New Evidence Corroborates the Quantum Mind

Gonna keep right on till they prove that the Bible was right .!

Penrose has some interesting theories but his "quantum mind" Is far from be being proved. I'm all for it but.

Here is a quote from penrose who actually doesnt separate mind from body. It's the (mis)interpretation of his theories that I don't like.

In my own opinion, it is not very helpful, from the scientific point of view, to "think of a dualistic 'mind' that is (logically) external to the body, somehow influencing the choices that seem to arise in the action of R. If the 'will' could somehow influence Nature's choice of alternative that occurs with R, then why is an experimenter not able, by the action of 'will power', to influence the result of a quantum experiment? If this were possible, then violations of the quantum probabilities would surely be rife! For myself, I cannot believe that such a picture can be close to the truth. To have an external 'mind-stuff' that is not itself subject to physical laws is taking us outside anything that could be reasonably called a scientific explanation, and is resorting to the viewpoint D (cf. §1.3).

www.informationphilosopher.com...

reply to post by ZetaRediculian


Yet in that recent interview, they speak of proto-conscious as if it were a force, and they say their theory's postulations are open to materialistic, and spiritualistic, interpretations.

It is plainly in the context of their words...

"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. "This opens a potential Pandora's Box, but our theory accommodates both these views, suggesting consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers inside brain neurons, which both govern neuronal and synaptic function, and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes in the fine scale, 'proto-conscious' quantum structure of reality."

source

reply to post by Bleeeeep


Exactly!

I have heard that Penrose quote taken out of context before.

Of course Penrose thinks consciousness is external to the body. His whole theory is based on the fact that he believes the brain is non computable and therefore proto-consciousness originates on the smallest levels or Planck scales of space-time geometry. Also, the whole website that's posted is quotes from 1994 and 97.

This was before the delayed choice quantum eraser experiments and other delayed choice experiments like the recent entanglement swapping delayed choice experiments.

So it's a quote that's truly taken out of context. There have been a lot of discoveries since 1994.

reply to post by neoholographic


Very cool thread - I just mentioned Orch OR in this thread - Time Travelling Porn Experiment. Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, whom I have messaged a few times, talks about how a quantum theory of mind works regarding memories of the past and the future - his books Parallel Universes and I think The Yoga of Time Travel are essential starting points.

If you check out the link in my signature, I have a thesis paper link in that philosophy of mine somewhere - it seemed to cover all the bases at the time, which was back in 2008 or so. Yeah the link is

A Mathematical Evaluation of Consciousness.

Or, you know, I'll just link it straight up : A Mathematical Evaluation of Consciousness, free to share, all that - it was a thesis paper I researched for my psychology major - I even contacted the writers of the books I used, including Dr. Hofstadter, an opponent of the idea, at least professionally.

Honestly, I think we are all about to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Who's ready? It's going to get really, really complicated. My personal opinion is this is the direction things are going to move in - with string theory, quantum physics, all of that - crazy stuff -

reply to post by neoholographic

There's zero evidence that the brain operates and navigates through the information it stores.

There is plenty of evidence of that, from brain scans during activities or lack of them. From trance states (meditation) to image, sound and imagination recognition even the creation of lies can be detected (better that a normal lie detector that is mostly based on the placebo effect, the more one believes it works the better its detection is, the weak physiologic clues are easy to forge but not mental activity).

reply to post by Panic2k11


Nope,

Here's more about the brain scan lie detector tests where brain activity was suppressed and the researchers couldn't figure out who suppressed it.

Brain-Scan Lie Detectors Just Don’t Work

The researchers could identify which photos were familiar to the participants and which ones were not, with 91 percent accuracy, Wagner said. However, when the researchers told the participants to try to actively suppress their recognition of the photos that were theirs—to “try to beat the system”—the researchers had much less success.

Scientists still don’t know how this “suppression” actually works; like so many questions about the inner workings of the human brain, it remains a mystery. But the fact that so many test subjects could, somehow, do it on command, led the authors of both the Cambridge and Stanford studies to come to the same conclusions.

In short, brain-scan guilt-detection type tests are beatable, their results are unreliable, and they shouldn’t be used as evidence in court. Except on television.

www.psmag.com...

The problem is people equate brain activity to consciousness and like I said there's zero evidence to support this. The brain stores information and of course the brain becomes active in certain areas when this information is accessed. It's just like my DVD player. It stores information on how to play a DVD and when I push play it becomes active but it takes a user to operate and navigate the information stored on the DVD player.

This is analogous to the brain. The brain isn't a magical device that creates it's own user. The brain stores information and the user operates and navigates through this stored information.

This goes back to specific memory recall. The brain is active when I recall a specific memory but who initiates the recall of this specific memory? How can the material brain, tell the material brain that the material brain wishes to recall a specific memory of when I first went swimming?

