Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Overview: Could Life And Consciousness Be Related To The Fundamental Quantum Nature Of The Universe?

thanks, F6, for giving it all a real context, it sure feels to make sense .. a lot of this first is kinda fuzzy .. so far .. :)

Consciousness defines our existence and reality. But how does the brain generate thoughts and feelings? Most explanations portray the brain as a computer, with nerve cells ("neurons") and their synaptic connections acting as simple switches, or "bits" which interact in complex ways. In this view consciousness is said to "emerge" as a novel property of complex interactions among neurons, as hurricanes and candle flames emerge from complex interactions among gas and dust molecules. However this approach fails to explain why we have feelings and awareness, an "inner life". So we don't know how the brain produces consciousness.

We also don't know if our conscious perceptions accurately portray the external world, or if we all have similar pictures of what lies outside our conscious minds. In fact, the fundamental nature of reality remains as mysterious as the mechanism for our conscious perceptions.

Reality seems to be described by two sets of laws. In our everyday ("classical") world, the physics of Newton and Maxwell accurately and logically predict the behavior of objects and energy. However at very small scales (e.g. that of atoms and sub-atomic particles), the seemingly bizarre and paradoxical laws of quantum mechanics reign. For example in the quantum world, particles may be "schizophrenic", occupying two or more places or states at the same time (quantum superposition). And quantum particles separated in distance may be intimately connected (nonlocal quantum entanglement) and/or unified into common entities (Bose Einstein condensation).

Despite our lack of understanding, these strange quantum properties are utilized in quantum computation and other forms of quantum information technology (e.g. quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation) which are likely to revolutionize science.

Quantum computers differ from conventional computers which represent information as e.g. binary bits of either 1 or 0. In quantum computers information may also be represented as simultaneous quantum superposition of both 1 AND 0 (quantum bits, or "qubits")! While in superposition, qubits interact/compute with other qubits via nonlocal quantum entanglement. Eventually each qubit "collapses" from its quantum schizophrenia and chooses either 1 or 0 as its classical form. The classical bits resulting from the previously entangled qubits are the solution, or answer to the quantum computation. Because the quantum interactions among qubits occur in near infinite parallelism, quantum computers have enormous potential advantages over conventional computers, at least for certain applications.

But why are there two separate realities, and how are they related? The boundary between the quantum and classical worlds is unclear, and the transition between the two is commonly described as quantum state reduction, collapse of the wave function, or decoherence. Although quantum effects generally occur at small scales there is no apparent transition or cutoff due to size or scale, no absolute reason why large objects may not be in superposition.

Early quantum experiments led to the conclusion that quantum superpositions persisted until measured or observed by a conscious observer, that "consciousness collapsed the wave function". This became known as the "Copenhagen interpretation", after the Danish origin of Nils Bohr, its primary proponent. The Copenhagen interpretation placed consciousness outside physics!

To illustrate the apparent silliness of this idea, Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 formulated his famous thought experiment now known as Schrödinger's cat. Imagine a cat in a box. Outside the box a quantum superposition (e.g. a photon both passing through and not passing through a half-silvered mirror) is coupled to release of a poison inside the box. According to the Copenhagen interpretation the poison would be both released and not released, and the cat would be both dead and alive until the box was opened and the cat observed. Only at that instant would the cat be either dead or alive. Schrödinger intended his thought experiment to show how ludicrous was the Copenhagen interpretation, however to this day there is no accounting for reduction or collapse of a large scale, isolated quantum superposition.

Experiments also seemed to show that when quantum superpositions do reduce/collapse, the particular choice of classical states among various possible superpositioned states was random. This presumption displeased Einstein: "God does not play dice with the universe". (Randomness in quantum computers is averaged out, so that results reflect quantum algorithmic processes.)

There are several modern interpretations of quantum state reduction, or "collapse of the wave function".

* Persisting is the Copenhagen interpretation (measurement or conscious observation collapses the wave function) which is consistent with "positivist" philosophies in which the mind constructs reality. The Copenhagen view puts consciousness outside physics, but doesn't account for fundamental reality; it merely accounts for the results of experiments.

* The "multiple worlds" or "multiple minds" view follows a suggestion put forth by Hugh Everett that each superposition is amplified, leading to branching off of a new universe and conscious observer; in one universe the cat is dead, and in another universe the cat is alive. There is neither collapse nor reduction, however an infinity of realities (or of conscious minds) is required.

