Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds [video]

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/05/brain-really-uses-quantum-effects-new.html

by lisper • 2 years ago

182 169 2 years ago

backreaction.blogspot.com

ttctciyf• 2 years ago

The paper itself[0] is a little (hah!) over my head, but this[1] tickled me:

I’ve heard more than one person say that what a pity that Penrose fell for this crazy Hameroff person. But, well, I’ve met both Penrose and Hameroff and they’re both crazy of course, but neither of them is stupid.

0: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6G1D2UQ3gg&t=181s

Animats3• 2 years ago

The important thing in that paper is not "quantum", but the claim that internal data transmission by light within neural systems is a thing. The paper cites this result on ultra-weak light emissions from neurons.[1] The paper is behind Elsevier's paywall.

So the paper then takes data transmission by light as a given, and goes on to hypothesize structures that direct light as fiber optics do, and from there goes on to "ultrafast" data transmission.

Comments from biochemistry people would help here. It's not at all clear what's an actual result and what's hand-waving. However, it is clear that this is an area where experimentation is possible. Further work should move this out of the range of speculation and either confirm or dismiss it.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10111...

nutrie• 2 years ago

Every time I listen to Sir Roger speak, I wonder how much he keeps to himself. He is such a gem.

nomemory• 2 years ago

I suspect a lot. He has unorthodox views on lots of topics. For one he doesn't seem to believe in the heat death of the Universe. He has some interesting theories in regards to gravitational waves and so on.

aspenmayer2• 2 years ago

he doesn't seem to believe in the heat death of the Universe

I’m not sure I believe that the heat death of the universe really is the end of all things forever and for all time either, after reading Asimov’s The Last Question and a particularly fantastic manga oneshot adaptation by manga artist Ryul.

If you haven’t read it, I can’t recommend it more highly, and the manga version is a nice addition to the canon. I found a version narrated by the man himself on the Internet Archive, and I also found a fully voice acted audio version from the Drabblecast, also linked below.

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

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41230

Original publication:

https://archive.org/stream/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Ser...

Manga version:

https://imgur.com/a/9KWrH

https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/oo67iat/the-last-questio...

https://mangadex.org/title/f1e5d886-cc50-4cbf-ac8b-6914d9343...

https://archive.org/details/manga_The_Last_Question

Audiobook versions:

https://archive.org/details/IsaacAsimovAudioBookCollection/1...

https://www.drabblecast.org/2011/03/11/drabblecast-200-the-l...

icf80• 2 years ago

TEXT 24: This individual soul is unbreakable and insoluble, and can be neither burned nor dried. He is everlasting, present everywhere, unchangeable, immovable and eternally the same.

https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/2/

AnotherGoodName2• 2 years ago

Quantum effects allow for randomness which is nice since it gives some sense of not being a machine entirely on rails.

That alone alone doesn't give determinism though. For that we still need to have some influence on the outcomes of quantum events. If there's a mechanism by which we can will for some quantum outcomes to be more likely than others that'd be nice. It'd fit with intuition that we aren't just observers of a series of events but actual participants that determine the outcome.

GrantMoyer• 2 years ago

I find the notion that free will requires a non-determistic system strange. Consider for the sake of argument that you love apples and hate oranges. Then given a free choice between an apple and an orange, you'll always pick the apple. The system is determisitic, and your free will is what makes it deterministic. On the other hand, if you were required to choose an apple or an orange based on a coin flip, you wouldn't call that free will.

jl6• 2 years ago

Someone who hates oranges might still, on rare occasion, pick one. Maybe they’re having a bad day, misunderstood the instruction, or wanted to turn their life around starting now. We might make decisions with high likelihood but it’s a qualitative leap to go from 99.999999% to 100%.

matt-attack• 2 years ago

There’s an excellent 2hr or so podcast episode on free will that has drastically changed my mind on the notion of determinism. The main argument is that the notion of “choice” is in fact an illusion and when you dive into what you’re actually doing when you “choose” you realize that it’s really just determinism under the hood.

