. And yet here, for the first time, is evidence he might have been right. This is where we all look at our shoes and mutter something about burdens of proof.
Note that it is still possible to describe consciousness as a computer -- it just has to be a quantum one. I find a lot of us techies relax around strong materialist positions (Penrose, Churchland, Searle) once you have coerced your interlocutor into admitting that there is no way of proving that there isn't an abstract(able) substrate. We can probably all agree that my Core i7 is not a mind. The disagreement amounts to whether or not a computing substrate of which all the relevant components have tidy classical explanations can be a mind, and after reading this, my fence-sitting on that issue is done. Without a single example of a functioning classical-mechanical mind, and strong evidence that quantum effects are nurtured within the brain, it would appear the magical-thinking quantum-worshipping nonsense-spouting materialist weirdos have it this time. Dammit.
that's nonsene, you can use "classical" computation to simulate quantum effects to arbitrary precision (it's how we can do things like simulate NMR spectra with the born-oppenheimer approximation).
The descriptor "quantum" to describe a computer is also actually kind of nonsense, because fundamentally a transistor works because of "quantum effects".
However: While I disagree that penrose's overarching idea that "brains are magic" is nonsense, his specific mechanism invoking microtubules may be correct (and I personally lean towards that mechanism and have for a while)... But I also don't think that has any bearing on "the computability of strong AI". It does however, have a bearing on "trying to develop strong AI by biomimicry", e.g. neural nets, deep learning nets, etc.
No. Only for one-dimensional systems can classical systems approximate quantum ones to arbitrary accuracy. The resulting technique is known as DMRG. (Although there is some crazy 12-dimensional corner case with adiabatic quantum computation I recall hearing about [1], it's totally irrelevant to most simulation in general and especially the sort you are talking about, unless you know of a classical way to find the ground state of all 1-D spin glasses, in which case there are a lot of people at UCSB who would be very excited to talk to you.)
I am aware of Krysta Svore's work at MSR [1][2] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhW3Sen9TVY) that might be what you are describing, but those "classical" methods certainly do not work on all systems and with arbitrary accuracy. And the iterative approximations do not converge for more complex systems in the lifetime of the universe, nor do we have enough computing power to do so. She is predicting ground state structure, certainly not say excited states where geometry and Berry phase effects and non-adiabaticity come into play.
> And the iterative approximations do not converge for more complex systems in the lifetime of the universe
I'm not arguing computational efficiency, here. Just "possibility". For the most part, say, a chemist like me (if I even resorted to a computational package) would do one or a handful of rounds, take a look, and say, 'that's good enough for me'. In the end, on the scale of things like microtubules, a first order approximation of whatever 'quantum effect' needs to be accounted for will probably suffice because randomness from just about everything else (e.g. brownian motion) will drown things in the noise.
Simulating a quantum system in a classical mechanical system may be possible in a limited sense, for trivial problems, but certainly not at speed. It's straight up P v NP. You will boil an ocean to watch any nontrivial simulation crawl frame by frame.
But you wander off that point and return to the 'wet-and-noisy' argument he addresses explicitly in the abstract. Let's call it the Argument from Noise, or AfM.
Again, if you read the abstract, you'll see K explains how this new discovery makes moot the AfM (but not rebut it, as a rebuttal or refutation requires an argument; making moot merely requires a contradicting observation. E.g. if the cops have a watertight argument for how, why when and where X murdered Y, it's moot if 100 reliable witnesses report X was playing acoustic folk-rock at a nearby cafe at the time.)
Quantum origin of conscience might actually make teleporting not a horrible deal. Perhaps if you make a perfect duplicate of someone consciousness it gets entangled (or other technobable) and causes the person to briefly enter a coma like state until one of the duplicates is destroyed. In that case teleporting a la Star Trek wouldn't be as horrible as it is depicted - i.e. clone someone and then kill one original.
No he hasn't, you are completely misrepresenting his argument.
He has been arguing for strong AI, but against it being a UTM, on the claim of there being problems that humans can solve that are provably non-computable.
He may be wrong, but not because he thinks conciousness is magic. I have read a fair amount of his work and he explicitly disavows such a view.
