Our brains are quantum computers and consciousness is not a biochemical process

Though interesting and all, I find it funny that we don't even know the full computational potential of the brain (considering the basic neuronal model of consciusness) and already we're moving in to theories that complicate the concept a whole lot more.

I'm convinced that the sheer brutal amount of neurons and their connections are more than enough for consciusness to emerge. And while consciusness of course seems like a big thing, it's really only the tip of the iceberg, more of a byproduct. The real thing is the subconscius.

Why complicate things? We don't need the quantumwooblah.

a reply to: FlySolo

My brain thanks you for your contribution towards my enlightenment.

a reply to: FlySolo

Everytime I read something mind-blowing, such as this, my mind is boggled thinking about evolution resulting in the complexity that is our minds, bodies, biological processes.

I totally get and understand the process...and the selection process, but evolution seems to fit simpler life forms much better than the more complex, intelligent of life here on earth.

My daughter is a psychologist, and I remember reading some of her undergrad books. The one that blew my mind the most was a piece on our brains... we have 2 seperately operating brains. There was a form of epilepsy that is treated by severing the connections between the 2 hemispheres.

As you can imagine, this opened a whole series of tests.... for instance, they would block one eye (the eye that "feeds" the side of the brain that controls speech and then show something funny to the subject who would laugh. When asked why they laughed, the reply would be (from the blind speech center) "I don't know".... pretty spooky, no?

a reply to: bbracken677

what do you mean from the blind speech center?

a reply to: FlySolo

now....what does this mean.....we same same? or we no same same?

a reply to: FlySolo

Interesting thread.

While I wont jump to the conclusions you have - the holographic universe idea - I can basically see how compelling it is to see consciousness as something that is 'additional', cut off from conventional explanation by a so-called 'explanatory gap' that boggles our imagination because the very thing we need - objective distance - to study consciousness is.....consciousness itself. Thus, a paradox, a riddle, a solution with no outlet.

I'm much more in line with the growing field of enactive cognitive science where mind isn't thought of as "in the head" but as dispersed, embodied, and really causally dependent on the conditions which it results from.

Take your self. Do you think it is yours? In a way, your mind is "locked" in your head, but when you actually trace out the origins of your development you can see that a) self is a DEVELOPMENTAL process, and b) that the developmental process is intrinsically related to other minds.

This is somewhat akin to the fact that the oxygen in our planets atmosphere is a result of the photosynthesis of plants. But plants would not have emerged were it not for the favorable ecological conditions when cell life first emerged. In essence, then, life and mind, as Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Alva Noe and other philosophers stress, are fundamentally "non-local" phenomena, involving MULTIPLICITIES that co-evolve over time, and over time, new complexities emerge, and really, with mankind, a new ontology. If all of physical reality before was causally dependent on the original conditions of the big bang - an arrow that could be said to go this way --> , with human beings, self awareness enables an opposite trajectory: a "tracking" of what the self is made of and what it does; originally this was nothing more than a utilitarian necessity of living in a difficult environment; physiological evolution enabled us to 'rise above' and stand bi-pedally, allowing us to use our hands, which, as the philosopher Raymond Tallis points us, was probably highly implicated in the evolution of our embedded and self-referential style of thinking: when the hands are before you as hands are before us, one begins to relate to ones body as separate from what one thinks. So even our thinking in itself is not some distinct ability from our body: our thinking and our body dialectically evolved.

Now think of the uniqueness of the human mind. Human Beings today are not exactly the same as human beings 200 years ago, or 2000 years ago, or 200,000 years ago. As our cultures become more complex and as our understanding of reality increases, so too does the 'self' and its experience of itself change. Each person alive today conceptualizes his existence in a manner similar to, but also slightly different from thinkers of the past.

I do not think the mind can be reduced to the brain, but obviously, the brain is functionally and structurally related to consciousness. This conclusion is indisputable; neuroscience as well as clinical neurology has demonstrated one-to-one correspondences between certain mental or emotional abilities and a part of the brain; vision is thus associated with the back of our heads; hearing with the sides; spatial and sensory integration with the upper parts and executive thinking with the frontal lobes. And further discriminations along even more subtle lines can be made out within each region and probably within each neural fiber.

But does it go even further? That's questionable. The brain may be organized structurally and functionally in specific ways, but as neuroplasticity shows, neurons in one region (the visual cortex, say) are not fundamentally different from neurons in another region (auditory cortex), as the former region can invade the latter or vice versa, as in people born deaf or blind. Thus, blind people will have an expanded hearing and feeling capacity, or deaf people will have better vision.

This also teaches us another lesson, The brain DOES impose limits upon us. Being blind actually opens you up to a richer auditory and tactile world, a world that us normal people wont be able to experience with augumenting our neurological hardware.