In other words a deterministic universe is actually completely consistent with our experience once you realize that the mechanism of us “choosing” anything is really an illusion.

Highly recommend it.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-sense-with-sam-...

raindeer26• 2 years ago

Indeed. The problem is that the word "free" has different meanings when talking about free will and freedom in other contexts. What you talk about is value freedom, while ppl denying the existence of free will refer to "physcial" freedom. Few ppl notice the distinction though which makes the debate somewhat strange.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08435

teew3• 2 years ago

For some reason, most opinions on this topic that one reads on forums with of technically inclined people are non-compatibilist (the view that causal determinism and free will are mutually exclusive) while a good number of people that think a lot about will (i.e. philosophers) are compatibilists...

Note though that in metaphysics/theory of mind determinism is defined as the state at a given moment being necessitated from the state at a previous moment. I think one could critique your argument by saying that you're just pushing back the question of determinism by one level (i.e. "what's responsible for your preference of apples in the first place?"). The fact that you always choose the same way can then be taken to be a proof of determinism instead.

A compatibilist line of argument for your position might go something like this: What we consider a free will would hardly be met by a will completely detached from any deterministic constraints whatsoever. If a necessary condition for free will was that it is free from any external conditions, what would there even be for it to 'choose', and on what basis could its choices be made? Only if your mind knows of apples and oranges (objects subject to deterministic systems) and can interact with them (is at least partly part of the same system) can it make a meaningful choice between them. (Again, this view is based on the assumption that determinism exists and that free will is possible.)

MeImCounting6• 2 years ago

The question is rather what circumstances gave rise to the system that would make a given choice. Thats all "free will" is: the current state of a system that gives rise to a specific choice.

Free will as its commonly understood is an entirely religious concept and has little/no utility in explaining behavior. It is, IMO entirely unrelated to consciousness and a distracting subject that traps people into circular reasoning.

cykros• 2 years ago

I've for a long time simply asked the question: with what faculty does one decide what their will is?

If it's the will itself, that's circular, and sounds like a feedback loop. If it's something else, great...tell me about it. And how it's free.

Animats3• 2 years ago

Thermal noise alone is enough to yield randomness.

moralestapia6• 2 years ago

"Randomness" is not a correct interpretation of quantum mechanics, all you can say is that, beyond some limit, uncertainty in measurements kicks in. A deterministic process being behind it cannot be ruled out (yet?).

heisenzombie• 2 years ago

Hmm, we have actually ruled out quite a lot of that sort of thing... For example we're pretty sure there's nothing like a "local hidden variable", e.g. a little deterministic process in an electron determining if it's going to be spin up or spin down when measured.

See: Bell's theorem.

dumbo-octopus2• 2 years ago

For a detailed investigation of this topic by an renowned quantum computer scientist: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159.

layer83• 2 years ago

Instead it’s a machine on a roulette table? There is no third state between determinism and randomness. Either something has a cause, or it doesn’t, and hence is random (or a combination of both).

actual participants that determine the outcome.

Nobody disputes that we are (well, almost nobody). But we as participants are ourselves an outcome of processes that are somehow determined, and our decisions have causes. And assuming that they’re instead random doesn’t improve the situation.

AnotherGoodName2• 2 years ago

There's four states. Randomness vs deterministic. And then within randomness the possibility to influence outcomes vs none.

A purely deterministic mind is a movie. You watch it. There's no way to influence the outcome or it wouldn't be deterministic. You're just a long for the ride.

A non deterministic mind could be nothing more than randomness with no ability to influence outcomes still which makes it little different to a movie. Again you're just a long for the ride even if the ride has random events.

But non deterministic and the ability to actually influence outcomes? That's the intuition I suspect most people have for free will right there.

_Microft• 2 years ago

… but so does anything that performs photosynthesis?

p0w3n3d• 2 years ago

There is a lot of intelligence in plants. For example crown shyness, navigating to water, trees informing each other that a giraffe is eating their leaves, etc.

ben_w2• 2 years ago

None of that is what I'd call "a lot" of intelligence, not even in aggregate.

