TEDx Brussels 2010 - Stuart Hameroff - Do we have a quantum Soul?

[scar504]

To summarize Prof. Hameroff's point microtubularvacuolcoalestinqua­ntumfixedpointpositionalistdet­erministradiationvianeurologic­lsynapsisandactivesuperpositio­ningcausevaccumestatus1ststagg­amacellstoindeterminatelypermi­atetheskullsonyourhead Q.E.D

[MrRobotoToo]

A worthless mish-mash of unrelated concepts.

[HadeanAgent]

@MrRobotoToo And you say this on what basis and with what credentials? Thought so.

[Sloth7d]

@MrRobotoToo Is it? I know I was lost just a bit when trying to follow him, but I'm not completely knwledgeable on the subject of quantum mechanics. Can you explain.

[MrRobotoToo]

@Sloth7d There are many instances in this talk where he conflates completely unrelated concepts, but since you asked specifically about quantum mechanics, I'll restrict myself to his confusions regarding this topic. Even though it's true that quantum nonlocality and entanglement are pervasive throughout the universe, the conclusions that he draws from this fact are completely unjustified. Quantum entanglement operates at the level of the subatomic constituents of matter, but this does not

[MrRobotoToo]

@Sloth7d (continued)

imply that emergent phenomena like consciousness and emotions are entangled in the same way that, say, electrons can be entangled. There are concrete, quantitative criteria that allow physicists to determine if two subatomic particles are entangled; these criteria, however, can simply not be applied to things like emotions or disease. Also, quantum nonlocality has no causal power--that is, it is impossible for effects to be transmitted faster than the speed of light,

[MrRobotoToo]

@Sloth7d (continued)

even in quantum mechanics. Finally, quantum decoherence and the attendant emergence of classical behavior is a CONSEQUENCE of a system being entangled with its environment. Quantum coherent behavior arises when a system becomes disentangled from its enviroment. Therefore, one should expect that quantum coherent behavior will be rare in the biological realm. And, indeed, it is: the only known instance being in the photosystem of plants.

[MrRobotoToo]

@Sloth7d Just one last thing: there's a debate posted here on Youtube titled 'The Nature of Reality' where Hameroff is part of a panel that includes Deepak Chopra, Michael Shermer, and Leonard Mlodinow, among others. At one point, Mlodinow, who's a physicist at Caltech, asked Hameroff to define the word 'wavefunction', since Hameroff had used the word liberally in his presentation. Hameroff hemmed and hawed, unable to provide a succinct definition. But anybody with an

[MrRobotoToo]

@Sloth7d (one last thing continued)

undergraduate knowledge of physics would readily be able to define the word (e.g. the probability amplitude to find a particle at different points in space). What this show is that Hameroff doesn't really know what he's talking about when he uses the technical jargon of quantum mechanics.

[Sloth7d]

@MrRobotoToo Thanks for the lesson, MrRobotoToo. That helped. =) I'll look up the Nature of Reality debate in a bit. I've been putting off educating myself on quantum mechanics for quite a bit, and I guess this is a wake up call.

[MrRobotoToo]

@Sloth7d Here's a good place to start /watch?v=x5RQ3QF9GGI&feature=c­hannel_video_title

[Aodhansdaddy]

@MrRobotoToo Considering the majority of Hameroffs knowledge comes from Sir Roger Penrose i would say the QP in his hypothesis is sound. You can also look at Hameroff destroying Krauss and his cronies on here at the Beyond Belief conference. The simple fact is, none of us know he real answer. Alternative explanations for things are how we learn, if we accepted materialism as absolute fact we'd never have discovered QP because it would never have fit within the scientific framework

[sitemountain]

Hmmm,,, I find this chaps manifesto suspiciously attractive: all things to all men, highly optimistic & a 'cure all' picture he would like us to buy into. I'm especially skeptical of him name dropping Roger Penrose's ideas as if they fit neatly into his hypothesis. I'd like to hear whether Penrose is happy with the use of his work as if it dove tails nicely into the picture the is painting.

