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September 29, 2021

Tunguska Seminar 02.1

Star Wars —

By Dr. John C. (“Jack”) Adler, as told to Bill DeSmedt

When we left off last time, Tunguska research had just taken a giant step forward with help from a science-fiction story — Aleksandr Kazantsev’s 1946 “Explosion” (“Vzryv!”).

Once it was corroborated in the mid-sixties by Igor Zotkin’s scale-model simulations, Kazantsev’s notion that the Tunguska Object might have exploded in mid-air had pretty much solved the no-crater problem. Meteors and comets were both back on the table.

It was the first real breakthrough in Tunguska studies — the one everybody’d been hoping for.

Unfortunately, it was also the last.

You’d think all that was left to do was pick up the pieces: Find enough in the way of evidence to decide between comet and meteor, declare the mystery solved, and go home.

Didn’t work out that way.

Then as now, the most painstaking fieldwork on site, the most meticulous analysis back in the lab, never succeeded in turning up more than a few trace elements in the soils, peats, and tree resins of Tunguska. And there was, and is, no way to know for certain those traces weren’t just by-products of the flash fire that incinerated thousands of square miles of taiga the morning of the Event, or the results of an especially heavy concentration of the normal background infall of meteoric dust and debris that rains down all over the earth, day in and day out.

It’s for sure nobody’s ever found a chunk of stuff big enough to see with the naked eye, much less heft in your hand — and that’s from an object that, going by the blast wave energy, supposedly weighed anywhere from fifty to five hundred thousand tons!

No, no matter how long you mull it over, there just isn’t enough evidence on the ground to tell for sure if the object that exploded high over the taiga back in 1908 was a meteorite or a comet — or something else entirely.

So, what do you do in a situation like that, when there’s just no telling one way or the other? How can folks like Tom Gehrels be so sure it “was a comet or asteroid,” like we saw last time [Gehrels 1996]?

For all the hard evidence there is, it could just as well have been Aleksandr Kazantsev’s little green men from Mars.

Well, wouldn’t you know, science has got a rule for what to do in case of a toss-up. It’s called Ockham’s Razor, after William of Ockham, the 14th century English philosopher who thought it up. And what the Razor says is: “do not multiply causes beyond necessity.” Or, to put that in plain, ordinary Texan: if all else fails, pick the simplest explanation that fits the facts — where “simplest” can mean, among other things, “most commonplace.”

And let’s face it, folks, comets and asteroids are a lot more commonplace than tiny black holes (which have never been observed in nature), not to mention way stranger stuff that’s been posited — like antimatter or “mirror matter” or even UFOs.

In other words, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, you’re best off going with a comet or an asteroid.

So, are we done yet? Can we all go home now?

Not quite. Because it’s like Albert Einstein says: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” No matter how simple an explanation is, it’s not going to be worth the paper it’s written on if it doesn’t fit the facts. And it so happens that, while there isn’t any hard evidence for either of the two leading contenders, there is a certain amount of evidence against them.

And that right there changes the groundrules. If you’ve got any evidence pro or con, Ockham’s Razor goes right out the window, along with the strop. And different rules of engagement kick in instead — namely, like Carl Sagan used to say [Sagan 1980]:

The critical issue is the quality of the purported evidence, rigorously and skeptically scrutinized — not what sounds plausible …

Now, Carl was talking about really “extraordinary claims” (namely, UFOs) when he said that. And it’s for sure that nowadays meteorites and comets happen to be far less extraordinary — hence, more plausible — than flying saucers. But that doesn’t mean we should let those less extraordinary theories off the hook altogether either.

After all, it wasn’t but a couple hundred years ago that then-president Thomas Jefferson, on hearing reports from Yale University of a meteorite crashing in Weston, Connecticut, remarked [Ofgang 2020] —

It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven.

Back then, in other words, Ockham’s Razor would have cut against the meteorite explanation, too.

What all this means is that, somewhere along the way even the most mundane explanations have got to stand up to Carl Sagan’s same rigorous and skeptical scrutiny. Sure, maybe you give them more of the benefit of the doubt, but only as long as they aren’t flying in the face of the facts.

So, just what are the facts? The facts that’ve kept the comet-vs.-meteorite controversy simmering all down through the decades?

Well, lacking any knock-down physical evidence one way or the other (no crater, remember?), the two camps have been throwing everything else into the pot, from Zdenek Sekanina’s distillation of everything written on Tunguska up to 1983 [Sekanina 1983], to Mark Boslough’s computer simulations of blast patterns [Boslough 1984], to Luigi Foschini’s announcement of a “solution” based on orbit probabilities [Foschini 2001] … the list goes on.

And, while nobody’s managed to come up with a proof of their own position, be it pro-meteorite or pro-comet, they have managed to put some dents in the other side’s theory along the way.

Here’s a sampling:

The absence of physical evidence on the ground has itself been taken as evidence against the stony-meteorite hypothesis by V. Bronshten [Bronshten 2000].
According to him —

[T]he complete lack of stony fragments over the area affected by the shock waves generated either by the meteorite itself or by its explosion is in itself sufficient to reject the hypothesis that the Tunguska body is an asteroid…

[N]either the radiation from the fireball nor the interaction with the air flow after the explosion can evaporate stony fragments of the hypothetical body of asteroidal nature. Therefore, this body could not be stony. Only the icy nucleus of a comet could explode without leaving large fragments.”

But Zdenek Sekanina turns that argument on its head [Sekanina 1998]: The “icy nucleus” of a comet, he says, is way too fragile to have survived a plunge into the lower atmosphere — the heat of atmospheric friction should have vaporized it at an altitude of 200 kilometers, much too high to cause the observed blast effects on the ground.Those blast effects raise another problem for Academician Nikolai V. Vasil’ev [Vasil’ev 1992] of Tomsk University. According to him, careful analysis of the treefall pattern hints that some part of the object continued on course after the first, multi-megaton air-burst. That’s really hard to square with the fragile nature of a cometary nucleus. After all, being basically just “dirty snowballs,” they’re not much denser than water. And a meteorite doesn’t come off looking much better — because if a piece of rock or iron made it through the main explosion intact, then where is it?

(At the bottom of Lake Cheko, I can hear some of you saying. We’ll take that one on soon, but it’s going to need a whole seminar to itself.)

Then, there’s the geomagnetic storm that raged for four hours after the Event [Zhuravlev 1996]. It’s hard to see how a comet could have stirred that up.As for the magnetic anomalies L. Weber recorded at Kiel University on the three nights leading up to the impact [Weber 1908], it’s even harder to see how a comet or an asteroid could have generated those — from a couple million miles out in space.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Maybe any one or two of these objections could be shrugged off. But taken all together, they were enough to make that grand old man of Tunguska studies, Academician Nikolai Vasil’ev, throw up his hands in despair. His summational article on “Paradoxes of the Tunguska Meteorite Problem” [Vasil’ev 1992] winds up like this:

Since a final resolution to the question of the Tunguska phenomenon’s nature has yet to be found, and since it must be acknowledged that the perennial attempts to interpret it within the framework of the classical paradigm have so far brought no decisive success, it seems expedient to examine and test alternative ways of explaining it.

“Examine and test alternative ways of explaining it.” In other words, if your pet theories aren’t either of them panning out, why not try something different? Sounds like pretty good advice, doesn’t it?

It fell on deaf ears, though … as we’ll see next time.

References

[Gehrels 1996] Tom Gehrels, “Collisions with Comets and Asteroids,” Scientific American, March 1996, pp. 54-59.

[Ofgang 2020] Erik Ofgang, “In December 1807, a Meteorite Fell from the Sky above CT and into Scientific History,” Connecticut Magazine, November 17, 2020.

[Sagan 1980] Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Random House, 1980.

[Sekanina 1983] Zdenek Sekanina, “The Tunguska event: no cometary signature in evidence,” Astronomical Journal, 1983, vol. 88, No. 1, pp. 1382-1414.

[Foschini 2001] Luigi Foschini, “A Solution for the Tunguska Event,” astro-ph/9808312v2, 16 December 2001 at: http://www.arxiv.org.

[Bronshten 2000] V. Bronshten, “On the nature of the Tunguska meteorite,” Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2000, No. 359, pp. 777–779.

[Sekanina 1998] Zdenek Sekanina, “Evidence for Asteroidal Origin of the Tunguska Object,” Planetary and Space Science, 1998, vol. 46, No. 2/3, pp. 191-204.

[Vasil’ev 1992] Nikolai V. Vasil’ev, “Paradoxes of the Tunguska Meteorite Problem,” Proceedings of the Higher Educational Institutes, No. 3 “Physics,“ 1992, pp. 111-117, http://www.tunguska.ru/obzor/stat/.

[Zhuravlev 1996] Victor Zhuravlev, “Geomagnetic Effects as one Aspect of the Tunguska Event,” Paper delivered at the International Workshop Tunguska – 1996 Bologna, Italy, at: http://omzg.sscc.ru/tunguska/en/articlese/zhur_us.html

[Weber 1908] L. Weber, “On the lightshow in the night sky at the beginning of July,” Astronomische Nachrichten, 1908, Vol. 178, No. 4262, pp. 239-240.