Just b/c there is quantum activity in the microtubules doesn't mean that is the seat of consciousness. When you get down to it, the whole body is a quantum system. So I really find this off base.
Well wait a minute. They predicted "there is quantum activity in the microtubules". Almost everyone said "you are crazy, that's impossible". If it turns out indeed that there is, then this was a successful scientific prediction, in the style of predicting the structure of DNA or the existence of the neutrino.
You are right, it doesn't mean that this is the seat of consciousness, but it doesn't mean it isn't, either. Further investigation would be required. But saying it's "off base" just because you don't like the thesis is exactly the opposite of what science is supposed to be. It is scientism, not science.
For the record: Almost nobody would have disagreed with this statement. What people may have argued about is if quantum activity in the microtubules correlates to anything to do with the function of the brain, esp. memory, or cognition.
This article shows no direct in vivo evidence of such a thing, just a simulation that shows exactly what "quantum activity" is possible, and a tenuous, hypothetical connection to how that may deal with cognition.
FWIW, I have long believed in penrose's microtubule hypothesis (wrt to cognition, but not necessarily consciousness), and I find this finding to be encouraging to my belief, but in the article there is some obfuscation of just how much (or how little?) has been found here.
To my recollection, most people disagreed with said statement. The thought was that any kind of quantum coherence would not hold for a nonnegligible time, because hey, decoherence. This was before we started seeing proof of quantum effects biology at all.
People can not disagree that there are "quantum effects" at the brain because this term has no obvious meaning. There is a completely deceptional "evil sister" of that theory, that defines "quatum effecs" in a completely different way from what's on the paper, it normaly only appears when there isn't a chance for peer review, and yes, people are fast to torn it apart.
The usual answer to this one theory presented at the paper is along the lines of "yes, that's quite possible. It may be quite important for discovering how the neurons work, but even if it's right, it does not mean that our current models are wrong", coupled with a "why did you get the idea that this can be in any way more powerfull than other kind of expected phenomena?"
> Almost everyone said "you are crazy, that's impossible"
according to the article's narrative, at least...
> You are right, it doesn't mean that this is the seat of consciousness, but it doesn't mean it isn't, either. Further investigation would be required
True. But it could also of course be His Noodly Appendage at work in each of those microtubules. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence, etc.
I think what the GP was objecting to was that there's no more reason to jump to the article's conclusion than an infinite number of other conclusions based on the evidence at hand, and it's sloppy science to imply otherwise.
Untrue, because the reason the microtubule coherence was posited in the first place, at all, was as an origin of consciousness. There wasn't another reason to presuppose it. So the fact that the activity exists does have information content with respect to the central thesis. It certainly doesn't prove it, but it moves the needle.
Analogy: Suppose the Earth is covered with clouds and we have never seen the sky, we have not invented space ships yet, etc. Nobody knows why tides happen. Someday someone predicts there is a GIANT rock orbiting the Earth not too far away, and everyone says that is crazy. But eventually you send a rocket up with a camera, and you see this giant rock there! Whoa. Since the tides caused you to look for the rock, and you found the rock, you have reason to suspect the rock does cause the tides. Maybe it doesn't -- further verification is required. But the big rock is evidence, it moves the needle. That is what science is, is making testable predictions and then testing them and then letting the results of those tests help you understand what is going on in the world.
Invoking the FSM or discounting evidence, because it doesn't match preconceived notions, is in fact the kind of thing that is the bane of science and always looks embarrassing / shameful in retrospect. I would hope that people at HN understand science well enough to see this pattern and not participate.
P.S. Re the "according to the article's narrative" snipe, uhh, some of us have been following this issue since the 90s when the idea was proposed. "You guys are crazy" is an accurate description of the majority consensus.
That would be an example of science in action, and I'm certainly not denying that more evidence would make these theories more tenable. Considering that virtually every spare differential at every scale is taken advantage of by the body to conduct its work, it's not surprising at all to find quantum effects put to work all over the brain.
