From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jesse Mazer
Sent: Wednesday, 3 August 2011 3:26 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Simulated Brains
On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 1:14 AM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 8/2/2011 10:03 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
I'm just interested in how we would decide who won? If there is
some test you can suggest or some theoretical development you anticipate
it would be very relevant to the question of the philosophical zombie.
Whatever, this conversation is going nowhere. I am over it. You want
your dollar? Will that make you happy?
No. I'm not unhappy, just curious.
Brent
It might help if Stephen would explain what scale of quantum coherence
he's predicting. The new possible explanation for photosynthesis only
involved quantum coherence within a *single* molecule, not quantum
coherence spread across the entire chloroplast (organelle where
photosynthesis occurs), let alone across an entire cell or multiple
cells in a plant. It seems that most people who think quantum coherence
has something to do with how the brain does its job are talking about
large-scale quantum coherence across brain regions with a macroscopic
separation (Tegmark's article, which reflects the opinion of nearly all
physicists, is that this sort of thing is totally unrealistic due to
decoherence), is this specifically what you're predicting Stephen? Or
would you count it as a "win" if quantum coherence were only found to
play a useful role within individual neurotransmitter molecules or
similarly small collections of atoms?
Jesse
Tegmark could be 100% right about what macroscopic brain
(electromagnetic) 'coherence' looks like when you use a brain to observe
it. It might 'look decohered', however this 3rd person view might be the
wrong way to think of coherence from a first person perspective. I can
imagine that my own personal EM field system might be behaving in ways
that eliminate the bits that make my brain look decohered to a 3rd
person.
(a) 1st person coherence (my brain with what its looking at) and (b)
3rd person coherence (the way my brain looks like when (a) is happening
in it)... could be different. (b) decoherence does not necessarily mean
(a) is also decohered.
For the electrical engineers... remember 'common mode rejection'? 2
input pins can have all manner of noise on them... but because both pins
have the same noise, the device receiving the signals can subtract the
two and ...voila ... pure signal. The pins look noisy as hell, but
there's still coherence from the persoective of one pin to another.
For mechanical engineers... think of vibration resistance in old-style
hard drive read heads. If the platter and the read head vibrate/get
shocked the same amount, then there's no read error. If you 'sit on the
read head' there's no apparent vibration/shock. Common-mode vibration
resistance. Same thing.
The very act of first person-ness (1st person frame) in X might be
performing the same function ... removing the decoherence apparent to an
external observer of X, while remaining decohered in the frame of
reference of the 3rd person observer.
Tegmark could be right, but the claim that quantum coherence is not
occurring in the first person might not be a valid implication of that
observation. Good observation, wrong inference.
Q. If I am high temp and 'thermally noisy' down deep, and everything
else is 'thermally noisy down deep' in exactly the same way, then how
does that impact from a 1st person perspective? Isn't this just like
common-mode rejection...'or 'virtual coherence'?
Colin Hales
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