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Quantum Mind Blog'Once we have bitten the quantum apple, our loss of innocence is permanent.' - R. Shankar RECENT BLOGS:- 1 September 2010: Searle's chinese room 31 August 2010: Penrose & Godel 30 August 2010: Patricia & Paul Churchland 29 August 2010: Clinical evidence for freewill 25 August 2010 Cherry picking/unreported data 22 August 2010 Beyond scientific materialism 22 August 2010 The unconscious will 18 August 2010 David Chalmers: Conversations on Consciousness 13 August 2010 Haisch/Rueda on the structure of the quantum vacuum 6 August 2010 Velmans: Reflexive monism 3 August 2010 Brain as a gate 2 August 2010 Bureaucratic stifling of scientific ideas (2) 2 August 2010 Identity theory 31 July 2010 Freewill, information, quantum mechanics and biology 30 July 2010 Freewill involves energy consumption 27 July 2010 Spacetime as the basis 27 July 2010 Bureaucratic pressure on scientific ideas 27 July 2010 Experimental test of Penrose's objective reduction 22 July 2010 Towards quantum superpositions of living organisms 17 July 2010 Marcus Chowns recent book looks at relationship of the quanta and spacetime + Chaitin's views on mathematics and computers 1 SEPTEMBER 2010 SEARLE'S CHINESE ROOM Susan Blackmore's discussion with John Searle in 'Conversations on Consciousness includes a summary of Searle's chinese room thought experiment, the thing for which he is best known in consciousness studies. Searle used this in his dispute with the artificial intelligence community to try and demonstrate that a computer would never be conscious. There are similarities in concept to Penrose's view that there is a lack of understanding in computers. In the chinese room demonstration Searle says that he does not understand Chinese. He is, however, confined to a room with a programme for handling Chinese symbols. Questions are sent to the room also expressed in the form of Chinese symbols. When these are received, Searle consults a rule book and sends back the appropriate answer again in the form of Chinese symbols provided by the rule book. This means that he has received Chinese input and provided Chinese output without understanding anything about the Chinese language. His suggestion is that computers are in the same position of receiving input, following certain rules, and producing a resulting output, without any understanding of the subject matter. The computer only needs to manipulate symbols such as sequences of zeros and ones. The conversation does not attempt to deal with all of the numerous arguments that have been advanced against the chinese room. However, Searle does discuss what he claims to be the favourite counter argument, known as the systems reply. In this argument the whole room as a system, including tables, desks and paper plus Searle is categorised as a system that understands Chinese. He regards this as a desperate attempt to escape the obvious conclusion of the chinese room thought experiment. It is difficult not to agree with him. It is difficult to conceive a world in which paper, desks and tables add any conscious understanding to the brain of a human manipulating unknown symbols according to a rule. Searle suggests that criticism of the chinese room conclusion is metaphysically based relative to a believe that computation must be all that comprises the human brain, because that is part of a particular world view. He also points out that if a realisation of the limitations of computers became more widespread a lot of research funding in the artificial intelligence area would be threatened. Governments and corporations had been happy to plough money into robotics because of the naive or 'folk' believe since the mid-twentieth century that autonomous robots were just round the corner and essentially only involved strapping a computer onto a mobile electrical appliance. 31 AUGUST 2010 PENROSE & GODEL In this conversation there is an early disagreement between Blackmore and Penrose over the meaning of 'understanding'. Blackmore will not have it there is a distinction between an automatic response such as catching a ball, which at the moment of doing it, requires no conscious thought about the balls dynamics and dealing with a problem that requires conscious thought. Blackmore gives the impression of seeing herself make an important point. Maybe she wants to distance herself from Penrose position, because otherwise I find it hard to make sense of her argument. Susan Blackmore discussion with Penrose centres on a discussion of the Godel theorem, which forms the basis of Penrose's take on consciousness and understanding. He says that with simple mathematical statements, there is no argument as to which are true or false. These statements appear as objective facts. The question is how do we come to the realisation of the truth of these statements. Initially, we have axiomatic rules, which is applied give trustworthy conclusions. Godel shows that given that the rules give truths, it is possible to transcend the rules. If the rules only give truths, they must be consistent, but the statement which asserts the consistency of the rules lies outside the rules. The question is how do you ascertain the truth of the