(Evolution itself can be described as a form of intelligence, but evolution is as different from individuals as humanity collectively is from a single thought).

ioblomov• 2 years ago

Given that it took probabilistic models to create the fluency of generative AI, it would only make sense that brains exploit quantum effects.

api• 2 years ago

I’ve speculated for many years that biology is harnessing quantum computing in some way and that this is one of the simplest explanations for how the brain can do what it does so quickly on so little power. It only consumes around 40 watts and does things an entire AWS data center can’t do.

Quantum compute could be being leveraged to do things like accelerating search for gradient descent. This would allow very rapid learning in polynomial time. There are also quantum algorithms that can more or less serialize parallel search, etc.

The objection is usually that biology is hot and noisy and wet and that this is a poor environment for QC. This assumes that it’s doing QC in a remotely similar way to how the quantum computers we are trying to build would do it. Billions of years of evolution might have found ways to harness quantum phenomena for information processing that are quite radically different. It’s all analog for starters, so nothing like a “qubit” or rigidly defined circuits.

Maybe some biochemical reactions are structured so as to invoke and amplify useful quantum effects that allow things to happen informatically that would be much slower or more costly without those effects.

Without understanding what’s happening this would just look like noise and luck to us. I do know that there are “unreasonably effective” enzymes and reactions involved in things like DNA repair, though it’s been a while since I read about this. I think there are cases where repair complexes find DNA errors more effectively than can easily be explained by basic chemistry and chance, and we are not sure exactly what’s going on. Maybe there’s something involving quantum information processing happening somewhere.

613style2• 2 years ago

This feels a lot like a standard line of muddy thinking we see in youtube videos about consciousness (for example): "we don't understand brains, and we don't understand quantum mechanics, so they're probably related."

It's easy to speculate, but it's not easy to find any evidence at all to back up those guesses. It's still not clear that this has anything to do with consciousness or information processing or AWS datacenters.

throwaway114602• 2 years ago

There's evidence that biology takes advantage of quantum effects on all levels - all the way from individual chemical bonds and interactions of molecules (quantum biochemistry) up to cellular and multi-cellular. Mostly because there's no way it could work on such small scales and be so energy efficient if it didn't.

So one thing is certain - the brain does use quantum mechanics just like the rest of the body, because otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have so much done inside such a small volume, with such small amounts of energy.

Of course this question is actually meant to be "is brain a quantum computer?" and we don't have any idea.

AndrewKemendo• 2 years ago

If you take the results of this work and also recent work in understanding what’s called the “Null space” of preparatory neuronal activity prior to action [1] then it paints a fairly clear picture that the null space might be interacting with this micro tubular architecture, and perhaps the activation function for skeletal muscle act is this wave collapse, informing the null space function evaluation

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-024-00796-z.epdf?shar...

coppsilgold• 2 years ago

Would it be surprising if evolution managed to exploit quantum mechanics for function? It did exploit everything else.

There is also a theory that quantum mechanics plays a role in olfaction[1].

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction>

moralestapia6• 2 years ago

It plays a role in photosynthesis, I don't have the reference at hand (I'm on my phone), but that one is 100% verified.

dekhn2• 2 years ago

You can start at https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/06/14/photosynthesis-key-to-... and https://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/PBD-quantum-se... and use the names in those articles to pull up the relevant literature.

dekhn2• 2 years ago

There are several biological processes for which we're fairly certain that some quantum mechanical process is exploited. Strictly speaking, everything about biology is ultimately explained by quantum chemistry and physics, but not in a particularly exciting way. However, I don't think anybody has found any concrete evidence that any process in biology exploits entanglement. Instead, the examples we've seen so far are mostly around tunnelling, and coherency.

People argue a lot about the "meaning of quantum" but nearly all the arguing is about the behavior of entanglement and wavefunction collapse. Tunnelling and coherency are pretty banal QM phenomena at this point.