That's in the general, but we're talking about a specific theory. Your story is also about survivorship bias of scientific theories used as justification for a failure of imagination. Just because while looking for a place to seat consciousness they posited a phenomenon that turned out to take place does not imply that seating. Staking out a claim and adjusting it as information arrives is part of doing good science, but it does not follow that the initial or altered claim is then a good or likely scientific theory.
Penrose's theories are especially problematic in this area (as opposed to your analogy) because consciousness as a phenomenon is so poorly defined and because of the (many) changes that have been made wrt the physical structures proposed as the mechanisms of his version of consciousness over the years. Fortunately the "objective reduction" is a very specific requirement for consciousness Penrose has laid out, and I see no evidence here that suggests we're seeing it in action, nor the additional needed evidence that it itself is necessary for "consciousness". Implying otherwise is my objection.
> P.S. Re the "according to the article's narrative" snipe, uhh, some of us have been following this issue since the 90s when the idea was proposed. "You guys are crazy" is an accurate description of the majority consensus.
I was not denying that there were people saying "You guys are crazy", I was saying that I have my doubts that there was ever consensus around calling crazy a statement like "there is quantum activity in the microtubules". See dnautics's comment above. "Theory pilloried by scientific community turns out to be true" is a nice narrative, but again: survivorship bias. Most theories turn out to be wrong (and, more crucially, less usefully wrong than accepted theories).
Predicting the existence of a giant rock wouldn't be sufficient. The theory would also have to predict the tides based on the assumption of a giant rock.
In the article's case, only the rock is being predicted but the link to the tides is not established (except that the former somehow causes the latter).
In order for the claim or idea that consciousness depends on quantum information processing( processing not accessible from classical computation) you would need a rigorous definition of consciousness. Or one that at least required quantum information processing and explanation for the requirement.
I do not see either kind of definition put forward so the claim or idea that quantum information processing is necessary for consciousness does not seem very productive.
Currently 90% of the comments here are meaningless guesses and opinions written by people who haven't read anything and/or know nothing about the mentioned theory, the new findings or the physics involved.
I wish there was somebody here who have actually read the mentioned papers, knows something about the relevant physics, is aware of the prior criticism of Orch-OR, and can say what, if anything, the new findings mean for Orch-OR and for its critics.
I recently finished my physics PhD focused on quantum effects in photosynthesis, and I saw Hameroff and Bandyopadhyay's talks at Google's "Quantum Biology" workshop back in 2010.
These guys live in a bizarre alternate universe where a number of legitimate experimental results and calculations based on real physics add up to striking conclusions with no basis in reality. They are happy to combined many random factoids -- anything that vaguely supports their ideas -- and pretend that the combination is convincing evidence.
For example, the authors hypothesize that the spin of magnetic dipoles could be quantum bits used for information processing in microtubules. As support, they cite experimental evidence for resonances in electrical conductance in microtubules at certain RF frequencies. But coherent motion of electrons is a totally different physical phenomena than coherent spin.
The most amazing thing to me is that these guys do manage to operate in their own parallel academic universe, with their own journals, conferences and (most frighteningly) funding.
As I found out at the Google workshop (which had been basically hijacked by these guys), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has been funding this fellow Bandyopadhyay's experiments that, at the Google conference, he was touting as "experimental evidence for a topological quantum computing in the brain." An AFOSR officer I talked to was very proud about this project. In my view this is basically a criminal misuse of US taxpayer money (probably 100k/year).
No offense, but wasn't your advisor on the FMO complex coherence train for the longest time before they found another chromophore[1] that rendered many coherence projections spurious?
There has been plenty of hype about quantum coherence in photosynthesis, too, which I have played a part in debunking [1]. It is clear (in my opinion) that quantum coherent motion not play a large role in energy transfer in photosynthesis, but I think the jury is still out on whether or not it plays a small role or none at all.
Part of the answer may depend on how "coherence" is defined. I do have a number of objections to the conclusions drawn in the paper discussed in the blog post you link to (about the 8th chromophore). For more details, you can see a paper I wrote a few years ago [2]. I don't agree with the interpretation that "The energy transfer is incoherent in the native complex." This is still a rather large point of contention among scholars in this field.