consistency statement or any other statement that transcends the rules. This according to Penrose, comes from understanding, and further to that it is claimed that the rule system is itself only an imitation of what understanding does. 30 AUGUST 2010 PATRICIA & PAUL CHURCHLAND The well known consciousess philosophers, Patricia & Paul Churchland, put their views to Susan Blackmore in her book, 'Conversations on Consciousness'. I feel that there's a certain amount of smoke screen in this Churchlands conversation with Blackmore. There's rather too much emphasis on examples of resistance to now established scientific ideas when they were new. This has the effect of putting any opponents of the Churchlands views in the position of the ignorant, or those supposedly too old to come to terms with new ideas, while it is implied that bright young students have no difficulties with their ideas. This is to some extent a substitute for actually substantiating their scientific argument. At the end of the day any argument that happened to be new could be promoted in this way regardless of its merits. There is also a danger to the Churchlands own position from this line. Patricia Churchland has come up with indignant if superficial attacks on quantum consciousness. What if that is the new theory that is too novel for the established players to live with? The Churchlands argument is essentially an identity theory. Few scientifically orientated people would disagree with the first part of their argument. There are identities in physics. Light is the same as electromagnetic waves. The waves don't cause light or correlate with light, they are light. The problem with this is that the brain state of light bears no resemblance to the particles or waves oscillating in the external world. Blackmore does try to get the Churchlands to confront this problem, with her asking them to explain what gives us the sensation of the red or the sensation of pain when the brain state is nothing like the external oscillation of photons or external damage to body tissues. The Churchlands seem to sidestep this argument. The colour red is a relative stimulation of different cells. This does not seem to be an answer. Whether one or several cells are involved, the conscious brain still bears no resemblance to the external particles. Similarly pain is said to refer to a mapping of nociceptive stimulations, but the resulting brain still has no resemblance to the damaged tissue on the outside of the body. Maybe it is the pattern of the brain activations that is meant to be conscious. But pattern arises in all non-conscious information systems so we have no reason why these particular patterns should be conscious. The descriptions of internal processing here seem to serve merely to deflect us away from the central question of why these brain states are conscious. 29 AUGUST 2010 CLINICAL EVIDENCE FOR FREEWILL In his book 'The Mind and the Brain, co-authored with Sharon Begley, Jeffrey Schwarz describes the successful treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), where patients are told that the condition derives from a brain disorder, and where they are encouraged to exert their conscious will in order to overcome compulsive behaviours. Schwarz claims that not only can this be successful, but that brain structures become altered so as to produce different habituations from the compulsive ones. The efficacy of the conscious will described here differs from most mainstream views. Schwarz links the conscious will to Henry Stapp's version of quantum consciousness theory where the whole brain is put into a superposition that is collapsed by a measurement. 25 AUGUST 2010 CHERRY PICKING/UNREPORTED DATA The sad catalogue of emails relative to unreported data and cherry picking of data relative to the drug 'Seroquel' (Financial Times, August 23) is also a health warning as to taking interpretation of data at its face value in the consciousness studies sector. In particular, we are faced with a slew of psychology experiments interpreted as indicating the non-existence of freewill, which on closer inspection can be seen to fall a good way short of their proclaimed result. 22 AUGUST 2010 BEYOND SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM Imants Baruss of King's University College, Ontario writing in the Journal of Consciousness Studies considers that we need to go somewhat beyond scientific materialism to explain matter itself, and that this means we also need to go beyond scientific materialism to understand consciousness, while at the same time not proposing anything that is inconsistent with physics. He considers the possibility that consciousness could be inserted as a primitive element in quantum theory. But he is more inclined to think that consciousness could be more fundamental than that, involving a 'pre-physical' substrata underlying both mental experience and matter. Baruss quotes Jerry Fodor (1. 2000) as saying that the last half century of research has demonstrated that there are aspects of human mental processes that are not accessible to the present computational models, theories and techniques. Dennett himself admitted (2. 