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Published on September 29, 2021 16:13

September 22, 2021

Tunguska Seminar 01.2

The Mile-High Club —

By Dr. John C. (“Jack”) Adler, as told to Bill DeSmedt

So, when we left off last time, the first Russian expedition had, after a two-decade hiatus, finally reached the site of the 1908 Tunguska Event, only to find the mystery of what might have caused it still unresolved — for there was no crater.

Meanwhile, that selfsame mystery had begun to come to the attention of the wider world. More particularly, to the attention of British meteorologist Captain Charles J. P. Cave [Cave 1908]. Back in 1908, Captain Cave had been one of the folks who’d noticed some peculiar pressure readings on their barographs in the early morning hours of June thirtieth. He’d seen the auroras in the night skies over Northern Europe all throughout the following month too. So, when in 1929 he learned for the first time about what had gone on in Siberia that same June morning, Cave connected up the dots.

… Into an arrow pointing straight at the Tunguska River Basin.

A year or so later, Francis J.W. Whipple, head astronomer of London’s Kew Observatory put it all together [Whipple 1930]. Whipple was an authority on comets, like his namesake Fred L. Whipple at Harvard University, who would come up with the “Dirty Snowball” theory of cometary composition about twenty years later.

Anyway, our Whipple figured that, if Cave’s observations of the auroras and such were somehow tied in with this Siberian impact, then “the thought arises that the meteor was essentially a small comet and that the tail of the comet was caught by the atmosphere.”

A Soviet researcher by the name of I. S. Astapovich came to the same conclusion at about the same time [Astapovich 1934, 1935].

It was looking like Q.E.D. for sure.

At the time, Whipple confessed “I do not feel much confidence in this hypothesis” [Whipple 1934]. Turns out he needn’t have waffled so much: His “cometary hypothesis” was destined to become one of the top two contenders for an explanation to the Tunguska Event. As soon as one more missing ingredient was added to the mix.

That missing piece wasn’t all that long in coming. As I mentioned toward the end of the first blog, the Second World War had started off by imposing a forced moratorium on Tunguska research — and by bringing about the demise of its leading researcher, Leonid Kulik.

Now, in its closing days, the war also delivered a vital clue to the mystery.

Took things to a higher level, you might say.

Anywhere from two to ten miles high.

* * *

The key clue to the devastation at Tunguska was sitting there in plain sight amid the man-made devastation left by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Even so, we all might have missed it if the Soviet inspection team that toured the ruins in late 1945 hadn’t included a Russian engineer and part-time science fiction writer by the name of Aleksandr Pyotrovich Kazantsev.

Kazantsev was struck by the uncanny resemblance between the blackened but still-standing trees on the grounds of Hiroshima Castle (see the above photograph) and that “telegraph pole” forest Kulik had found standing upright at the center of the Tunguska blast zone.

Kazantsev went and drew two conclusions from this chance observation: one dead on target, the other, out in left field — way, way out!

Let’s take the left-field idea first: Kazantsev figured that the destruction at Tunguska, like that at Hiroshima, could’ve resulted from a nuclear explosion. And, since there were no nukes on earth back in 1908, it must have been the explosion of a nuclear-powered spaceship from Mars! The following year he wrote this notion up in a science fiction story called “Explosion” and got it published in a Soviet magazine [Kazantsev 1946].

He kept on writing about it, too, always in a fictionalized form, like his 1958 story “A Guest from the Cosmos.” Did Kazantsev actually believe any of this himself? Hard to say. But back in the fifties there were plenty of others who were ready to, some scientists among them.

What you’ve got to understand is, Soviet science back in the Stalinist era — and for a good while thereafter too — had this tendency to go off the deep end every now and again. That’s how you got Lysenko purging geneticists on grounds that chromosomes were mere metaphysics, for instance, or the 1955 Soviet Philosophical Dictionary defining cybernetics as a “bourgeois pseudoscience.”

And, then too, UFOs were a big thing back in the USSR, maybe even with the powers-that-be. Because, after all, necessarily being from a more advanced civilization, space aliens would’ve had to have been Communists, right?

So it was maybe to be expected that a Moscow junior-college astronomy teacher and part-time UFOlogist named Feliks Zigel started writing about Kazantsev’s science fiction as if it were science fact [Zigel’ 1961, 1968]. Or that physics professor Aleksei Zolotov claimed to have detected “abnormal radioactivity” at the Tunguska site [Zolotov 1969] in experiments that, strangely enough, nobody else could duplicate.

So much for the out-in-left-field side of what Kazantsev took away from Hiroshima. What about the dead-on-target side?

Quite simply, it was this: That peculiar pattern of destruction at Hiroshima — trees and buildings still standing at ground zero while everything lay flattened for miles around it — was due to the fact that the atomic explosion there had taken place, not at ground level, but eighteen hundred feet up in the air.

It was, in other words, an air-burst.

And that was the missing piece, or so it seemed. In the mid-sixties, Igor Zotkin took that germ of an idea and tested it as best he could [Zotkin & Tsikulin 1966]. By comparison with the computer simulation technology we can throw at the problem nowadays, Zotkin’s experiment was dirt-simple, almost embarrassingly so — but it worked. He built a scale model of the taiga using matchsticks for pine trees, strung a wire over it and then flew a lit firecracker down the wire. Kept varying the wire-guided trajectory, in an attempt to reproduce the pattern of the Tunguska treefall. His first time out, all Zotkin succeeded in doing was blowing his model to bits. But, after a little tinkering with the angle of approach, his aerial mini-explosions were duplicating the distinctive “butterfly” pattern that other researchers had mapped out at the blast site during the fifties.

Seeing the Tunguska Event as an air-burst not only solved the mystery of Kulik’s telegraph-pole forest, it maybe even held out the hope of explaining the absence of a crater. Because, if the Tunguska Object had exploded anywhere from two to ten miles up, you wouldn’t expect it to carve a big gouge out of the earth, now would you?

Still, it should have left some sort of physical evidence on the ground.

Right?

Wrong.

References

[Astapovich 1934] I. S. Astapowitsch, “Air waves caused by the fall of the meteorite on 30th June, 1908, in Central Siberia,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society,1934, vol. 60, pp. 493–504.

[Astapovich 1935] S. Astapovich, “New Investigations of the Fall of the Great Siberian Meteorite of June 30, 1908,” Priroda, 1935, №9, pp. 70–72.

[Cave 1908] Charles J. P. Cave, “A remarkable solar halo,” Nature, July 16, 1908.

[Whipple 1930] Francis J. W. Whipple, “The great Siberian meteor and the waves, seismic and aerial, which it produced,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 1930, vol.16, No. 236, pp. 287- 304.

[Whipple 1934] Francis J. W. Whipple, “On phenomena related to the great Siberian meteor,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 1934, vol. 60, pp. 505-513.

[Kazantsev 1946] Aleksandr P. Kazantsev, “Vzryv [Explosion],” Vokrug sveta [Around the world], 1946, No. 1, pp. 39-46.

[Zigel’ 1961] Feliks Yu. Zigel’, “Nuclear Explosion over the Taiga: Study of the Tunguska Meteorite,” Znanie-Sila [Knowledge is Strength], 1961, No. 12, pp. 24-27.

[Zigel’ 1968] Feliks Yu. Zigel’, “Unidentified Flying Objects,” Sovetskaya Zhizn’ [Soviet Life], February 1968, pp. 27-29.

[Zolotov 1969] Aleksei V. Zolotov., “The Problem of the Tunguska catastrophe of 1908,” Nauka i tekhnika [Science and Technology], Minsk: 1969.

[Zotkin & Tsikulin 1966] Igor T. Zotkin and M. A. Tsikulin, “Simulation of the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite,” Sovetskaya Fizika, Doklady [Soviet Physics: Reports], 1966, No. 11, pp. 183-186.

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Published on September 22, 2021 10:59

September 21, 2021

The Making of a Thriller: Postscript, Part III

Quantum Brains!

Last time we closed with:[1]

As we progress up the evolutionary ladder toward more and more complex organisms, there seems to be a concomitant tendency for quantum effects in those organisms to experience longer and longer coherence lifetimes.

… And recent research seems to be pointing toward the possibility that this trend line is going to top out at (where else?) the human brain.

So, yeah — let’s get on with that!

Microtubules redux?

Given where this series of postscripts started,[2] it’s only fair to point out that Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have far from given up on their microtubule-based Orch-OR proposal. On the contrary, in a 2016 essay,[3] they directly confronted Max Tegmark’s decoherence argument:

Tegmark (2000) published a critique of Orch OR based on his calculated decoherence times for microtubules of 10-13 s[econds] at biological temperature, far too brief for physiological effects. However Tegmark did not include Orch OR stipulations and in essence created, and then refuted his own quantum microtubule model. He assumed superpositions of solitons separated from themselves by a distance of 24 nm along the length of the microtubule. As previously described, superposition separation in Orch OR is at the Fermi length level of atomic nuclei, i.e., seven orders of magnitude smaller than Tegmark’s separation value, thus underestimating decoherence time by seven orders of magnitude, i.e., from 10-13 s to 10-6 s. Hagan et al. (2001)[4] used Tegmark’s same formula and recalculated microtubule decoherence times using Orch OR stipulations, finding 10-4 to 10-3 s, or longer.

So far, Max has responded with .

