Saturday, April 02, 2005

The Quantum Brain

This is for a fellow who speaks of jello.

"....as modern biological science has penetrated down into the subcellular levels of living matter, and in particular those that constitute the brain, it has indeed begun to encounter the eerie quantum effects that have confounded physicists for a century. These effects are not analogies, they are real, and, as we will see, it is only by considering them that we can begin to understand the building blocks of life. That this is so is not yet widely known to most biologists, but it soon will be. And it will have a dramatic effect on both science and on scientists.
At the subcellular level, matter itself actually looks and behaves (in the words of one physicist) “more like a thought” than like the cogs of a machine. Nothing in the world that causes the particle to jump, discovered the first quantum mechanics. But the first premise of science is that everything happens solely as a result of causes in the world. “If we are going to stick to this dammed quantum-jumping,” complained one of its founders, “then I regret that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory.”
Furthermore, if subatomic particles can freely choose to come and go as they please, then perhaps old-fashioned claims as to our own nonmechanical nature aren’t so archaic after all: Suddenly, the machinery of brain might prove the illusion, mind and will a more foundational reality. A number of the founders of quantum mechanics wondered out loud whether the ancient mystics might not be right after all: Perhaps there is a Player. Standing apart from the mere “physical system,” he everywhere spins the shots, making everything happen this way rather than that. Wolfgang Pauli thought so: Tongue not wholly in cheek, he simply referred to the so-called exclusion principle, a cornerstone of modern physics and chemistry, as “God.”
It turns out, however, that the amount of absolute “freedom” individually available to the bits and pieces of the universe is unbelievably tiny. It amounts to much only on the scale of atomic and subatomic particles. At any scale large enough to be of concern to human beings (e.g., for stuff the size of viruses), the net effect of all that freedom is zero—it just cancels out. Electrons may jump from here to there for no reason whatsoever but planets don’t; nor boulders; nor grains of sand; nor we.
But now the revolution: It appears possible that instead of averaging freedom away as usual, the human brain, itself a machine, has nonetheless evolved a unique structure that harnesses subatomic “choice,” concentrates it, and amplifies it upward, scale by scale, taking advantage, as we will see, of the strange facts of “chaos.” Of all things, it’s the machine in our head that lets us transcend our own mechanicality.
Our brains are, if you will, “quantum computers.” But they are not of the sort now making headlines. Subtle quantum effects in the brain afford us a capacity we would not otherwise have, yet to make maximum use of such effects our natural brains are now designing even better synthetic ones. These employ quantum principles directly, not, as in the human brain, in subtle and nearly invisible fashion. ....if quantum processes are the source within the human brain of genuine thought—as also of genuine will, intention, and choice—then the quantum computers we are on the verge of designing (or whose evolution we are at least facilitating) may turn themselves into genuine sentient beings. They may have as much intelligence as we have, quite possibly more: There are severe limits to how much quantum weirdness the human brain may employ...limits on how much a synthetic brain might employ are far less severe. Vast, synthetic, self-evolving, superintelligent, and completely sentient computers must surely sound like pure science fiction, but they are not.”
(The Quantum Brain
By Jeffrey Satinover :6-8)


There is a misanthropic tendency among evolutionists. They cannot seem to accept that human beings and being human is somehow special and unique, more than humus. Yet if given only Chance and Nature, Life could evolve then there would most likely be extraterrestrials. If there were extraterrestrials then they would most likely have already walked the patterns of Life that given the limitations of the physical would have to have some semblence of similarity to our own. In the end, they would come to an exponential increase technology, the practical application of knowledge. Therefore, they would have already created superior sentient computers which would cause a further exponential increase in technology. This they, you know, THEM, would then be bending the Cosmos to their will in ways that would leave signs. There would be star farms, harnessing the energy of the Cosmos. Are these the type of signs of intelligence that are to be found? No. The sort of signs of intelligence that can be found do not have an explanation from within the universe, so they are rejected by evolutionists. And the position is come to in which the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is applying filtering standards to distinguish between the work of Intelligent Design and Nature based on code and coding that if applied to the genetic code would immediately detect Design over and over again. No one would be trying to argue that adaptive capacity written into a code could somehow begin to write the code itself, by Nature's "selections."

For some reason, those who accept extraterrestrials cannot accept anything that is extracosmosial, no matter what they observe.

It seems to me a consistent pattern of Nature that Chaos is being used for types of Life to be born and then born again and again. (Although some life does not heed the advice of Christ to be born again into spiritual life nor the advice of Plato to come on out of the womb/cave to see the light in the life of the mind.)

Did you hear about them, though? It seems that the Naturalist and the religious can all agree that one day, one way or another, all human brains will be out of time.


I suppose that the utlimate question is, when you are out of space-time then where are you?

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