* Another interpretation which avoids reduction/collapse is that of David Bohm in which objects have both a particle aspect and a "pilot" wave aspect (non-local hidden variable or quantum potential) which acts on and guides the particle. Bohm's approach shows that the quantum world can exist independently of the human mind, offering a "realist" alternative to Bohr's prevailing "positivist" Copenhagen view. But Bohm's view requires another layer of reality.

* The theory of decoherence reconciles the Copenhagen interpretation with quantum superpositions in the absence of measurement or conscious observation. Any interaction, or loss of isolation, of a quantum superposition with a classical system (e.g. through heat, direct interaction or information exchange) would "decohere" the quantum system to classical states. But decoherence theory doesn't define isolation (no quantum system is truly isolated from its classical surroundings) nor deal with superpositions which are isolated.

* Finally, several proposals posit an objective threshold for reduction ("objective reduction", "OR"). British mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose suggests that each superposition corresponds with bifurcation/separation of the universe at its most basic level (quantum gravity, or fundamental spacetime geometry at the Planck scale). This is akin to the multiple worlds view, however according to Penrose the separations of the universe at its most fundamental level are unstable and spontaneously reduce ("self-collapse") due to an objective, intrinsic feature of spacetime geometry ("objective reduction"). Moreover the larger the superposition, the more rapidly it reduces. For example an isolated electron in superposition would undergo objective reduction only after 10 million years; a one kilogram cat in superposition would self-collapse in only 10-37 seconds. Penrose's proposal is currently being tested experimentally.

In his 1989 book "The emperor's new mind" Penrose suggested that the choices resulting from this quantum gravity mediated form of objective reduction are not random, but influenced by Platonic information embedded at the Planck scale, the fundamental level of the universe. Moreover this particular type of non-random ("non-computable") choice is characteristic of choices made in consciousness. Therefore Penrose proposed that quantum computation which reduces by quantum gravity-mediated objective reduction must be occurring in the brain. Thus human thought differed in a very basic way from the output of classical computers. Penrose's book was (appropriately) seen as a slap in the face to artificial intelligence ("AI") proponents who claimed to be able to develop conscious computers by simulating neural and synaptic activities in silicon.

As qubits in the brain Penrose suggested superpositions of neurons both firing and not firing. There were two rational objections to this suggestion. First, quantum superpositions are disrupted by interactions with the environment ("decoherence"), requiring isolation and ultra-cold temperatures in laboratory situations. How could superpositions avoid decoherence long enough to perform useful functions in the warm, wet brain?

Second, neurons and synapses seemed rather large and complex for delicate quantum effects. Single cell organisms like paramecium are able to swim gracefully, avoid objects and predators, learn and remember, find food and mates and have sex!

If we look inside neurons, paramecium and other cells, we see highly ordered networks (the "cytoskeleton") comprised of microtubules and other filamentous structures which organize cellular activities. Paramecium sensory input and movement, cell division ("mitosis"), cell growth, synapse formation and all aspects of coordinated functions are accomplished by microtubules, cylindrical polymers of the protein tubulin arranged in hexagonal lattices comprising the cylinder wall.

For twenty years I had been studying how microtubules could process information, acting like computers. In the 1980s along with colleagues Rich Watt, Steen Rasmussen and others I had suggested that cooperative interactions among tubulin subunits acted as molecular scale "cellular automata". Our work had shown that the tubulins switching in microtubules provided the same potential information processing capacity in each neuron as the entire brain at the synaptic level. But an enormous increase in classical information processing didn't help with the enigmatic issues of consciousness.

However microtubules seemed to be excellent candidates for the quantum computers Penrose was seeking. As the states of tubulin are controlled by quantum mechanical internal forces (van der Waals London forces), they may exist in quantum superposition of multiple states ("quantum bits, or "qubits"), and microtubules may be seen as quantum computers involved in cellular organization.

The Orch OR model. Insert shows an axon (top) synapsing on a dendritic spine on a dendrite. Within the dendrite are a bundle of microtubules shown telescoping in scale (upper right). Each tubulin may exist in two possible classical states (blue, red) or a quantum superposition of both states, forming a protein qubit. Tubulin qubits interact/compute by nonlocal entanglement and reduce to classical output states as the solution of the quantum computation.

