Topic: Consciousness and Quantum Physics - page 5. (Read 12018 times)

Was about to reply to your apple comment, but I don't quite know what you mean by this.

Are you saying that things only appear random while we are ignorant of their cause? eg. Apples appear to fall at random time intervals to the ignorant, however when we find the causes of the falling apples (wind/deterioration of the stalk/increasing weight/gravity etc.) then what once appeared random now becomes predictable and a pattern can be made?

I agree with this, however many quantum effects are truly random, which is very rare in nature. So (according to current quantum theory) we can never predict these effects with certainty, just with various probabilities.

I know what you mean, it's way out there and may turn out to be plain wrong. But Penrose is no slouch. He is one of the worlds top scientists. I am interested because there are so few theories to explain living things and this one at least has some explainable process. the basic idea is that all life is conscious at some level and that is what makes life different from non-life. Hameroff is a professor of anesthesiology and was initially interested in thought and consciousness. He points out that what you heard in school about thinking being an effect of neurons working together is know to be wrong. An amoeba can hunt, hide, move away from pain, etc. It is doing some thinking, but it is only one cell and has no neurons. Something else is happening and it could be a quantum effect in the cytoskeleton of living cells.

Whatever the real answer to life is it will be mindblowing. That is why I'm not writing this theory off yet. Even though some scientists are very skeptical of this work.

I don't know either. But I am a biologist and I also don't know what life really is? 

Well that website is a big horrible mess.

Not only does it look like it was made in the mid 90s by a schoolkid who just found out about html color tags and MSpaint, but it just seems to be some guy ranting at quantum physicists because he doesn't believe them. From what I could read before I got a headache, he doesn't have many good arguments to prove them wrong. One section is dedicated to disproving Special Relativity, which has been shown to be accurate in real life situations multiple times (eg timing of GPS satellites).

Yeah I've read a bit about Penrose, I'm not sure about his idea that human thought and consciousness cannot be explained through known scientific effects, so he says it must be a result of unknown quantum effects. Seems like a pretty outrageous claim without some really good evidence (but I will read some more about his work, as I'm not very familiar with it.

the only way to experience is to sit down and meditate. once your mind gets concentrated enough, you can feel the dissolution of matter (one of the states of subatomic particles). the buddha spoke of them, and termed them as "kalapas" during his time.

quantum physics does not prove any of this stuff, it only supports it.

".....The idiots of Quantum
say that a cat can be
simultaneously dead
and alive !...."

Source: http://www.youstupidrelativist.com/11Blog/1Math/M0011Tegm.html

Really, it looks like more new age garbage to me....

That new age stuff is garbage. But... There is an interesting theory to connect consciousness with quantum states. It's real science from Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. This work is early and will change as more is known, however they are proposing that life itself is a quantum phenomena and linked to consciousness. It's the best theory so far to explain living things.

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/orchOR.html

Some people claim that consciousness is a product of quantum phenomena. For example, scientists like Robert Lanza and his Biocentrism Theory, and the (IMO less convincing) "new age guru" (pseudoscientist?) Deepak Chopra with his idea that quantum entanglement creates consciousness.

While these seemingly philosophical ideas make for very interesting reading, they seem to be speculations that are profoundly unscientific, and therefore shouldn't be described as scientific theories.

They tend to rely on misinterpretations of quantum phenomena, eg using the double-slit experiment and the "Observer Effect" to try and prove that conscious beings can influence quantum effects in a specific way (when in fact the collapse of the wave-function in the double-slit experiment is not dependent on the act of observing, it is due to the necessity of interacting photons with other particles so they can be measured, which subsequently change their state. Consciousness, or even life itself is not required to collapse the wave-function - just interaction with any other particles will do this just fine).

A popular theory by Chopra misinterprets quantum entanglement and claims that it can cause the future to affect the past, and can transmit information faster than light. No experiment yet conducted has shown that these phenomena are true, in fact they all seem to show the opposite.

I appreciate that quantum effects undoubtedly affect the mind, after all our brain is merely a collection of neural connections powered by electrons/molecules that all exhibit random quantum phenomena, which could likely change our perceptions/decisions in real life. I like to theorise that these phenomena give us true free will - the innate randomness of quantum effects means human behaviour could never be predicted to 100% accuracy.

But this is a different hypothesis to consciousness being a product of quantum phenomena, which as far as I'm concerned is pseudoscientific.

I'm not a quantum physicist, but I'd like to hear some other peoples thought on this matter - is there any testable/scientific proof that consciousness is a product of quantum phenomena?