Microtubules, Quantum and Indeterminism

[Solvreven]

So I'm not sure how many in this forum has seen this update.
There might be some evidence that suggests that conciousness is created by something called microtubules.
At the same time the study shows that the brain uses Quantum Effects that as far as we know are indetermined.
This does not prove that we have free will, but it ties a theory between Quantum Mechanics and Metaphysics.

Hope this could be interesting for more people here.
Here's a video:
 

 

[Solvreven]

I can add that this does not follow the law of causality which is what determinists use.
It does follow the law of identity.
It also begs the question if we can find this in animals, cells etc.. or some form of similar trace, which can point to what is conciouss and what is not. Maybe even point us in the direction of what might have free will of organisms/living entities.

[DavidOdden]

On 5/14/2024 at 9:09 AM, Solvreven said:

At the same time the study shows that the brain uses Quantum Effects that as far as we know are indetermined.

I don’t think the study does show that. In order to show how the brain uses anything, you have to have a functioning brain, whereas that study simply performed physical tests on a protein extracted from the brains of one or more dead pigs. They studied absorption and emission spectra, extracting numbers about “fluorescence quantum yield”, and they make no suggestions about “consciousness”. There is a substantial quantum leap from this physical study to speculations about consciousness and an even further leap to get to free will. Microtubules are ubiquitous in living things, only one type of which exhibits free will and only a few of which are conscious. This is a thing that I hate about popular science, that ordinary low-level scientific process is inflated (in the popular press) to a status not supported by the actual experiment. The article does contribute something useful, by way of better explaining how the brain can rapidly “compute”.

[Boydstun]

On 12/10/2022 at 4:30 PM, Boydstun said:

The issue of THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES recently issued (December 2022 – https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/…/ayn…/issue/22/2… ) includes a paper by Dr. Kathleen Touchstone titled “Error, Free Will, and Freedom.” It engages importantly with earlier writings of mine, and because the next issue of JARS will be its final issue, and it is already at the printer, I’m making a reply to Touchstone’s paper simply in online posts.

Kathleen Touchstone’s main-stage representation of what I wrote in OBJECTIVITY in the 1990’s about internal indeterminism is incorrect. I rejected the idea that quantum indeterminism could play a role in these organic processes. The classical Boltzmann-regime and chaos processes in the classical regime are the only plausible candidates for micro indeterminism in neuronal process as far as I knew or know even now.

I do NOT accede “the source of volition is errors.” I argued that error occurs, contra Descartes, in animal capabilities not requiring free will. But the circumstance that error arises without conceptual intelligence and free will does not entail that error Is the source of free will. Although, it suggests that cognitive error, conceptual or more primitive, is a necessary attendant of intelligence and free will.

I do NOT accede “this error [thence free will] is due to indeterminism that is associated with quantum probability” or “credit error—specifically as it relates to quantum probability—with being the root of free will.” I did NOT conclude: “Of the three sorts of chance, quantum probability offers the only possible physical source for volition because of the presence of indeterminism.” Rather, classical processes can be the physical bases of neuronal indeterminism once one rejects the illicit projection of regular classical isolated, independent, determined process-streams onto wider physical reality. A softening of the picture of determinism in ordinary physical reality is required (V2N4, pp. 183–86; also "Reply to Eilon" in V2N5 Remarks): a keeping true to actual physical process before us everyday, which leaves a possibility for neuronal processing systems, so far as I know, that yields free will.

Everything else in Touchstone’s representations of my old papers is accurate. I thank Dr. Touchstone for her deep dive into and recognition of the significance of those papers:

Boydstun, S., Chaos, OBJECTIVITY V2N1:31–46. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number1.html#31

——. Volitional Synapses: Part 1. OBJECTIVITY V2N1:109–38. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number1.html#109

——. Volitional Synapses: Part 2. OBJECTIVITY V2N2:105–29. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number2.html#105

——. Volitional Synapses: Part 3. OBJECTIVITY V2N4:183–204. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number4.html#183

A use of classical chaos (not quantum chaos or quantum regular) in brains, not for free will function (at least in this paper), but for accomplishing perception: How Brains Make Chaos in order to Make Sense of the World (1987) by Skarda and Freeman. Walter Freeman is also the author of How Brains Make Up Their Minds (2000).

[Solvreven]

On 5/21/2024 at 6:36 PM, DavidOdden said:

I don’t think the study does show that. In order to show how the brain uses anything, you have to have a functioning brain, whereas that study simply performed physical tests on a protein extracted from the brains of one or more dead pigs. They studied absorption and emission spectra, extracting numbers about “fluorescence quantum yield”, and they make no suggestions about “consciousness”. There is a substantial quantum leap from this physical study to speculations about consciousness and an even further leap to get to free will. Microtubules are ubiquitous in living things, only one type of which exhibits free will and only a few of which are conscious. This is a thing that I hate about popular science, that ordinary low-level scientific process is inflated (in the popular press) to a status not supported by the actual experiment. The article does contribute something useful, by way of better explaining how the brain can rapidly “compute”.

