Is consciousness to be found in quantum processes in microtubules?

[Write4U]

Thank you for that well considered posit. This is the good stuff.....

1. Neurons aren't just analogous to wires in an electronic device, they are processors. I'm not totally opposed to this one and think that there may be considerable truth to it, though I'm not comfortable pushing it nearly as far as Penrose and Hameroff appear to want to. My own view of neurons is that they are best thought of as switches, as something analogous to transistors in electronics let's say, though probably more capable than transistors (activation functions and so on). I still damnably persist in thinking of them as components in a much larger neural process, not as being in themselves fanciful loci of consciousness

As I understand it ORCH OR does not deal with the neuronal network per se, but at one level deeper, the hundreds of billions of microtubules inside the neurons. The mathematical beauty and computing abilities of microtubules is testable and apparently anesthetics work on microtubules and not the way that has been assumed before, which would indicate a connection with "consciousness".

2a. Overly technical stuff about computation and algorithms (see above). I'm even less persuaded. I don't think that neural networks work in algorithmic fashion anyway. Minds (beyond the level of simple invertebrates anyway) aren't just executing preexisting programs. They seem to operate more along the lines of pattern-recognition systems.) Our thinking process often isn't logical at all, but rather a series of things that remind us of other things. So proof theory wouldn't seem to apply.

I may be wrong, but I believe Hameroff also rejects the concept of algorithmic computing in the brain.

5b. This is one area where Orch-OR does make testable predictions. So that's a positive. It's where Bandyopadhyay's criticisms gain traction. Yet this only addresses particular parts of step 4a above, parts upon which the whole hypothesis doesn't seem to depend, making it relatively easy to readjust the assumptions of the hypothesis so that the criticisms no longer apply. (That's typically true with any scientific hypothesis, making the idea of definitive disconfirmation something of a myth in my opinion.) So far from being the slam-dunk that Bells is trying to portray them as being, these "disproofs" seem weak, tangential and easily evaded to me.

I agree. And Hameroff admits that much research still needs to take place, he argues only for the what he believes are the as yet undiscovered potentials in microtubules at one level deeper and bypassing the obstacles presented with considering only the gross neural system.

 

[Yazata]

Relax. London forces are just what you may have learned about as "van der Waals" forces: the weak forces of attraction between all molecules, even non-polar ones, which are responsible for such substances eventually condensing to liquid and solid states, at low enough temperatures.

Oh yeah, I remember them trying to pound Van der Waals forces into my head when I was a biology undergraduate. It's mostly dribbled out my ear in the decades since. I remember liking chemistry back then (it's the heart and soul of biology) and maybe I should review it.

But I have to say that I liked the image of you that I got in my head when I heard "London forces"! (Kind of like Yahweh on the mountaintop with clouds and lightening boiling all around.) W4U had better be careful!

 

[exchemist]

Agreed. It's only logical. Further, since it works really well, it must be conscious - just like plants.

 

[exchemist]

Oh yeah, I remember them trying to pound Van der Waals forces into my head when I was a biology undergraduate. It's mostly dribbled out my ear in the decades since. I remember liking chemistry back then (it's the heart and soul of biology) and maybe I should review it.

But I have to say that I liked the image of you that I got in my head when I heard "London forces"! (Kind of like Yahweh on the mountaintop with clouds and lightening boiling all around.) W4U had better be careful!

Heh heh.

But actually, Fritz London was German! Like so many Jewish scientists, he was chucked out of his job by the Nazis and emigrated, first to Britain and France and then to the USA.

 

[Michael 345]

This might be of interest to some

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time

https://www.sciencealert.com/scienc...-consciousness-but-that-might-soon-change/amp

 

[Write4U]

Are you now saying that the Orch Or is not Hameroff's theory?

No, I'm saying that the hypothesis of entangled particles in bird eyes allow birds to navigate by the earths magnetic fields is not part of ORCH OR , but still proof of quantum functions (entanglement) and therefore supporting the concept of functional quantum mechanics in biological organisms at very fine scales.

As Morello explains in the first episode, there’s evidence that some birds, particularly European robins, can actually visualise the magnetic field of Earth by detecting quantum entanglement.

The theory goes that electrons in the receptor cells of birds’ eyes can change their spin, and therefore their state of entanglement with other electrons, based on the Earth’s gravitational field. And depending on which way they’re flying in relation to this field, the electrons will either absorb energy from the Sun or release it back into the optic nerve.

This is amazing, not only because it’s a quantum phenomenon taking place inside the cells of a living creature, but also because it may mean that birds can SEE quantum entanglement - something our best scientists can barely visualise.