If you are interested in examining a contradictory opinion for some balance see: /watch?v=y5eUnpsJGRk

[HadeanAgent]

@sitemountain He worked very closely with Penrose. I'm sure they're in agreement.

[sitemountain]

@HadeanAgent Well even if he worked 'with' him knowing what I do about Sir Roger Penrose & his attitudes towards unsubstantiated hypothesizes I really doubt he would say anything remotely like what is being said here. There are plenty of Penroses clips on this website. Can you find even ONE which espouses anything about 'souls' (whatever they are)? I'll save you the time: No. He only speaks about consciousness & that IS observable in the universe -it can be imaged inside brains. Where is a soul?

[HadeanAgent]

@sitemountain I'm familiar with Roger Penrose's work. Whether he agrees with Stewart or not, he holds him in high enough esteem to work closely with him. Sure, Hameroff's ideas may be a little out there and he may have marginalized himself by voicing his interpretation of the world, but he's at least worth a listen, if anything because it opens new possibilities that nobody's dared thought of...and whether he himself is legendary or not, that sort of audacity is the stuff of legends.

[sitemountain]

@HadeanAgent Sure but audacity just means willing to take risks & this is a risk because it's 100% faith based. Maybe it will pay off but I notice that the big names like Penrose, Hawking or Dennett aren't singing along. Why not? Because he hasn't proved a thing! i wouldn't hold your breath for any proof of the soul if I were you. Did you actually watch Dennett talk about this? Here's the link again if you are interested in hearing the other side of the story too. Are you?

/watch?v=y5eUnpsJGRk

[qcon81]

@sitemountain Seriously?? Have you really looked at Penrose's work?? Did you grasp it? Well, I shouldn't have asked. Its very obvious.

[Haygirl345]

"There's no secret to life. Brain activities are equivalent to computers. Consciousness is an epi-phenomenal illusion with no causal power [...]. We are merely conscious autometa; helpless spectators, like Pac-Man." One of the only not even wrong statements in Classical Physics. Stupid, stupid Huxley.

[delatroy]

Lots of fancy words. Little clarity.

[silentrageze]

@delatroy That's because he's limited to 10 minutes for this talk, "lack of substance" is inappropriate, if you really want substance you just have to google Orch-OR or quantum biology. I get the feeling you've already made up your mind that this is all bullshit though because you chose to post a snide comment on youtube instead.

[delatroy]

@silentrageze no it's not because it's limited to 10mins. It's because he gave a poor presentation to communicate his topic to an audience that knows nothing of what he's talking about. He's mostly reading.

[snakeeyes3883]

but how does the hypno toad fit in to all this?

[chernobleman]

I've thought about this a lot. Because on top of this, most of manner is incidentally, empty space.

[w2aiq]

stuart seemed a little uncomfortable

[tatsumakisempyukaku]

The other point I wanna make is that to ask the question "what is consciousness?" seems invalid b/c consciousness is a subjective ontological category and to ask what it is-is to assume at the start that it is an objective ontological category. Just as u can't tell a blind person what redness is cuz they have to just experience redness. If you're experiencing then that's it. That's consciousness.

[pyrrho314]

@tatsumakisempyukaku : it has to have an "objective" component insofar as it's easy to reproduce (procreation)... so there is a state in the shared material reality that can lead to consciousness. It can be a relativist or indeterminate world, but it exists as something that recreates consciousness.

Thus the recreation of consciousness is a study of consciousness.

[tatsumakisempyukaku]

@pyrrho314 I do see your point. There does seem to be this characteristic in which one cannot exist without the other. That is, is it possible to say that without the subjective, there can be no objective and and vice versa? What is up without down? What is in without out? Meaning by having one, the identity of the other must be. Be that as it may, logicallly speaking, the first person subjective ontology, consciousness, must be "primus inter pares", first among equals. well at i think so

[abram730]

@tatsumakisempyukaku "what is consciousness?"

It's a failure state used by life when no functional pattern can be found and to discard non mirroring paterns.

