I find myself nodding along in agreement to this until I get to “Basically I want to say that the thing in the brain which is conscious, and therefore the thing which is you, is a sort of holistic quantum subsystem of the brain” which at the same time seems to be both too specific given how little we know, and at the same time too vague, with absolutely no explanatory power. In particular “quantum” and “holistic” both seem like empty buzzwords in this context, along the lines of mysterious answers to mysterious questions, or along the lines that “consciousness is weird, quantum mechanics is weird, therefore quantum mechanics must be involved in consciousness”.
Of course, this is being a little unfair—a proposed solution needs to be more specific than what we as yet know, and a solution that is not fully worked out by necessity has vague areas. But the feel of each of these is towards the decidedly not useful portion of either side. You sound pretty convinced that something quantum must be going on without saying what, if anything, it brings to the picture that classical descriptions don’t. And, well, given how warm, wet, and squishy the human nervous system is, I flatly would not expect any large scale quantum coherences. (Though the limits are often overstated).
Again, “holistic” doesn’t add much; heck, I’m not even sure what sorts of mechanisms it would rule out.
I posted here so my correspondent could see a second opinion, by the way, so thanks for that.
You sound pretty convinced that something quantum must be going on without saying what, if anything, it brings to the picture that classical descriptions don’t.
First proposition: if you try to bring consciousness into alignment with standard physical ontology, you get a dualistic parallelism at best. (Arguments here.)
Second proposition: the new factor in QM is entanglement. I defined my quantum holism here as “the hypothesis that quantum entanglement creates local wholes, that these are the fundamental entities in nature, and that the individual consciousness inhabits a big one of these.”
I can explain technically what these “local wholes” might look like. You should think of a spacelike hypersurface consisting of numerous Hilbert spaces connected by mappings into a graph structure. Each Hilbert space contains a state vector. Then the whole thing evolves, the graph structure and the state vectors. This is, more or less, the QCH formalism for quantum gravity(discussed here).
The Hilbert spaces are the local wholes (the “monads” of a previous post). My version of quantum-mind theory is to say that the conscious mind is a single one of these, and that the series of experiences one has in life correspond to the evolution of its state vector. Now, although I started out by saying that standard physical ontology is irredeemably unlike what we actually experience, I’m certainly not going to say that a featureless vector jumping around an abstract multidimensional space is much better. Its advantage, in fact, is its radically structureless abstractness. It is a formalism telling us almost nothing about the nature of things in themselves; constructed only to be a predictively adequate black box. If we then treat conscious appearances as data about the inner nature of one thing, at least—ourselves, our minds, however you end up phrasing it—they can help us to interpret the formalism. What we had described formally as a state vector evolving in a certain way in Hilbert space would be understood as a mathematical representation of what was actually a conscious self undergoing a certain series of experiences.
In principle, you could hope to use experience to reveal the reality behind formal physical description at a much higher level—for example, computational neuroscience. But I think that non-quantum computational neuroscience presupposes an atomistic, spatialized ontology which is just mismatched to the specific nature of consciousness (see earlier remark about dualism resulting from that framework). So I predict that quantum coherence exists in the brain and is functionally relevant to conscious cognition. As you observe, it’s a challenging environment for such effects, but evolution is ingenious and we keep finding new twists on what QM can do (the latest).
Thanks. Though I’m still highly skeptical, this gives me much more to engage with. This will take me some time to process though, and it might take me a while as I’m preparing for a conference this week.
I find myself nodding along in agreement to this until I get to “Basically I want to say that the thing in the brain which is conscious, and therefore the thing which is you, is a sort of holistic quantum subsystem of the brain” which at the same time seems to be both too specific given how little we know, and at the same time too vague, with absolutely no explanatory power. In particular “quantum” and “holistic” both seem like empty buzzwords in this context, along the lines of mysterious answers to mysterious questions, or along the lines that “consciousness is weird, quantum mechanics is weird, therefore quantum mechanics must be involved in consciousness”.
Of course, this is being a little unfair—a proposed solution needs to be more specific than what we as yet know, and a solution that is not fully worked out by necessity has vague areas. But the feel of each of these is towards the decidedly not useful portion of either side. You sound pretty convinced that something quantum must be going on without saying what, if anything, it brings to the picture that classical descriptions don’t. And, well, given how warm, wet, and squishy the human nervous system is, I flatly would not expect any large scale quantum coherences. (Though the limits are often overstated). Again, “holistic” doesn’t add much; heck, I’m not even sure what sorts of mechanisms it would rule out.
I posted here so my correspondent could see a second opinion, by the way, so thanks for that.
First proposition: if you try to bring consciousness into alignment with standard physical ontology, you get a dualistic parallelism at best. (Arguments here.)
Second proposition: the new factor in QM is entanglement. I defined my quantum holism here as “the hypothesis that quantum entanglement creates local wholes, that these are the fundamental entities in nature, and that the individual consciousness inhabits a big one of these.”
I can explain technically what these “local wholes” might look like. You should think of a spacelike hypersurface consisting of numerous Hilbert spaces connected by mappings into a graph structure. Each Hilbert space contains a state vector. Then the whole thing evolves, the graph structure and the state vectors. This is, more or less, the QCH formalism for quantum gravity (discussed here).
The Hilbert spaces are the local wholes (the “monads” of a previous post). My version of quantum-mind theory is to say that the conscious mind is a single one of these, and that the series of experiences one has in life correspond to the evolution of its state vector. Now, although I started out by saying that standard physical ontology is irredeemably unlike what we actually experience, I’m certainly not going to say that a featureless vector jumping around an abstract multidimensional space is much better. Its advantage, in fact, is its radically structureless abstractness. It is a formalism telling us almost nothing about the nature of things in themselves; constructed only to be a predictively adequate black box. If we then treat conscious appearances as data about the inner nature of one thing, at least—ourselves, our minds, however you end up phrasing it—they can help us to interpret the formalism. What we had described formally as a state vector evolving in a certain way in Hilbert space would be understood as a mathematical representation of what was actually a conscious self undergoing a certain series of experiences.
In principle, you could hope to use experience to reveal the reality behind formal physical description at a much higher level—for example, computational neuroscience. But I think that non-quantum computational neuroscience presupposes an atomistic, spatialized ontology which is just mismatched to the specific nature of consciousness (see earlier remark about dualism resulting from that framework). So I predict that quantum coherence exists in the brain and is functionally relevant to conscious cognition. As you observe, it’s a challenging environment for such effects, but evolution is ingenious and we keep finding new twists on what QM can do (the latest).
Thanks. Though I’m still highly skeptical, this gives me much more to engage with. This will take me some time to process though, and it might take me a while as I’m preparing for a conference this week.