In the early 1990s Sir Roger Penrose and I teamed up to develop a model of quantum computation in brain microtubules responsible for consciousness. The quantum computations are isolated from environmental decoherence by specific evolutionary mechanisms, and reduce to classical states by Roger's objective threshold related to quantum gravity ("objective reduction - OR"). This links the process to fundamental spacetime geometry—the fine structure of the universe. The quantum computation is "orchestrated" by feedback from microtubule-associated proteins, hence we term the process "orchestrated objective reduction" ("Orch OR").

Consciousness is thus a sequence of discrete events, arising from alternating phases of 1) isolated quantum coherent superposition (in which microtubule quantum states are isolated by actin gelation), and 2) classical input/output in which microtubule information communicates with the non-conscious portions of the brain, nervous system and outside world. The alternating phases correspond with brain neurophysiology, e.g. the well known "40 Hz" gamma EEG oscillations.

We account for feelings and conscious experience by philosophical pan-protopsychism in which the components of conscious experience are irreducible, fundamental entities embedded in the Planck scale of fundamental spacetime geometry. Our proposal is consistent with the philosophy of A. N. Whitehead who proposed that consciousness was a sequence of "occasions of experience" occurring in a "basic field of proto-conscious experience".

Thus the infinitesimally tiny Planck scale, described by loop quantum gravity, string theory, quantum foam etc., is the authentic Matrix whose configurations give rise to conscious experience (and everything else).

The vast majority of brain activity is non-conscious; consciousness is the "tip of an iceberg". However no specific brain regions houses consciousness. Neurons may be non-conscious at one moment, and support conscious activities at the next. The transition, we propose, is Orch OR. This implies that pre-conscious activities including Freud's subconscious and our dreams are manifest as quantum information, e.g. as schizophrenic superpositions of multiple possibilities. The bizarre nature of the dream world has been described (Matte Blanco, 1971) as "where paradox reigns and opposites merge to sameness", also an apt description of the quantum world.

Thus we see consciousness is a self-organizing process on the edge between the quantum world and the classical world, and a connection between biological systems and the fundamental level of the universe. Orch OR is consistent not only with neurobiology and physics, but with spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Kabbalah.

Orch OR/consciousness can occur only in very special circumstance: quantum superpositions must be isolated from environmental decoherence long enough to reach threshold for Penrose OR. Neural activities in the brain are typically in the time scale of tens to hundreds of milliseconds, requiring isolated superposition of microtubules occupying thousands of neurons. Simple organisms may be conscious, but would require longer periods of isolated superposition, and have infrequent moments of consciousness. Whereas we may have e.g. 40 conscious moments per second, a simple worm may have only one conscious moment per minute (and of far less intensity than ours).

OR may also possibly occur in cosmological situations such as gigantic Bose Einstein condensations in neutron stars. By our definition, such OR events would be conscious, but lack cognition (OR without Orch). Astrophysicist Paola Zizzi has suggested that the period of inflation during the Big Bang represented a quantum superposition of the incipient universe which was terminated by OR. Thus the universe at its birth had a moment of cosmic consciousness (the "Big Wow") - the macrocosm of our individual conscious microcosms.

I work as an anesthesiologist, and routinely erase and restore the consciousness of my patients. The anesthetic gases I administer pass through the lungs, into the blood and brain where they localize in tiny pockets inside certain neuronal proteins. The critical proteins whose disrupted function causes anesthesia/loss of consciousness include tubulins as well as various membrane protein receptors. The tiny intraprotein pockets where anesthetics bind are "hydrophobic" regions, nonpolar areas where the dynamics of the proteins are controlled by quantum forces called van der Waals London forces. Unlike any other drugs, anesthetics act only by these same extremely weak quantum mechanical London forces, apparently preventing/impairing normally occurring London forces whose collective coherence is necessary for consciousness.

Despite intense criticism by scientific, computational and philosophical establishments, Orch OR remains a viable theory, and perhaps the only complete model able to deal with the enigmatic features of consciousness and provide testable predictions. Recent evidence shows that some forms of quantum processes involving organic molecules are enhanced by increased temperature, suggesting that decoherence may not be a significant problem.

Many view the idea of quantum consciousness (and Orch OR in particular) as unlikely. But I view it as a "speck on the horizon", a paradigm that will eventually dominate our view of brain, mind and reality. It is the only approach which seems capable of tying everything together. Moreover the connection to a Platonic fundamental reality provides a scientific avenue to spirituality.