As for Sabine... I don't find her popular science vides about biology to be particularly enlightening or accurate.

greyface-• 2 years ago

It would be surprising if it didn't. Why would an evolutionary process avoid searching through mechanisms that involve quantum effects?

novaRom• 2 years ago

Quantum effects are everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology

kumiy• 2 years ago

I honestly think that mosquitoes might be already exploiting a quantum effect while flying. For example, when you're not looking at them directly or when they fly in a chaotic manner to avoid being seen, they seem to disappear and reappear in different locations, traveling through space-time.

bullfightonmars• 2 years ago

Not at all! There is evidence of quantum effects in the light harvesting complexes in chlorophyll that operate at ambient temperatures. This appears to be a key element to the efficiency of guiding photons to the photosystem.

lll-o-lll• 2 years ago

Didn’t Thunderf00t perform an experiment to prove that heavy water tastes sweet due to a quantum effect?

Hugsun• 2 years ago

The first thought that came into my head reading this title was: "Ah, so they turned off the quantum effects for someone and they became dumb".

I guess that someone was me.

alevskaya2• 2 years ago

This referenced paper seems like primarily a theoretical modelling paper (almost all of its figures are simulations?) that contains as far as I can read 3 (!) actual experimental measurements in bulk on a fluorospectrophotometer. The claim is that the observed increased fluorescent quantum yield (QY) of microtubules over tubulin can be explained by the ideas in their simulations.

It's hard to buy that their proposed stories are the simplest explanation for these few measurements. Much more boring phenomena can influence QY. e.g. simply occluding fluorophores from the bulk solvent can have a huge influence on QY and spectra. (I used to design biological fluorescent reporter reagents...)

havaloc• 2 years ago

Star Trek had it right, living organisms beam at a "quantum resolution".

parpfish2• 2 years ago

this paper is going to unleash a mighty wave of woo-woo

Animats3• 2 years ago

Most useful comment so far.

parpfish2• 2 years ago

Thanks. I put a lot of thought into it, so it’s nice to feel appreciated.

usgroup3• 2 years ago

I think -- roughly speaking -- Penrose argues that human capabilities such as transductive reasoning are clearly not computable, therefore falsifying the idea that the mind reduces to an algorithm. He then goes on to propose how nonetheless what the mind does might be physically grounded, even if not in purely computational machinery.

rowanG077• 2 years ago

That doesn't make sense to me at all. If something is physically grounded and can be achieved then shouldn't it, by definition, be computable.

User232• 2 years ago

No. Why should it be?

usgroup3• 2 years ago

In your statement, I'm not sure by which definition physically grounded things are a sufficient condition for being computable, but I think Penrose depends on the Turing notion of computability and the hardness of the halting problem.

We can of course move goal posts, redefine computability however we like, to get whatever conclusion we care for, but I think that Penrose effort is intellectually honest.

lambdaone2• 2 years ago

I think the interesting question here is whether Penrose is claiming that the things of which the brain is capable (most notably the production of consciousness) are inherently non-computable by _any_ kind of artificial device, which is effectively a form of vitalism, or whether he is claiming that they _might_ be computable, but only with a quantum computer.

denton-scratch4• 2 years ago

shouldn't it, by definition, be computable

By which definition? Why does anything that is "physically grounded" and "achievable" be computable?

Meanwhile, I don't know what "physically grounded" and "achievable" mean in this context.

mb643• 2 years ago

That wasn't the impression I got from Sabine's video. It's consciousness itself (the subjective experience) that isn't computable (AI will probably never be conscious).

GoblinSlayer17• 2 years ago

Would you say that philosophical zombie is computable? AFAIK dualists agree that philosophical zombie is impossible in this universe, which means what is computable is a conscious being.

TheLoafOfBread• 2 years ago

So there is a chance to abuse a cockroach and turn it into quantum computer for breaking encryption on the budget.

Horffupolde• 2 years ago

Given that the brain is a physical object subject to all quantum effects, wouldn’t the novelty be that it doesn't use quantum effects? That it does sounds obvious.

thsksbd4• 2 years ago

its worse than that. A physical system can go far without QM -> see a system subject to Newton laws.