 

[C C]

This might be of interest to some

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time

https://www.sciencealert.com/scienc...-consciousness-but-that-might-soon-change/amp

Goff would at least be a break from microtubules and Hameroff. But the title slash nature of the thread entails enslavement to that, no lengthy detour from the two.

Charles Peirce (1892): "Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness." --Man's Glassy Essence

Philip Goff (21st century): . . . physics is confined to telling us about the behaviour of matter. For example, matter has mass and charge, properties which are entirely characterised in terms of behaviour – attraction, repulsion and resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us nothing about what philosophers like to call "the intrinsic nature of matter", how matter is in and of itself.

It turns out, then, that there is a huge hole in our scientific world view – physics leaves us completely in the dark about what matter really is. The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.

The result is a type of "panpsychism" – an ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. But the "new wave" of panpsychism lacks the mystical connotations of previous forms of the view. There is only matter – nothing spiritual or supernatural – but matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter "from the outside", in terms of its behaviour, but matter "from the inside" is constituted of forms of consciousness.​

The word "consciousness" shouldn't be used so much, though, as that often gets conflated with cognition and in turn even a limited degree of intelligence. It instead concerns ontological properties, what's left out of abstract physical description.

From Structural Realism, an entry in the SEP: . . . Peter Unger also argues that our knowledge of the world is purely structural and that qualia are the non-structural components of reality. Frank Jackson argues that science only reveals the causal / relational properties of physical objects, and that “we know next to nothing about the intrinsic nature of the world. We know only its causal cum relational nature”.​

Donald Hoffman is arguably of similar category to Goff, but there are probably differences, especially with regard to focusing on his so-called "Multimodal user interface theory":

 

[Write4U]

billvon said: ↑
Agreed. It's only logical. Further, since it works really well, it must be conscious - just like plants.

Considering that plants do not have brains, their growth and survival behaviors are remarkable. Just look at a carnivorous Venus Fly-Trap and the sensory mechanisms it uses to decide when to close the trap. Microtubules .

The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) is a carnivorous plant native to subtropicalwetlands on the East Coast of the United States in North Carolina and South Carolina.[3] It catches its prey—chiefly insects and arachnids—with a trapping structure formed by the terminal portion of each of the plant's leaves, which is triggered by tiny hairs (called "trigger hairs" or "sensitive hairs") on their inner surfaces.

The leaf blade is divided into two regions: a flat, heart-shaped photosynthesis-capable petiole, and a pair of terminal lobes hinged at the midrib, forming the trap which is the true leaf. The upper surface of these lobes contains red anthocyanin pigments and its edges secrete mucilage. The lobes exhibit rapid plant movements, snapping shut when stimulated by prey.

The trapping mechanism is tripped when prey contacts one of the three hair-like trichomes that are found on the upper surface of each of the lobes. The mechanism is so highly specialized that it can distinguish between living prey and non-prey stimuli, such as falling raindrops;[10] two trigger hairs must be touched in succession within 20 seconds of each other or one hair touched twice in rapid succession,[10] whereupon the lobes of the trap will snap shut, typically in about one-tenth of a second.[11]

The edges of the lobes are fringed by stiff hair-like protrusions or cilia, which mesh together and prevent large prey from escaping. These protrusions, and the trigger hairs (also known as sensitive hairs) are likely homologous with the tentacles found in this plant's close relatives, the sundews. Scientists have concluded that the snap trap evolved from a fly-paper trap similar to that of Drosera.[12].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_flytrap

Those cilia (sensitive hairs) are powered by microtubules....

Inventing a better mouse-trap, anyone?

1. Cameron, Kenneth M.; Wurdack, Kenneth J.; Jobson, Richard W. (2002). "Molecular evidence for the common origin of snap-traps among carnivorous plants". American Journal of Botany. 89 (9): 1503–1509. doi:10.3732/ajb.89.9.1503. PMID 21665752.
2. ^ Jump up to:a b "Background Information on Venus Fly Traps—Venus Fly Trap naming and history". FlyTrapCare.com. 4 April 2008. Archived from the original on 17 December 2008.
3. ^ Rice, Barry (January 2007). "How did the Venus flytrap get its name?". The Carnivorous Plant FAQ.
4. ^ Ellison, DM; Gotelli, NJ (2009). "Energetics and the evolution of carnivorous plants—Darwin's 'Most Wonderful plants in the world'". Journal of Experimental Botany. 60 (1): 19–42. doi:10.1093/jxb/ern179. PMID 19213724.
5. ^ Gibson, TC; Waller, DM (2009). "Evolving Darwin's 'most wonderful' plant: ecological steps to a snap-trap". New Phytologist. 183 (1): 575–587. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8137.2009.02935.x. PMID 19573135.
6. ^ Hodick, Dieter; Sievers, Andreas (1989). "The action potential of Dionaea muscipula Ellis". Planta. 174 (1): 8–18. doi:10.1007/BF00394867. PMID 24221411.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_flytrap#cite_note-12 Evolving Darwin's ‘most wonderful’ plant: ecological steps to a snap‐trap

