11 replies to this topic

[kevin]

Link: http://www.nature.co...1/030901-8.html
Date: 09-05-03
Author: Philip Ball
Source: Nature - Science Update
Title: Molecules of Life Come in Waves
Comment: With the quantum phenomena of entanglement being shown at the macroscopic level as well as biological molecules exhibiting wave like phenomena, the synergistic effect of physics with biology will give rise to more insights as to the nature of human consciousness, time and reality.

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Molecules of Life come in Waves
Compounds found in cells show quantum behaviour.
5 September 2003
PHILIP BALL


A wave-like particle can pass through both slots in a barrier.
© SPL

Physicists have watched biological molecules become waves in a dramatic demonstration of the effects of quantum mechanics1.

It's not clear that biological molecules act like quantum waves in this way as they go about their business in living cells. However, physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, UK, and psychologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona in Tucson have proposed that consciousness might arise from wave-like quantum-mechanical effects involving protein filaments called microtubules in nerve cells.

It would be going too far to suggest that the latest observations provide any support for this idea - for one thing, microtubules are much bigger and heavier than the molecules used in the new experiment. But they do demonstrate that the quantum world has wider boundaries than we might have supposed.

Scientists know that subatomic particles and individual atoms can behave like waves, in line with the famous quantum notion of wave-particle duality. But these properties are thought to give way to classical, billiard-ball-like behaviour as particles get larger. Quantum mechanics is needed to describe how large molecules vibrate, spin and move, but the molecules themselves are seen as occupying a well-defined position at any moment.

Wave-like objects, in contrast, are smeared out. A particle behaving like a wave can, for example, seem to pass through two slits in a barrier simultaneously. When this happens, the two waves emerging from the slits may interfere with each other.

Big waves

Light waves produce a pattern of light and dark bands in two-slit experiments, where the beams alternately reinforce and cancel each other. Beams of quantum particles such as electrons generate a similar pattern.

In 1999, Markus Arndt and colleagues at the University of Vienna, Austria, reported an interference pattern from a beam of C60 molecules passed through an array of slits2. These molecules - hollow spheres made up of 60 carbon atoms, also known as buckyballs - were the biggest objects shown to exhibit quantum wave-like behaviour.

Now the Vienna group has seen an interference pattern for molecules of tetraphenylporphyrin (TPP). These plate-shaped molecules are twice the width of buckyballs. The core of a TPP molecule is a porphyrin chemical group, which is the key component of light-absorbing chlorophyll in plants and oxygen-binding haemoglobin in blood.

The researchers have also broken their own record for the heaviest objects seen to display wave-like interference, using fluorinated C60 molecules.


References
Hackermüller, L. et al. Wave nature of biomolecules and fluorofullerenes. Physical Review Letters, 91, 090408, (2003). |Article|
Arndt, M. et al. Wave-particle duality of C60 molecules. Nature, 401, 680, (1999). |Article

[patrick]

I don't buy quantum consciousness. It's too much like a "Spooky Hand" for me.

[kevin]

How do you feel about Entanglment..

http://physicsweb.or...cle/news/5/8/20
http://www.qubit.org...tang/index.html
http://www.newscient...p?id=ns99992564
http://abcnews.go.co...port981022.html

It's pretty spooky itself..

If the measuring the state (act of choice), of an entangled photon, instantaneously affects the measurement of its correlated partner no matter how far apart they are... what does that say for the nature of time itself.. and I wonder how Peter Lynds proposal that nothing is 'instantaneous' may fit into this...

I haven't been able to bring up the article because of a connectivity problem, but this month's nature has an article that discusses the results some researchers have had in showing entanglement at the macroscopic level in magnetic crystals..

stranger and stranger... are we heading through a looking glass?

[patrick]

I feel perfectly fine with entanglement. There's really nothing spooky about it; it's just physics.

What's spooky about quantum consciousness is that it is nothing more than a thinly veiled dualism. It tries to place consciousness 'out of reach' when we haven't even looked everywhere we can reach yet.

[Mind]

At this point in the debate, I must agree with Patrick. Quantum consciousness has been proposed but with no explanation of mechanism. Of course this puts it in basically the same boat as other theories of consiousness. Still I don't see how it is any better a theory at this point. Only better tools and a greater understanding of physics will bring us closer.

Of course, if consiousness is an illusion (refer to Libet experiments) then no amount of physical understanding will allow us to crack this problem.

[kevin]

Actually Mind, that consciousness is an illusion is only one interpetation of Libet's experiments, another is that the brain refers information 'backwards in time' from a near future experience, like prescience, which is something that is allowed for in quantum field theory (so I've read, not that I understand how it does.. yet).

Libet's experiments attempt to show that unconscious cerebral activity is responsible for the initiation of voluntary action bringing into question the nature of freewill and whether or not 'consciousness' is just a response. This might be inferred from one set of experiments where he shows that 'readiness potential' occured up to 350ms before the subject recorded that they were conscious of their intent to move. Another way to interpet the readiness potential is that it is being inferred backward in time from a future action.

from http://www.conscious.../Time_Flies.htm

An interesting experiment to test whether or not information can be referred backwards in time from the near future was done by Dick Bierman and Dean Radin. They found that subjects exhibited a physiological response towards violent or sexual pictures, shown at random times, before the image actually appeared. Dick Bierman repeated the experiments in 2002 using fMRI imaging and found emotional responses up to 4 seconds before and other labs with similar experiments had similar results. It seems this outlines some form of 'presentiment'.

Here's a link to a presentation he made on his results at "TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS - TUCSON 2002"

http://www.conscious...tucson-2002.ppt

and an abstract and paper to the work are thought provoking.

