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submitted 3 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] HawlSera@lemm.ee 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

They recently found evidence that not only was Penrose right all along about quantum effects in the brain but there's these crystaline things in your brain that do quantum shit, not very specific on all the details.. but the first thing I thought was

"Can't wait for Spirit Science to completely and delibrately misinterpret this to sell more rocks."

Edit: Maybe I was jumping the gun a bit about claiming Orch-OR itself was proven

Source on "Penrose was right": https://youtu.be/xa2Kpkksf3k

[-] Xendarq@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

I think you just did that as there is no experimental evidence at all to support Orch OR.

[-] HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

https://youtu.be/xa2Kpkksf3k

[-] turmacar@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Next up, Maxwell.

Turns out the secret to defeating entropy was demons all along.

[-] HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Not familiar with that one and I'm way too high right now to read an explanation.

[-] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 5 points 3 months ago

tl;dr Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment where an imaginary demon lets only hot molecules into a hot room and cold into a cold room (from each other), thereby violating thermodynamics.

Maxwell's demon, a thought experiment of chambers filled with hot and cold gas, connected by a microscopic trapdoor.

Thermodynamics/statistics shows that on average hot particles will go from the hotter side to the colder more than vice versa, gradually evening things out. That's increase of entropy (increase of 'disorder', because there's less 'order' of the separation between hot and cold regions.)

Maxwell's demon sits at the trapdoor and opens it only for hot particles from the cold side to go to the hot side, and cold ones from the hot side to go to the cold side. So the separation gets more; entropy decreases. But the demon apparently isn't increasing entropy elsewhere or expending non-negligible energy.

Therefore violating thermodynamics which, I think Einstein famously said, is basically the only physical law you can be completely certain won't be violated.

[-] HawlSera@lemm.ee 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I think I'm too dumb to get it in general...

But I do hope that one day we can rewrite all the laws of the universe and invent God, that's the dream. To one day have a world where anything is possible. Till then we are stuck with the laws of physics.

[-] ultramaven@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago

God is just E=mc^2

If you can attain enough energy to convert it into mass, you are all-powerful.

[-] bunchberry@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

OrchOR makes way too many wild claims for there to easily be any evidence for it. Even if we discover quantum effects (in the sense of scalable interference effects which have absolutely not been demonstrated) in the brain that would just demonstrate there are quantum effects in the brain, OrchOR is filled with a lot of assumptions which go far beyond this and would not be anywhere near justified. One of them being its reliance on gravity-induced collapse, which is nonrelativistic, meaning it cannot reproduce the predictions of quantum field theory, our best theory of the natural world.

A theory is ultimately not just a list of facts but a collection of facts under a single philosophical interpretation of how they relate to one another. This is more of a philosophical issue, but even if OrchOR proves there is gravitational induced collapse and that there is quantum effects in the brain, we would still just take these two facts separately. OrchOR tries to unify them under some bizarre philosophical interpretation called the Penrose–Lucas argument that says because humans can believe things that are not proven, therefore human consciousness must be noncomputable, and because human consciousness is not computable, it must be reducible to something that you cannot algorithmically predict its outcome, which would be true of an objective collapse model. Ergo, wave function collapse causes consciousness.

Again, even if they proved that there is scalable quantum interference effects in the brain, even if they proved that there is gravitationally induced collapse, that alone does not demonstrate OrchOR unless you actually think the Penrose-Lucas argument makes sense. They would just be two facts which we would take separately as fact. It would just be a fact that there is gravitionally induced collapse, a fact that there is scalable quantum interference effects in the brain but there would be no reason to adopt any of their claims about "consciousness."

But even then, there is still no strong evidence that the brain in any way makes use of quantum interference effects, only loose hints that it may or not be possible with microtubules, and there is definitely no evidence of the gravitationally induced collapse.