
Quantum Vibrations Inside Brain Corroborate 20-Year-Old Theory of Consciousness - wikiburner
http://www.kurzweilai.net/discovery-of-quantum-vibrations-in-microtubules-inside-brain-neurons-corroborates-controversial-20-year-old-theory-of-consciousness
======
thirdtruck
> They will engage skeptics in a debate on the nature of consciousness, and
> Bandyopadhyay and his team will couple microtubule vibrations from active
> neurons to play Indian musical instruments. “Consciousness depends on
> anharmonic vibrations of microtubules inside neurons, similar to certain
> kinds of Indian music, but unlike Western music, which is harmonic,”
> Hameroff explains.

Did they really posit a connection between quantum and sonic vibrations (a
huge and "woo-woo-y" leap) in the context of consciousness?

> “The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature
> of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among
> brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some
> sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff
> and Penrose in the current review.

And they're suggesting that consciousness is intrinsic to quantum systems? I
think I missed some of the connections between the two.

For that matter, I'm still of a position that the very idea of "consciousness"
is an artifact of the brain's anthropocentric and self-image-preserving post
ergo hoc systems, as opposed to anything concrete. Compare it to software: we
"see" operating systems, drivers, apps, and the like, but those are all labels
of our invention. It's ultimately nothing but ones and zeros.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Way to conflate the qualitative into the quantitative, the mark of
materialism.

~~~
jessaustin
More details, please.

~~~
omarchowdhury
[http://www.academia.edu/882409/The_Reign_of_Quantity_and_Sig...](http://www.academia.edu/882409/The_Reign_of_Quantity_and_Signs_of_the_Times_Rene_Guenon)

~~~
thirdtruck
I don't always cite "tl;dr". But when I do, it's in regards to over 300 pages
of half-century-old metaphysical text.

But on a more serious note, is a more concise counter-argument available, one
that takes the latest discoveries of neuroscience into account? And if I see
any appeals to consequences in the explanation, I won't bother reading more of
it.

------
abalone
Anytime you hear the word "consciousness" in the field of neuroscience, expect
a barrage of pseudo-scientific sloppy reasoning to follow.

Even if there are quantum effects involved in the operation of the brain, or
any other organ of the body, the idea that they are responsible for this thing
called "consciousness" anymore than action potentials or chemical messengers
_is a gigantic, unsupported assumption._

More likely the words "quantum" and "microtubule vibrations" sounds
sufficiently mysterious to appeal to the casual reader's dualist bias. A
proper scientific study into "X", whether X be consciousness or anything else,
would begin by defining it concretely.

~~~
thirdtruck
"Consciousness of the gaps", to summarize.

------
codex
Penrose has for years been advocating against strong AI, instead arguing that
there "magic stuff" in the brain that prevents conciousness from arising in a
machine. Great mathematician, but totally off his rocker here, which is
outside his field. His arguments make no sense. Someone spewing his quackery
without his credentials would be laughed out of the room.

~~~
undoware
yes. And yet here, for the first time, is evidence he might have been right.
This is where we all look at our shoes and mutter something about burdens of
proof.

Note that it is still possible to describe consciousness as a computer -- it
just has to be a quantum one. I find a lot of us techies relax around strong
materialist positions (Penrose, Churchland, Searle) once you have coerced your
interlocutor into admitting that there is no way of proving that there isn't
an abstract(able) substrate. We can probably all agree that my Core i7 is not
a mind. The disagreement amounts to whether or not a computing substrate of
which all the relevant components have tidy classical explanations can be a
mind, and after reading this, my fence-sitting on that issue is done. Without
a single example of a functioning classical-mechanical mind, and strong
evidence that quantum effects are nurtured within the brain, it would appear
the magical-thinking quantum-worshipping nonsense-spouting materialist weirdos
have it this time. Dammit.

~~~
dnautics
that's nonsene, you can use "classical" computation to simulate quantum
effects to arbitrary precision (it's how we can do things like simulate NMR
spectra with the born-oppenheimer approximation).

The descriptor "quantum" to describe a computer is also actually kind of
nonsense, because fundamentally a transistor works because of "quantum
effects".