Objective processes take precedence. Also the conscious state requires an objective connection.. Like a word on the tip of your tongue, conscious is nothing without an objective mirror. It's a coherent pattern, and identical pattern connect. A blind man has no mirror for red.

[tatsumakisempyukaku]

Science is just a methodology that works irrespective of the ontological context of reality. For materialist to hijack science is ludicrous. All science does is give a functional description of our experience. And it does not follow that we can get an ontology from a functional description. Albeit, quantum physics destroys any notion of materialism. I mean how is matter a wave function? That's mathematics isn't it?

[PavelSTL]

@Philosophier121 the reason why I don't take you guys seriously is because I've already been where you are, and I was saying exactly the same things. Searle (viz. chinese room) was my favorite philosopher and I was all about Chalmers' "fundamental property of the universe". It's only through studying and reflecting on these matters further did I realize that my head was up my ass, thanks to the gentlemen aforementioned. Again, this is a comments section, not forum, but just suggestion: READ UP

[JohananRaatz]

@Philosophier121 "but Philosophy is the basis of Science."

Yeah I guess that would mean that science is based on "intuition" and "nebulously defined notions" in which case we can't trust neuroscience either! lol

[PavelSTL]

Well, sure, but that's like saying "God is not the domain of science". When you deal with a neboulously defined notion like "mind" - where the best you can say is "you know, what you phenomenally experience" - you can cook up all kinds of categories of observables and classify them into different "collapse mechanisms". THAT is pseudoscience. Chalmers et al in the fine tradition of Philosophy rely on intuition more than warranted. In folk language it's called "making shit up"

[JohananRaatz]

@PavelSTL "When you deal with a neboulously defined notion like "mind""

There's nothing nebulous about it. An "I" is a very concretely defined thing just like mathematics or logic. It's just not empirical is all. Concrete =/= empirical. And maybe there's a "universal Orch-OR" who knows.

"THAT is pseudoscience."

So Sir Roger Penrose is a pseudoscientist? lol

"rely on intuition"

Um no lol they rely on a priori KNOWLEDGE. A priori knowledge =/= intuition though.

[PavelSTL]

@Philosophier121 Why is it odd? YOu're making claims that I know neuroscientists wouldn't be making, you're making stuff up. My original comment was that you won't find a professional neuroscientist who would consider the notion of epiphenomenalism (Chalmers' position) coherent. You obviously disagree. So I'm asking for an example.

[PavelSTL]

@Philosophier121 You obvously don't understand Dennett. By the way, here's a blatant observation for you: the Earth is flat. If you had started with psychology instead of philosophy, you'd understand the problems with "blatant observations"

[JohananRaatz]

@PavelSTL "By the way, here's a blatant observation for you: the Earth is flat. If you had started with psychology instead of philosophy,"

Yes but there is a huge difference between a priori blatant observations and a posteriori blatant observations. A posteriori ones could be wrong. A priori ones can not be wrong though as they are intrinsically known rather than just empirically known thereby making them irrefutable.

For example "I think therefore "I" am." "I" = a mind. Thus minds exist.

[PavelSTL]

@Philosophier121 I suggest you start quoting professional neuroscientists instead of talking on their behalf. I don't subscribe to Chalmers' problem to begin with, nor to your assumed dualistic assumptions about "mind". YOu might as well tell me that there's a problem of ghosts and angels that won't be resolved by science. The point is before you tell me the problem can't be solved, you need to demonstrate there's a problem in the first place. Neither Chalmers nor his followers accomplish it

[JohananRaatz]

@PavelSTL Yes but we don't observe ghosts and angels we DO however observe "I's."

Unless of course: watch?v=ags_M3ILszo

[PavelSTL]

@JohananRaatz it's obvious that you have very little understanding of what you're talking about with an attitude of an expert, a typical sign of a crackpot. I'm not really interested in disecting your rather trivial fallacies in a section designed for comments. This is not a philosophy forum. So good luck pursuing whatever it is.

Penrose is physicist, not a neuroscientist. Newton was an alchemist and Einstein believed in God and rejected QM. So I guess we should follow them. whatever.

