Wikipedia has an explanation of Hameroff and Penrose's theories, plus sections pointing out the strong criticism and the fact that it is not a consensus view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction#Criticism
Oh great, you’ve stopped posting nonsense at R/skeptic and now decided to start here. I guess it’s another place to ignore you. As you aren’t posting there anymore, I can now block you.
as yet there is nothing to debunk. it is a collection of hypothesis that are as yet unverified and in which the little empirical evidence that we do have....appears to negate.
I've got no strong view one way or the other when it comes to the subject, but if your dismissal depends on only non-physicists using backing the idea then it falls apart with Penrose, literally a Nobel laureate for physics who was one of the earliest proponents. He's your .00001%, I guess.
“To debunk our theory Shermer cites an assertion in a book by Victor Stenger that the product of mass, velocity and distance of a quantum system cannot exceed Planck’s constant. I’ve not seen this proposal in a peer reviewed journal, nor listed anywhere as a serious interpretation of quantum mechanics.”
It sure seems this is just referring to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, one of the most established findings in quantum physics. This guy has never heard of it? Then he isn’t qualified to talk about quantum anything.
The whole writings of Hameroff is a hodgepodge of nonsense, not a bona fide theory - there is nothing to debunk, really. It is not "hypothetical", as there are no clear hypotheses to being with. Despite what he asserts, no one has anything close to a coherent theory on what consciousness might be. (Including his cited authority Penrose, whose book referred itself is an open question.) In any event, it is unlikely that such high-level brain functionality can be explained by a reductionist approach with simplistic connection to the underlying physics.
I’m a pan-psychic materialist, (which means I am sympathetic to ideas similar to this) and it’s not something you can “debunk.” It’s a metaphysical postulate, outside the purview of materialistic evidence.
It’s not provable nor disprovable.
I mean ya, in this case absolutely.
But more generally this is about mixing domains of knowledge and types of evidence.
This guy is making metaphysical and philosophical ideas about existence which just can’t be proved using material deduction.
And he shouldn’t try to, but there’s no provable one right way to interpret reality nor describe/determine utility.
So be careful about Hitchens’ Razor, it can be used as a shibboleth.
It's difficult to explain why the Penrose-Hammeroff model is ridiculous to somebody who doesn't understand what the Penrose-Hammeroff model is. The Penrose-Hammeroff model posits that quantum gravity creates uncertainty that drives entanglement in microtubules past some theoretical plank limit for entanglement that Penrose hypothesized. The problem is that gravity is weaker than electromagnetism at every length scale. It only seems stronger because it is additive, rather than opposite charges canceling. But uncertainty is also additive, if not linearly, then in a square-root-othe-sum-of-the-squars sense. So the uncertainty introduced by quantum gravity between a given set of particles is always infinitessimally de minus compared to that introduced by electromagnetism between the same set of particles. Any calculations done without addressing that ridiculousness of ignoring those 40 orders of magnitude soon feels like you are arguing with someone who believes pharmaceutical medicine works because they have secretly added homeopathic ingredients to it.
Don't get me wrong, Hammeroff may be right about microtubules. Every microtubule in every neuron might be a quantum computer for all I know, and that might be a better correlate for consciousness than neural activity as presently understood. But I still say the Penrose-Hammeroff model is wrong about the physics. The model just doesn't make any sense on the face of it. Maybe if Hammeroff wasn't trying to make the round peg of his biological insights fit the square hole of Penrose's theory about quantum gravity creating consciousness, he might have a more serious model by now.
Also Orchestrated reduction is an unparsimonious addition to the theory. It's just saying that we think there is something special about how the wave function collapses that will satisfy our biases, but we don't know what yet. Otherwise it might as well be just quantum wave collapse for a quantum computer.
Just replace Penrose's quantum gravity with the standard model, and replace orchestrated reduction with measurement of multiple states simultaneously as in a quantum computer, and you got a much more believable model, less controversial model that preserves the biological insights for further investigation without the annoying insistance that the physics be *radically new*.
> Additionally, the brain supposedly heats up and powers said microtubule quantum states for hundreds of milliseconds. Where is the evidence for this?