Science is getting closer and closer to what religion calls God. This kind of ties into a thread I made a few days ago HERE.

S&F

a reply to: FlySolo

One side of your brain controls speech. I forget which, but if it is the left, say, you block the right eye, in effect blinding the left brain. Hence, the blind speech center. In the case I was describing, the right brain and left brain had been seperated by severing the connections between the 2.

Here is a link to some experiments

lwww.legiontheory.com...

originally posted by: FlySolo
a reply to: bbracken677

what do you mean from the blind speech center?

Here's a brief video that gives the gist of "split-brain" patients:

I have always believed this to be the case, that there is a universal knowledge out there somewhere.
I read the Celestine Prophecy years (decades?) ago, and have always considered that book to be very influential to my beliefs.

Anyone that hasn't read it should.

a reply to: Astrocyte

i can't embed this video but I think its a must see. Great discussion with four scientists regarding consciousness. Like a Ted talks type event. Fascinating stuff. Called the Whispering mind.
www.youtube.com...=106

a reply to: Astrocyte

Good post. I like that notion of spread out consciousness. Its a matter of different views: When you play a guitar, where is the song? Is it in the guitar strings? When my ear drums are resonating with it, its also in me. So the song has a sort of non-locality, its the same thing in many places at once. If two ATSers meet each other in a dream, both dreaming of the same place, both having the same memories of it the next day, and both accurately remembering what the other did, did they not meet in a dream, even if the dream could be said (through the material view) to only be the result of a coincidence of similar configuration of neurons in our brains?

As far as your last line, the Huxley quote comes to mind:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern

a reply to: muchmadness

Ok, I get it. Spooky no doubt.

Been reading for years but I created an account just to join this conversation.

I spent my graduate school years doing pharmacology research and took a keen interest in drug mechanism of actions.

For example, Diphenhydramine (Benadryl) hits the H1 receptor therefore giving you the anti-histamine effects. When it crosses the blood brain barrier you become drowsy so people use it as a sleeping aid.

We can apply these very physical explanations to almost every class of drugs out there. But there is one class of drugs that is especially elusive. You might have guessed it - its anesthetics. There is no satisfactory explanation in how anesthetics work. We know how to dose it, we know when to give it, when not to give it, and we know its onset of action, and how to wean people off of it. However, we don't know how it interacts with the brain on a very macroscopic and physical level to induce unconsciousness.

www.rsc.org...

anesth.medicine.arizona.edu...

Knock yourselves out with these 2 articles. With the recent discovery of quantum processes in the human brain microtubules and the proposed mechanism of actions of anesthetics - it is no wonder these drugs can selectively erase consciousness. Intra-protein london dipole forces within microtubules in coherent oscillation is required for consciousness (at least that's what is being proposed in ORC or) and it just so happens that anesthetics (used to erase consciousness) binds to these hydrophobic pocket regions generating the london dipole forces required for quantum brain processes?

It looks like the proposed theory of consciousness fits perfectly with the proposed theory of how drugs that erase such consciousness work.

Cheers

Counsiousness may function even at the atomic level of quantum mechanics, meaning the entire universe may be counsiousness.

a reply to: FlySolo

Thank you for sharing the article.

I like to think of, or equate, consciousness as space-time, the universe, and brains as gravity wells sprinkled through the universe of consciousness... we are the planets, so-to-speak, or suns on good days... .met a few back holes, too.

eta So brains may be seen like adapters, twisting the fabric of consciousness into discreet units.

Then again, I have done my share of experimentation with ...er...molecules arranged a certain way... and the first fifty times I saw your avatar, I saw it as a scraggly, drought hit cotton plant with tufts of cotton on some of the branches... so there's that...

a reply to: Baddogma

I saw it as a scraggly, drought hit cotton plant with tufts of cotton on some of the branches... so there's that...

haha that's funny.

a reply to: FlySolo

Thank you

From www.evawaseerst.be...
.... that our creators implanted a kind of quantum computer in the brains of Homo sapiens and restyled him, is not new for a lot of us. Probably our geniuses have already unraveled that computer but if they ever will be able to find the god particle (not that of mister Peter Higgs) is another question. [Human consciousness can be a kind of quantum computer, implanted in DNA, which multiplies itself with mankind.]

Read the site if you want.

originally posted by: SkippyBalls
a reply to: FlySolo

I am replying just because you deserve a reply. I have nothing to add. I suspect others have nothing to add either. It's pretty much uncharted territory.

Good post.

This is old news, so it's certainly not 'uncharted'

I been wondering about the choice of the word "quantum" in Quantum Mechanics.

Math is finite but adding quantum is a kind of leap, right? Math with a leap? Is that the way science has of admitting to a spiritual or "higher realm" whathaveyou without calling it that? Just wondering…

I hate the choice of words, so many are misconstrued with a frosting of stigma.