Is consciousness to be found in quantum processes in microtubules?

Discussion in 'Pseudoscience' started by Write4U, Sep 8, 2018.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    The question of consciousnes has beenaround for some 2000 years.
    That's wholly dependent on the subject.
    AFAIK, quantum mechanics is not well understood either, let alone having practical application.
    I agree it is the first time trying to apply quantum mechanics on a biological brain function. This is NEW!
    And ORCH OR is sufficiently understood to rule out the entire hypothesis based on a few tests? As I said before, I'd hate to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

    It is very easy to make sweeping claims that "consciousness is an emergent phenomon from neural activity". That is an untestable proposition and completely useless. At least HP offer a testable concept, once we figure out what and how to test this new science.

    p.s. Is QM testable?

    Dave Morgan, PhD in theoretical physics from William and Mary.
    Answered Aug 11
    https://www.quora.com/Which-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-is-the-most-plausible

    Let's throw out QM?
     
    Last edited: Nov 1, 2019
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. exchemist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,451
    Don't be absurd. The predictions of QM were all triumphantly borne out, from the first moment it was formulated. It is one of the greatest scientific successes of the c.20th.

    The whole of modern chemistry relies on QM. It is reconfirmed every time somebody takes an infra red spectrum in the lab, for a start. So for a berk like you to claim it does not have practical applications is just confirmation (as if it were needed

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    ) that you are speaking totally ex ano.

    The quotations you cite refer to something that is not experimental science at all, to wit, how QM should be interpreted philosophically (Copenhagen, Many Worlds and all that jazz). This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not its predictions can be tested by observation. They are, every day, and nobody has ever yet come up with an observation that contradicts its predictions.

    Even the double slit experiment was a prediction that remained theoretical and was not confidently believed until technology was eventually able to detect a single QM particle passing through the slits at a time....whereupon QM's counterintuitive prediction was found to be correct.

    Orch-R by contrast has never made a correct prediction and has made a number of false ones, as posts 5 and 398 show.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    OK, perhaps a poor choice of words.
    I merely quoted; Dave Morgan, PhD in theoretical physics from William and Mary. Answered Aug 11.
    He made that observation, if you disagree with his posit, tell him.
    Who said, "the most scientific interpretation of quantum mechanics is the “shut up and calculate" ?
    I didn't, but of course that does count as practical application? But do we know why it works? Do we know when or why a particle behaves as a wave and when or why it is a particle?

    Is that as deep as it gets? Do we know how and why QM works the way it does?

    AFAIK, Schrodingers cat was a thought experiment which yielded a paradox. Is that the extent of our understanding? It isn't testable is it?

    Anyway, I am investigating microtubules and what they may be capable of. I would not presume to speak about QM, I'll leave that to Penrose.
    Oh, I forgot, Penrose is also a crackpot, my bad? And of course Both Hameroff and Penrose are "snake-oil salesmen". What is the world coming to?
     
    Last edited: Nov 2, 2019
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    Here are some answers to the question if ORCH OR has been debunked.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Barry McGuinness, Psychologist, meditator, writer, Britisher
    Updated Sep 26, 2017
    https://www.quora.com/As-of-yet-is-...osed-by-Sir-Roger-Penrose-and-Stuart-Hameroff
     
  8. Bells Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,270
    And sometimes, even a wonderful marriage ends up being a sham.

    Why?

    Do I look like the type of person to follow on blind faith alone while disregarding all evidence to the contrary?

    I reject it because it is completely unproven and other scientists who have studied and tested it, have been able to show how and why it fails and/or is impossible.

    Not in the way that you are presenting it.

    Just because mitosis is classified as an equational division does not mean that the microtubules are little computers or are quantum computers.

    Of course you do. Many people still think that Wakefield was acting in good faith..

    Meanwhile Hameroff is looking for the 'soul', and all the quasi religious ideas that comes with it, in microtubules...

    I am curious though, is it in good faith to ignore all studies that proves one's theory cannot work or is wrong, and then keep claiming that it's a sound theory?

    It's a figure of speech.

    There is a reason why Hawkins suggested Penrose should stick to the field of science he knows instead of venturing into Hameroff's quest..
     
    Last edited: Nov 2, 2019
  9. globali Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    292
    How about picking up a random anesthesiologist and doing a google scholar search on the reseasrch interests....
     
