On 31 May 2017, at 12:44, Telmo Menezes wrote:
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 --
I share that intuition when intelligence is used in the sense of
competence. In that case, consciousness, or conscience, might be at
the antipode of intelligence.
That feeling is strengthened when reading the news...
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).
We have to distinguish Hameroff from Penrose. Hameroff believes/
assumes that the brain operates at the quantum level,. He assumes that
it is a quantum computer. But a quantum computer does not violate the
classical Church's thesis, and his hypothesis does not change the
conclusion of Mechanism (although it makes more complex the derivation
of physics a priori).
Elementary arithmetic is full of quantum computing machineries. I even
suspect that the prime number distribution encodes a universal quantum
chaotic dovetailing, but even if that is true, that should not be used
to justify physics, because we would get the quanta, and not the
qualia (unless the Riemann hypothesis is shown undecidable in PA (and
thus true!).
Only Penrose asks for an explicit non computable physical reduction of
the waves, with some role for gravity, and is authentically non-
computationalist. Penrose is coherent with computationalism. He keep
physics as fundamental, but accept the price: the abandon of
mechanism. But his argument aganist mechanism is not valid, and
already defeated by machines like PA, ZF, etc.
Bruno
Telmo.
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