In the meantime, for those of you who may have missed it, in a comment on the first Postscript blog, physicist and sf author David Brin remarked:[5]

The quantum effects don’t have to be of the time scale similar to neuronal activity. “Problems” can be delegated to microtubule quantum units that entangle electrons, ask them a question and the[y] decohere in an instant and then report to the neuronMurky, stochastic questions and outcomes that add up among thousands of tubules and create a basis [for] whether the neuron will fire. I got no problems with any of that.

It’s the ‘consciousness” part of it that seems mystically mumbo to me. If tubule-quantum can expand computational power by many orders of magnitude, well, it’s still computation.

I guess I’d have to agree with David that q-computation is still just computation — else wouldn’t any future q-computer necessarily become conscious?

(I’m not sure Sir Roger would agree, though, that what’s going on in the microtubules is “computation” in any conventional sense of the word: seems to me his whole argument from Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorems[6] is that conscious entities like us are capable of arriving at true conclusions which are not computable, not even in principle.)

Rather, for my money (all two cents of it), it feels like what Orchestrated-OR is trying to accomplish (via the notion of “orchestration”) is to provide some wiggle room for free will somewhere in between Newtonian clockwork determinism and utter quantum randomicity.

Regardless, the saga continues on from there, with no end in sight. Most recently, Stuart Hameroff has thrown down the gauntlet in an article purporting to show how easy it would be to falsify Orch-OR’s claims, and implicitly challenging the theory’s detractors to do just that.[7]

But in the meantime …

A New Spin on the Problem

It started almost imperceptibly: Back around the turn of the millennium, faint adumbrations of a new approach to quantum consciousness began emerging into the light, like the first tender crocus shoots poking out of a drift of late-winter snow.

Perhaps the best known of this first new crop of theories was the so-called “mind pixel” hypothesis put forward in 2002 by Huping Hu and Maoxin Wu.[8][9] Its signature contribution was to do away with microtubules altogether, and focus instead on the quantum phenomenon known as “nuclear spin.”

But just what is nuclear spin? Well, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to call it a metaphor.

Think of a figure skater performing a pirouette: She starts spinning slowly with her arms outstretched, but when she pulls them in close to her body, her spin speeds up. That’s conservation of angular momentum, one of physics’ hallowed conserved quantities.

Now, lose the skater and just keep the angular momentum.

Because electrons and other subatomic particles don’t actually spin — that’s the metaphor part. (For one thing, if they did, their surfaces would have to be moving faster than the speed of light, in violation of special relativity.) But they do have a quantum property that acts as if they were spinning — as though they had angular momentum, in other words.

In particular, passing a stream of such particles through a magnetic field will cause it to split into two discrete sub-streams, depending on whether their “spin” is “up” or “down” (apologies for the scare quotes, but it’s all metaphors from here on down, folks!).

For those hungering for a bit more detail on quantum spin in general (and, quite frankly, who isn’t?), you might want to check out Matt O’Dowd’s brief YouTube video.[10]

Alternatively, here’s how Kohei Itoh of Keio University explained it for a recent Future Learn course:[11]

You know that each electron has a spin, and the spin can be either aligned with the surrounding magnetic field, which we call spin up, or anti-aligned with it, which we call spin down. The nucleus of some types of atoms also has a spin. You probably know that the nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons. Besides charge and mass, these can give a nucleus a spin. …

But what’s the advantage, for present purposes, of nuclei over electrons here? Well, it all comes down to Max Tegmark’s old bugaboo: quantum decoherence.

Here’s Kohei again, pointing out that, as opposed to electrons in orbit around a nucleus —

Nuclear spins are actually already naturally protected. The electrons around the nucleus serve as a kind of shield, keeping the [environmental influences] away from the nucleus. … [T]he advantage is that we can keep the state exactly the way we want it for a long time.

Now, it’s important to note that Kohei isn’t talking about woo-woo, pie-in-the-sky concepts like quantum consciousness here. No, he’s an active participant in the race to build the world’s first quantum computer, a generational research effort that’s currently costing big-tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft billions of dollars this year alone![12]

And one other thing from the above quote that bears repeating: the advantage of leveraging nuclear spin for q-computing is that “we can keep the state exactly the way we want it for a long time” — even, as it turns out, in the face of decoherence.

How long a time, especially in “warm and wet” environs like the human brain? Well, we’re getting to that.

But to get there, we’ve first got to take something of a detour into the intellectual odyssey traveled by Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics professor and founder of Kavli’s Quantum Brain project, Matthew Fisher.

… An odyssey that took Matt all the way from what he calls “conventional” condensed matter physics (in which research area he won the 2015 Oliver E. Butler Prize) to what he calls “quantum neuroscience.”[13]

… An odyssey that began in 2013, when he was pondering the unreasonable efficacy of lithium in treating mania and bipolar disorder.

… Because, curiously, unlike Prozac and other macro-molecular medications, lithium is a simple elementary, well, element. And the mystery of its effectiveness only deepened when Matt realized that, of its two stable isotopes (the commonly occurring lithium-7 and the much rarer lithium-6), the latter had much stronger psychotropic effects.

Matt described his initial astonishment as follows:

How could that possibly be, I exclaimed loudly and emphatically … Bio-chemistry depends on the number of electrons in an atom/ion, and is largely insensitive to the number of neutrons in the atomic nucleus (3 vs. 4, for the lithium-6 and lithium-7 isotopes, respectively).

Yet not only did lithium-6 yield much stronger effects than its isotope — it also sported much, much longer quantum coherence lifetimes:

… [W]hen Google told me that the quantum coherence time of the nuclear spin of a lithium-6 ion when solvated in water is a whopping 5 minutes (!) — roughly the same as my [short-term] memory, and much longer than lithium-7’s coherence time of 10 seconds — the remarkable possibility that quantum processing with nuclear spins might be operational in the brain was placed firmly in my own brain!

In other words, there appears to be, pace Tegmark, what Matt calls a “loophole” in the decoherence death-trap.[14]

… [W]ith different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nucleus the nuclear spin properties of the two lithium isotopes are very different, these considerations raise the remarkable possibility that nuclear spin processing might be operational in the brain. If present this processing would be quantum processing since the nuclear spin is quantized. Might the brain have evolved to enable cognitive quantum processing?

To Matt, the implications were clear:

If there is quantum processing operational in the brain, it is going to require degrees of freedom (neural qubits) which are isolated. So we can ask, what degrees of freedom, if any, are isolated from the wet environment in biology? There is only one answer: nuclear spins. …

For a given nucleus it is possible to use NMR [i.e., Nuclear Magnetic Resonance] to measure a nuclear spin decoherence time, the time that it takes for the nuclear spin to quantum entangle with its environment. For example, the decoherence time of the sodium nucleus when a sodium ion is floating in water is roughly a tenth of a second – long on microscopic timescales but not long on human timescales.

However …

These decoherence times vary between the elements. For a Li-7 ion solvated in water the nuclear spin decoherence time is about 10 seconds. Remarkably, a solvated Li-6 ion has a nuclear spin decoherence time of five minutes! That is a long time. Perhaps longer than my own aging memory.

Accordingly, Matt went searching for an element within the brain that might serve as a biological equivalent of the quantum bits (or qubits) on which quantum computation is based. And he thinks he’s found a likely candidate in potassium-based Posner clusters. More on that here[15] — this blog’s gotten way too long as it is.

In any case, if Matt Fisher’s speculations prove out, you can forget about Max Tegmark’s femtosecond longevity limits — Matt’s talking about a nuclear spin decoherence time measured in minutes, maybe even hours!

Matt’s ballpark estimate is somewhere between fifteen minutes and eleven and a half days!

It’s beginning to look, in the words of Oxford University’s Vlatko Vedral, as if the idea that a warm, wet brain is too messy to have useful coherences is “simple-minded.”[16]

As noted, all this still lies in the realm of speculation at this point, but already it’s shown enough promise that the Heising-Simons Foundation[pp] has ponied up $1.5 million for a three-year grant funding a “Quantum Brain” (or QuBrain) collaboration at the Kavli Institute.[17]

* * *

Well, that’s pretty much it for me. I’ve taken my best shot at laying out the case for quantum consciousness. And, while I don’t imagine I’ve managed to convince everyone, I hope, at the very least, to have shown that there’s enough to it to merit serious scientific consideration, rather than just an out-of-hand “warm and wet” dismissal.

Footnotes

[1] http://www.billdesmedt.com/the-making-of-a-thriller-part-iv/.

[2] http://www.billdesmedt.com/the-making-of-a-thriller-ps-part-i/.

[3] Stuart R. Hameroff and Roger Penrose, “Chapter 14. Consciousness in the Universe: an Updated Review of the ‘Orch-OR’ Theory,” in R. R. Poznanski et al. [eds], Biophysics of Consciousness: A Foundational Approach, World Scientific, 2016, https://galileocommission.org/consciousness-in-the-universe-an-updated-review-of-the-orch-or-theory-hameroff-2016/.

[4] Hagan, S., Hameroff, S. & Tuszynski, J. “Quantum computation in brain microtubules? Decoherence and biological feasibility,” Phys. Rev. E, 65, 061901.