  10. exchemist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,451
    On the contrary I agree entirely with Dave Morgan "PhD", whoever he is, so I have no need to go and tell him anything. (By the way, just drop the wanky appeals to authority, can't you?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    )

    Morgan makes perfectly clear in the quote you provide: "... none of the interpretations of QM have measurable or testable predictions or consequences, so scientifically speaking, they are all equally plausible. Evaluating interpretations of QM comes down to making judgements about their metaphysical/epistemological/ontological content..." that these issue are philosophical ones, not scientific ones.

    As for "Shut up and calculate", that is absolutely the most strictly scientific approach, given that all theories in science are predictive models of physical reality, that cannot be assumed to represent it accurately or completely. And yes that is "as deep as it gets", from the point of view of science. Just as the Big Bang theory does not provide an answer to why the Big Bang happened. In science, your theories can only go as far as the observations can justify them - or maybe you can speculate a little bit farther, but not much. There always comes a point in science at which you have to say, "Well that is just how nature seems to behave and we don't know why."

    Incidentally, if you "would not presume to speak about QM", why have you just devoted several posts to talking rubbish about it?
     
  11. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    13,077
  12. exchemist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,451
    Ah yes, but "how" =/= "why".

    Also, these speculations are not backed by any observation, so they are really getting on towards metaphysics. Remember, if a hypothesis is not testable by observation, it is not part of science. Some of this very early cosmogeny is close to, or over, the line.
     
  13. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    What do microtubules do? They make copies, no?
    No he isn't, Penrose is. Hameroff just wants to work with microtubules.
    Where did I claim it is a sound theory?
    Ahh, I see . Physics and Biology are incompatible and never the twain shall meet?
     
  14. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    I try to be balanced in providing information from several sources, including critiques.
    Penrose is the QM guy and should know if Hameroff's microtubules might provide a vehicle for his ORCH OR..
     
  15. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    That sweeping statement is not necessarily true.
    https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/determine-which-following-observations-testable-380449

    Are we not in the stage where we are testing a hypothesis?
     
  16. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    ???
     
  17. exchemist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,451
    Last edited: Nov 2, 2019
  18. Bells Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,270
    My point still stands.

    Are you sure about that?

    In the words of Hameroff:

    First, by soul I mean that consciousness (and/or unconscious processes) may be accompanied by: 1) nonlocal interconnectedness among living beings, 2) interaction with a Platonic wisdom, or cosmic intelligence inherent in the universe, and 3) existence outside the body.

    I am not claiming proof of the soul, but of a scientifically plausible explanation for it based on these three factors. The potential explanation involves quantum theory, a poorly understood but indisputably accurate field of science. Orch OR proposes that consciousness is a sequence of momentary frames, or conscious events occurring in the brain roughly 40 times per second (faster or slower depending on arousal etc), coupled to high frequency EEG brain waves called gamma synchrony.

    [...]

    Neuroscience and mainstream philosophy attacked our theory even before it was published, and continue to do so. Nonetheless Orch OR remains viable, completely consistent with known neuroscience and can also account for aspects of the soul.

    1) Interconnectedness among living beings can be accounted for by nonlocal quantum entanglement. 2) Interaction with cosmic intelligence may be influence by Penrose noncomputable Platonic wisdom embedded in Planck scale geometry. 3) Existence outside the body: According to Orch OR, consciousness occurs at the fundamental level of Planck scale geometry, normally in and around microtubules between our ears. But when brain coherence is lost, quantum information related to consciousness and the unconscious mind remain in the universe, distributed but still entangled.

    So I believe that science can in principle accommodate the soul through the application of quantum mechanics to neuroscience
    .​

    And it doesn't end there. Since you ignored the other link, which dealt specifically with Hameroff's Science of Consciousness conference, and how a plethora of scientists were now refusing to go, because Hameroff was essentially going down a religious and mysticism route...

    Hameroff, an anesthesiologist with an angular gray goatee, a bulldog manner, and a penchant for bowling shirts, is the author of articles with quizzical titles like "Quantum Walks in Brain Microtubules — a Biomolecular Basis for Quantum Cognition?" While the Science of Consciousness event has, technically, three program chairs and an advisory committee, it is more or less the Stuart Show. He decides who will and who will not present. And, to put it nicely, not everyone is in love with the choices he makes. To put it less nicely: Some consciousness researchers believe that the whole shindig has gone off the rails, that it’s seriously damaging the field of consciousness studies, and that it should be shut down.

    [...]

    For a while, Chalmers and Hameroff ran the Tucson conference together, back when it was called "Toward a Science of Consciousness," a slightly more humble label for a fledgling field. But Chalmers quietly withdrew as co-organizer a few years back — so quietly that Wikipedia has yet, as I write this, to notice the change. While Chalmers may be open to more crazy-seeming ideas than most, Tucson had grown too crazy even for him. "I was always trying to drag it back to the mainstream," he says. "It got far enough out there that I no longer felt comfortable with it being my product."