1978, 3. Giunti, 1995, 4. van Gelder & Port, 1995) that for computationalism to work there needed to be a formal language in the brain, which he called 'mentalese', but evidence of this has never been found, and modern computer scientists do not appear to believe in the probability of such a language. Baruss refers to Henry Stapp who theorises that mental effort allows the quantum Zeno effect (frequent measurement preventing anything from happening at the quantum level) to hold in place a template that allows our intentions to manifest. Jeffrey Schwarz has invoked Stapp's idea to explain the self-directed neuroplasticity that he found using brain imaging in the right dorsomedial area of the brain (5. Schwarz, 2002). Baruss is prepared to consider that there may be some truth amongst the various quantum theories of consciousness, but thinks that the real answer to the question lies at a more fundamental level. He suggests a fundamental 'pre-physical' level of reality from which the world of matter and the mental/conscious world arises. He indicates that this is somewhat akin to David Bohm's idea of the implicate order underlying and resolving the differences between quantum and relativity theory, and also provides the level of the universe from which consciousness arose. It is suggested here that consciousness arising from the deepest level could effect the annihilation and creation operators that shape spacetime, and thus influence physical manifestations. It is further suggested here that changes in our intentions could produce changes in the deepest level, which could in turn influence the physical level. Baruss further suggests that some altered states of consciousness involved identification with this deeper level of the universe. My response to these Bohm/Baruss ideas is to find them interesting, but to wonder whether it is necessary to invoke this extra layer to the universe, for which there is as yet little or no hard evidence. It does seem that consciousness could arise just from the quantum and spacetime, although we are still lacking a properly agreed theory for resolving quantum and relativity theory. 22 AUGUST 2010 THE UNCONSCIOUS WILL A recent paper by Custers and Aarts published in 'Science' on July 2 and summarised here under (Freewill 6) discusses studies purporting to show the unconscious selection of goals. In one instance, a group of subjects undertook language puzzles. One group was 'primed' with a puzzle referring to achievement, while a control group was not primed in this way. The primed group were found to be more motivated in their puzzle solving. Similar examples of priming for characteristics such as cooperation or acquisitiveness are quoted from other studies. From this the authors claim that goal pursuit is 'influenced and controlled unconsciously', but the studies only appear to substantiate the 'influenced' part of their proposition. As described, the primed groups are more motivated than the controls, but both groups have identical goals, and in fact these goals have been selected by the experimenters and not by either the unconscious or the conscious will of the subjects. 18 AUGUST 2010 DAVID CHALMERS: CONVERSATIONS ON CONSCIOUSNESS Chalmer's ideas are covered elsewhere on this site, so here we'll simply focus on particular points that come out of Blackmore's interview with Chalmers. Blackmore puts the view that the idea that the existence of subjective experience is a hard problem is analogous to the 19th century theory of vitalism, where an elan vital was required to explain life, as distinct from inanimate objects and chemistry. Chalmers counters by saying that this is a disanalogy. He asks what it is that has to be explained with regard to life. Life metabolises energy from the environment, and uses this to control its behaviour, compete for resources, adapt, grow and finally reproduce. These are functions, and the functions are what have to be explained. The vitalists using the knowledge of the 19th century could not understand how inanimate matter could perform the functions observed in living things, and therefore postulated the idea of an elan vital. However, the progress of science demonstrated that there were mechanisms in living organisms that could perform these functions. However, Chalmers points out that the vitalists were only trying to explain third-person behaviours that they could observe from outside the organism. With consciousness, we are trying to explain the first-person subjective experience, which is quite distinct from the third-person observed behaviours of living organisms. Further into the interview, Chalmers makes an important distinction between the reducible and the irreducible in physics. He points out that in physics there are irreducible things or properties, such as spacetime, mass and charge. They are just given aspects of the universe, and science does not try to explain them in terms of anything else. These things are taken as fundamental. Chalmers argues that if we cannot derive consciousness from other physical properties, then it must itself be a fundamental. If consciousness cannot be reduced to something else, it must itself be irreducible or fundamental. From this basis, we can look for laws that govern the connection between first-person consciousness