[5] David Brin on 2021-09-13 at 5:15 pm, Comment #2, http://www.billdesmedt.com/the-making-of-a-thriller-ps-part-i/, infra.

[6] Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, 1989, https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computers-ebook/dp/B074JCG4P9/.

[7] Stuart Hameroff, “‘Orch OR’ is the most complete, and most easily falsifiable theory of consciousness,” Cognitive Neuroscience, 24 November 2020, DOI: 10.1080/17588928.2020.1839037, https://doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2020.1839037/.

[8] Huping Hu and Maoxin Wu, “Spin-mediated Consciousness Theory: Possible Roles of Oxygen Unpaired Electronic Spins and Neural Membrane Nuclear Spin Ensemble in Memory and Consciousness, v1,” 11 August 2002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/020806....

[9] Huping Hu and Maoxin Wu, “Spin-mediated consciousness theory: possible roles for neural membrane nuclear spin ensembles and paramagnetic oxygen,” Medical Hypotheses, 2004, vol 63. No 4, pp. 633-648, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987704002440/.

[10] Matt O’Dowd, “Electrons DO NOT Spin,” PBS Space Time, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWlk1gLkF2Y/.

[11] Kohei Itoh, “Nuclear Spin,” https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/intro-to-quantum-computing/0/steps/31585/.

[12] “Quantum computing is at an early stage. But investors are already getting excited,” Investors News, 15 September 2021, https://investorsnews.net/2021/09/15/quantum-computing-is-at-an-early-stage-but-investors-are-already-getting-excited/.

[13] Matthew Fisher, “Quantum Brain,” UC Santa Barbara, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/mpaf/quantum-brain/.

[14] Matthew Fisher, “Are we quantum computers or merely clever robots?” Talk presented at the Conference on 90 years of Quantum Mechanics, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore on 24 January 2017, Asia-Pacific Physics Newsletter, April 2017, vol 6, No 1, pp. 39-46, https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/users/mpaf/p178a_0.pdf/.

[15] Nicole Yunger Halpern and Elizabeth Crosson, “Quantum information in the Posner model of quantum cognition,” 28 May 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.04801/.

[16] Michael Brooks, “A bit in two minds,” New Scientist, 2 December 2015, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830500-300-is-quantum-physics-behind-your-brains-ability-to-think/.

[17] https://www.hsfoundation.org/about/

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Published on September 21, 2021 16:40

September 15, 2021

Tunguska Seminar 01.1

Honey, I Lost the Crater!

By Dr. John C. (“Jack”) Adler, as told to Bill DeSmedt

Howdy, folks, and welcome to my Soapbox Seminar Series all about the Tunguska Event of 1908.

Just what the heck is the Tunguska Event, you ask?

Well, thereby hangs a tale …

* * *

At seven-fourteen local time on the morning of June 30, 1908, the Russian settlers and native Evenki tribesmen living out in the sparsely populated Tunguska region of the Central Siberian plateau were treated to the grandaddy of all rude awakenings. Something — nobody could be quite sure what — blazed a bright blue trail across the early morning sky and exploded over the basin of the Stony Tunguska River with a boom! that could be heard a thousand miles away.

The way eyewitness Semyon Borisovich Semyonov put it, it was as if “Suddenly the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole north of the sky was covered with fire.”[Kulik 1927]

Depending on how you reckon it, the force of that explosion was anywhere from two to forty megatons of TNT — that’s anywhere from a hundred to two thousand times bigger than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima. It toppled ancient stands of virgin Siberian forest across an area the size of metropolitan Denver. Its shockwave traveled twice — that’s twice, folks — around the globe, showing up on barographs in Potsdam, London, Washington DC, and Djakarta Indonesia. The glow of sunlight scattering off the explosion’s high-altitude debris lit the night skies over north Europe for the next month — lit them so brightly you could read the fine print in a newspaper at midnight.

If whatever it was hadn’t chanced to wreak its devastation in one of the most desolate spots on the face of the earth, if it had instead occurred five hours later, the earth’s rotation would have shifted the impact zone to the outskirts of populous St. Petersburg, and the death toll would have risen into the hundreds of thousands.

As it was, all it left was two thousand square miles of smoking wasteland, and one enduring mystery …

What caused it?

Because, from that day back in mid-1908, down to this one over a century later, nobody’s succeeded in coming up with a knock-down explanation for what’s become known as the “Tunguska Event.”

But, as we’ll see, that’s not for lack of trying.

* * *

This series of informal talks — I’ve taken to calling them “Soapbox Seminars,” because, like the soapbox speakers in at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, I do tend to get a little, uh, strident at times — is going to focus on one of those attempts at a Tunguska Event explanation, the one I call the “Vurdalak Conjecture” (Vurdalak being the Russian word for “vampire”).

Put simply, this conjecture holds that a submicroscopic primordial black hole might have been the Tunguska culprit.

But before we get to Vurdalak, we’re going to have to review the current state of Tunguska studies as a whole, in a seminar I call —

Honey, I Lost the Crater!

Let’s start with something that Tom Gehrels, the principal investigator for Operation Spacewatch, wrote in Scientific American about twenty-five years back:

The identity of the Tunguska object inspired a lot of nonsensical speculation for decades, and some highly imaginative suggestions were made, including that it was a mini-black hole or an alien spacecraft. Scientists, however, have always understood that it was a comet or asteroid.

Got to confess, I just love that quote. Because Tom’s a hundred percent right: Scientists — real scientists, like he almost says — have always understood that the Tunguska object had to be a comet or an asteroid.

Had to be.

They just didn’t know which.

Seems sort of strange, though, doesn’t it? Dozens of expeditions over the years, more trees consumed in publishing papers about the disaster than in the disaster itself, a new “solution,” so called, coming down the pike seems like every other year or so —

You’d think in over a century’s time they could work out something simple, like: Was it a comet or a meteorite?

Well, you’ve got to sympathize: Tunguska’s a hard place to get to, even now, more than a hundred years after the Event. And once you get there, there’s nothing big and obvious to look at: no crater, no fragments, nothing that jumps out at you and hollers “Hey, I’m a meteorite!” or maybe “It’s the comet, stupid!”

Then, too, there’s only three or four months out of the year you can get any useful work done on site, and that’s in the middle of summer, when the whole place is infested with skeeters so big and mean the Russians call them “flying alligators.” They’ll bite you right through a protective rubber glove. I mean those’re some serious insects!

No, Mother Nature sure hasn’t made it easy for folks to investigate this particular mystery of hers.

But that’s not what’s really keeping scientists from coming up with a definitive answer to the riddle. No, their real problem is — other scientists. Seems like every time some researcher’s ready to declare victory for one theory or another, a researcher for the other side pops up and shoots his idea full of holes.

It’s gotten to where folks who ought to be out looking for new evidence are spending half their time trying to explain away the evidence some other folks have already found.

Now, there’s no way I can give you all the back-and-forth on this. Even considering it took almost twenty years to get the first scientific expeditions in there, that still adds up to nine or so decades of theorizing and counter-theorizing.

But maybe I can give you the flavor of it quick enough.

* * *

At first, relatively few scientists even knew about the Tunguska Event. And those that did assumed it must’ve been a giant meteorite that had crashed that summer morning in the backwoods of Central Siberia. That hypothesis went unchallenged for nearly two decades — which was how long it took to get an expedition in on the site.

Not that the delay wasn’t understandable: Russia had other things on its mind in the years following the 1908 Event, after all: Things like World War One and the Bolshevik Revolutions — not to mention a Russian Civil War and famine and general socio-economic upheaval thrown in for good measure.

Oh, there were a few attempts to get through to the Tunguska basin in those early years, but they all came to nothing in the end. In part because the native Evenki guides refused to enter the area. They seemed to think it was under a curse.

Wonder why.

Then, one fine spring day in 1927, everybody’s favorite theory — a meteorite impact — went up in smoke. Because that was the day when mineralogist Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik finally reached the Event’s ground zero, a place Kulik called “The Cauldron.”

Once he got there, he knew he’d come to the right place: All around the Cauldron, far as the eye could see and beyond, the ancient forests of the taiga had been scorched and flattened by the blast. Something like forty million trees had been toppled like matchsticks in all directions, forming a radial “throw-down” pattern in the shape of a gigantic target, with the supposed impact site at the bulls-eye.

But, in reaching ground zero at last, Kulik had dealt a death blow to the meteorite hypothesis he himself had championed.

Because there was no crater.

Leonid Alekseyevich was expecting to see a hole the size of the Grand Canyon, but all he found was what he called a “telegraph-pole forest” — a grove of pine trees stripped bare of bark and branches, standing upright in the middle of a much larger expanse of radial treefall. That, plus a few waterfilled depressions that might have been mini-craters, but turned out to be just plain old sinkholes.

(Then, of course, not far away there’s Lake Cheko, which some folks from the University of Bologna have recently been claiming as the long-lost “Tunguska Impact Crater.” Makes for a good story, too, except for one thing — namely, there’s eyewitness testimony for that lake having already been there way before the 1908 Event. We’ll devote a whole separate seminar to that one later on. No sense getting ahead of ourselves right now.)

For now, let’s just assume that, whatever caused the Tunguska catastrophe, it had not been a conventional meteorite impact.