Stuart Hameroff, M.D.
Department of Anesthesiology
Arizona Health Sciences Center

Tucson, AZ 85724
[phone]
[phone] FAX

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/overview.html

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Quantum mind .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

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Could a Computer Ever be Conscious?

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is Professor and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of [TheLanguage Instinct]. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book [How theMind Works] (Norton, October).

In one of the first episodes of the [Twilight Zone], a man named James Corry is serving a fifty-year sentence in solitary confinement on a barren asteroid. Allenby, the captain of a supply ship takes pity on him and leaves behind a crate containing "Alicia," a robot that looks and acts like a woman. Corry, of course, soon falls deeply in love. A year later Allenby returns with the news that Corry has been pardoned and that he has come to get him and a maximum of fifteen pounds of gear. Alicia, unfortunately, weighs more than that. When Corry refuses to leave, Allenby shoots Alicia in the face, exposing a tangle of smoking wires. He tells a devastated Corry, "All you're leaving behind is loneliness."(Note 1)

The horrifying climax raises two vexing questions. Could a mechanical device ever duplicate human intelligence, the ultimate test being whether it could cause a real human to fall in love with it? And if a humanlike machine could be built, would it actually be [conscious]? Would dismantling it be the snuffing out of a sentient being that we felt we had witnessed on the small screen?

Pose the first question to experts in Artificial Intelligence, and you'll get one of two answers: lifelike robots are just around the corner, or it will never happen.(Note 2) Don't believe either of them. These are the kinds of "experts" who a few decades ago predicted that nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners were in our future or that man will never reach the moon.(Note 3) Certainly computers will continue to get smarter, as the recent defeat of the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, by IBM's Deep Blue reminds us. Today's computers can converse in English on restricted topics, control mechanical arms that weld and spray-paint, and duplicate human expertise in dozens of areas, from prescribing drugs to diagnosing equipment breakdowns. {And artificial intelligence has jumped from the laboratory to everyday life. Most people today have had their speech recognized by telephone directory assistance systems, and many have used intelligent search engines on the World Wide Web, appliances controlled by fuzzy logic chips, or mutual fund portfolios selected by artificial neural networks.}(Note 4)

{Still, today's computers are not even close to a four-year-old human in their ability to see, talk, move, or use common sense. One reason is sheer computing power. It has been estimated that the information processing capacity of even the most powerful supercomputer is equal to the nervous system of a snail -- a tiny fraction of the power available to the supercomputer inside the bloated human skull.(Note 5) But the kinds of processing are different, too. Computers find it easy to remember a twenty-five digit number, but find it hard to summarize the gist of [Little Red Riding Hood]; humans find it hard to remember the number but easy to summarize the story. One reason for the difference is that computers have a single, reliable processor (or a small number of them) working very, very fast; the brain's processors are slower and noisier, but there are hundreds of billions of them, each connected to thousands of others. That allows the human brain to recognize complicated patterns in an instant, whereas computers have to reason out every niggling detail one step at a time. Human brains also have the advantage of sitting inside human beings, and can soak up terabytes of information over the years as the humans interact with with other humans and with the environment. And brains have the benefit of a billion-year R&D effort in which evolution equipped them with cheat sheets for figuring out how to outmaneuver objects, plants, animals, and other humans.}

So how well will tomorrow's machines do? Technological progress is notoriously unpredictable. When it comes to replacement parts for the body, who knew that artificial hips would become commonplace and artificial hearts elusive? When it comes to the performance of duplicates of the mind, the most reasonable answer is that computers will probably do a lot better than they do now, for some kinds of thinking, and they will probably not do as well as a human being, for other kinds.

But let's return to science fiction and assume that someday we really will have Alicia-class robots. Will they be "conscious"? It all depends on what you mean by the word. Woody Allen once wrote a hypothetical course catalogue with a listing for Introductory Psychology that read, "Special consideration is given to a study of consciousness as opposed to unconsciousness, with many helpful hints on how to remain conscious."(Note 6) We laugh because we realize that the word "consciousness" has at least two meanings.(Note 7)

One of them is Freud's famous distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind. I ask, "A penny for your thoughts?" You reply by telling me the content of your daydreams, your plans for the day, your aches and itches, and the colors, shapes, and sounds in front of you. But you cannot tell me about the enzymes secreted by your stomach, the current settings of your heart and breathing rate, the projections on your retinas, the rules of syntax that order words as you speak, or the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to pick up a glass. This shows that information processing in the nervous system falls into two pools. One pool can be accessed by the brain modules behind verbal reports, rational thought, and deliberate decision-making. The other pool, which includes gut responses, the brain's calculations for vision, language, and movement, and repressed desires or memories (if there are any), cannot be accessed by those modules. Sometimes information can pass from one pool to the other. When we first learn how to use a stick shift, every motion has to be thought out, but with practice the skill becomes automatic (conscious processes becomes unconscious). With intense concentration and biofeedback, we can focus on a hidden sensation like our heartbeat (unconscious processes become conscious).