A chemical system is necessarily QM. Chemistry is either purely empirical, or quantum.

amelius• 2 years ago

Without QM, electrons would just drop into the nucleus. So good luck building anything without QM.

epgui2• 2 years ago

Anything that needs enzymes to function would break down without quantum effects.

wk_end• 2 years ago

Words are intended to cut up the world - this is how they get their meaning. If you’ve taken these words to apply to everything in the in universe, you’ve rendered them meaningless, which is not the intention. Projectiles are subject to quantum effects but you can model their behaviour classically perfectly well. A charitable reading would be something like “to model the operational behaviour of the brain, classical mechanics is insufficient”.

gfodor2• 2 years ago

This is the kindest response I’ve ever seen to someone suffering from whatever it is that causes these kinds of comments on this specific website.

notfed• 2 years ago

A charitable reading of what? I don't think that's the claim here, is it?

epgui2• 2 years ago

I’m sorry, but your projectile example is just terrible. We’ve known for decades that the proper functioning of many (most?) enzymes depend on quantum effects. Your body would just break down otherwise.

nsenifty• 2 years ago

Perhaps the title should have been "Brain uses Quantum effects in a useful/controllable way". Sabine explains it well in the video. To use quantum effects for computation, you'd need very controlled conditions and it was thought be to not possible in the brain.

yayr• 2 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6G1D2UQ3gg here is the link

tensor• 2 years ago

When these claims come up they don't mean that they are using quantum effects to do normal atomic and molecular things, but rather that somehow quantum effects are used in the process of "cognition" thus allowing us to believe that we are in fact more than biological machines and leave room for various magical properties we like to think we have (souls, consciousness, free will, etc).

While quantum effects have been found to aid in photosynthesis, interesting uses in cognition or otherwise are in fact extremely rare in biology. I believe photosynthesis is one of the few documented examples. Also, despite the popularity of the quantum brain idea, no one has been able to show definitive evidence of it for decades now.

TLDR yes it would be incredibly novel if this claim were proven to be true.

galaxyLogic5• 2 years ago

"Soul" I think is basically the memories in our brain. And memories are data, like a picture of bits some of which are on and some of which are off. Is there a picture or just random noise? If there is picture, there is soul.

Another way of thinking about it is that a picture is made up dots which are NOT lit up. So our memories, our soul is is not "physical". It does not have mass, because whether a dot is lit up or not does not change its weight. Memory is not made up of particles but by the information encoded by their positions.

baja_blast4• 2 years ago

interesting uses in cognition or otherwise are in fact extremely rare in biology

How would you know that when we just started studying such effects?

layer83• 2 years ago

“Quantum effects” usually refers to coherent states of superposition. In an environment like the brain that is suffused with photons (it’s warm), if nothing else, superpositions decohere virtually instantly. It’s therefore implausible that quantum effects could play any appreciable computational role in the brain.

alevskaya2• 2 years ago

Quantum mechanics is needed to explain any microscopic phenomena in chemistry and biology - that is not at all in dispute.

The odd set of claims is that somehow biology has 1) figured out how to preserve long-range entanglement and coherent states at 300K in a solvated environment when we struggle to do so in cold vacuum for quantum computing and 2) somehow still manages to selectively couple this to the -known- neuronal computational processes that are experimentally proven to be essential to thought and consciousness.

This more or less amounts to assertions that "biology is magic" without any substantive experimental evidence over the last thirty years that any of the above is actually happening. That's why most biophysicists and neuroscientists don't take it at all seriously.

aatd86• 2 years ago

Yeah, a bit like when I try to lift my leg, I actually think about how to activate my neurons so that muscle fibers contract one by one... That's definitely not what happens.

That at some level we have quantum phenomenon doesn't mean that everything occurs at the quantum level.

Seems that even Nature uses abstractions.

Jevon23• 2 years ago

Biology isn’t magic, but it does do a heck of a lot of amazing things that we don’t understand yet.

We haven’t even been able to reproduce abiogenesis.

