
Is the Brain a Quantum Computer? - ilkhd
http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/quantum.pdf
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mckilljoy
I 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.

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tectonic
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.

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jacoblyles
While it makes sense that our brains could be structured in such a way that
some things are easier to understand than others, I think it would be
remarkable that it somehow filters out our understanding of the process of
consciousness in particular.

I think that particular criticism is vague and ill-formed, but oft-repeated
because it sounds good. After all, having a brain hasn't stopped us from
learning about the brain, even though one might think it would be hard to
learn about brains with brains.

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stilus
<http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/documents/CogScipub.pdf>

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ktf
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.

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sans-serif
Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum
mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source.

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pronoiac
I 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.

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cakeface
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.

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pronoiac
D'oh! Sorry.

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gojomo
The 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._

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danbmil99
No

