I was a non-traditional student- divorced mother with two toddlers. My guidance counselor, also a psychology professor and a woman, told me graduate school was too grooling for a woman with young children and therefore she would not give me the letter of recommendation I needed to get into grad school. So, I went to the next female professor, with the idea the women help other women to get ahead. After three female professors told me basically the same thing, I went to a man. Nope, I’m a woman with two young children and no help with them. Never did get the three letters of recommendation for grad school, despite my mostly As in my major of psychology. I love school, but I don’t like the fact some of us get held back because of gender or what have you. I also figured out that the psychology professor, also my guidance counselor, told me that a B.S. degree is just that, then you get More of it, finally you get it Piled high and Deep. The woman in the video is right. It’s all B.S., More of it, and Piled high and Deep. The only thing that university helped me with is discovering I have Dyscalculia or math dyslexia, which in the long run helped me to pass, just passed by busting my butt, banging my head, and screaming over College Algebra and Stats so I could get my degree. I worked so hard that I’m proud of my grade even if it wasn’t an A or a B… It was passing and that’s all that matters after years of going undiagnosed, because in the 60s and 70s they didn’t recognize it like they did regular dyslexia. I digress though. Basically what I’m saying is the woman in the video is very right about all of that stuff and it’s all BS.
Where a binary bit is a 1 way linear computing bit in regular computing , a qubit is 2 way quantum computing bit.
This kind of 2 way mechanism is what Penrose (physicist) was looking for in his book “The Emperor’s New Mind”.
When Hameroff (anesthesiologist) read the book he recognized that the microtubules he works with every day, might be precisely what Penrose was looking for.
note the bi-directional data flow across the MT coils
Penrose had never heard of microtubules, but when learned that cells communicate and respond to data exchange via the cyto skeleton (microtubules), he was immediately intrigued.
They got together and developed a hypothesis for quantum processing via microtubules in the brain. ORCH OR.
The original protests from the scientific world was that the brain was much to wet and warm for very delicate quantum processes, a very valid argument, very difficult to test experimentally.
Due to the extremely small nano-scale at which these processes take place, it took some 20 more years to develop the means for measuring the data flow in microtubules, but it seems they have finally succeeded and done away with the warm/wet environment argument…
Above is one of the new discoveries that while single microtubules are too slow, entire microtubule networks are able to process qubits quantum data via “super radiance”.
And that very discovery is a huge step toward the concept of quantum data processing in the brain.
But the scientific world, entrenched as it is, is slow to recognize this huge leap forward in the quest for the discovery of consciousness.
But I am sure that the ORCH OR crowd, as well as the IIT (Integrated Information Theory) crowd are dancing in the streets. If this initial result holds up, this may well be the discovery of the century, leading to an understanding of consciousness and where it originates in the brain.
He does not converse. He is a denier of EVERYTHING! He likes the attention.
I don’t see it. You almost always assume other knowledge when explaining these things
And you give him what he wants
No, this is not separate. Microtubules also control consciousness itself and are what anesthesiologists use to render a patient unconscious. That is how Hameroff became interested .
In the schematic. look at the yellow and blue arrows indicating the opposite flow of EM data across the microtubules. This is qubit computing and a microtubule allows this simultaneous 2 way data exchange.
Note that a microtubule is a dipolar coil just as we construct to control the flow of electricity in variable potentiometers.
The more remarkable is that they are self-organizing and can regulate the data flow across its surface via growth and shrinkage in response to the type of data it is processing.
Microtubules also control the copying of DNA data during mitosis (cell division).
They are a remarkably versatile data processing machine.
The brain alone contains some 100 trillion microtubule connections (synapses) between some 100 billion neurons and IMO it is the only network large enough to process enormous volumes of data at quantum level.
They’re just arrows. It explains nothing
What?
And that’s significant how?
I dunno, this is starting to get out of hand. I can’t really follow half of it. It started with a video on whether something is me is not and that just bugged me is all.
I don’t really understand a lot of things and even though I was told I was smart growing up I never really believed my parents or therapist when they said that because I never saw it in what I did. I struggled and things were harder for me or I just didn’t get a lot of stuff. But I was “smart” and supposed to get it or know it, and I guess I had to have an interest in the stuff too.
Maybe I just don’t want to admit I’m wrong or don’t know because then I don’t know what comes next after that. If I’m wrong what then? If I don’t know what do I do?
[quote=“lausten, post:168, topic:10989, full:true”]
They’re just arrows. It explains nothing
It explains the direction of data transport from the plus pole to the minus pole and vice versa.
What?