However: While I disagree that penrose's overarching idea that "brains are
magic" is nonsense, his specific mechanism invoking microtubules may be
correct (and I personally lean towards that mechanism and have for a while)...
But I also don't think that has any bearing on "the computability of strong
AI". It does however, have a bearing on "trying to develop strong AI by
biomimicry", e.g. neural nets, deep learning nets, etc.

~~~
selimthegrim
No. Only for one-dimensional systems can classical systems approximate quantum
ones to arbitrary accuracy. The resulting technique is known as DMRG.
(Although there is some crazy 12-dimensional corner case with adiabatic
quantum computation I recall hearing about [1], it's totally irrelevant to
most simulation in general and especially the sort you are talking about,
unless you know of a classical way to find the ground state of all 1-D spin
glasses, in which case there are a lot of people at UCSB who would be very
excited to talk to you.)

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.4077](http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.4077)

~~~
dnautics
Are you sure you're not confusing "exact solutions" for iterative
approximation?

~~~
selimthegrim
I am aware of Krysta Svore's work at MSR [1][2]
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhW3Sen9TVY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhW3Sen9TVY))
that might be what you are describing, but those "classical" methods certainly
do not work on all systems and with arbitrary accuracy. And the iterative
approximations do not converge for more complex systems in the lifetime of the
universe, nor do we have enough computing power to do so. She is predicting
ground state structure, certainly not say excited states where geometry and
Berry phase effects and non-adiabaticity come into play.

[1]
[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=177...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=177462)
[2]
[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=177...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=177458)

~~~
dnautics
> And the iterative approximations do not converge for more complex systems in
> the lifetime of the universe

I'm not arguing computational efficiency, here. Just "possibility". For the
most part, say, a chemist like me (if I even resorted to a computational
package) would do one or a handful of rounds, take a look, and say, 'that's
good enough for me'. In the end, on the scale of things like microtubules, a
first order approximation of whatever 'quantum effect' needs to be accounted
for will probably suffice because randomness from just about everything else
(e.g. brownian motion) will drown things in the noise.

~~~
undoware
Simulating a quantum system in a classical mechanical system may be possible
in a limited sense, for trivial problems, but certainly not at speed. It's
straight up P v NP. You will boil an ocean to watch any nontrivial simulation
crawl frame by frame.

But you wander off that point and return to the 'wet-and-noisy' argument he
addresses explicitly in the abstract. Let's call it the Argument from Noise,
or AfM.

Again, if you read the abstract, you'll see K explains how this new discovery
makes moot the AfM (but not rebut it, as a rebuttal or refutation requires an
argument; making moot merely requires a contradicting observation. E.g. if the
cops have a watertight argument for how, why when and where X murdered Y, it's
moot if 100 reliable witnesses report X was playing acoustic folk-rock at a
nearby cafe at the time.)

------
transfire
Just b/c there is quantum activity in the microtubules doesn't mean that is
the seat of consciousness. When you get down to it, the whole body is a
quantum system. So I really find this off base.

~~~
jblow
Well wait a minute. They predicted "there is quantum activity in the
microtubules". Almost everyone said "you are crazy, that's impossible". If it
turns out indeed that there is, then this was a successful scientific
prediction, in the style of predicting the structure of DNA or the existence
of the neutrino.

You are right, it doesn't mean that this is the seat of consciousness, but it
doesn't mean it isn't, either. Further investigation would be required. But
saying it's "off base" just because you don't like the thesis is exactly the
opposite of what science is supposed to be. It is scientism, not science.

~~~
dnautics
"there is quantum activity in the microtubules"

For the record: Almost nobody would have disagreed with this statement. What
people may have argued about is if quantum activity in the microtubules
correlates to anything to do with the function of the brain, esp. memory, or
cognition.

This article shows no direct _in vivo_ evidence of such a thing, just a
simulation that shows exactly what "quantum activity" is possible, and a
tenuous, hypothetical connection to how that may deal with cognition.

FWIW, I have long believed in penrose's microtubule hypothesis (wrt to
cognition, but not necessarily consciousness), and I find this finding to be
encouraging to my belief, but in the article there is some obfuscation of just
how much (or how little?) has been found here.

~~~
jblow
To my recollection, most people disagreed with said statement. The thought was
that any kind of quantum coherence would not hold for a nonnegligible time,
because hey, decoherence. This was before we started seeing proof of quantum
effects biology at all.

~~~
marcosdumay
People can not disagree that there are "quantum effects" at the brain because
this term has no obvious meaning. There is a completely deceptional "evil
sister" of that theory, that defines "quatum effecs" in a completely different
way from what's on the paper, it normaly only appears when there isn't a
chance for peer review, and yes, people are fast to torn it apart.

The usual answer to this one theory presented at the paper is along the lines
of "yes, that's quite possible. It may be quite important for discovering how
the neurons work, but even if it's right, it does not mean that our current
models are wrong", coupled with a "why did you get the idea that this can be
in any way more powerfull than other kind of expected phenomena?"

------
pavelrub
Currently 90% of the comments here are meaningless guesses and opinions
written by people who haven't read anything and/or know nothing about the
mentioned theory, the new findings or the physics involved.

I wish there was somebody here who have actually _read_ the mentioned papers,
knows something about the relevant physics, is aware of the prior criticism of
Orch-OR, and can say what, if anything, the new findings mean for Orch-OR and
for its critics.

