QUANTUM MAGIC IN THE BRAIN? UM. NO.
No there is no evidence of it, no need of it, and I dunno what Penrose is putting in his tea when he pulls this nonsense out of thin air. Nor do I grasp why people treat the quantum background as mysterious. It’s not.
We are very close to overcoming the mathiness pseudoscience that cantor, einstein, bohr inserted into physics, and the nonsense decades that resulted from the fiction of ‘space time’. As far as I can tell … is correct in that the universe is quite simple (see Neil Turok) and we’ve been lost in mathiness (me) and particles (him) meaning ‘words and pictures’ instead of materials and models – which we then describe with mathematics at least at the high level. Since at some point mathematical reducibility ends (See Wolfram) – which I think we have already seen in models of the quantum background (see Derek B. Leinweber).
It’s true bioelectricity is finally gaining attention (See Michael Levin) in the cellular use of charge to assist in cellular organization and specialization. But this is just another example of (a) there are only so many forces and realistically, they’re all emergent from one cause (b) evolution isn’t picky and it will make use of ANY and EVERY means of information transformation and persistence it can discover – with my favorite examples being the number of ways cells can communicate across and thru walls, and the number of ways neurons can advertise, discovery, connect, and cooperate and then constantly modify to service neural economy – which is just mind-boggling in complexity. I probably consider it my favorite subject in neuroscience. Infinite computability is amazing.
As for quantum effects – the present woo woo vehicle – there is ‘no room’ so to speak for information to travel through the medium but other than the means we already understand. Each emergent layer of complexity of organization effectively filters out variability within it, which is why evolution can maintain persistence despite lacking memory and intelligence of other than the structure of the dipoles>waves> particles>elements> molecules etc. (See Lee Cronin)
The emergent effects of the brain are obvious, which is why even our primitive computers today, using analogous structures are demonstrating just how fast and powerfully higher faculties originate from nothing other than the universal law of grammar: continuous recursive disambiguation.
I’ve been working on this nonsense since the 70s and endured each AI winter. But none of our assumptions, even from the 1950s have been wrong. It just took vastly more computing power to produce a simple equivalent, and none of us imagined we could brute force intelligence BACKWARD by massive training from textual data on the internet.
That little bit there, even if it ends up being just an interface to agents that do all the challenging reasoning, calculating, and computing, was something even the guys who tried it didn’t know would work. And it worked far better than any of them imagined.
Anyway. At this point I think we’ve almost overcome (at least at the developmental edge of research and development) the postwar venture into pseudoscience – not just in psychology, social science, economics, and political science, but in physics and mathematics as well.
The one thing I find fascinating is the dethroning of math in favor of computation because of the greater reducibility of computation vs mathematics.
The importance of this reform, which should have come from babbage in the 1830’s but didn’t, can’t be overestimated. Because we have wrongly treated mathematics as the gold standard and the number of conceptual negative consequences of losing greek geometry and engineering to the influences of persian astronomy and algebra. The profundity of that metaphyscal difference was very costly – repaired by Descartes and destroyed again by Cantor Einstein Bohr and their followers.
Cheers
CD
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