Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
cogsci.uwaterloo.ca
Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#2Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#3I 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.
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#4I 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.
The title of the post is exactly the title of the article, so I'd say it is very representative of the article. That the answer to the posed question is "no" is not misleading.
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#5I 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.
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#6I 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.
The title of the post is exactly the title of the article, so I'd say it is very representative of the article. That the answer to the posed question is "no" is not misleading.
D'oh! Sorry.
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#7The abstract makes it clear they argue "no":
We argue that computation via quantum mechanical processes is irrelevant to explaining how brains produce thought, contrary to the ongoing speculations of many theorists. First, quantum effects do not have the temporal properties required for neural information processing. Second, there are substantial physical obstacles to any organic instantiation of quantum computation. Third, there is no psychological evidence that such mental phenomena as consciousness and mathematical thinking require explanation via quantum theory. We conclude that understanding brain function is unlikely to require quantum computation or similar mechanisms.
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#8http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/documents/CogScipub.pdf
For the impatient, the above link is to a paper called "The Brain Is Both Neurocomputer and Quantum Computer," which is a response to the paper linked to in the main post.
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#9I 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.
Re: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
#10Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source.