and third person behaviour, akin to the laws that prevail in normal physics. He rejects Blackmore's suggestion that the idea of consciousness as a fundamental is necessarily panpsychist. He suggests that consciousness can be fundamental and rare, just as mass is relatively rare in the prevailing vacuum of the universe. Chalmers argues against the idea of quantum properties being linked to consciousness, but his approach seems rather superficial in this area. His argument is prima facie attractive in asking why a wave function collapse in the brain should produce consciousness there, when wave function collapses occur all over the universe. However, this does not really look at the more detailed question of what might happen if longer-lived quantum coherence and wave function collapse are involved with the sensory processing involved in brains. In this situation the brain could be literally a gate to the background fundamental consciousness of spacetime. Chalmers is in fact himself not so far from that view, where he suggests that the fundamental property of consciousness might only emerge where we have complex information processing as in brains. What Chalmers lacks is any description of the mechanism by which this would happen, something that is provided in some forms of quantum consciousness theory. 13 AUGUST 2010 HAISCH/RUEDA: ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE QUANTUM VACUUM The middle portion of Bernard Haisch's recent book, 'The God Theory' discusses the structure of the quantum vacuum and spacetime. Beginning from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Haisch explains that electric and magnetic fields flowing through space constantly oscillate, as a function of the uncertainty of their position and momentum. The name 'zero-point field' refers to the fact that this is the lowest possible energy state that persists even when the heat/movement of molecules has ceased. Because electromagnetic radiation permeates the whole of space this adds up to an enormous amount of energy. Haisch stresses that there is no such thing in the universe as a void, and that this lowest energy state is still full of this zero point energy. This quantum vacuum is viewed as a sea of energy fluctuations and force perturbations jumping in and out of existence. Haisch treats the zero point energy as a real thing, and concentrates attention on what effect this has. The existence of the zero point energy has long been demonstrated by the Casimir force. At distances smaller than a millimetre metal can be forced together, because long wave length radiation is suppressed between the plates, so more pressure is exerted on the metal sheets from outside than inside. The nearer the plates are brought together, the more radiation is excluded and the greater the external pressure. Haisch developed ideas about the effects of the zero-point field in conjunction with a colleague, Alfonso Rueda. The assumption since Newton has been that the mass of an object, which is in effect a measure of its inertia, was an innate property of the object itself. Rueda made an opposite proposal that the inertial resistance to acceleration came not from the object itself but from contrary force exerted by the surrounding zero-point field. Further to this, it is suggested that the zero-point field could explain the Pauli exclusion principle, with the buffeting of the underlying electromagnetic field preventing the electron from losing energy and spiraling into the nucleus of the atom. The astrophysicist, Sir William McCrea has additionally suggested that these vacuum fluctuations are needed not just to overcome the inertia of macroscopic objects, but to generate any action in the universe at all, including radioactive decay and electron transitions, thus making it the key element in the passage of time/the increasing entropy of the universe. If these roles are attributed to the zero-point field, it can be viewed as an underlying reality that sustains the matter that appears in spacetime. Haisch suggests that there should be other zero-point fields besides the electromagnetic zero-point field relating to the other forces of nature such as the strong and weak nuclear forces. Thus it is acknowledged that the zero-point electromagnetic field might be only part of the story. What is the significance of all this for consciousness studies? 'Fundamentalist' theories try to explain consciousness in terms of fundamental quantum features, which ultimately involves the nature of the quantum vacuum/spacetime. An understanding of this therefore becomes central to an understanding of the physical basis of consciousness. If the quantum vacuum is as central to the material structure of the universe, as these proposals suggest, it becomes the more plausible that it could underlie consciousness. 