Will computers ever become conscious, in this sense of access to a subset of the information in the whole system? In a way, they already are. The operating system of your computer is designed so that certain kinds of information are available to the programmer or user -- opening and saving files, sending messages to the printer, displaying directories -- and others are not -- such as the movements of the disk drive head or the codes sent by the keyboard.That's because any information system, computer or brain, has to work in real time. A device in which every morsel of information had to be easily available at all times to every process would be perpetually lost in thought. It would have to calculate whether the price of tea in China was relevant to which foot should be put in front of the other one next. Only some kinds of information are relevant to what the system is doing at a given time, and only that information should be routed in to the system's main processors. {Even robots of the future, with their thousands of processors, will need some kind of control system that limits what goes into and out of the individual processors. Otherwise the whole robot would lurch and zigzag as the processors fight for control, like Steve Martin in [All of Me] when his right side was controlled by the ghost of Lily Tomlin.} So in that sense, computers, now and in the future, are built with a distinction between "conscious" and "unconscious" processing.(Note 8)

But it's a very different sense of the word "consciousness" that people find particularly fascinating. That sense is [sentience]: pure being, subjective experience, raw feels, first-person present tense, "what it is like" to see red or feel pain or taste salt. When asked to define "consciousness" in this sense, we have no better answer than Louis Armstrong's when a reporter asked him to define jazz: "Lady, if you have to ask, you'll never know."(Note 9)

How can we ever know whether Alicia is conscious in this sense -- whether there's "anyone home" seeing the world through her camera-eyes and feeling the signals from her pressure sensors? No matter how smart she acts, no matter how responsive, no matter how vehemently she says she is conscious, an Allenby can always insist that she's just a very fancy stimulus-response machine programmed to act [as if] she were sentient. Try as hard as you like, but you will not come up with an experimental test that will refute him.

Perhaps it is some consolation to know that our befuddlement here is not just a technological puzzle but is a piece with some of the deepest problems in philosophy. If I can't know whether Alicia is sentient, how can I know whether [you] are sentient? I [think] you are, and I'm not so sure about Alicia, but maybe I'm just chauvinistic about creatures that are made out of meat rather than metal. How can I be so confident that consciousness is secreted by the brain tissue in my skull, rather than lurking in the software that my brain is running -- software that Alicia's computer could run just as well?(Note 10)

Lest you think that the answer is obvious one way or another, ponder these thought experiments. Suppose surgeons replaced one of your hundred billion neurons with a microchip. Presumably you would feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. The chips do what the neurons did, so your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some [other] conscious entity moving in with you? Suppose that the transporter in [Star Trek] works as follows. It scans in a blueprint of Kirk's body, destroying it in the process, and assembles an exact duplicate out of new molecules on the planet below. When Kirk is beamed down, is he taking a nap or committing suicide?

The head spins in confusion; it's hard to imagine what a satisfying answer to these questions would even look like. But they are not just brain-teasers for late-night college dorm-room bull sessions. The imponderables also drive our intuitions about right and wrong. Was Allenby guilty of destruction of property,
or of murder? Does a newborn boy feel pain when he is circumcised, or is his crying just a reflex? What about a lobster boiled alive, or a worm impaled on a fishhook?

These problems won't be solved any time soon, so don't expect someone to tell you with certainty whether a computer will ever be sentient. Perhaps it is a meaningless question, and we have been deluded by misleading verbiage into taking it seriously. Perhaps some unborn genius will have a thunderbolt of insight and we will slap our foreheads and wonder why the problem took so long to be solved. But perhaps the problem never will be solved. Perhaps the human mind, a mere product of evolution of one species on this planet, is biologically incapable of understanding the solution. If so, our invention the computer would present us with the ultimate tease. Never mind whether a computer can be conscious. Our [own] consciousness, the most obvious thing there is, may be forever beyond our conceptual grasp.(Note 11)

Notes .. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1997_08_18_usnewsworldreport.html

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