[JohananRaatz]

@PavelSTL Well if they are fallacies they are not my fallacies. I'm just pointing out what Chalmers and others have already demonstrated.

"Penrose is physicist, not a neuroscientist."

So? What we call mentality -whatever it is- is necessarily a fundamental thing thus logically it would belong in the domain of physics and not neuroscience. (If you doubt this try to cut your "I" in half) Neuroscience simple deals with the correlates.

"Einstein believed in God"

So does Hameroff so what?

[JohananRaatz]

@PavelSTL Look the bottom line is that you can't break down something that is phenomenal in terms of something that is empirical. You first need a common ground to correlate pieces of phenomenal and empirical information to each other. That requires philosophy, you can't EXPLAIN the correlation with the brain -just point out that and how they correlate.

[PavelSTL]

@Philosophier121 Wrong. I have friends who study Neuroscience too, in a very prestigious University, and they never turn to philosophy. If you want to talk about "mind" in the same way you talk about proto-religious metaphysical realms, where everything is loosely defined and based on nothing but intuition, sure philosophy is a good tool. If you want something you can put to use, like make useful predictions or build something with "mind", whatever the hell that means, then you need science.

[JohananRaatz]

@PavelSTL Neuroscience doesn't actually study the mind though. The mind is comprised on phenomenal observables whereas the brain is comprised of empirical observables -each derived from a different kind of collapse mechanism. Thus to say that neuroscience studies the mind is just pseudoscience. The mind is not in the domain of neuroscience. Chalmers made this quite clear.

And BTW Dennett is a self-admitted p-zombie. I'm not sure how much stock one should put in the arguments given by a zombie.

[PavelSTL]

@JohananRaatz and by the way, the whole idea of p-zombies is as coherent as a square circle. Dennett makes it clear. Imagining a brain that functions like any human's but lacks consciousness is just as ridiculuous as imagining an unhealthy body in which all body parts function normally. Same silly idea. "Mind" is not a thing, it's what brain DOES, just like "immune system" is not a thing, but rather what the body DOES.

[JohananRaatz]

@PavelSTL "brain that functions like any humans but lacks consciousness is just as ridiculuous"

No it's not as we have no idea how a brain could possibly produce a phenomenal state.

"Same silly idea"

It's not the same idea as health in a body is determine empirically and the structure of the body is also determine empirically. The same is not true about mind/brain. It's apples and oranges.

""Mind" is not a thing,"

Lol you're kidding right? I know "I" exist. Or maybe you are a p-zombie also.

[JohananRaatz]

@PavelSTL "something with "mind", whatever the hell that means,"

You don't know what your own "I" is? You don't need to be an expert to figure that out.

[morriganish]

The gentleman was talking about the rigidity of orthodox sciencentific thinking and using a slang terme to emphasise this.

[sqbsbear]

interesting topics, not enough time to cover them, the brevity and rushed feeling from this talk ruined it, would love really hear more about this.

[sqbsbear]

@sqbsbear man, the more i listen to this, he is just really jumping all over the place, I wish he'd either just pick one thing to talk about or give this guy like 30 minutes.

[zimij325]

We are quantum biology that need no expensive elitist technology. Ain't it quaint how these great achievements are supported by ancient eastern traditions. The problems arise because of selfish competition hence the public tax supported military's acquisition and development of nifty gadgetry to be toxically produced and sold back to us as the pursuit of happiness. I'm just saying...

...no thanks, my microtubuals are fine. Stan Grof covered this ground in 1981.

[PavelSTL]

1:35 "consciousness is epiphenomenal illusion with no causal power. That's a standard party line in neuroscience and philosophy."

Is he serious? I didn't know philosophy had a "standard party line" and I'd challenge Hameroff to find a single professional neuroscientist who considers epiphenominalism to be a coherent idea. It's not even wrong. While Hameroff shows a great deal of imagination wrt QM, he shows a complete lack of it when it comes to cellular automata. I recommend Dennett.

[kolinos4]

первыйнах!