6 AUGUST 2010 VELMANS: REFLEXIVE MONISM We discuss here an interview that Max Velmans gave to Susan Blackmore (Conversations on Consciousness), as part of a series of interviews with prominent consciousness theorists. Velmans has developed a theory of consciousness called reflexive monism. He starts by thinking in terms of the three dimensional space that surrounds us. He contrasts this approach to both dualism, and to standard reductionist approaches that seek to portray consciousness as a state or function of the brain. The standard view is that sensory inputs to the brain are processed to the point where they become a conscious experience in the brain. Velmans, however, suggests that the subjective experience is not in the brain, but is the three dimensional world around us. In this theory, there's no split between the three dimensional world and the world in the brain, although he accepts that there is a world outside the brain, which is as described by physics and therefore very different from what we experience. Velman's view is that the history of the universe through the Big Bang and the process of evolution leads to the present situation where we have human organisms each with an individual viewpoint or perspective on the whole universe. The universe is thus differentiated into bits that each have a view of the whole. This idea is labelled as reflexive monism. Velmans sees consciousness as a fundamental property. He agrees with Chalmers in this although not in other respects. However, he seems, in this interview, uncertain how to develop this concept. He tries to compare the distinction between the objective and subjective view to experiments in quantum mechanics where the description of a particle depends on the arrangement of equipment. Unfortunately, this is a view of quantum mechanics that many have drifted away from. The more modern view might be that the description changes when the quanta interact with the environment, and that particular experimental arrangements produce such an interaction. Velmans, who is not a quantum consciousness theorist, intends only an analogy, but this does place a question mark over whether this whole concept of two unrelated views of the same thing or two aspects of the same thing without any apparent physical connection actually means anything. Velmans suggests here that identical information is being presented in two different ways. In a way, this is likely to be in some sense true of any physical explanation of consciousness in the brain, but without some suggestion of what physical structure might underlie the dual aspects, we really don't have much to go on. Velmans attempts to further substantiate his view with a thought experiment. There could be an experimental situation where a scientist was looking at a brain scan of relevant neurons in a subject's brain, while the subject was simply looking out and getting a subjective impression of the room they were in. So the scientist is getting an objective impression of the subject's brain state, while the subject is getting the subjective output of the brain state. The scientist and the subject then swap roles, with the scientist looking at the room while the subject looks at a scan of his brain. It is suggested that this somehow doesn't make sense, or blurs the subjective/objective roles. However, the action of looking at a scan of neural processing and of looking at what the neural processing produces are still quite distinct as between objective and subjective, whether the person having the objective experience is a scientist or untrained. There is nothing magical about being a scientist that makes their experience objective, regardless of what they are looking at. Velmans suggests that it is something to do with being in a scientist's role when looking at the scan, but the objectivity is nothing to do with the job description of the observer, and all to do with where they are looking. In the detail of his written material Velmans is one of the most logical and incisive of writers, but in the end this looks like an unsatisfactory merger between ideas of consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe and more conventional views wedded to classical physics. 3 August 2010 BRAIN AS A GATE Proposals such as those of Hameroff may well be only first shots at describing the physical mechanism of consciousness in the brain. What does emerge, however, is the idea of the brain as a gate. This is not a metaphor but a physical description as in logic gate, voltage-gated ion channel or even the physical structure that allows access to premises is handled in a particular way. In this respect, a particular brain process can be seen as giving access to understanding or consciousness coded into fundamental spacetime. 2 AUGUST 2010 BUREAUCRATIC STIFLING OF SCIENTIFIC IDEAS (2) Concern is being expressed about steps towards making it difficult for new ideas to emerge in science. On 27 July we mentioned the new rules from the Engineering and Physical Research Council that can ban a scientist from getting any funding at all for at least a year if, they sufficiently dislike an idea that has been submitted. Hard on the heels of this comes a report relating to the growing international controversy over shaken baby syndrome, where an expert supporter of more recent findings has been banned from giving evidence in court by the General Medical Council (New Scientist, 31 July 2010). This has been interpreted as a warning to other experts not to disclose their scientific findings to the law courts. 