There needs to be a user interacting with the information stored on the material brain in order to recall specific memories. The most that can be shown is that the brain is active when I recall these specific memories just like my DVD player is active when I push play. What it can't show is that the material brain initiated the recall of this specific memory. This is because the brain isn't magical.

reply to post by neoholographic

Identifying the Potential for fMRI as a Lie Detector The potential to use fMRI as a lie detector was discovered unintentionally by Daniel Langleben, MD, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, while he was studying adolescent boys with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Using fMRI, he tried to determine whether their brains operated differently from the brains of children without ADHD, and if so, in what areas. While performing experiments and asking these children to carry out different tasks, he found that these children had difficulty lying. This observation intrigued him, and he began trying to identify the areas of the brain involved with deception by examining which areas either were missing or did not function correctly in these children. As a result, he became the first individual to utilize fMRI to study deception.11

Although Dr Langleben has been performing research on this topic for 6 years, many in the scientific and judicial worlds are still skeptical about whether this form of lie detection should be used in court.12

Deception relies on 2 main principles:
Theory of mind, which allows the person to infer what others are thinking; and
Deontic reasoning, which allows the person to appreciate social rules.13

After extensive testing, it has been shown that regardless of the patient's age, sex, employment, level of education, or time from the action occurring to the scan does not matter; the lie is still detected in the same region in everyone who is tested.14 Yet skepticism about the legitimacy of this consideration still exists due to the lack of real-life situation experiments.

From The Potential Role of fMRI in Lie Detection 1/1/2013

I think the jury is still out on that one.

On the rest we are more or less in accord, I don't see it as "a user" but an operating system (algorithms) and I'm still open for memory not to be exactly locally stored (Discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons corroborates controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness)

BlueMule
Here is the Science Daily article:

Discovery of Quantum Vibrations in 'Microtubules' Inside Brain Neurons Supports Controversial Theory of Consciousness

So is it time to track down all the debunkers and gloat or what?

edit on 18-1-2014 by BlueMule because: (no reason given)

What exactly is a quantum vibration? Seriously. This specific juxtaposition of contradictory terminology seems to suggest that no such event is possible. Especially since a vibration is a repetitive movement from point A to point B and then back again and a quantum of anything is just the one indivisible unit of whatever it is. The two terms don't seem as if they can possibly join together to describe anything that's real.

Yeah, I did do a Google search, and there's nothing that isn't extremely vague associated with that pair of words.

Science Daily isn't the best source for much of anything other than hype.

reply to post by Panic2k11


You said:

I think the jury is still out on that one.

Of course the Jury is still out because the user can suppress when they're lying like the previous articled showed. And it's not just that. Of course a lie will be associated with brain activity but you can't equate brain activity with consciousness. Of course there's brain activity when the user interacts with the information stored on the material brain. Just like there's activity in my DVD player or TV when the user interacts with the DVD player or the TV. Like I said, there's no evidence that mind emerges from the material brain. There's no evidence that brain activity can initiate itself when carrying out a specific tasks like recalling a specific memory from when I was in the Army. Again, who initiates the lie?

If a person had on a blind fold and I was given a 10 and 5 dollar bill and I gave the blind folded person 5 dollars and told them I gave them 10 dollars that would be a lie. When I'm hooked up to the fMRI machine and I'm asked about it, the User has to make the choice to lie about the 5 dollars or tell the truth. The user has to initiate the response which is then associated with brain activity. There's zero evidence that the material brain initiated the response. It's just an assumption that people just accept as truth because anything that doesn't fit the preconceived notion that consciousness must emerge from the material brain can't be valid even though there's zero evidence to support this notion.

This is just one reason why I support aspects of Penrose/Hameroff theory of the Quantum Mind.

reply to post by NorEaster



You should have done a Google search and read the actual paper. It makes no sense to act like Hameroff and Penrose are just making things up. It's fine if you don't agree with them, but a simple knee jerk reaction like they're just making it up and it's meaningless makes no sense. A simple read of the paper answers the question:

Abstract

The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it occurs in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are unknown. We proposed in the mid 1990ʼs that consciousness depends on biologically ‘orchestrated’ coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity, and that the continuous Schrödinger evolution of each such process terminates in accordance with the specific Diósi–Penrose (DP) scheme of ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) of the quantum state. This orchestrated OR activity (‘Orch OR’) is taken to result in moments of conscious awareness and/or choice. The DP form of OR is related to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and space–time geometry, so Orch OR suggests that there is a connection between the brainʼs biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe. Here we review Orch OR in light of criticisms and developments in quantum biology, neuroscience, physics and cosmology. We also introduce a novel suggestion of ‘beat frequencies’ of faster microtubule vibrations as a possible source of the observed electro-encephalographic (‘EEG’) correlates of consciousness. We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe.

www.sciencedirect.com...

That Abstract answers your question. All you had to do was take the time to look instead of having a knee jerk reaction. Here's more:

The recent discovery of warm-temperature quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons by the research group led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay, PhD, at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan (and now at MIT), corroborates the pair’s theory and suggests that EEG rhythms also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations.

An important new facet of the theory is introduced. Microtubule quantum vibrations (e.g. in the megahertz frequency range) appear to interfere and produce much slower EEG “beat frequencies.” Despite a century of clinical use, the underlying origins of EEG rhythms have remained a mystery. Clinical trials of brief brain stimulation — aimed at microtubule resonances with megahertz mechanical vibrations using transcranial ultrasound — have shown reported improvements in mood, and may prove useful against Alzheimer’s disease and brain injury in the future.

Again, it's simple and straightforward. Because of the Orch OR activity in Microtubules, quantum vibrations can play a major role in EEG rhythms and this discovery could help with certain illnesses.

Like I said, you may not agree with them but it belittles your argument when you act like people are just making these things up.