GoblinSlayer17• 2 years ago

AIU quantum computer needs to maintain superposition, but for body superposition is not a concern and it doesn't maintain it.

munksbeer4• 2 years ago

I am a complete lay person, so I feel a bit silly challenging someone who is clearly an expert, but the idea that a physical process that has had countless trillions of generations of mutation and change, "figuring out" how to use an underlying feature of the universe to optimise, isn't far fetched at all.

It seems that the most powerful force in the universe is simply, survival of the fittest.

supportengineer• 2 years ago

Not to mention our eyes. Can our eyes decode quantum properties as well as the usual visual wavelengths?

thsksbd4• 2 years ago

I'm always amused by the lack of creativity of biologists.

It seems every decade or so some closely held dogma of biological systems is proven wrong after they mock physicists, computer scientists or mathematicians who first suggest it.

I_am_tiberius• 2 years ago

The following is most likely nonsense, but I always had the intuition that there is a hidden connection between mother and child that remains after the child's birth.

victorbstan• 2 years ago

Could’ve just asked me.

cat_plus_plus• 2 years ago

So there is a little quantum soul which is the consciousness of the brain. How does the soul get it's consciousness?

I think the best attitude is that a. We have no clue what causes consciousness and b. it's probably much more widespread that we previously assumed. We assume that other humans, cats and sufficiently advanced AI are conscious based on observing behaviors similar to our own. But why should self awareness be tied to specific behavior? Why not a star self aware of being a star, without having any of the same senses, drives and capabilities as a human? At best we can assume is that some other animals/things might be self aware of similar occurrences as we are.

As for quantum effects, if brain is able to leverage them in computation, that's an obvious evolutionary advantage. One obvious person of a brain is to simulate many possible potential actions and their real world outcomes. If it's able to use quantum states to model multiple scenarios simultaneously, that's quicker/more detailed modeling with less energy use.

But as far as quantum effects causing consciousness, how could we possibly tell and what useful insights have we gained by making this assumption?

wrp• 2 years ago

For a popular survey of the relevant neurophysics, try Stairway to the Mind by Alwyn Scott (1995). He argues it is very unlikely that quantum effects are relevant, and is skeptical of Penrose.

canjobear• 2 years ago

If the brain can get any extra fitness from exploiting quantum effects, it will. But the reason people are interested in this stuff seems to be that they think there's a connection between the quantum nature of the brain and consciousness. I don't see how the argument is any more than this:

1. Quantum effects seem mysterious.

2. Consciousness seems mysterious.

3. Therefore, quantum effects cause/are consciousness.

...which seems pretty weak.

zone411• 2 years ago

Why is the link to this blog spam instead of to the paper or a better article? Hossenfelder lacks qualifications in neuroscience and is often confidently inaccurate.

chefkd• 2 years ago

Is this just huma brains or does it apply to something like beavers?

baja_blast4• 2 years ago

The microtubules were from a pigs brain according the material and methods. These proteins exist in all animal cells. So this probably explains why single cell organisms are so intelligent despite not having a brain

piloto_ciego2• 2 years ago

Pay attention to the people with the most dogmatic views in this thread about determinism and free will. It’s extremely interesting. Typically (and strangely) I find the most dogmatic folks are mostly determinists. I think probably because it’s more “science-y” than a philosophy that has to say “I don’t know.”

Even in this thread you’ll note that there’s a very vocal group of people who would happily shout down any idea that there’s any sort of free will in the universe and that the universe is anything other than a cold mechanistic computation that was determined billions of years ago. They’ll shit talk Penrose, or shout about pseudoscience, and very few of them will critically engage with the topic in good faith. They’ve already made up their minds. Not only that but some of them (troublingly) will even talk how we’re not even conscious at all. As if we are all just meat computers or something.

Now, I don’t know if we’re conscious or not and I don’t know if the world is on rails either, but it certainly feels like I have free will and it certainly feels like I’m responsible for my actions and it qualitatively feels like I’m conscious.