~~~
waterlesscloud
The comments on this story make me seriously consider abandoning HN
altogether.

------
nyan_sandwich
>quantum >vibrations >consciousness

Reverend Bayes says 99% probability of quackery.

------
shoyer
I recently finished my physics PhD focused on quantum effects in
photosynthesis, and I saw Hameroff and Bandyopadhyay's talks at Google's
"Quantum Biology" workshop back in 2010.

These guys live in a bizarre alternate universe where a number of legitimate
experimental results and calculations based on real physics add up to striking
conclusions with no basis in reality. They are happy to combined many random
factoids -- anything that vaguely supports their ideas -- and pretend that the
combination is convincing evidence.

For example, the authors hypothesize that the spin of magnetic dipoles could
be quantum bits used for information processing in microtubules. As support,
they cite experimental evidence for resonances in electrical conductance in
microtubules at certain RF frequencies. But coherent motion of electrons is a
totally different physical phenomena than coherent spin.

The most amazing thing to me is that these guys do manage to operate in their
own parallel academic universe, with their own journals, conferences and (most
frighteningly) funding.

As I found out at the Google workshop (which had been basically hijacked by
these guys), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has been
funding this fellow Bandyopadhyay's experiments that, at the Google
conference, he was touting as "experimental evidence for a topological quantum
computing in the brain." An AFOSR officer I talked to was very proud about
this project. In my view this is basically a criminal misuse of US taxpayer
money (probably 100k/year).

~~~
selimthegrim
No offense, but wasn't your advisor on the FMO complex coherence train for the
longest time before they found another chromophore[1] that rendered many
coherence projections spurious?

[1][http://condensedconcepts.blogspot.com/2012/07/details-do-
mat...](http://condensedconcepts.blogspot.com/2012/07/details-do-matter-in-
photosynthesis.html?m=1)

~~~
shoyer
There has been plenty of hype about quantum coherence in photosynthesis, too,
which I have played a part in debunking [1]. It is clear (in my opinion) that
quantum coherent motion not play a large role in energy transfer in
photosynthesis, but I think the jury is still out on whether or not it plays a
small role or none at all.

Part of the answer may depend on how "coherence" is defined. I do have a
number of objections to the conclusions drawn in the paper discussed in the
blog post you link to (about the 8th chromophore). For more details, you can
see a paper I wrote a few years ago [2]. I don't agree with the interpretation
that "The energy transfer is incoherent in the native complex." This is still
a rather large point of contention among scholars in this field.

The differences between quantum computing in the brain and quantum coherence
in photosynthesis are actually rather large. There is actual, essentially
undisputed evidence for quantum coherence in photosynthesis (in the
experiments). There is a real scientific process going on with interactions
between experiment/theory. Moreover, the people who did the over-hyped
experiments a few years ago that were published in Nature/Science have moved
on from claiming it is "quantum computing in biology" when further evidence
and analyses came out against it. Hameroff and Penrose seem to be sticking to
their original ideas even though they have been thoroughly debunked.

[1]
[http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/12/6/065041/](http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/12/6/065041/)
[2]
[http://stephanhoyer.com/pubs/PhysRevE.86.041911.pdf](http://stephanhoyer.com/pubs/PhysRevE.86.041911.pdf)

~~~
selimthegrim
Nice papers! From his name and writing style, I strongly suspect 'fedja' is an
undergrad classmate of mine now at UChicago.

------
username223
Why am I not surprised that this involves microtubules? Kurzweil meets Penrose
meets Indian mysticism -- it's hard to imagine a denser nexus of
consciousness-related quackery.