   Among carnivorous plants, Darwin was particularly fascinated by the speed and sensitivity of snap‐traps in Dionaea and Aldrovanda. Recent molecular work confirms Darwin's conjecture that these monotypic taxa are sister to Drosera, meaning that snap‐traps evolved from a ‘flypaper’ trap. Transitions include tentacles being modified into trigger hairs and marginal ‘teeth’, the loss of sticky tentacles, depressed digestive glands, and rapid leaf movement. Pre‐adaptations are known for all these traits in Drosera yet snap‐traps only evolved once. We hypothesize that selection to catch and retain large insects favored the evolution of elongate leaves and snap‐tentacles in Drosera and snap‐traps. Although sticky traps efficiently capture small prey, they allow larger prey to escape and may lose nutrients.

   Dionaea's snap‐trap efficiently captures and processes larger prey providing higher, but variable, rewards. We develop a size‐selective model and parametrize it with field data to demonstrate how selection to capture larger prey strongly favors snap‐traps. As prey become larger, they also become rarer and gain the power to rip leaves, causing returns to larger snap‐traps to plateau. We propose testing these hypotheses with specific field data and Darwin‐like experiments. The complexity of snap‐traps, competition with pitfall traps, and their association with ephemeral habitats all help to explain why this curious adaptation only evolved once.

2. 
   Letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray;
   ‘I care more for Drosera than the origin of species ... it is a wonderful plant, or rather a most sagacious animal. I will stick up for Drosera to the day of my death.’
   

 

[Write4U]

But the title slash nature of the thread entails enslavement to that, no lengthy detour from the two.

CC
If it is connected to "consciousness" be my guest and post away. The subject is so large it can probably accommodate a host of discussions on the subject. I am not in any way against any science that can explain "consciousness". The problem is that most science is used to try to disprove some of the possible avenues to "consciousness", but very little in the way of new and revelatory science other than the ones currently under discussion.

Is "spooky action at a distance" related to QM? Is the mechanism of entanglement related to the mechanisms of "information sharing at a distance", i.e. a form of conscious communuication? As I understand it, entanglement does not recognize spatial geometry.
IOW, it's strictly temporal (instantaneous).

Can there be quanta of consciousness?

 

[Write4U]

W4U had better be careful!

With London Forces? I wield them!

 

[C C]

Goff would at least be a break from microtubules and Hameroff. But the title slash nature of the thread entails enslavement to that, no lengthy detour from the two.

CC If it is connected to "consciousness" be my guest and post away. [...]

The nice thing is that there's really little more to add about their view, anyway. Manifestation as the so-called "inner" manner in which matter exists wouldn't be subject to measurement beyond what such correlates to in the structural processes, technical descriptions and mapping of causal relationships. Those extrinsic affairs which it exhibits in perception and rational thought or inferences about experiments. Although these guys doubtless cough-up tons of filler for lectures, books, and articles (i.e., somebody else could add that stuff to quibble over).

One either gets it or one doesn't. Lee Smolin didn't realize it at the time he did the interview below in 2013, but even being familiar with all the details of that filler in the published literature probably wouldn't add much in the end beyond what he states himself below.

https://www.independent.com/2013/04/17/time-reborn/

TAM HUNT: You venture far beyond physics in your Epilogue, including some musings on the nature of consciousness. You discuss David Chalmers favorably, a well-known panpsychist (this is the view that all matter has some associated mind/subjectivity and vice versa). You also discuss Leibniz, Spinoza, and Peirce, all of whom were also panpsychists of various stripes (see David Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West). Would you like to take this opportunity to “out” yourself as a panpsychist?

SMOLIN: In college I wrote a long essay on the body-mind problem where I invented for myself an idea that I’ve later come to understand is a form of panpsychism. It is expressed on page 270 of Time Reborn as:

"The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don’t know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe — through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains."

This is as far as I am willing to go now, on an issue where I don’t know the literature well, and I haven’t thought enough about.​

 

[exchemist]

CC
If it is connected to "consciousness" be my guest and post away. The subject is so large it can probably accommodate a host of discussions on the subject. I am not in any way against any science that can explain "consciousness". The problem is that most science is used to try to disprove some of the possible avenues to "consciousness", but very little in the way of new and revelatory science other than the ones currently under discussion.

