Creating a new thread to avoid causing decoherence on the other one :) >> What if the substitution level turns out to be at a higher level than >> quantum? E.g. at the level of the neurons and their connections and >> activations levels? > > > That would enlarge the uncertainty spectrum on the realities we can access > without losing anything subjective. It would help the doctor to build the > artificial brain. It could also make more difficult to justify the smallness > of Planck constant, and to explain why the quantum seems more obviously > present in the micro-states, Decoherence would be easier to fight against, > and quantum computing would be more easy to be realized. This lakes me think > that the quantum level is boundary of the substitution level.
This appears to be a testable hypothesis. I know that Penrose proposed a theory on the quantum effects inside neurons that turned ou to be problematic because of decoherence, but of course that doesn't mean that quantum mechanics might not play a much more holistic role in brain activity. I remember a presentation perhaps a decade ago by a neuroscientist at an artificial life conference, where she showed that neurons can operate in a chaotic regime. In fact, she claimed at the time that we did not have the computational power to accurately simulate a single neuron. To me, this suggests that the activation of neurons might be governed by much subtler phenomena than simple threshold effects. Perhaps it is conceivable that small scale quantum effects could propagate to the macro level of the brain. On the other hand, it is also true that artificial neural network models with just simple threshold neurons are already Turing complete, provided that one allows for recurrence. This proves nothing, but purely when worrying about neuroscince / artificial intelligence, I am a it weary of going for more complicated models when there is still so much to explore in the simpler ones... I say this while completely disregarding the hard problem. I have perhaps the unusual intuition that intelligence and consciousness are quite different issues -- although I doubt that it is possible to build a sophisticated AI that is not conscious (or even a simple one, I don't know). Telmo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