2 AUGUST 2010 IDENTITY THEORY A few thoughts on identity theory: Firstly, I think that mind/brain should be replaced by consciousness/brain when discussing anything in this area that requires a certain amount of rigour. Mind is a word that seems peculiar to the English language and appears to cover, the brain, mental processing such as thoughts and response to stimuli and consciousness. It's a useful word, but it does allow a certain amount of fudging where you want to specifically talk about consciousness. A good example of identity theory is to say that because we accept that H20 is the same thing as water, so that there is an H20/water identity, we should accept that there is identity between consciousness of for instance pain and the firing of particular neurons. I don't think this works, although it can look superficially attractive. In the first place, why are we convinced by the H20/water identity? This is because what we know about the electromagnetic bonds between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms and between the individual H20 molecules gives a full explanation of the way the substance known as water behaves, with for instance liquidity at ambient temperature and the ability to interact with biomolecules. The key thing is that the H20 understanding explains the behaviour of the water we see both in everyday life and neuroscience. If water regularly did other things than are generally observed, such as brandishing the sword Excalibur all of itself, or defying gravity, the identity explanation would fail because the electromagnetic bonds in H20 do not allow for that behaviour. I think mind/brain identity or more specifically in the example above, consciousness of pain/neuronal activity identity fails on this basis. Identity theorists may invites us to think of the neuronal activity at the detailed level of electrical potentials and molecules. So we ought to be able to see how electrical potentials, molecules and any other details produce the observed characteristics of consciousness in the way that electromagnetic bonds produce the observed characteristics of water. However, it is not possible to do this within classical physics. Kelvin was right, in terms of classical physics, when more than a century ago he said that it had more or less all been done. We know how particular atoms, molecules and electrical potentials interact and what these interactions produce, such as forming compounds or transmitting electrical signals, but conscious experience is nowhere on the list of classical physics. It is no use in this context appealing to special conditions in the brain, because the whole thrust of modern science is to the effect that there is no dualism or vitalism, and that brain obeys exactly the same laws as the rest of the universe. The failure of most identity theory seems to stem from concentrating explanation at the classical level, which can only produce a known limited range of behaviours. If we do eventually find a physical explanation for consciousness in the brain, it may in fact be possible to speak of an identity between consciousness and some particular brain states. 31 JULY 2010 FREE WILL, INFORMATION, QUANTUM MECHANICS AND BIOLOGY This article seems to illustrate some of the difficulties that modern thinkers have in getting to grips with the questions of consciousness and freewill. In the early part of the article the author states baldly that conscious free decisions are a subjective illusion, on the basis of the Libet experiments. Curiously, he goes on to quote at some length parts of Roy Baumeister's interesting 2008 paper, 'Free will in scientific psychology', which argues that the Libet experiments refer to immediate action, but do not concern themselves with more deliberative thinking. The part of the Baumeister's article quoted here refers to the biological cost of the processes associated with freewill. This is developed further with accounts of studies that show levels of glucose in the bloodstream fall when self control or free choice making are being exercised. This evidence of energy consumption looks to argue the process as being purely illusory. P. The latter part of the article is in a way hard to discuss, because it seems to discuss the wrong question. The main drive of the argument seems to be that the interactions of biomolecules can be understood in the same way as other chemical reactions, with no need to resort to examining the quantum mechanical underpinnings. This is true in so far as it goes, but does not even approach the question of why the biological structures, unlike the chemical ones, are associated with consciousness. 30 July 2010 FREEWILL and ENERGY CONSUMPTION A paper by Roy Baumeister (Freewill 6) argues for the efficacy of freewill. In particular studies show that the processes of both self control and rational choice deplete glucose in the bloodstream, leading to a deterioration in subsequent performance. This can, however, be at least partly restored by the administration of more glucose. It appears unlikely that evolution would have selected for such a high energy process if it were not efficacious. Consciousness is closely associated with freewill, and these studies therefore carry a strong implication that consciousness itself is also a physical thing or process involving energy and being efficacious. 