Is "spooky action at a distance" related to QM? Is the mechanism of entanglement related to the mechanisms of "information sharing at a distance", i.e. a form of conscious communuication? As I understand it, entanglement does not recognize spatial geometry.
IOW, it's strictly temporal (instantaneous).

Can there be quanta of consciousness?

Until someone has defined and measured "consciousness " quantitatively, no. And that won't happen. This notion is pure quantum woo.

 

[billvon]

Considering that plants do not have brains, their growth and survival behaviors are remarkable. Just look at a carnivorous Venus Fly-Trap and the sensory mechanisms it uses to decide when to close the trap. Microtubules . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_flytrap

Venus flytraps are far from the most complex plants out there - and none of them have brains. I recommend "The Hidden Life of Trees" for an overview. Nothing about microtubules in there, though.

 

[exchemist]

Venus flytraps are far from the most complex plants out there - and none of them have brains. I recommend "The Hidden Life of Trees" for an overview. Nothing about microtubules in there, though.

But wait......maybe they have a...sort of...... hive mind!

 

[billvon]

But wait......maybe they have a...sort of...... hive mind!

With quantum mechanical neurons. I mean, you can't prove they _don't_ have them, right?

 

[Write4U]

Until someone has defined and measured "consciousness " quantitatively, no. And that won't happen. This notion is pure quantum woo.

Then answer me this. How does a wave collapse by observation? Where does the wave function collapse, at the object being viewed at a distance or in the retina of the eye? If the wave function collapses at a distance, how can reception of a distant measurement (observation) be causal to the wave function collapse?

AFAIK, collapse occurs by mere observation without any measurement of some kind. Is that not one of results of the double slit experiment. Just the presence of an observer is causal to wave function collapse?

Where is the "necessary" physical interference as suggested when considering that "conscious observation" (measurement) is woo?

Wave function collapse

In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse occurs when a wave function—initially in a superposition of several eigenstates—reduces to a single eigenstate due to interaction with the external world. This interaction is called an "observation". It is the essence of a measurement in quantum mechanics which connects the wave function with classical observables like position and momentum. Collapse is one of two processes by which quantum systems evolve in time; the other is the continuous evolution via the Schrödinger equation

In 1927, Werner Heisenberg used the idea of wave function reduction to explain quantum measurement.[5] However, if collapse were a fundamental physical phenomenon, rather than just the epiphenomenon of some other process, it would mean nature was fundamentally stochastic, i.e. nondeterministic, an undesirable property for a theory.[2][6][7] This issue remained until quantum decoherence entered mainstream opinion after its reformulation in the 1980s.[2][4][8] Decoherence explains the perception of wave function collapse in terms of interacting large- and small-scale quantum systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse

Quantum decoherence

Decoherence has been used to understand the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics. Decoherence does not generate actual wave-function collapse. It only provides an explanation for apparent wave-function collapse, as the quantum nature of the system "leaks" into the environment. That is, components of the wave function are decoupled from a coherent system and acquire phases from their immediate surroundings. A total superposition of the global or universal wavefunction still exists (and remains coherent at the global level), but its ultimate fate remains an interpretational issue. Specifically, decoherence does not attempt to explain the measurement problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence

 

[Write4U]

exchemist said: ↑
But wait......maybe they have a...sort of...... hive mind!

With quantum mechanical neurons. I mean, you can't prove they _don't_ have them, right?

If this idea is so ridiculous, explain a insect hive-mind to me.

Hive mind

Swarm intelligence, the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial

• The apparent consciousness of colonies of social insects such as ants, bees, and termites

• Can insects think?

Do Insects Have Consciousness?

This moral hornet’s nest was first stirred at a local meeting of the worldwide science and drinking club Nerd Nite in a Sydney, Australia, pub. Honeybee scientist Andrew Barron began chatting with philosopher Colin Klein, who initially swatted away the idea of insect consciousness.

After all, insect brains are tiny and have just a million or so neurons, compared with a human’s average of 86 billion. Like many of us, Klein had assumed that insects are just collections of reflexes—that they are “dark inside,” he says—and this assumption jibed nicely with his habit of flushing the enormous cockroaches at his apartment down the toilet.

But then the two Macquarie University professors began to explore the research. One prominent theory holds that the core of human consciousness is not our impressive neocortex, but our much more primitive midbrain. This simple structure synthesizes sensory data into a unified, egocentric point of view that lets us navigate our world.