I think the study shows that microtubules uses quantum as how I've read the study. And the neurons also uses the microtubules. See: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936

Every cell in the body uses microtubules AFAIK, but when Stuart Hameroff (co-author of the ORCH-OR) has used sedatives on patients, he can make them unconscious. This is where the hypothesis stems from.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction

The hypothesis also says that the neuron has an immense amount of speed (hz), way more than previous thought of.

I'm not sure if i agree with you that humans are the only ones with free will (if i understand you correctly).. I think this is quite possible in other animals and perhaps even cells, although in a way more primitive sense than ours.

I've seen some videos and read some articles both from Penrose and Hameroff..
So I don't think this is "popular science BS". In most cases I would tend to agree with you.

Thanks for the reply!

[Solvreven]

Hameroff has made the case that plants might be conscious.
We are conscious in a way that boils down to something like: 10 million consciousnesses pr second, while for a plant, it might just trigger ones every 5 seconds.. and the more advanced the animal, the more conscious.

[Boydstun]

2 hours ago, Solvreven said:

Hameroff has made the case that plants might be conscious.
We are conscious in a way that boils down to something like: 10 million consciousnesses pr second, while for a plant, it might just trigger ones every 5 seconds.. and the more advanced the animal, the more conscious.

The idea that there is any consciousness at all without working memory is absurd. If plants have no working memory, they have no consciousness at all, and I've seen no demonstration that plants have working memory. 

On degrees of consciousness in animals: Ascent to Volitional Consciousness by John Enright.

[Solvreven]

29 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

The idea that there is any consciousness at all without working memory is absurd. If plants have no working memory, they have no consciousness at all, and I've seen no demonstration that plants have working memory. 

Do you not think that a thing (a plant) can be conscious without remembering previous moments.
It is proven that our spinal cord (if I remember correctly), has memory that is unconnected to the brain).

[tadmjones]

Michael Levin at Tufts University is recently talking about his work with planaria and other biologic agents eg his zenobots. They have trained planaria to find food in a maze removed the head/brain and after regeneration of a new 'head' the same worm will remember/know the solution to the maze. They have also found that other biologics, I think skin cells of amphibians, when exposed to novel chemical threats , will develop the capacity to ameliorate the damage and that subsequent cell lines will then 'remember' the threat and react on first encounter, I think those studies were done with boron as the threat.

[Solvreven]

The spinal cord can learn and remember movements autonomously, thanks to specific dorsal and ventral neuronal populations. This discovery was made possible by a novel experimental setup that measures movement changes in mice, offering fresh insights into spinal cord plasticity.11. apr. 2024

https://neurosciencenews.com/spinal-cord-learning-memory-25904/

[tadmjones]

More in the vein of there being a lot of things on earth than are not dreamt of in philosophy, there was a video recently posted purporting to show one plant using pheromone production and transfer to 'warn' a neighboring plant of an advancing threat. Also I've seen discussion of the interplay between trees and the subterranean fungi that seem to show nutrient distribution actions related to seedlings and their proximity to the 'mother', some species moving nutrients toward to 'help' and others seeming to move nutrients away if the seeds develop too closely to the mom. I haven't read any studies , but the chatter is certainly interesting.

While actions of these types could be 'more' mechanistic than not, the carrying out of the specific actions of the specific organisms would demonstrate some 'type' of awareness/consciousness or even memory in starting and continuing discrete processes , no ?

Edited June 3 by tadmjones

[Boydstun]

1 hour ago, Solvreven said:

Do you not think that a thing (a plant) can be conscious without remembering previous moments.
It is proven that our spinal cord (if I remember correctly), has memory that is unconnected to the brain).

I do not. Furthermore, the memory required for consciousness is specifically working memory. (This is not to say, by the way, that working memory is sufficient for consciousness.* My own view is that consciousness is a feature only of living systems whose working memory has developed in the way of organic ontogeny.)

Remembering previous moments is not sufficient for working memory. Moreover, expanding the concept of "memory" to things such as magnetic hysteresis and to memory materials (a class of materials whose constitutive equations contain a dependence upon the past history of thermodynamic, kinetic, electromagnetic or other kind of state variables) is simply changing the concept of memory (equivocation), as was attacked by Robert Efron in his paper Biology without Consciousness* in The Objectivist. 

Working Memory

Working Memory of Primates

Cf. Episodic Memory: A, B.