The differences between quantum computing in the brain and quantum coherence in photosynthesis are actually rather large. There is actual, essentially undisputed evidence for quantum coherence in photosynthesis (in the experiments). There is a real scientific process going on with interactions between experiment/theory. Moreover, the people who did the over-hyped experiments a few years ago that were published in Nature/Science have moved on from claiming it is "quantum computing in biology" when further evidence and analyses came out against it. Hameroff and Penrose seem to be sticking to their original ideas even though they have been thoroughly debunked.
Why am I not surprised that this involves microtubules? Kurzweil meets Penrose meets Indian mysticism -- it's hard to imagine a denser nexus of consciousness-related quackery.
I suppose there's nothing like argument-free abuse to feel you've wrapped up a subject and feel a wee bit superior to it all especially when the proponents are persons of undisputed attainment in their respective fields.
You may or may not be aware that the study of consciousness attracts an amazing number of quacks and loonies. Penrose may be a good physicist, but that has very little to do with his credibility on neuroscience. If you want to read smart things about consciousness, look to people who study actual brains; Mike Gazzaniga was one of the better ones, at least 10 years ago. EDIT: also Patricia Churchland, who comes at it as a philosopher, but takes the time to learn the neurology.
I'm generally very skeptical of authors or papers that make claims about "quantum processes" and consciousness because they are generally written by people who know very little about neurology and even less about quantum physics. Ask them about quantum entanglement, and you'll generally get a misguided interpretation based on a decades old mistake in reasoning that has long since been corrected [1][2]. However, I decided to give this paper a try not because I expected there to be any actual content, but just to see why otherwise intelligent people would be drawn to what I consider to be obvious pseudoscience.
I didn't read the whole thing, but from what I know of quantum mechanics and QFT (standard undergraduate course load) I didn't see anything wildly misguided. This tells me that one of two things are true.
1. This paper describes a legitimate link between a non-classical process occurring in the brain that may "cause" consciousness. I do not know enough about the brain to rigorously evaluate the claims.
2 (more likely). Quantum physics is hard, even for scientists. Neither of the paper's author's are physicists, and neither have done any _recent_ meaningful work in any subfield of physics. I would expect that groundbreaking work in physics would require ideas beyond an undergraduate level, but I did not see any physics in the paper I didn't understand. It looks like at the very least, there is room for a false positive. What I mean by "false positive" is that sometimes not about A will cause you to reason that Q->C even when the truth is A->Q and A->C (correlation does not imply causation...). For example, it could be that the electrical signals of the brain that cause consciousnes + quantum effect, but if the same signals were running through a semiconductor we would instead see a different quantum effect (depletion zones, electron holes...). If our brains were made of 5nm CMOS transistors, a non-physicist might see quantum tunneling and conclude that it somehow caused consciousness.
I think the most important thing for non-physicists like me to remember about papers like this is that although sometimes scientists make important discoveries outside their fields we should allow specialists in the area to evaluate the non-physicists claims before believing them ourselves.
I liked this: If I may add - my personal few cents -
1) I am filled with distaste when people treat quantum mechanics "like magic". In this case it's just taking an unexplained phenomenon (consciousness, or heck, even the weaker 'cognition') and pushing an explanation into a 'more obscure' corner, which I think is intellectually lazy.
2) Drop consciousness for a second, it's really quite amazing if microtubules have a role in cognition (penrose's 'weaker hypothesis' vs. penrose's 'strong thesis' which is that consciousness is QM). And people on hn should take note, because this has implications for a lot of machine learning, which sometimes is bio-mimetic (neural nets e.g.)
3) if we take 1 and 2 into consideration, it is possible that cognition and ML is feasible using LESS computational power, just that we're missing out on the correct architecture by attempting biomimicry - granted, biomimicry has served some fields well, like image processing and OCR.
edit: and then I realized that my 1) is your link [1].
> 1) I am filled with distaste when people treat quantum mechanics "like magic". In this case it's just taking an unexplained phenomenon (consciousness, or heck, even the weaker 'cognition') and pushing an explanation into a 'more obscure' corner, which I think is intellectually lazy.