Insects, Barron and Klein now argue, have midbrain-like structures, including a “central complex,” that seem to allow bugs to similarly model themselves as they move through space. They cite evidence ranging from a study that used microelectrodes to look at fly brain activity, to seemingly macabre research showing that when a jewel wasp injects venom into a cockroach’s central complex, the zombiefied prey will allow itself to be led by the antennae into its predator’s lair.

While the human midbrain and the insect brain may even be evolutionarily related, an insect’s inner life is obviously more basic than our own. Accordingly, bugs feel something like hunger and pain, and “perhaps very simple analogs of anger,” but no grief or jealousy. “They plan, but don’t imagine,” Klein says. Even so, insects’ highly distilled sense of self is a potential gift to the far-out study of consciousness. Probing the insect brain could help quantify questions of what it means to think that vexed the likes of Aristotle and Descartes, and could even aid the development of sentient robots.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-insects-have-consciousness-180959484/

 

[C C]

cc

CC
If it is connected to "consciousness" be my guest and post away. The subject is so large it can probably accommodate a host of discussions on the subject. I am not in any way against any science that can explain "consciousness". The problem is that most science is used to try to disprove some of the possible avenues to "consciousness", but very little in the way of new and revelatory science other than the ones currently under discussion.

I did forget another strain of pan-phenomenalism (AKA panpsychism), via Giulio Tononi. Christof Koch favors his integrated information theory as a way to literally measure consciousness or bring it into the realm of quantitative expression. IIT does propose axioms for consciousness.

But this seems just more of the traditional policy of correlating phenomenal properties to physical relationships, but with the addition of an abstract middleman between the two. That is, information itself is a useful symbolic concept projected upon the structural states and patterns of "concrete" components/entities. There are no fundamental agents constituting information apart from exotic theories that might propose the universe is made up of real bits, rather than such units being part of an accounting strategy.

Is "spooky action at a distance" related to QM? Is the mechanism of entanglement related to the mechanisms of "information sharing at a distance", i.e. a form of conscious communuication? As I understand it, entanglement does not recognize spatial geometry. IOW, it's strictly temporal (instantaneous). Can there be quanta of consciousness?

The pregeometry movement is arguably shifting to the idea of space and time arising from quantum entanglement (one example below). But again, unless some form of pan-phenomenalism is posited, there's no reason why the most discrete and inter-connected items of QM affairs (prior in rank to space emerging from them) would involve the manifestations of consciousness anymore than neural processes.

If phenomenal properties aren't how matter exists independent of human representations of it (matter having these so-called internal states), then it's back to the traditional magic of a mechanistic performance conjuring a radical novelty which didn't pertain to the world beforehand. Thereby leaving the door open to dualism since no deeper explanation is offered than that of brute emergence. Versions of classic dualism similarly involved a "summoning" of an immaterial _X_ when the developing/brain body reached a sufficient level of complexity or performance -- i.e., a proper orchestration of biological components.

Space emerging from quantum mechanics
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/07/18/space-emerging-from-quantum-mechanics/

Sean Carroll (excerpt): Divide Hilbert space up into pieces — technically, factors that we multiply together to make the whole space. Use quantum information — in particular, the amount of entanglement between different parts of the state, as measured by the mutual information — to define a “distance” between them. Parts that are highly entangled are considered to be nearby, while unentangled parts are far away. This gives us a graph, in which vertices are the different parts of Hilbert space, and the edges are weighted by the emergent distance between them.

We can then ask two questions:

(1) When we zoom out, does the graph take on the geometry of a smooth, flat space with a fixed number of dimensions? (Answer: yes, when we put in the right kind of state to start with.)

(2) If we perturb the state a little bit, how does the emergent geometry change? (Answer: space curves in response to emergent mass/energy, in a way reminiscent of Einstein’s equation in general relativity.)

It’s that last bit that is most exciting, but also most speculative. The claim, in its most dramatic-sounding form, is that gravity (spacetime curvature caused by energy/momentum) isn’t hard to obtain in quantum mechanics — it’s automatic! Or at least, the most natural thing to expect. If geometry is defined by entanglement and quantum information, then perturbing the state (e.g. by adding energy) naturally changes that geometry. And if the model matches onto an emergent field theory at large distances, the most natural relationship between energy and curvature is given by Einstein’s equation. The optimistic view is that gravity just pops out effortlessly in the classical limit of an appropriate quantum system. But the devil is in the details, and there’s a long ay to go before we can declare victory.

 

[river]

Space emerging from quantum mechanics

What came first matter or space ?

 

[billvon]

If this idea is so ridiculous, explain a insect hive-mind to me.

Emergent behavior based on signaling (visual, tactile, chemical) between bees.

Next question?