They're all ganging up, I tell you

[mmcirvin]

Oh, great, now Intelligent Design advocate William Dembski has become a fan of the quantum-consciousness people.

The Schwartz, Stapp and Beauregard paper's abstract critiques neuroscience:

Thus, terms having intrinsic mentalistic and/or experiential content (e.g. ‘feeling’, ‘knowing’ and ‘effort’) are not included as primary causal factors. This theoretical restriction is motivated primarily by ideas about the natural world that have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than three-quarters of a century. Contemporary basic physical theory differs profoundly from classic physics on the important matter of how the consciousness of human agents enters into the structure of empirical phenomena.

This absolutely floors me. Sure, there are people pushing consciousness-based interpretations of QM, as I've mentioned earlier. But the centrality of consciousness is very far from a consensus feature of quantum theory, and to act as if it is without any caution in the matter strikes me as highly misleading.

They elaborate on what they mean in section 5 of the paper, "The quantum approach". The rhetorical tack here is basically to speak of the measurements described by observable operators as necessarily conscious human measurements, and the choice of what observable to measure as a conscious human choice. But there's really nothing about that in the theory; this is a feature of certain interpretations of quantum mechanics.

The authors describe it as a necessary feature of the popular Copenhagen interpretation (I'll remain agnostic on the subject, and just say that the more I studied quantum physics, the less I knew what the words "Copenhagen interpretation" really meant; everyone who used it seemed to mean something different, Bohr's own statements were frustratingly vague, and early on there was a lot of emphasis on things like the wave-particle distinction that seem kind of quaint now). But the distinction between interpretation and experimentally-verified theory gets lost as they go on, until they're saying things like

The intentional actions of agents are represented mathematically in Heisenberg’s space of actions. Here is how it works.

Each intentional action depends, of course, on the intention of the agent, and upon the state of the system upon which this action acts. Each of these two aspects of nature is represented within Heisenberg’s space of actions by an action. The idea that a “state” should be represented by an “action” may sound odd, but Heisenberg’s key idea was to replace what classical physics took to be a “being” by a “doing.” I shall denote the action (or operator) that represents the state being acted upon by the symbol S. [...]

And then they run through some basic formulae of Heisenberg's operator formulation of QM, describing it all in this "intentional actions" language. I don't really know how Heisenberg treated this stuff philosophically—for all I know he talked about agents and actions—but I do know that you can use this math just fine without insisting on the symbols saying anything about intentions or conscious agents, and that to imply otherwise as if three-quarters of a century of quantum mechanics rests on some Heisenbergian theory of intentionality is really sort of a bait-and-switch.

I can't really intelligently comment on all the stuff about calcium ion channels in the brain, except to say that I've been hearing stuff like this from Fred Alan Wolf and Jack Sarfatti for ages, but Ian Musgrave's article linked at the top expresses some doubts.

Commenter "scordova" on Dembski's blog says:

This is a wonderful development! It declares that MIND is a fundamental, irreducible component of physical reality based on reasonable interpretations of contemporary physics. I have seen the idea of “MIND as fundamental” being mentioned directly or alluded to in the works of Wigner, Barrow, Tipler, Davies, Gribbin, Morowitz, von Baeyer, etc. — all respected physicists.

Now, some of these guys are respected physicists and others are better described as popular and controversial figures who happen to have science degrees. But I know von Baeyer and, while I could be wrong, I have serious doubts that he'd go for all this stuff.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I don't know how you can read The Panda's Thumb. I just looked at a few entries and i'm SO DEPRESSED because there are some VERY STUPID PEOPLE out there in charge of EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN. I was happier in my ignorance. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH! GRARR HULK SMASH LIBRARY

[bram.livejournal.com]

And now there's a "NEW Copenhagen Interpretation" thanks I think to Omnes.

I've always thought the gist of it was that there were classical objects--because OF COURSE our measurements give us single values--and the quantum objects of study. The purpose of physics was not really to account for the reality at base that explained how macroscopic classical reality is built from quantum stuff. The purpose of physics is to explain experiments.

Heisenberg seemed a positivist through and through for his whole career. States as matrices, the S-matrix, all that seemed to codify that the physical reality was whatever you could measure from it.

Tipler has said some extremely insane things and published them in books.

I do get annoyed at computer scientists pursuing AI to explain how the brain works. Perhaps intuition from dealing with natural physical systems--not even biological systems--makes me suspect the workings are not so straightforwardly cut and dried as the strong AI proponents make them to be.

Funny you should mention the S-matrix

[another-orphan.livejournal.com]

Stapp - the QM expert on the paper in question - was one of the founders of analytic S-matrix theory, working on it with Heisenberg.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That kind of positivism is a fine, cautious way to approach QM, in my opinion. What I don't see is Stapp's insistence on consciousness and intentionality associated with the measurements. It seems to me that if, in some fantastically improbable event, a collection of laboratory equipment accidentally arose out of thermal randomness and started carrying out quantum experiments, the formulae would still describe their results accurately.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...though I also think that you can make at least a stab at recovering classical behavior from quantum behavior, sort of the modern counterpart of the early talk of the Correspondence Principle.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Personally, when it comes to studying how the brain works, I'm more inclined to trust the neuroscientists than anyone else. They think of the brain as what it physically is, a chunk of fatty organ meat in the skull, and that strikes me as a pretty good starting point.

Then on the one hand you've got the strong-AI people, whose description of it as an information-processing system that can be described as an algorithm is probably technically correct, but exists on such a high level of abstraction that it may not be very practically useful. And on the other hand, there are a handful of physicists who are convinced that certain types of fatty organ meat have special quantum-mechanical properties, because if QM measurement and consciousness are both so mysterious they must be the same thing.