This is very misleading even after your "correction". Penrose's theories on consciousness and QM might be eccentric, but he is one of the better known physicists of our time, with integral contributions to the mathematics of GR. He deserves more than being presented as "not a physicist" at first, and then as somebody who "did some work on back holes 40 years ago" later. He is also definitely a very real physicist.
Here's an edge.org answer that briefly touches on this - from the other end, by another great physicist, Anton Zeilinger[0]: http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25548
Alright, when we're to the point of saying Penrose is no longer a real physicist or doing legitimate physics and implying that he doesn't have a very deep understanding of quantum physics... Well, there's not much point in continuing.
I like it when we dismiss papers without actually reading them. Makes it much more easier. Come on HN! Keep up with the pseudo-intellectual mid-brow dismissals.
> Penrose did important work on
the nature of black holes ~40 years ago. At one point in time he was a real physicist.
> why otherwise intelligent people would be drawn to what I consider to be obvious pseudoscience.
More so; Scientific papers have structure - reading them linearly from beginning to end, just that you skip the end, may not tell you anything about what the authors propose.
The beginning (like the introduction and method stuff) generally is a build-up where you connect the contribution with the contemporary knowledge, but it is only in the final discussion and conclusion parts that you will find the argumentation.
Picture yourself reading a Hercule Poirot story by Agatha Christie, but stop reading just as Hercule summons all the participants into the living room to wrap up the story. Would you then criticise Christie for writing a bad story :) Of course, the story could be bad with weak character narratives and a lousy plot, but would you not want to know whether the butler really did it before giving up?
The comment is explicitly not a dismissal. "I didn't read the whole thing, but from what I know of quantum mechanics and QFT (standard undergraduate course load) I didn't see anything wildly misguided."
And it taught me some valuable information about entanglement.
But go ahead, keep it up with criticizing the tone.
Excellent post. When you say "false positive" you could substitute "confounding effect" to use a more specific term for what you've described, by the way.
LSD's first-order mechanism is known, like all tryptamines it's a 5HT receptor binder. It's a fairly complicated tryptamine, though, what is more bizarre is that for simple tryptamines there are incredibly complex differences in effect for small changes in the molecule, and the rationale for 'second-order' differences in pschedelicity is generally unknown. There are some hand-wavey explanations about differential binding for different 5HT receptor classes with different prevalences in different parts of the brain. (I would strongly recommend reading TIHKAL/PIHKAL if you're interested, to get an idea of what I'm talking about).
In general, though, tryptamines effects (including LSD) are unlikely to involve microtubules, since they are charged, water soluble and don't cross inside the neurons (where microtubules are) so easily.
I would also generally posit that visual hallucinogens do not generally require MT/Quantum 'involvement'. The visual cortex is incredibly well-characterized, and relative to the rest of the brain well-understood in the absence of a strong MT hypothesis. Moreover, visual cortex-like applications are very amenable to neural network solutions in silico (e.g. ocr) and these ANNs also don't require a strong MT hypothesis.
No matter how many words people spend on writing about consciousness, not once have I ever seen anyone say anything revealing about consciousness. (And yes, I have read all the usual suspects.)
I find a good initial test of writings about consciousness is to ask "would Ray Kurzweil or his website get excited about this?" If the answer is no - perhaps the material is too dry, language-oriented, technical (in a non-sexy field), or cynical to be exciting - it is probably worth reading.
Like, off the top of my head, Kant or Hume. Plenty of contemporary people working away thanklessly as well, probably, too; but it's not my field. But even then, it more likely qualifies as "useful" rather than "revealing". Because there are no big easy-to-grasp-and-broadcast flashes of blinding insight. In the field of consciousness or any other.
Did they really posit a connection between quantum and sonic vibrations (a huge and "woo-woo-y" leap) in the context of consciousness?
> “The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review.
And they're suggesting that consciousness is intrinsic to quantum systems? I think I missed some of the connections between the two.
For that matter, I'm still of a position that the very idea of "consciousness" is an artifact of the brain's anthropocentric and self-image-preserving post ergo hoc systems, as opposed to anything concrete. Compare it to software: we "see" operating systems, drivers, apps, and the like, but those are all labels of our invention. It's ultimately nothing but ones and zeros.