Obviously, not all of my choices are made freely, but some of the ones that matter to me at least seem to be made freely. But a lot of people seem absolutely sure that we’re not making anny choices and we have no free will. It’s weird to me, because literally every day I get increasing evidence suggesting I have free will within some limits and the universe is unfathomable and unpredictable.

Not to be an ass, but if I can be honest I kinda pity the folks that don’t have that experience. I reckon if you’ve never made a decision that really mattered it would be easy to feel like it all wasn’t your choice. Maybe that’s too harsh, but anti-free will and determinism are just as untestable as any other philosophy I suppose, but I do wonder what kind of life can lead to people thinking that they’re not making any conscious decisions.

Nikretep• 2 years ago

I’m a determinist and I certainly feel like I’m in control of my thoughts and actions. That doesn’t mean I actually am. I think that we as humans are just hardwired to feel like we have free will, even if we believe otherwise on an intellectual level.

galaxyLogic5• 2 years ago

I don't know how you define "determinism" but perhaps in the sense that future is determined by the past, right? The initial state of a system and the forces acting on it determine its state at some future time. Right?

But universe doesn't work tat way. Universe is non-deterministic because quantum effects happen randomly. They cannot be predicted, only their probabilities can.

falseprofit2• 2 years ago

You should define “free will” if you want to claim you have direct experience of it. I’d suggest that what you’re experiencing may be just “will”.

And in my opinion, whether you’re “responsible for your actions” isn’t a question about the nature of reality (ontological), rather a question (or one of several) about how we should act in it (moral).

piloto_ciego2• 2 years ago

I’d say “free will is the ability to act at one’s own discretion.”

That’s not my definition it’s almost verbatim from the Oxford English Dictionary. Still, it’s exactly how I feel.

But morality is important to this discussion I think but I cannot put my finger on “why” it is.

GoblinSlayer17• 2 years ago

You might as well be a compatibilist. Yes, it looks like free will exists and the universe is deterministic, consequently free will is compatible with determinism. Then you can realize that the myth that free will is incompatible with determinism is just a superstition.

munksbeer4• 2 years ago

Yes, it looks like free will exists

Why do you say this? How do you define free will here?

munksbeer4• 2 years ago

It’s weird to me, because literally every day I get increasing evidence suggesting I have free will within some limits and the universe is unfathomable and unpredictable.

I find the whole subject fascinating, but I am not an expert. I break it down for myself in this manner, so perhaps you could give your view.

If we rewound the universe by an hour (as an example). Literally, every single thing, particle, what have you in the universe is exactly as it was an hour ago. Then you started it again (1). Would you end up where everything in the universe happened exactly as it already did? Faced with the same choices, would *you* make the exact same choices, to end up exactly as we are now?

If the answer is yes, then that implies determinism, and would probably reject what you think of as free will (I'm taking a guess, because you didn't explicitly define free will).

If the answer is no, then it appears that the choices are just random. You have all the same information, all the same moral conindrums, etc, and yet, you just chose something different. Why? In this case, if it is just random, then that also seems to reject the idea of free will.

If there is some other mechanism involved here, could you describe whether it would make the same decisions or not. And if not, then on what basis would the decisions be different?

(1) I'd really prefer to avoid nitpicky arguments about the arrow of time and so on. This is just a thought experiment.

krzat• 2 years ago

We have billions of neurons but they create one coherent experience, it would be pretty elegant if consciousness was involved here.

Basically: what is conscious is quantum, what is unconscious is classical.

Vast majority of brain activity is unconscious, what surfaces as experience is a global state of the entire system.

unsupp0rted• 2 years ago

That’s much cleaner than reality ever tends to be

mrfinn• 2 years ago

Am I the only one automatically thinking about LLMs here? Very wild speculation, but what if we accidentally tapped on a phenomena we actually didn't know before, some kind of "event horizon", related with the arise of consciousness and that's the underline reason about why LLMs work so well?

darthrupert• 2 years ago

Kinda weird that (if this is true) evolution is able to come up with things like this. And I'm not trying to dogwhistle for creationism here, just thinking it's weird.

Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds [video]

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