Kulik would return to Tunguska three times over the next twelve years, never quite giving up hope — but never finding that elusive crater either.

When he died in 1942 in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, the riddle seemed no closer to solution than when he’d first laid eyes on the “Cauldron” a decade and a half earlier.

But, in a way, the Second World War that took Kulik’s life also furnished one of the first clues as to what had happened in Tunguska long ago.

But that’s a story for next time.

References

[Kulik 1927] L[eonid] A[lekseyevich] Kulik, “The Problem of the Impact Area of the Tunguska Meteorite of 1908,” Doklady Akademiya Nauk SSSR (A), No. 23, 1927, pp. 399-402. (an English translation by John W. Atwell may be found in Appendix B of John Baxter and Thomas Atkins, The Fire Came By: The Riddle of the Great Siberian Explosion, Doubleday, 1976, pp. 155-156.)

[Gehrels 1996] Tom Gehrels, “Collisions with Comets and Asteroids,” Scientific American, March 1996, pp. 54-59.

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Published on September 15, 2021 15:35

Tunguska Seminar 01, Part I

Honey, I Lost the Crater!

By Dr. John C. (“Jack”) Adler, as told to Bill DeSmedt

Howdy, folks, and welcome to my Soapbox Seminar Series all about the Tunguska Event of 1908.

Just what the heck is the Tunguska Event, you ask?

Well, thereby hangs a tale …

* * *

The way eyewitness Semyon Borisovich Semyonov put it, it was as if “Suddenly the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole north of the sky was covered with fire.”[Kulik 1927]

As it was, all it left was two thousand square miles of smoking wasteland, and one enduring mystery …

What caused it?

Because, from that day back in mid-1908, down to this one over a century later, nobody’s succeeded in coming up with a knock-down explanation for what’s become known as the “Tunguska Event.”

But, as we’ll see, that’s not for lack of trying.

* * *

Put simply, this conjecture holds that a submicroscopic primordial black hole might have been the Tunguska culprit.

But before we get to Vurdalak, we’re going to have to review the current state of Tunguska studies as a whole, in a seminar I call —

Honey, I Lost the Crater!

Let’s start with something that Tom Gehrels, the principal investigator for Operation Spacewatch, wrote in Scientific American about twenty-five years back:

Had to be.

They just didn’t know which.

You’d think in over a century’s time they could work out something simple, like: Was it a comet or a meteorite?

No, Mother Nature sure hasn’t made it easy for folks to investigate this particular mystery of hers.

It’s gotten to where folks who ought to be out looking for new evidence are spending half their time trying to explain away the evidence some other folks have already found.

But maybe I can give you the flavor of it quick enough.

* * *

Wonder why.

But, in reaching ground zero at last, Kulik had dealt a death blow to the meteorite hypothesis he himself had championed.

Because there was no crater.

For now, let’s just assume that, whatever caused the Tunguska catastrophe, it had not been a conventional meteorite impact.

Kulik would return to Tunguska three times over the next twelve years, never quite giving up hope — but never finding that elusive crater either.

When he died in 1942 in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, the riddle seemed no closer to solution than when he’d first laid eyes on the “Cauldron” a decade and a half earlier.

But, in a way, the Second World War that took Kulik’s life also furnished one of the first clues as to what had happened in Tunguska long ago.

But that’s a story for next time.

References

[Gehrels 1996] Tom Gehrels, “Collisions with Comets and Asteroids,” Scientific American, March 1996, pp. 54-59.

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Published on September 15, 2021 15:35

The Making of a Thriller: Postscript, Part II

That was Then — This is Now

Last time, we left off Part I of what’s become a three-part blog postscript (is that even a thing?) with the observation that —

As with quantum decoherence itself, the problem with Max Tegmark’s reprise was its timing.

In a word, 2014 was late, maybe too late, in the game. Because …

(Well, you’ve already seen the headline.)

So, after slogging through the historical background, we’ve at long last arrived at the nub of the problem: If, as Max Tegmark claims, the brain is too “wet and warm” to sustain quantum coherence for the requisite few milliseconds needed to enable neuronal firing, then it’s pretty much game over, right?

Well, maybe — but, as luck would have it, even as Max was penning the passage referenced last time for inclusion in Our Mathematical Universe,[1] there was a lot else going on.

In effect, and despite the fact that Max’s “warm and wet” critique has been and keeps on being cited over and over (and over) again, it’s become kind of old news.

That’s because, starting in the early 2010s, there’d been a growing accumulation of experimental evidence (a.k.a. science’s touchstone) hinting that all manner of quantum phenomena might not only survive, but even thrive, in room-temperature scenarios.

What kind of scenarios?

Well, how about —

Photosynthesis

As early as 2007, a research team led by Gregory Engel of UC Berkeley reported they had gathered “direct evidence for remarkably long-lived electronic quantum coherence playing an important part in energy transfer processes” in bacterial photosynthesis.[2]

Following up on the postulated phenomenon in both bacteria and plants, Rienk van Grondell and Vladimir Novoderezhkin noted that “long-lived [quantum] coherences could be observed at room temperature” and that “understanding the persistence of these quantum phenomena in such a noisy environment”remained an open issue.[3]

Now, admittedly this “long-lived” persistence isn’t much to write home about: Rienk and Vladimir estimated it at 500 femtoseconds (where one femtosecond equals 10-15 seconds), which is just a hair under Max’s 10-13-second lower bound for decoherence. (And even that would turn out to be an overestimation — the more commonly accepted timescale nowadays is that coherence in photosynthetic systems dephases in about 23 femtoseconds,[4] which puts it smack dab in the middle of Max’s lower-bound range.)

But that’s beside the point. The bottom line is that here we have evidence of a quantum phenomenon persisting over timescales which, however short, are evidently long enough to perform useful functions in living organisms.

What kind of functions? Well, according to Jeffrey Davis of the Swinburne University of Technology, “Quantum effects have been predicted to play a role in the very early stages of photosynthesis where efficient energy transfer between chromophores is required,” implying that “quantum coherence enables light energy to simultaneously investigate multiple pathways, and then choose the shortest, most efficient path, thereby leading to efficient energy transfer.”[5]

But maybe bacteria and plants don’t seem “warm and wet” enough to convince you. So, how about —birds?

Avian navigation

Ever since its discovery by Wolfgang Wiltschko back in the late 1960s, magnetoreception — the process by which birds sense the Earth’s magnetic field (and do so accurately enough to navigate migratory distances of thousands of miles) — has been a prominent research topic for the past half-century. But it’s only since the turn of the millennium that attention has shifted to the possibility that birds’ brains (more specifically, their retinas) are leveraging quantum effects to perform this particular task.

From the early 2000s on, investigators have been exploring the possibility that “birds use a light-induced radical pair reaction involving coherent spin evolution of two electrons as the foundation of their magnetic compass sensor.” By 2011, the role of this “radical pair mechanism” (or RPM) was being characterized as “[o]ne of the two major hypotheses” for how migratory birds find their way.[6] And, by the end of the decade, it had become “the dominant theory of compass magnetoreception.”[7]

So, what is RPM? It’s a quantum process by which atoms or molecules with an odd number of electrons (radicals) can pair up inside a protein in the avian visual system called cryptochrome. These pairs oscillate between a “singlet” and a “triplet” state, which fact can be used to detect the orientation of even the weak magnetic field generated by the Earth. Recent experiments on this“fundamentally quantum” oscillation have estimated that “the spin coherence lifetime of the magnetically sensitive radical pair is in the range [of] 2–10 μs [microseconds].”[8]

So, that’s about seven or eight orders of magnitude longer than the coherence lifetimes we saw in the photosynthesis example, but still anywhere from a hundred to a thousand times shorter than the neuron firing rate.

Still, the hypothesis is promising enough, and experimentally well attested enough, that the European Research Council was moved to provide the universities of Oxford and Oldenburg with a six-year Synergy Grant for a project called “QuantumBirds,” which “brings together quantum physics, spin chemistry, behavioural biology, biochemistry, and molecular biology in a unique, ambitious, imaginative and genuinely synergetic research programme that will prove whether the primary magnetic detection event occurring in the birds’ retinas involves the quantum spin dynamics of photochemically formed radical pairs in cryptochrome proteins.”[9]

That’s “prove” as in, well, prove, folks!

In the spirit of the old engineering maxim that “if a straight-line fit is desired, plot only two data points,” I believe we may be witnessing a trend here: One implying that, as we progress up the evolutionary ladder toward more and more complex organisms, there seems to be a concomitant tendency for quantum effects in those organisms to experience longer and longer coherence lifetimes.

As I alluded to above, two examples is not a whole lot to hang a conclusion on. Still, recent research does seem to be pointing toward the distinct possibility that this trendline is going to hold true.

And that it’s going to top out at — wait for it — the human brain!

So, what is going on in the brain, anyway? That’ll be the central topic of Postscript, Part III, the final blogisode in this series. Watch for it next week!

Footnotes

[1] Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, 2014, https://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Max-Tegmark/dp/0241954630/.

[2] Gregory S. Engel et al., “Evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems,” Nature, 12 April 2007, https://www.academia.edu/15739382/Evidence_for_wavelike_energy_transfer_through_quantum_coherence_in_photosynthetic_systems/.

