{"id":28824,"date":"2024-05-13T05:00:04","date_gmt":"2024-05-13T09:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=28824"},"modified":"2024-05-12T21:33:14","modified_gmt":"2024-05-13T01:33:14","slug":"quantum-mechanics-consciousness-intelligence-and-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2024\/05\/13\/quantum-mechanics-consciousness-intelligence-and-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Intelligence and Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Roger Penrose is a Nobel prize winning mathematical physicist whose most important contribution was work on black holes in relation to the theory of general relativity.\u00a0 But he\u2019s getting old and so he decided to think about the nature of consciousness and he has come to the conclusion that the phenomenon of human consciousness is caused by quantum effects generated in the cells of the human brain.<\/p>\n<p>Wow!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Brain Really Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds\" width=\"783\" height=\"440\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/R6G1D2UQ3gg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>If you watch the video, you\u2019ll get a little information how the flow of chemicals in the microtubules or even the shaping of the atoms in the tubulin that makes up the tubules might be responsible for the quantum effects that provide the indeterminacy necessary to make human brain more than just a computer running a program.\u00a0 Penrose equates that quantum indeterminacy with the basis of human consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>Wow!<\/p>\n<p>Okay, maybe that\u2019s an interesting idea.\u00a0 Is it true?\u00a0 Damned if I know.<\/p>\n<p>But I do like the fact that it gives us a way of saying that computers won\u2019t have consciousness.\u00a0 Lots of people think that if we just make a computer big enough, then it will suddenly develop consciousness because humans have consciousness and we have the best brains in the biological hierarchy.<\/p>\n<p>Of course maybe if we can build indeterminacy into computers maybe they\u2019ll become conscious.\u00a0 Will that happen when the size of the circuits on the chips become so small that the actual paths that the electrons take become indeterminate?\u00a0 I guess that\u2019s possible.\u00a0 We can make the AI as flawed as we ourselves are.\u00a0 Maybe we\u2019ll be able to make them neurotic or bi-polar or even psychotic if we want.\u00a0 That\u2019s kind of what happened to HAL 9000.\u00a0 He became psychotic because he was forced to lie about the mission that was such an important part of his self-image.<\/p>\n<p>And maybe that\u2019s possible.\u00a0 But somehow I don\u2019t think complexity makes consciousness.\u00a0 We \u201cknow\u201d we have consciousness.\u00a0 But is that because we have giant brains?\u00a0 Dogs don\u2019t have giant brains but try to convince any dog owner that his pet isn\u2019t conscious.\u00a0 He\u2019ll laugh you out of the room.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think consciousness is a synonym for intelligence.\u00a0 I think consciousness is a synonym for life.\u00a0 We\u2019re conscious.\u00a0 Dogs are conscious.\u00a0 Even mice are conscious.\u00a0 Are mosquitoes conscious?\u00a0 How about protozoans.\u00a0 What about our individual cells?<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m guessing the all are.\u00a0 Obviously, a rotifer isn\u2019t spinning around a pond saying, \u201cI rotifer, therefore I am.\u201d\u00a0 But I think he knows he\u2019s there in some sense.\u00a0 Does that mean he has indeterminate microtubules providing him with agency?\u00a0 Well, maybe it has nothing to do with quantum effects but for whatever reason, In some minimal sense, I think the answer is yes!\u00a0 Consciousness equals life.<\/p>\n<p>Now don\u2019t ask me if viruses have consciousness.\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to bring this down to individual DNA and RNA molecules.\u00a0 That would make my head hurt.\u00a0 But I believe that life is life and it is all of a piece.\u00a0 And whatever we have that is called consciousness is only the most exquisite version of what every other creature has writ small.<\/p>\n<p>Whether God created quantum mechanics to allow us to have agency or whether the actual mechanism of our souls is completely impossible to reverse engineer by any human intelligence is unknown and probably unknowable.\u00a0 What has already become apparent over the course of the last four hundred years of scientific investigation is that the more we learn the more we learn that we know absolutely nothing.<\/p>\n<p>Isaac Newton \u201cknew\u201d what kept the Moon in orbit and how to calculate the orbits of the planets to whatever accuracy he needed.\u00a0 He had discovered God\u2019s textbook for his creation.<\/p>\n<p>James Clarke Maxwell knew what the equations were that governed electromagnetism and ushered in the modern age of electric power.<\/p>\n<p>Albert Einstein decoded time-space and \u201ccorrected\u201d Newton\u2019s laws.<\/p>\n<p>But a generation later, Heisenberg\u2019s Uncertainty Principle forever locked the door on our knowledge of the quantum world.\u00a0 We invented quarks and gluons and muons and who knows what else.\u00a0 But every time we learn something new we find out that ten other things are just illusions.\u00a0 Dark matter and dark energy and string theory and who knows what else crowd around the dark corners of the forefront of our knowledge and we still know less than nothing about ourselves and why we\u2019re here.<\/p>\n<p>Well, I\u2019m okay with that.\u00a0 Just as long as we\u2019re not kidding ourselves about where we stand with respect to our dogs.\u00a0 They\u2019re our friends meant to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Roger Penrose is a Nobel prize winning mathematical physicist whose most important contribution was work on black holes in relation to the theory of general<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3545],"tags":[4548,3495],"class_list":["post-28824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-science","tag-consciousness","tag-quantum-theory"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Intelligence and Life - Orion&#039;s Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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