~~~
vixen99
I suppose there's nothing like argument-free abuse to feel you've wrapped up a
subject and feel a wee bit superior to it all especially when the proponents
are persons of undisputed attainment in their respective fields.

~~~
username223
You may or may not be aware that the study of consciousness attracts an
amazing number of quacks and loonies. Penrose may be a good physicist, but
that has very little to do with his credibility on neuroscience. If you want
to read smart things about consciousness, look to people who study actual
brains; Mike Gazzaniga was one of the better ones, at least 10 years ago.
EDIT: also Patricia Churchland, who comes at it as a philosopher, but takes
the time to learn the neurology.

------
mgraczyk
I'm generally very skeptical of authors or papers that make claims about
"quantum processes" and consciousness because they are generally written by
people who know very little about neurology and even less about quantum
physics. Ask them about quantum entanglement, and you'll generally get a
misguided interpretation based on a decades old mistake in reasoning that has
long since been corrected [1][2]. However, I decided to give this paper a try
not because I expected there to be any actual content, but just to see why
otherwise intelligent people would be drawn to what I consider to be obvious
pseudoscience.

I didn't read the whole thing, but from what I know of quantum mechanics and
QFT (standard undergraduate course load) I didn't see anything wildly
misguided. This tells me that one of two things are true.

1\. This paper describes a legitimate link between a non-classical process
occurring in the brain that may "cause" consciousness. I do not know enough
about the brain to rigorously evaluate the claims.

2 (more likely). Quantum physics is hard, even for scientists. Neither of the
paper's author's are physicists, and neither have done any _recent_ meaningful
work in any subfield of physics. I would expect that groundbreaking work in
physics would require ideas beyond an undergraduate level, but I did not see
any physics in the paper I didn't understand. It looks like at the very least,
there is room for a false positive. What I mean by "false positive" is that
sometimes not about A will cause you to reason that Q->C even when the truth
is A->Q and A->C (correlation does not imply causation...). For example, it
could be that the electrical signals of the brain that cause consciousnes +
quantum effect, but if the same signals were running through a semiconductor
we would instead see a different quantum effect (depletion zones, electron
holes...). If our brains were made of 5nm CMOS transistors, a non-physicist
might see quantum tunneling and conclude that it somehow caused consciousness.

I think the most important thing for non-physicists like me to remember about
papers like this is that although sometimes scientists make important
discoveries outside their fields we should allow specialists in the area to
evaluate the non-physicists claims before believing them ourselves.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism)
[2] [http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76036/how-does-
qf...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76036/how-does-qft-help-
with-entanglement)

 _EDIT_

Penrose did important work on the nature of black holes ~40 years ago. At one
point in time he was a _real_ physicist.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
I like it when we dismiss papers without actually reading them. Makes it much
more easier. Come on HN! Keep up with the pseudo-intellectual mid-brow
dismissals.

> Penrose did important work on the nature of black holes ~40 years ago. At
> one point in time he was a real physicist.

> why otherwise intelligent people would be drawn to what I consider to be
> obvious pseudoscience.

> I didn't read the whole thing,

~~~
tilt_error
More so; Scientific papers have structure - reading them linearly from
beginning to end, just that you skip the end, may not tell you anything about
what the authors propose.

The beginning (like the introduction and method stuff) generally is a build-up
where you connect the contribution with the contemporary knowledge, but it is
only in the final discussion and conclusion parts that you will find the
argumentation.

Picture yourself reading a Hercule Poirot story by Agatha Christie, but stop
reading just as Hercule summons all the participants into the living room to
wrap up the story. Would you then criticise Christie for writing a bad story
:) Of course, the story could be bad with weak character narratives and a
lousy plot, but would you not want to know whether the butler really did it
before giving up?

------
dzhiurgis
They mention that anaesthesia targets microtubules, hence stopping quantum
process.

Anyone else wondering whether psychedelics enhance quantum processes (although
I remember reading that LSD mechanism of action breaks links between neurons).

~~~
dnautics
LSD's first-order mechanism is known, like all tryptamines it's a 5HT receptor
binder. It's a fairly complicated tryptamine, though, what is more bizarre is
that for simple tryptamines there are incredibly complex differences in effect
for small changes in the molecule, and the rationale for 'second-order'
differences in pschedelicity is generally unknown. There are some hand-wavey
explanations about differential binding for different 5HT receptor classes
with different prevalences in different parts of the brain. (I would strongly
recommend reading TIHKAL/PIHKAL if you're interested, to get an idea of what
I'm talking about).

In general, though, tryptamines effects (including LSD) are unlikely to
involve microtubules, since they are charged, water soluble and don't cross
inside the neurons (where microtubules are) so easily.

I would also generally posit that visual hallucinogens do not generally
require MT/Quantum 'involvement'. The visual cortex is incredibly well-
characterized, and relative to the rest of the brain well-understood in the
absence of a strong MT hypothesis. Moreover, visual cortex-like applications
are very amenable to neural network solutions in silico (e.g. ocr) and these
ANNs also don't require a strong MT hypothesis.

------
brudgers
I read the headline. I thought "Penrose." I clicked the link. I thought "Yep".

In some respects, the internet never changes. If only there was quantum
corroboration for objectivism.

------
benched
No matter how many words people spend on writing about consciousness, not once
have I ever seen anyone say anything revealing about consciousness. (And yes,
I have read all the usual suspects.)

~~~
slurry
I find a good initial test of writings about consciousness is to ask "would
Ray Kurzweil or his website get excited about this?" If the answer is no -
perhaps the material is too dry, language-oriented, technical (in a non-sexy
field), or cynical to be exciting - it is probably worth reading.

Like, off the top of my head, Kant or Hume. Plenty of contemporary people
working away thanklessly as well, probably, too; but it's not my field. But
even then, it more likely qualifies as "useful" rather than "revealing".
Because there are no big easy-to-grasp-and-broadcast flashes of blinding
insight. In the field of consciousness or any other.