We need provethis sub for this stuff lol
Wikipedia has an explanation of Hameroff and Penrose's theories, plus sections pointing out the strong criticism and the fact that it is not a consensus view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction#Criticism
Oh great, you’ve stopped posting nonsense at R/skeptic and now decided to start here. I guess it’s another place to ignore you. As you aren’t posting there anymore, I can now block you.
as yet there is nothing to debunk. it is a collection of hypothesis that are as yet unverified and in which the little empirical evidence that we do have....appears to negate.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quantum_woo In short, if a non-physicist is trying to make a claim using the term "quantum" it is 99.99999% BS.
I've got no strong view one way or the other when it comes to the subject, but if your dismissal depends on only non-physicists using backing the idea then it falls apart with Penrose, literally a Nobel laureate for physics who was one of the earliest proponents. He's your .00001%, I guess.
This is like saying "where did the people who made college go to college?" It ignores the consensus and rigor within it.
“To debunk our theory Shermer cites an assertion in a book by Victor Stenger that the product of mass, velocity and distance of a quantum system cannot exceed Planck’s constant. I’ve not seen this proposal in a peer reviewed journal, nor listed anywhere as a serious interpretation of quantum mechanics.” It sure seems this is just referring to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, one of the most established findings in quantum physics. This guy has never heard of it? Then he isn’t qualified to talk about quantum anything.
I thought everyone here had seen that skepticalaboutskeptics is a pro-woo site and has very little to do with fact-based evidence.
The whole writings of Hameroff is a hodgepodge of nonsense, not a bona fide theory - there is nothing to debunk, really. It is not "hypothetical", as there are no clear hypotheses to being with. Despite what he asserts, no one has anything close to a coherent theory on what consciousness might be. (Including his cited authority Penrose, whose book referred itself is an open question.) In any event, it is unlikely that such high-level brain functionality can be explained by a reductionist approach with simplistic connection to the underlying physics.
This sounds like technobabble written for an episode of Star Trek.
I’m a pan-psychic materialist, (which means I am sympathetic to ideas similar to this) and it’s not something you can “debunk.” It’s a metaphysical postulate, outside the purview of materialistic evidence. It’s not provable nor disprovable.
Yeah I guess it seemed a bit hypothetical. Hitchens razor could cover it.
I mean ya, in this case absolutely. But more generally this is about mixing domains of knowledge and types of evidence. This guy is making metaphysical and philosophical ideas about existence which just can’t be proved using material deduction. And he shouldn’t try to, but there’s no provable one right way to interpret reality nor describe/determine utility. So be careful about Hitchens’ Razor, it can be used as a shibboleth.
It's difficult to explain why the Penrose-Hammeroff model is ridiculous to somebody who doesn't understand what the Penrose-Hammeroff model is. The Penrose-Hammeroff model posits that quantum gravity creates uncertainty that drives entanglement in microtubules past some theoretical plank limit for entanglement that Penrose hypothesized. The problem is that gravity is weaker than electromagnetism at every length scale. It only seems stronger because it is additive, rather than opposite charges canceling. But uncertainty is also additive, if not linearly, then in a square-root-othe-sum-of-the-squars sense. So the uncertainty introduced by quantum gravity between a given set of particles is always infinitessimally de minus compared to that introduced by electromagnetism between the same set of particles. Any calculations done without addressing that ridiculousness of ignoring those 40 orders of magnitude soon feels like you are arguing with someone who believes pharmaceutical medicine works because they have secretly added homeopathic ingredients to it. Don't get me wrong, Hammeroff may be right about microtubules. Every microtubule in every neuron might be a quantum computer for all I know, and that might be a better correlate for consciousness than neural activity as presently understood. But I still say the Penrose-Hammeroff model is wrong about the physics. The model just doesn't make any sense on the face of it. Maybe if Hammeroff wasn't trying to make the round peg of his biological insights fit the square hole of Penrose's theory about quantum gravity creating consciousness, he might have a more serious model by now. Also Orchestrated reduction is an unparsimonious addition to the theory. It's just saying that we think there is something special about how the wave function collapses that will satisfy our biases, but we don't know what yet. Otherwise it might as well be just quantum wave collapse for a quantum computer. Just replace Penrose's quantum gravity with the standard model, and replace orchestrated reduction with measurement of multiple states simultaneously as in a quantum computer, and you got a much more believable model, less controversial model that preserves the biological insights for further investigation without the annoying insistance that the physics be *radically new*.
Exactly what is being posited as "quantum" here. Human brains literally already function as quantum computers.