[3] Rienk van Grondelle and Vladimir I. Novoderezhkin, “Quantum effects in Photosynthesis,” Procedia Chemistry, Vol 3, No 1, 2011, pp. 198-210, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876619611000660/.

[4] Erling Thyrhaug et al., “Identification and characterization of diverse coherences in the Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex,” Nature Chemistry, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41557-018-0060-5.

See also: University of Groningen, “Quantum effects observed in photosynthesis.” Science Daily, 21 May 2018, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180521131756.htm/.

[5] Lisa Zyga, “Study supports role of quantum effects in photosynthesis,” Phys.org, 25 January 2012, https://phys.org/news/2012-01-role-quantum-effects-photosynthesis.html/.

[6] Thorsten Ritz, “Quantum effects in biology: Bird navigation,” Procedia Chemistry, Vol 3, No 1, 2011, pp. 262-275, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876619611000738.

[7] Siu Ying Wong et al., “Navigation of migratory songbirds: a quantum magnetic compass sensor,” Neuroforum, 2021, vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 141-150, https://doi.org/10.1515/nf-2021-0005/.

[8] Dmitri Kobylkov et al., “Electromagnetic 0.1-100 kHz noise does not disrupt orientation in a night-migrating songbird implying a spin coherence lifetime of less than 10 µs,” Journal of the Royal Society: Interface, 18 December 2019, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31847760/.

[9] https://www.quantumbirds.eu/.

See also: University of Oldenburg, “Quantum Birds,” AAAS EurekaAlert!, 23 June 2021, https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/894145/.

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Published on September 15, 2021 13:20

September 9, 2021

The Making of a Thriller: Postscript, Part I

Quantum Consciousness?

So, I thought (hoped) that this blog series would be done once I finished Part IV, and I could get on to my (many, many) multiple-part investigation of the Tunguska Event — not to mention upgrading an old AI hack of mine for a freeware release (more on that in a future blog).

Alas, you know what they say about the morning after …

Well, the morning after I posted what I’d thought would be my last “Making of a Thriller” blogisode[1], I found this response from David Owen in the GoodReads “Science Fiction & Philosophy” discussion subthread dealing with “Consciousness and Free Will”[2] —

“If you assume consciousness is neural activity, then there is nothing ‘Quantum’ about it. The brain’s environment is warm and wet, and therefore quantum effects would decohere in such an environment long before they could have any impact on consciousness.”

Shades of Deepak Chopra!

Actually, I thought I’d engaged that “warm and wet” issue in this passage from the blog itself:

… quantum entanglement has been observed in such warm, wet, noisy confines as green, growing plants and birds’ brains, where it figures in phenomena like photosynthesis and navigation.

Well, when I wrote this, I had in mind a favorite scene from my 2014 technothriller Dualism.[3] Point is, as I was to discover in putting this blog together, a lot has happened in this area since 2014.

In any case, adverting momentarily to my above-quoted passage: David may simply have missed it in skimming through the previous blog, or perhaps found it too lacking in substance to constitute a proper counter-argument, and was just too polite to say so.

That latter issue, at least, I think I can address — in the form of this two-part postscript.

The Rise and Fall of Orch-OR

But to do so, I’ve first got to back up a bit, and see where that “there-is-nothing-‘Quantum’-about-consciousness” counter-claim is coming from.

And since Penrose and Hameroff’s “Orchestrated Objective Reduction” (“Orch-OR” for short) hypothesis is probably the best known of the quantum consciousness proposals — not to mention the principal target of the original “warm and wet” critique — we’ll start off there:

Back in the early 1990s, British theoretical physicist Sir Roger Penrose was struggling with a problem of his own making. In his 1989 book The Emperor’s New Mind[4], Sir Roger had suggested that Kurt Goedel’s 1931 incompleteness theorems[5] implied that there was more to human thought processes than any formal, algorithmic system (e.g., one running on a computer) could emulate, and that the reason might lie in the putatively quantum nature of human consciousness. This, in turn, led Sir Roger to surmise that the key to such a non-computable process was somehow tied to something called “wave function collapse” (which we’ll get into in just a moment).

But now Sir Roger was well and truly stuck: casting about for a way to ground this intuition in a neurophysiological mechanism that could enable quantum processing.

It was at this point that he was contacted by American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff. Stuart had read The Emperor’s New Mind, and believed that Sir Roger’s missing mechanism might be a neuronal structure called a microtubule.[6] The two of them formed a collaboration (still going strong last time I checked) which resulted, inter alia, in a 1994 book by Sir Roger called Shadows of the Mind[7].

From this point on, the Orch-OR story proper begins to delve more deeply into brain physiology than I really feel comfortable commenting on. So, let’s instead just cut to the chase.

A chase that heated up, so to speak, when Swedish-American mathematical cosmologist Max Tegmark decided to put the Penrose/Hameroff hypothesis to the test.

And, as reported in Max’s 1999 article, entitled “The Importance of Quantum Decoherence in Brain Processes,”[8] what his test appeared to show (in mathematical simulation, at least) was that our grey matter was wildly inhospitable terrain for quantum phenomena of any kind — that, in fact, quantum effects could in no way survive in the human brain long enough to influence its operations. One of those operations in particular is the firing of neurons (in which Stuart Hameroff’s microtubules are directly implicated), and that takes whole milliseconds, whereas quantum effects are estimated at best to last only one ten-billionth as long (anywhere from 10-13 to 10-20 seconds)!

Why such a short quantum life expectancy? The culprit here, as David alluded to in his GoodReads comment, is an effect known as decoherence,[9] whereby environmental factors (chiefly collisions with ions and water molecules in the case of the brain) act to rapidly “dephase” (a.k.a. disrupt) the particle superpositions and other signature manifestations of quantum physics.

(Sidebar: This wasn’t the first time that decoherence had been marshaled against a role for consciousness in quantum physics. In fact, when the concept was first proposed back in the 1970s, some saw it as the sought-after alternative to the apparent need for a conscious observer to resolve the so-called “measurement problem.” This was the riddle of how a particle’s smeared-out Schroedinger wave-function can suddenly “collapse” down into a definite state simply as a result of being measured. According to the reigning Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics formulated by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg back in the 1920s, what drove the wave-function collapse was a deliberate observation, a measurement, performed by a conscious observer. But what decoherence implied was that chaotic environmental factors alone were sufficient to produce such a collapse, obviating the need for conscious observers, and consciousness itself, for that matter.)

Back to Max’s Orch-OR rebuttal: there’s no need to plow through all those formulae (I didn’t) — not when you can read a watered-down account (ah, those water molecules again!) of the whole to-do in Max’s 2014 book Our Mathematical Universe.[10]

It is in OMU, incidentally, and not in his original article, that for the first time (as far as I’ve been able to determine) Max uses the phrase “a warm and wet place” to describe the brain (p. 207), a mantra which subsequent commentators on these issues (including David Owen above) have seized upon and repeated seemingly ad infinitum.

But, as with quantum decoherence itself, the problem with Max’s reprise was its timing.

In a word, 2014 was late, maybe too late, in the game. Because …

That was then — this is now.

Next (and hopefully last) time it’ll be on to what the past decade’s worth of research can tell us about quantum effects in bacteria, birds, and — you guessed it: — brains!

Footnotes

[1] http://www.billdesmedt.com/the-making-of-a-thriller-part-iv/.

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/21986764-consciousness-and-free-will

[3] Bill DeSmedt, “The Gods Themselves,” Dualism, 2014, https://www.amazon.com/Dualism-Archon-Sequence-Book-2-ebook/dp/B07GSHWM33/.

[4] Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, 1989, https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computers-ebook/dp/B074JCG4P9/.

[5] “Gödel’s incompleteness theorems,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems/.

[6] “Microtubule,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule/.

[7] Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, 1994, https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Mind-Missing-Science-Consciousness-dp-0198539789/.

[8] Max Tegmark, “The Importance of Quantum Decoherence in Brain Processes,” 1999, https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/brain.pdf/.

BTW, the lede from Charles Seife’s reportage on the above developments read: “Sir Roger Penrose is incoherent, and Max Tegmark says he can prove it” (“Cold Numbers Unmake the Quantum Mind,” Science, 4 February 2000, https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.287.5454.791/). Evidently Charles had confused “decoherence” with “incoherence.” Great Moments in Science Journalism — not so much.

[9] “Quantum decoherence,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence/.

[10] Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, 2014, https://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Max-Tegmark/dp/0241954630/.

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Published on September 09, 2021 15:22

August 25, 2021

The Making of a Thriller: Part IV

Quantum Dualism? —

We closed Part III of this blog series on a glimmer of hope that consciousness might in fact be a “real” thing, in some way separate and apart from the physical universe in which it finds itself. By the same token, this threatened to land us back in the same old mind/body perplex — namely, how can an immaterial entity (such as, on this view, the mind is purported to be) interact with material reality?

So, on the one hand, we’d like to believe our conscious experiences are in some sense real, if not the only real things to which we have direct experiential access. On the other hand, we’d like to believe that the thoughts arising from our consciousness can in some sense influence our actions in the external world.

We seem to be enmired in a quagmire of a quandry.

Quantum Dual-Aspectivism?