27 JULY 2010 SPACETIME AS THE BASIS As of now spacetime looks to be the fundamental level of the universe. What is referred to as the quantum vacuum may be seen as distortions or excitations of spacetime, which represent the fundamental quanta such as quarks and electrons. This is all that exists, the world as we perceive being an adaptive modeling of this in the brain. Mind, subjective consciousness and mathematical understanding can in some theories be seen as themselves a coding or excitation of this fundamental spacetime. 27 JULY 2010 BUREAUCRATIC STIFLING OF SCIENTIFIC IDEAS Concern is being expressed about a further step towards making it difficult for new ideas to emerge in science. Under new rules in the UK, the Engineering and Physical Research Council (EPSRC) can ban a scientist from getting any funding at all for at least a year if, they sufficiently dislike an idea that has been submitted. I suppose it beats being burnt at the stake. 27 JULY 2010 EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF PENROSE'S OBJECTIVE REDUCTION This recent article by Michael Brooks in the New Scientist describes a long-term experiment now underway to test Roger Penrose's hypothesis of objective reduction. This proposes that even particles that are isolated from the environment will decohere when their individual spacetime geometries becomes separated by more than the Planck length. This experiment is being run by Dirk Bouwmeester at the University of California, Santa Barbara and involves mirrors only ten micrometres across and weighing only a few trillionths of a kilo, and the measurement of their deflection by a photon. The experiment is expected to take ten years to complete. This means that theories of consciousness based on objective reduction are likely to remain speculative for at least that length of time. Confirmation of objective reduction would still leave the question of any connection to consciousness open. However, the ability to run an experiment that could look to falsify objective reduction, at least qualifies it as a scientific theory. 22 JULY 2010 QUANTUM SUPERPOSITION OF LIVING ORGANISMS An article by Romero-Isart et al in the New Journal of Physics discusses the possibility of experiments to put micro-organisms into quantum superposition. Recent research has shown that it is possible to create superpositions of collections of photons. This has given rise to speculation as to what the size limit to such collections might be, and whether it might even be possible to put a small organism such as a virus into superposition. Technical progress suggests that it will be possible to increase the size of the collections put into superposition. Pieces of technology such as micro-mirrors or cantilevers may be put into superposition, as could micro-organisms such as viruses. Experiments depend on an optical cavity with a mechanical oscillator, where the experimenter attempts to reduce the mechanical object to its ground state. Achievement of this is expected to open up the possibility of more fundamental and applied experiments, including those with micro-organisms. The authors consider experiments on micro-organisms to be feasible because they behave as dielectric objects, which have been used in other forms of these experiments, some micro-organisms are resistant to the vacuum conditions of these experiments, and the sizes of some organisms such as spores and viruses is comparable to the wavelengths involved in these experiments. The authors anticipate that such experiments could address the role of life and consciousness in quantum mechanics. It is not immediately easy to see where this work is leading in terms of the understanding of consciousness. Most theories of quantum consciousness look at the possibility of consciousness deriving from quantum states within complex organisms, whereas here we have the potential for whole organisms to be put into superposition. There may be some connection to the idea that the surprising capabilities of micro-organisms depend on quantum computing, but even here the mechanisms proposed are seen as a detailed part of the internal structure. 17 JULY 2010 The Never Ending Days of Being Dead: Dispatches from the Front Line of Science The ideas discussed in this book look crucial to our understanding of spacetime, energy, matter, the physical law and the relationship of consciousness to all of these. Spacetime and the energy it contains are viewed as fundamental, while quantum particles are suggested to be less fundamental being distortions of the underlying spacetime. This could be seen as related to the Penrose suggestion of objective reduction as a result of the separation of the spacetimes of superposed particles, which is also a distortion of spacetime. Also discussed are the ideas of Gregory Chaitin, which appears close to Penrose in arguing that mathematicians can go beyond what any computer can perform, because they can go beyond the constraint of the Gödel incompleteness theorem. Chaitin also proposes that logical mathematics is the exception and can be seen as islands of logic in a vast sea of random truths with no logical basis. |
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