An evolved biological version of a variable transistor we use to control electrical current…
10W 20W30W 50W100W 200W Wire Wound Adjustable Variable Resistor
And that’s significant how?
Making exact copies of DNA into the daughter cell. Just like making copies with your computer
This is a close representation of the process
None of this tells me how thoughts happen
I know. I am not claiming that. This just represents the chemical data flow transport back and forth via microtubules. Like a computer printer making copies.
What this does not show is the bidirectional EM flow along the microtubules because that happens at an even smaller scale and probably at the inside of microtubules to shield the data from the noisy warm, wet environment, but much like an electrical network where the electrical cables are represented by the biological neuronal axons.
See, before you can begin to analyze the data flow you need to know where and how that happens in the body and the brain.
Then we can begin to analyze the quantum aspects, if any, and once we have that figured out we might be able to model it for medical purposes, AI purposes, etc.
It seems that we are now at the stage where we have figured our that microtubules are able to shield quantum data from the wet warm environment and that quantum computing via qubits in the brain and body, is a real possibility.
Still a long way to go, but now we know that somewhere along the way consciousness emerges from the neural network fed by the microtubule network within the neurons.
This is a crude representation, but in view of the lack of an alternate system, this has to be the right direction of further investigation, rather than looking for some external magical elan vital.
As Tegmark observes, “We already have all the necessary parts that make us consciously self-aware”
Our senses collect the data to be evaluated and compare it with data in memory, and when the data matches expectation, cognition happens and we consciously experience the data being processed. Something like that.
(Is spacetime threatened by the [qubit]
The flux qubit revisited to enhance coherence and reproducibility - PMC)
It gets complicated.
And I can’t help feeling it’s more philosophy than real down to Earth scientific materialism and biology.
Hoffman makes a big deal out of them. Chapter 6.
I’m not really sure what all this means.
I don’t think anyone really does.
It’s like the good old Rorschach test for us mortals.
Qubits belongs to the world of the super brains & experts, here check out the details:
The flux qubit revisited to enhance coherence and reproducibility - PMC?
Beware, it’s a humbling read…
at Commun. 2016; 7: 12964.
Published online 2016 Nov 3. doi: 10.1038/ncomms12964
The flux qubit revisited to enhance coherence and reproducibility
Fei Yan,1 Simon Gustavsson,1 Archana Kamal,1 Jeffrey Birenbaum,2 Adam P Sears,3 David Hover,3 Ted J. Gudmundsen,3Danna Rosenberg,3 Gabriel Samach,3 S Weber,3 Jonilyn L. Yoder,3 Terry P. Orlando,1,4 John Clarke,2 Andrew J. Kerman,3and William D. Olivera,1,3,5
I couldn’t make it past the abstract.
How much more off topic could you possibly be? Thanks for disrupting this thread for absolutely no reason.
Whatever it means, it has nothing to do with your topic here. I would recommend ignoring Write4U in the future. If you want to discuss Penrose, there are 50 other threads you could join.
Do you think this has nothing to do with things being automatic? Where do you want to go with this?
Free will?
No, please, dear god, no. Not Free will.
I want to go with the actual question, not the part that interests you and pretty much only you (in this group anyway).
The topic is “meaning”. The mechanism of how our bodies interact with quantum gravity is not the topic. Knowing quantum physics will not tell me what it means to have quantum physics operating at my cellular level.
We’re not driven by a soul that is in touch with gods. After that bit of information, there isn’t a lot that relates to meaning. You just said it yourself. Knowing that chimps are our cousins is helpful. Knowing there are 30,000 year old cave paintings in France is helpful. Knowing we are the same species as a tribe in South America that has no interest in our civilization is helpful. Knowing about the electrical impulses of things I can’t see tells me nothing about why I’m thinking about my grandmother right now or what that means and what I imagine when I think about the word “you”.
This is the question to which @Write4U responded with the Orch OR diagram. inthedarkness responded by becoming an expert in neurobiology that uses childish language to critique it. And we’ve had 50 posts of BS ever since. In the end (which I hope this is) Write admits that this science has not been accepted widely, that is early in the theory stage, and that it doesn’t get past the electrical impulses and tiny micro stuff anyway. Whether it’s electricity or quantum mechanics, it doesn’t address what thoughts are. No one has come close to mapping a thought. We can see areas of the brain light up, that’s it.
The question darkness asked is not “how do the impulses work” or “what are they”, he’s asking what our brain knowledge means to us. It’s a legitimate question. He has a lot of trouble even asking it, and he deflects just about any answer, but it’s still a real question. Orch OR is not the answer.