Fortunately, we need not be stuck. There may be a way out, in the form of a “third force” in the philosophical interpretation of quantum physics. Bernard d’Espagnat, one of the leading exponents of this third alternative, calls it “veiled reality” (see his Veiled Reality: An Analysis of Present-Day Quantum Mechanical Concepts, Basic Books, 1995).

The basic notion is that mind and matter are indeed different, but only insofar as they are each different faces of, or projections from, an underlying but unknowable quantum reality. At the same time, precisely because they project from a more fundamental reality, both mind and matter can be influenced by that “really real reality” and, through it, can be coordinated with one another.

(Note that this is not all that far removed from the sitiuation of those hermetically sealed-off monads of Leibnitz’s that we looked at briefly back in Part II. They, too, required some transcendent force to coordinate their (otherwise non-existent) interactions with one another — only in their case that role was played by God.)

(Sidebar: Whatever goes around comes around: Over two hundred years ago Immanuel Kant proposed that we don’t actually experience the world as it is, that all we see — all we can see — are the surface phenomena. The bedrock realities, the noumena as Kant called them, remain forever inaccessible to us — “veiled,” if you will.)

Thought Experiment

It was something like this that I had Jon Knox trying to put across to the Nietzsche AI with his “NIT-picking” thought experiment. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to read it in situ, let me rehearse the argument here. Knox, Dualism’s antihero, has been engaged in a running debate on this very mind/body issue with an artificial intelligence styling himself after the 19th-century German nihilistic philosopher — a debate which Knox must win if he is to convince Nietzsche of his seriousness and thereby secure the AI’s cooperation in a criminal investigation they are both pursuing.

Knox is slowly but surely losing the war of words, until he encounters Nietzsche in a full-body immersive virtual environment. As to what happens then …

“I was thinking,” Knox said, “about Ray Kurzweil’s ideas for how to make virtual reality indistinguishable from the real thing. All you’d need to do, according to him, is to inject microscopic electrodes into the brain itself and let them cruise around feeding simulated stimuli directly into the sensory-motor inputs of the cerebral cortex.”

Nietzsche hesitated a long moment before saying, “A plausible enough extrapolation from present-day capabilities. What of it?”

“Stay with me now: Say we used that neural-implant technology — call the things NITs for short — say we used those NITs to create a simulated world like this one, except this time we took the trouble to make things, ourselves included, look really real, less like refugees from a graphic novel. … It could be done, no?”

Nietzsche nodded reluctantly.

“… So, okay, given all that, here’s the question: Could any of those experiments detect the NITs themselves?

“Detect the neural implant technology that is causing your brain to have its simulated experiences? Certainly, assuming the simulation is designed to represent them.”

“Say it’s isn’t. Say that’s the one part we left out.”

“Then, no, of course not. If an entity is not part of the world being simulated, then, to an observer within that world, it does not exist.”

“And, by the same token, once you’re inside the sim there’s no way to prove anything exists outside of it, right? I mean, even with current technology, as far as you and I are concerned, right now this here —” Knox stomped his foot on the ground and was mildly surprised to hear an entirely satisfactory thump. “— could be the whole universe.”

“I fail to see your point.”

“My point is coming right up,” Knox said. “Let’s go back to what you were saying before — about how mind-body dualism contradicts basic physics because there’s no conceivable way a non-physical mind could influence the operations of a physical brain, much less anything else.”

“Yes?”

“Well, then, how is this different?” 

“I beg your pardon?” 

Knox sighed. “Look, there’s no question that there is an outside world, right? In fact, appearances to the contrary, that’s actually where I am right now. And Kurzweil’s NIT-based virtual reality would be way more seamless, to the point where I might forget anything outside it existed at all. Regardless of how perfect the sim might be, though, that external world would still be there, hidden behind a full-sensory hallucination. Still with me?”

“I am still unsure where this is leading.”

“Just here: think of the external me — the real me back in the outside world — as the mind behind the body I appear to be inhabiting in the simulation. Now, isn’t that a possible analogue of the mind-body connection?”

“Not at all. In the real world there is no physical mechanism linking your hypothetical immaterial mind with your material body. In your so-called thought experiment, on the other hand, that linkage would be supplied by these ‘NITs’ you posit.”

“That’s just my point: there wouldn’t be any NITs as far as the simulation was concerned. We already agreed we weren’t going to model them, remember? So the only place they’d exist would be in the outside world — on the other side of the mind/body divide, by analogy. And, if that’s the case, then that outside world not only encompasses both my real self and the virtual reality I’m currently stuck in, it also encompasses the means by which the one interacts with the other.”

“Ah, this is a species of what is known as dual-aspectivism — the theory that both mind and matter are merely aspects of some third, ultimately unknowable reality. But such assumptions are themselves superfluous. We have no need of them to explain the world as it is.”

“That’d be the same as saying that my continued existence back there in the real world isn’t needed to explain my presence here in virtual reality, having this conversation with you. And yet, somehow I’ve got a really, really strong suspicion that it is.”

Did that do it? Was Nietzsche stumped for once? Certainly he was taking an inordinately long time to answer.

And was it Knox’s imagination, or was there a hint of resignation in Nietzsche’s voice when he spoke at last?

“Please stand by a moment, Jonathan. I will attempt to reconstruct the sequence of thermal footprints, as you requested.

Quantum Mindfulness

But, if consciousness is in some sense a manifestation of an underlying quantum reality, wouldn’t that imply that the mind itself is a quantum phenomenon? Well, speaking as the author of Dualism, I certainly have to hope so, since without some grounding for a quantum-entangled collective consciousness, there’d be no Maximally Entangled Ratiocinative Group Entity (MERGE) effect.

And without MERGE, my search for a MacGuffin (remember that from Part I?) would have come up empty!

But aside from that, how plausible is it really?

Perhaps a bit more so than you might suspect. Arguments for some sort of linkage between mind and (quantum) matter have been around ever since the mid-1920s, when Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg formulated their Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, positing that it takes an act of measurement by a conscious observer to collapse a probabilistic quantum wave-function into a hard-and-fast classical reality.

With the advent of decoherence theories, Copenhagenism no longer commands the uncritical allegiance of the physics community the way it once did. Still the suspicion that there’s some sort of relationship between consciousness and quantum reality has continued to simmer over the years, as exemplified by Michael Lockwood’s 1989 Mind, Brain, and the Quantum: The Compound ‘I’.

Then in 1996, British mathematical physicist (and colleague of Stephen Hawking) Roger Penrose teamed up with American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to reignite the controversy. (Anesthesiology may seem an odd pairing with theoretical physics but, then, who better qualified to explore the mysteries of consciousness than one whose stock-in-trade it is taking it away?)

In any case, Penrose and Hameroff issued a 1996 manifesto in the journal Mathematics and Computers in Simulation entitled “Orchestrated reduction of quantum coherence in brain microtubules: A model for consciousness.” According to this “Orch-OR” theory, the tiny microtubular structures which make up the scaffolding for the brain’s neurons were in fact the long-sought locus of quantum interactions between the mental and the physical.

Max Tegmark, who by his own admission has come up with some wild and crazy theories himself, didn’t like this one. As he recounts in his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, the nub of his objection was that the pristine conditions required for coherent quantum effects to manifest could not long survive in the warm, wet, noisy confines of the human brain.

But that was based on work Max had done back in 1993. Since then, as I had Mycroft point out to Knox, quantum entanglement has been observed in such warm, wet, noisy confines as green, growing plants and birds’ brains, where it figures in phenomena like photosynthesis and avian navigation.

And, more recently, in a Physics of Life Reviews article entitled “Consciousness in the Universe: a review of the ‘Orch-OR’ theory,” Hameroff and Penrose reported on new experimental results appearing to corroborate their earlier claims by providing evidence of quantum vibrations in microtubules.

Even if Orch-OR is vindicated, though, that will far from settle the mind/body debate, as Hameroff and Penrose themselves maintain their theory is agnostic between consciousness as immaterial and consciousness as merely(?) requiring new physics.

The End … Of the Beginning

If there’s one thing that researching and writing Dualism taught me, it’s that the field of consciousness studies is, now more than ever, an area of active research. With new technologies coming on line in dizzying succession, and new theories to test against them keeping pace, the coming years are likely to unveil new insights into this most central, and human-centric, of questions.

I hope that, in some small way, Dualism may stir folks’ interest in, and enhance their preparedness for, following this ongoing exploration into what makes us who we are.

That’s really what the making of this particular thriller was all about.

Q

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Published on August 25, 2021 09:41

August 20, 2021

The Making of a Thriller: Part III

Consciousness and Other Stories —

When we left off last time we were marveling at the hoops that philosophers like John Searle and David Chalmers seemed willing to jump through in hopes of finding that mind is not simply reducible to gross materiality. And we closed by suggesting that what justifies all those conceptual gymnastics is a simple, albeit inconvenient, truth — namely, that the one aspect of reality which has so far eluded reductionist explanation is our conscious experience of that same reality.

The Feeling of What Happens

The problem with thinking and talking about conscious experience, though, is that — given how totally immersed we are in and by it — it’s hard to gain any perspective on it. Might as well ask a fish about its experience of water.

But let’s give it a try.

To begin with, some insight into consciousness can be gained by considering the question of who and/or what can be said to have it. People, obviously (unless, of course, you’re a solipsist, in which case nobody does, except you!). But what about dogs? Field mice? Rocks?