Edited June 3 by Boydstun

[KyaryPamyu]

I found some stuff about the spinal chord in Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869).

"The independence of the spinal cord on the brain is likewise proved by many beautiful physiological experiments. A hen, from which Flourens had removed the entire cerebrum, sat indeed motionless as a rule; but on going to sleep it tucked its head under its wings; on waking, it shook itself and preened its feathers. When pushed, it ran forward in a straight line; when thrown into the air, it flew. It did not eat spontaneously, but only swallowed the food thrust into its bill. Voit repeated these experiments with pigeons. They first fell into a deep sleep, from which they only awoke after a few weeks; then, however, they flew and moved of their own accord, and comported themselves in such a manner as to leave no doubt of the existence of their sensations; only intelligence was lacking, and they did not spontaneously take food. Thus a pigeon, having thrust its beak against a suspended wooden pendulum, caused it to swing for upwards of an hour till Voit’s return, so that the pendent spool over and over again struck its beak. On the other hand, such a brainless pigeon endeavors to evade a hand trying to grasp it, to carefully avoid obstacles in its flight, and can settle cleverly on narrow supports. Rabbits and guinea-pigs, whose cerebrum has been removed, run freely about after the operation; the behavior of a decapitated frog has been already mentioned. All these movements, as the preening of its feathers by the hen the leaping of rabbits and frogs, take place without noticeable external stimulus, and are so like the same movements in uninjured animals that it is impossible to assume a difference in the underlying principle in the two cases: in the one case as in the other, there is a manifestation of will. Now we know that the higher animal consciousness is conditional on the integrity of the cerebrum (see Chap. ii. C.), and when this is destroyed, it is said these animals are without consciousness, and accordingly act and will unconsciously. But the cerebral consciousness is by no means the sole, but merely the highest consciousness of the animal, the only one which in higher animals and in man attains to self-consciousness, to the ego, therefore also the only one which I can call my consciousness. That, however, the subordinate nerve-centers must also have a consciousness, if of a vaguer description, plainly follows from the continuity of the animal series, and a comparison of the ganglionic consciousness of the Invertebrata with that of the independent ganglia and central parts of the spinal cord of the higher animals.

It is beyond a doubt that a mammal deprived of its brain is always capable of clearer feeling than an uninjured insect, because the consciousness of its spinal cord stands in any case higher than that of the ganglia of the insect. Accordingly this will, which gives evidence of itself in the independent functions of the spinal cord and the ganglia, is by no means to be at once declared to be in itself unconscious; we must rather provisionally assume that for the nerve-centers from which it proceeds it certainly may become more or less clearly conscious. On the other hand, compared with the cerebral consciousness which a man exclusively recognizes as his consciousness, it is certainly unconscious, and it is accordingly shown that there exists in us an unconscious will, since these nerve-centers are all contained in our corporeal organism, therefore in us." (The Unconscious Will in the Independent Functions of the Spinal Cord and Ganglia)

Edited June 3 by KyaryPamyu

[Solvreven]

1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

I do not. Furthermore, the memory required for consciousness is specifically working memory. (This is not to say, by the way, that working memory is sufficient for consciousness.* My own view is that consciousness is a feature only of living systems whose working memory has developed in the way of organic ontogeny.)

There seem to be a rather good discussion to be had on weather consciousness can be had at the cellular level even.
So I'm open to the discussion around what memory in that case means.
Does cells have any forms of memory in and of themselves that a severely primitive compared to the human memory and consciousness.
As for the Heisenberg uncertainty principcle and the Copenahagen interpretations of Quantum Mechanics seems to be pretty good.
I have some friends that has higher education within quantum mechanics (which are very Objectivis friendly), and they say Peikoff is just dead wrong on this issue.
For my own part I'm just here out of curiousness in sharing some info on the subject (I'm by no means an expert on the subject). But I do find it intruiging, and there seems to be a lot of good minds in this forum.

[EC]

1 hour ago, Solvreven said:

There seem to be a rather good discussion to be had on weather consciousness can be had at the cellular level even.
So I'm open to the discussion around what memory in that case means.
Does cells have any forms of memory in and of themselves that a severely primitive compared to the human memory and consciousness.
As for the Heisenberg uncertainty principcle and the Copenahagen interpretations of Quantum Mechanics seems to be pretty good.
I have some friends that has higher education within quantum mechanics (which are very Objectivis friendly), and they say Peikoff is just dead wrong on this issue.
For my own part I'm just here out of curiousness in sharing some info on the subject (I'm by no means an expert on the subject). But I do find it intruiging, and there seems to be a lot of good minds in this forum.