    Honestly, it’s always been a little out there. In the 1990s, some researchers complained that there was too much attention paid to wild ideas at Tucson, and so they started their own conference and organization, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, which held its first meeting in 1997. ASSC became Tucson’s more buttoned-down sibling. Scan the program for its forthcoming meeting this summer and you’ll see sessions on the "cortical and subcortical mechanisms of conscious perception" and "understanding the neurocognitive underpinnings of voluntary act." For a session on "Sustained Spiritualization of ‘Sant-Su’ Scheme Toddlers Evolving the Race of Supermen," you’ll need to go to Tucson.

    Chalmers is among the few researchers who maintain a presence in both camps, and he paints a happy face on the schism. But he can’t completely disguise his discomfort with what Tucson has become, or with some of the speakers who now share the stage. While he’s too polite to name names, Chalmers does wonder aloud "whether the conference should be revolving around spiritual gurus."

    The gurus he mentions are the likes of Deepak Chopra, who are also invited to speak at the "Science of Consciousness" conference..

    While Chopra attracts one sort of audience, he drives another one away — including scientists like David Cox. A professor of biology and computer science at Harvard, Cox was recently named director of the MIT-IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence Lab; he was invited to speak at Tucson about brain mapping. He declined, explaining in an email to Hameroff that "I wouldn’t expect a geophysicist to go to a conference where ‘Flat Earthers’ were given equal platform, nor would I expect astrophysicists to attend a conference populated by astrologers." It wasn’t just Chopra, though. Other sessions set off his alarm bells, like the ones on quantum energy. "They say it’s quantum something or other, and it doesn’t make any sense. The evidence there is just so uncompelling," Cox says. "It’s like they’re looking for magic dust."

    Hakwan Lau has gone to Tucson in the past, but he didn’t show up this year and doesn’t plan to attend in the future. Lau, an associate professor of cognitive psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a longtime consciousness researcher who was inspired by David Chalmers’s work in the 1990s and pursued consciousness even though he was warned he would never get tenure if he did (lo and behold, he got tenure). Lau considers what Tucson has become an embarrassment. "It would be better for the field if it didn’t exist," he says.

    During an interview, Hameroff then dismissed scientists and biologists, suggesting they were snotty and academic snobs for their distaste at his pushing mysticism with his Orch Or - which people accused him of stacking the conference with instead of dealing with what can be proven.

    So, you may want to revise your beliefs in regards to Hameroff.

    You really are terrible at this.

    I don't know what you are seeing, because you have this repulsive tendency to deliberately take things out of context and be dishonest.
     
    globali and exchemist like this.
  19. exchemist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,451
    The information you provided in this case was not balanced at all. It was misleading and irrelevant, as it had nothing to do with evidence in favour of or against QM.

    But you, apparently failing to understand what it meant (and I am being polite here), chose it in the hope it you could use it to support your futile attempt to put QM and Orch-OR on an equal footing in terms of verification.

    Penrose is not "the QM guy". He is one mathematical physicist out of tens of thousands. Tegmark is another. Do they agree about Orch-OR?

    And you still, after 20 pages, have not addressed - or so much as even acknowledged - the evident failures of Orch-OR I pointed out in posts 5 and 398.
     
  20. Bells Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,270
    And just in case you think the author was joking about the "Sustained Spiritualization of ‘Sant-Su’ Scheme Toddlers Evolving the Race of Supermen", he wasn't.

    There is a whole spiel and article that you can download from Hameroff's "Center for Consciousness Studies" at the University of Arizona, with the title "Sustained Spiritualization of ‘Sant-Su’ Scheme Toddlers Evolving the Race of Supermen"..

    Here is a cached link to the topics that appear to have been discussed at Hameroff's conference.. The very conference he organises and chooses who is going to speak there:

    http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IeFZUHUSGZsJ:www.consciousness.arizona.edu/documents/3TSC2018IntegratedEast-WestForumPosterAbstracts.doc &cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au

    My personal favourite, and it comes just before a talk on Hameroff's microtubules:

    21. Impact of Indian Classical music in evolving a Race of Super-Humans
    Manju Srivastava, Darash Adhari, Aseem Srivastava