Thomas Nagel offered a useful touchstone in his 1974 Philosophical Review article “What is it like to be a bat?” — namely, that a thing is conscious if there is something it would be like to be that thing.

Now, a bat’s sensorium, for instance, might give it a very different set of experiences from a human’s — gliding through the crepuscular air, hearing in the ultrasonic, navigating via echo-location rather than sight. Nonetheless, Nagel argued, it would be possible to imagine what it might be like to be a bat.

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem as if it would be like anything at all to be, say, a rock or a mud puddle. There just wouldn’t be any internal experience whatsoever with which to connect.

To clarify things a bit further, the sort of consciousness Nagel is talking about here is relatively low level, a rung or two down the ladder from the higher, more human-like quality of true self-awareness. There are plenty of creatures who would seem to pass the “what is it like to be” test, but only a few (apes, chimps, elephants, and dolphins among them) who can also ace the so-called “mirror test” — who can, that is, look into a mirror and realize that what they’re seeing is themselves.

In any case, when I had Jon Knox wondering whether Dualism’s resident artificial intelligence Nietzsche is really conscious, it’s this whole spectrum of sensation he’s wondering about: Would it be like anything to be Nietzsche? Would an AI have any experience of an inner life? Would it be like John Searle’s (essentially empty) Chinese Room, or would it truly be, as Knox himself imagines, an experience of “no algorithms, just mysteries?”

The stumbling block here, though, is that nowadays — having been raised on a media diet of Star Trek’s Commander Data and Spike Jonze’s Her — folks may find it difficult to recognize the nature of the problem, or even that there is a problem. After all, why shouldn’t a sufficiently complex machine intelligence attain consciousness? What’s the big deal?

From this standpoint, the difference between Siri or Alexa and Nietzsche begins to look more like one of degree than of kind.

The issue would take on a different complexion if it could be shown to be the case that David Chalmers is right, that conscious experience is not equivalent to, or emergent from, any physical process at all, be it ever so sophisticated — that conscious experience is something existing out there alongside physical reality, at right angles to it, so to speak.

But Can That be Shown?

Maybe, maybe not. For my money, the closest anybody’s come is Frank Jackson, with his 1982 Philosophical Quarterly article on “Epiphenomenal qualia” (where qualia is Frank’s coinage for the felt quality of a conscious experience). The notion is related to Tom Nagel’s bat question, except here we’re not exploring what it would feel like to inhabit some other, alien consciousness, but what it feels like to inhabit our own while we’re undergoing some experience: What it feels like to see the color red, for instance.

No one who’s read my previous blog-series on “The Why of Stories” should be surprised to learn that Frank drives the point home with a story — in this case, the parable of Mary. Mary is, in Frank’s telling, one of the world’s leading neurophysiologists, living at some future time when the neurophysiological physics of color vision has been explored to the point of being completely understood. But, owing to some odd whim of her parents, Mary has been raised since birth in a totally black-and-white environment. It’s not that she’s color blind — her color vision is entirely unimpaired — it’s just that she has never been exposed to anything other than black or white, and hence has never experienced at first hand the perception of color which she, as a neurophysiologist, otherwise comprehends so comprehensively. In the fullness of time, Mary is finally released from her chromatically-impoverished prison and encounters her first rose. We can imagine her exclaiming to herself, “Oh, so that’s what red looks like!” — but what does this mean, really?

In particular, does Mary learn anything new about the world or her experience of it when she beholds that rose for the first time? If so, it can’t be any new physical fact, can it? Because, by hypothesis, she already knows all the physics and physiology, all the physical facts, involved in color vision. For that matter, if knowing the physics and physiology is all it takes, shouldn’t Mary have been able to conjure up for herself the experience of seeing red without ever leaving her chiaroscuro confinement?

Note, however, that the price of establishing, in this manner, a mind/body distinction is that we find ourselves back in the old epiphenomenalist quandary once again: If mind is in fact wholly different from matter, how can they ever interact?

They can’t. Not as long as we’re stuck with the mind/body dichotomy.

But are we?

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Published on August 20, 2021 17:27

August 11, 2021

The Making of a Thriller: Part II

Mind Games —

As Part I of this “Making of a Thriller” blog series drew to a close, it alluded to a conundrum on which the plot of my technothriller Dualism was said to turn.

Which is to say that Dualism the novel spends at least part of its time grappling with Dualism the metaphysical stance, and hence with an issue central to the field called philosophy of mind — namely, whether consciousness (as manifested both in humans and in, at the very least, other mammals) is of a piece with the physical world in which it subsists, or whether it represents something altogether separate and apart from material reality.

Philosophy of Mind

This so-called “mind/body problem” can trace its history back to the beginnings of philosophy itself, having first been raised by Plato. In the “allegory of the cave” he introduced in Book VII of his Republic, Plato held that, far from encompassing all of reality, the material things we see all around us are mere shadows of a more truly real world of pure ideas wherein the soul itself finds its natural home.

In more recent times, the notion that mind and body are separate substances is most closely associated with Rene Descartes, who set out to subject all of his beliefs to a radical skepticism, but found that the one thing he could in no way doubt was the fact that he was thinking about doubting. Descartes took this Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) as the cornerstone of his attempt to construct a doubt-proof philosophy.

(Brief aside: So, Descartes is just finishing his lunch at a sidewalk Parisian café when the server walks up and asks him if he’d care to see a dessert menu. Descartes replies, “I think not” — and disappears! Bah-dum-dum!)

In any case, by formulating the Cogito, Descartes was implicitly espousing the view that mind owns an independent existence as something distinct from, and different from, matter. Where he ran into problems was when he tried working his way back from the mind’s reality to the reality of anything else.

Present-day physical science has the opposite problem: it can, potentially at least, reduce all the mechanics of the universe, from quarks to quasars, to Democritus’s “atoms moving in a void,” but seems to have a hard time accounting for the consciousness that is, after all, needed to contemplate this starkly reductionist view.

Even so, such root-and-branch materialism does have a trump card to play, and, in Dualism, Nietzsche (my AI character, not the German philosopher) plays it.

It goes like this: If the mind truly were non-physical, it could have no interactions with the physical world it (unaccountably) finds itself in. This, in turn, would mean that our thoughts could in no way influence our behaviors, perhaps not even our ability to realize we’d ever thought them (assuming awareness and memory themselves rely on physical changes in the brain).

That argument seems to have swept the field nowadays. And had done so even before Daniel Dennett set the seal to it with his 1991 book modestly entitled Consciousness Explained. Dan, incidentally, doesn’t think he’s conscious — and he doesn’t think you are either. In his “You Can’t Argue with a Zombie” essay (http://www.davidchess.com/words/poc/lanier_zombie.html), Jaron Lanier happily (and hilariously) grants Dan the former point, though not the latter.

Be that as it may, the upshot has been that even those few philosophers still willing to take up the cudgels on behalf of the mind have felt compelled to paint themselves into one of two metaphysical corners: arguing either for “emergence” or for “epiphenomenalism.”

Emergence is championed by, among others, John Searle, whose Chinese Room Argument makes an appearance in Dualism. In his 1992 Rediscovery of the Mind, Searle posits that mind is an “emergent phenomenon” arising naturally from the activity of physical brains of a certain complexity, but then goes on to argue that, in consequence, consciousness itself is somehow qualitatively different from — and hence not straightforwardly reducible to — the physical substrate from which it ostensibly arises.

The signature metaphor for this species of emergence is water: the individual molecules of H2O don’t exhibit coolness or liquidity or the ability to slake thirst — those properties all emerge at a macro-scale when masses of molecules are lumped together.

Yet the metaphor also points to its own limitations: “watery” characteristics may emerge from any arbitrary cluster of H2O molecules, but dumping a random batch of neurons in a pile hardly seems likely to yield consciousness. Evidently something else, something more structured, is called for.

Epiphenomenalists take an altogether different tack, as exemplified by David Chalmers in his 1996 landmark study The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. There, Chalmers argues for a (quasi-)immaterial mind — either altogether non-physical in nature, or operating on new, as yet undiscovered physical laws — but, in the process of so doing, simply accepts the above-mentioned physicalist objection regarding such a mind’s inability to interact with the material world in any way.

In the resulting view, our thoughts really cannot influence our actions, rather the two are simply kept in synch somehow. In other words, it’s all just a lucky coincidence that, when I think about lifting my arm, lo and behold, my arm rises into the air.

(This view is somewhat reminiscent of the self-contained, non-interacting monads posited as the ultimate irreducible constituents of reality by the 17th century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. The difference is that Leibnitz had God to fall back on: divine intervention would make sure that everything synched up in the end — a dialectical move unavailable to most contemporary philosophers.)

What drives philosophers like Searle and Chalmers to embrace — even at the price of buying into such tortured reasoning — the notion of the mental as not being straightforwardly reducible to the physical, is one simple fact.

A simple fact, which, however, just happens to be the primary fact of human existence: our subjective conscious experience.

But that’s a topic which will have to wait till our next blogisode.

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Published on August 11, 2021 12:42

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The Accidental Author

In which technothriller author Bill DeSmedt discovers that a book is one of the things that just happen to a person from time to time, and what to do about it.

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