No there's not, consciousness is an emergent property of quantum computational processing of perceptual data via a complex chemical and quantum entanglement process that I have linked to sources of exactly how the process works on this very forum years ago but like every fact of importance gets buried by the mostly irrelevant over time but extremely quickly lately if one notices the activity of a quiet forum before I post and then after.

[Solvreven]

18 minutes ago, EC said:

No there's not, consciousness is an emergent property of quantum computational processing of perceptual data via a complex chemical and quantum entanglement process that I have linked to sources of exactly how the process works on this very forum years ago but like every fact of importance gets buried by the mostly irrelevant over time but extremely quickly lately if one notices the activity of a quiet forum before I post and then after.

So as you might see, I'm pretty new here, so I'm unaware.
Would this say that it's plausible that plants in anyway has consciousness?
Can one draw a line to what has and what hasn't consciousness in general?

[Doug Morris]

On 6/3/2024 at 4:01 AM, Solvreven said:

We are conscious in a way that boils down to something like: 10 million consciousnesses pr second,

In what sense?

 

[tadmjones]

I think in the sense of Penrose's idea that consciousness doesn't collapse 'the wave function', but that the collapse 'of the wave function' is the genesis of consciousness and that calculation of 10 m c/s is the average 'load' of the microtubulars.

But that really only raises other problems of combination and or multiplicity. If every collapse produces 'consciousness' and all the neurons are the sites of the collapses, are all the collapses separate instances of 'consciousness' that somehow combine to produce an integrated 'self' that is conscious, or does each collapse produce atomized 'consciousnesses' that do not interact with the 'one' felt 'self' which is a particular collapse but separate from the 'others'.

Edited June 4 by tadmjones

[Solvreven]

14 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

In what sense?

I know Hameroff recently had a presentation of this.. but I can't seem to find it.

[Solvreven]

14 hours ago, tadmjones said:

But that really only raises other problems of combination and or multiplicity. If every collapse produces 'consciousness' and all the neurons are the sites of the collapses, are all the collapses separate instances of 'consciousness' that somehow combine to produce an integrated 'self' that is conscious, or does each collapse produce atomized 'consciousnesses' that do not interact with the 'one' felt 'self' which is a particular collapse but separate from the 'others'.

So I don't find their theory to be the best.. I think the discoveries they've made are pretty fantastic and interesting.
I also think it opens up alot about how Free Will can arise in physics. Most physicists nowadays are trying to crush the idea of Free Will.

Also i agree with the questions you are bringing up, as I think they're theory is faulty.

I don't think there is impossible to bridge a theory of quantum consciousness with objectivism either. This is the only point I've come to disagree with Peikoff, as I don't think Rand have said much about the subject of Quantum Physics.
 

[Solvreven]

 

[Solvreven]

On 6/4/2024 at 9:33 PM, Doug Morris said:

In what sense?

This is directly from Hameroff i believe.

[Solvreven]

It's a reply to this: https://aeon.co/essays/can-we-see-past-our-soul-blindness-to-recognise-plant-minds

[Doug Morris]

On 6/13/2024 at 1:15 AM, Solvreven said:

This is directly from Hameroff i believe.

Please explain the scales.

 

[DavidOdden]

On 6/3/2024 at 12:59 AM, Solvreven said:

I'm not sure if i agree with you that humans are the only ones with free will (if i understand you correctly).. I think this is quite possible in other animals and perhaps even cells, although in a way more primitive sense than ours.

Arguments frequently crash and burn when parties use words to mean radically different things. Here and below, we have a number of divergences, for example over “free will”.

It is so clear to me that only humans have free will that I cannot comprehend your non-acceptance of my point, unless it simply means that we don’t mean the same thing by “free will”. One way to test for definitional differences is to elicit examples of distinguishing cases, and see how the parties analyze each case. But even before we engage in that, we ought to agree on the basic classification. Given that man has free will, are there existents that do not have free will; are there existents which have will which is not free? What are some specific examples – of existents with unfree will, or existents with no will?

I have a pillow which has memory, also a thumb-drive, and a light-switch (it remembers that it is off and stays off until I make it be otherwise. Are there any existents that have absolutely no memory (which is not the same as “has limited memory” or “can only remember a limited class of things”). Then are these things with memory not in some sense “conscious”? If you heat up certain substances (metals, ice, or glass for example) they melt. Can we not then say that these substances experience heat? Likewise certain things change when you put them in the freezer, for example fish or water: do they not experience cold?

My answer to all of the above is “no, no, no and no”, because that is not what “memory, will, experience, conscience” etc. refer to. So bearing this in mind, what are some examples of non-mammal animals with free will, and what kind of will do arthropods have (do they even have will)? How do you know (decide) that humans have free will and rocks do not?