    Music is divine and it is the food of soul and the spirit. Music is an art which has its impact on regions far beyond the pind and brahmanda. The divinity and music have inseparable relationship. Divinity expresses itself through music only. Divine music is all the time there in cosmos. It’s like a store house of the energy of the supreme father, who is omnipotent and omnipresent. The soul being the part of supreme father is all the time yearning to hear the divine music. Its power and charm nourishes, stirs and uplifts the soul. Thus it may be designed and used for awakening and development of the deeper and higher layers of consciousness within the new generation (the generation of super humans), and above their mind, and their greater powers and potentialities. As it is a consciousness in which the three aspects of the Deity, Wisdom, Power and Love, fuse together and where all the higher values and aspirations of humanity like truth, beauty, goodness, harmony and unity are not mere abstractions or feelings but part of the very substance of consciousness. The melodic mode (Raaga) structures in the Indian classical music system activate specific chakras, which allow the Kundalini energy to rise easily and energize and nourish the chakra. The raga also influences the chakra to maintain its optimum spin and balance, ensuring a balanced energy supply to different organs that are connected to the specific chakra. Thus it is assumed that if we make the children to listen to the different ragas from the birth itself it will activate their kundalini energy and consciousness to the extent that they can be evolved as the super-humans. Thus, in the present study we investigated the effect of different ragas on group of children between ages three months to 12 years. We have continued to follow them, to explore the effects of such training on their brain, cognitive, social and emotional development
    .​

    These were mixed in between speakers who were talking about Hameroff's Orch Or theory...

    The talk that came after the Indian music in evolving a race of super humans:

    22. Modelling Microtubules as Self-Correcting Topological Quantum Memories

    And on and on it went.

    #25 speakers dealt with "In silico study of tubulin isotypes in perspective of qudit"

    #26 "Teaching Aparavidya (Quantum field theory) to students with analogies to the Vedic Science of Consciousness"

    Aparavidya is all of modern science and systems science, whereas paravidya is the knowledge derived from esoteric experimentations and research of Saints by making use of hidden senses which exist in the human brain and can be rendered kinetic through meditation. The Vedic science describes deeper levels of the mind as causally prior, intrinsically more dynamic, abstract, comprehensive and unified-parallel to the structure of more fundamental levels in physics (Alexander, Davies et. al.,1987).​

    And coming in at speaker's abstract #61:

    Sustained Spiritualization of ‘Sant-Su’ Scheme Toddlers Evolving the Race of Supermen

    Surat Kumar, Kavita Kumar, Bhakti Kumar, Reeti Kumar


    In the backdrop of Weiss’ field theory, explaining the magnetic induction through magnetic domains of + and – polarities; it was proposed by us that spiritual domains do exist in the structural tubulin scaffold of microtubules. When a disciple comes under the influence of a pure spiritual source (Guru/Spiritual Mentor), all tiny ‘spiritual-domains’ of disciple are coherently aligned with Guru’s spirituality through resonance coupling. Hence, proximity of the Spiritual Mentor can perpetuate greater spirituality among disciples through spiritual induction. Therefore, the disciple in turn becomes spiritually charged through spiritual induction under the spiritual aura of Guru. A scheme of ‘Sant-Su’ has been started in Dayalbagh with the same objective in mind. In this scheme, toddlers of 3 months to 3 years of age come in the proximity of Spiritual Mentor daily for about 2-3 hours. Such a sustained exposure of younger generation of toddlers to prime spiritual force field or spiritual aura of the Guru, is expected to bring out the characteristics of Supermen, perpetuated by spiritualization.

    So yeah..

    Hameroff is a quack.
     
  21. globali Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    292
    Seems like Hameroff is the king of the quacks.
    Why doesn't Write4u try the unexplained-mysteries forum? Its about paranormal phenomena, ghosts, telepathy, etc. It has more than 100,000 members...
    He can find there tons of gullible sheep eager to give their irrational beliefs some quasi-scientific explanations. They will love him. He can become something like a cult leader. An Apostle of a new meta-faith.
     
  22. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    All scientists from India are quacks. ALL "spiritual" people are quacks. I'm an atheist.
    Does either affect the hard science? Prayer will prevent microtubule catastrophe?

    Moreover have you any evidence that I subscribe to those extraneous philosophical issues.?
    I specifically addressed the question why I do not make mention of Deepak Chopra and in the next post you accuse me of acting like I am some kind of Indian guru.

    Why do you persist on piling unrelated emotional outbursts on me. You're being hysterical!
    Make an effort to be objective, will you?
     
    Last edited: Nov 2, 2019
  23. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    ALL SPIRITUAL PEOPLE ARE QUACKS! Is that clear enough for you?

    Are you a spiritual person?
     
    Last edited: Nov 2, 2019
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page