No
Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#12I don't feel papers like this are really adding much to the community. Of course all explanations of consciousness go against our conventional understanding of the universe, that's why we don't understand consciousness yet. More likely than not, we just don't understand the universe as well as we thought we did. Bonus points to those who think different.
We're also viewing consciousness from WITHIN consciousness, so our views are distorted by filters that we cannot see, and thus we assume that there is something fundamentally special going on, when in fact we're just viewing the system from an angle that makes it very hard to understand.
While it makes sense that our brains could be structured in such a way that some things are easier to understand than others, I think it would be remarkable that it somehow filters out our understanding of the process of consciousness in particular.
I think that particular criticism is vague and ill-formed, but oft-repeated because it sounds good. After all, having a brain hasn't stopped us from learning about the brain, even though one might think it would be hard to learn about brains with brains.
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#13I was going to answer the title, with "no" - http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/brain.html - but the article itself agrees with me anyway. So. Your title is misleading & not representative of the article, & that's annoying.
Maybe that is only what happened after we observed it. The title alone of this post blew my mind at the possibility even if not possible.
Although the hypothesis that the brain is a quantum computer is biologically and computationally implausible, there might be psychological phenomena not amenable to a neurocomputational explanation that are explicable by appeal to quantum theory. Penrose (1994, 598 A. Litt et al./Cognitive Science 30 (2006) 1997) and Hameroff (1998a, 1998b) argued that mathematical thinking and conscious experience are two such phenomena.
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#14I don't feel papers like this are really adding much to the community. Of course all explanations of consciousness go against our conventional understanding of the universe, that's why we don't understand consciousness yet. More likely than not, we just don't understand the universe as well as we thought we did. Bonus points to those who think different.
We're also viewing consciousness from WITHIN consciousness, so our views are distorted by filters that we cannot see, and thus we assume that there is something fundamentally special going on, when in fact we're just viewing the system from an angle that makes it very hard to understand.
we assume that there is something fundamentally special going on, when in fact we're just viewing the system from an angle that makes it very hard to understand.
How do you know there isn't something special going on? Seems to me that believing there isn't anything special is just as much a guess as believing there is, given how little we understand consciousness.