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ANOMALOUS ANTICIPATORY BRAIN ACTIVATION PRECEDING EXPOSURE OF EMOTIONAL AND NEUTRAL PICTURES
Dick J. Bierman and H. Steven Scholte
University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, Netherlands
Abstract
The present study examined the neural substrates of anticipation in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Ten subjects were scanned while 48 pictures were presented. Each stimulus sequence started with the 4.2 seconds presentation of a fixation point before and during which the anticipation was measured. After the exposure of the stimulus picture which lasted also 4.2 second there was a period of 8.4 seconds during which the subject was supposed to recover from the stimulus presentation.

It is found that large parts of the visual cortex do show larger activity after emotional stimuli than after calm. All brain regions that show a difference have also a response on calms except for regions that are at or near the amygdala. Here violent and erotic stimuli do generate a response but the response on calm stimuli is flat.

Anticipatory effects tend to influence baseline values and hence influence the response values. This might be a problem if the subject is guessing the upcoming stimulus condition correctly but with proper randomization this is theoretically impossible. Great care was taken to randomize stimulus conditions with replacement while using different pictures for each stimulus presentation .

Results suggest that, in spite of proper randomization, anticipatory activation preceding emotional stimuli is larger than the anticipatory activation preceding neutral stimuli. For the male subjects this appeared before the erotic stimuli while for the female both erotic and violent stimuli produced this anomalous effect. Possible normal explanations of this apparent anomaly, also called ‘presentiment’, are discussed. Most notably the possibility that this effect is just a result of ‘fishing’ for the right analysis out of many possible analyses. Exploratory results are presented dealing with differential effects in the responses to emotional stimuli and calm visual stimuli.

PDF File of Paper
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I've just come across this website

http://www.conscious.../quantum-mind2/

and have had a look at the program they had this year... lots to ponder on there.

[chubtoad]

http://www.conscious...ecoherence.html
From Science, February 4, 2000
NEUROSCIENCE:
Cold Numbers Unmake the Quantum Mind
Charles Seife


Calculations show that collapsing wave functions in the scaffolding of the brain can't explain the mystery of consciousness. Sir Roger Penrose is incoherent, and Max Tegmark says he can prove it. According to Tegmark's calculations, the neurons in Penrose's brain are too warm to be performing quantum computations--a key requirement for Penrose's favorite theory of consciousness.

Penrose, the Oxford mathematician famous for his work on tiling the plane with various shapes, is one of a handful of scientists who believe that the ephemeral nature of consciousness suggests a quantum process. In the realm of the extremely small, an object with a property such as polarization or spin may exist in any of a number of quantum states. Or, bizarrely, it may inhabit several quantum states at once, a property called superposition. A quantum superposition is extremely fragile. If an atom in such a state interacts with its environment--by being bumped or prodded by nearby atoms, for instance--its waveform can "collapse," ending the superposition by forcing the atom to commit to one of its possible states.

To some investigators, this process of coherence and collapse seems strikingly similar to what goes on in the mind. Multiple ideas flit around below the threshold of awareness, then somehow solidify and wind up at the front of our consciousness. Quantum consciousness aficionados suspect that the analogy might be more than a coincidence. Eleven years ago, Penrose publicly joined their number, speculating in a popular book called The Emperor's New Mind that the brain might be acting like a quantum computer.
"Between the preconscious and conscious transition, there's no obvious threshold," says Penrose's sometime collaborator Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Ideas start out in superposition in the preconscious and then wind up in the conscious mind as the superposition ends and the waveform collapses. "The collapse is where consciousness comes in," says Hameroff.

But what exactly is collapsing? From his studies of neurophysiology, Hameroff knew of a possible seat for the quantum nature: "microtubules," tiny tubes constructed out of a protein called tubulin that make up the skeletons of our cells, including neurons. Tubulin proteins can take at least two different shapes--extended and contracted--so, in theory, they might be able to take both states at once. If so, then an individual tubulin protein might affect its neighbors' quantum states, which in turn affect their neighbors'--and so forth, throughout the brain. In the 1990s, Penrose and Hameroff showed how such a tubulin-based quantum messaging system could act like a huge quantum computer that might be the seat of our conscious experience.

The idea attracted a few physicists, some consciousness researchers, and a large number of mystics. Quantum physicists, however, largely ignored it as too speculative to be worth testing with numerical calculations. Now Tegmark, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, has done the numbers. In the February issue of Physical Review E, Tegmark presents calculations showing just what a terrible environment the brain is for quantum computation.
Combining data about the brain's temperature, the sizes of various proposed quantum objects, and disturbances caused by such things as nearby ions, Tegmark calculated how long microtubules and other possible quantum computers within the brain might remain in superposition before they decohere. His answer: The superpositions disappear in 10-13 to 10-20 seconds. Because the fastest neurons tend to operate on a time scale of 10-3 seconds or so, Tegmark concludes that whatever the brain's quantum nature is, it decoheres far too rapidly for the neurons to take advantage of it.

"If our neurons have anything at all to do with our thinking, if all these electrical firings correspond in any way to our thought patterns, we are not quantum computers," says Tegmark. The problem is that the matter inside our skulls is warm and ever-changing on an atomic scale, an environment that dooms any nascent quantum computation before it can affect our thought patterns. For quantum effects to become important, the brain would have to be a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

Hameroff is unconvinced. "It's obvious that thermal decoherence is going to be a problem, but I think biology has ways around it," he says. Water molecules in the brain tissue, for instance, might keep tubulin coherent by shielding the microtubules from their environment. "In back-of-the-envelope calculations, I made up those 13 orders of magnitude pretty easily."
Some members of the quantum-consciousness community, however, concede that Tegmark has landed a body blow on Penrose-Hameroff-type views of the brain. "Those models are severely impacted by these results," says physicist Henry Stapp of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. (Stapp's own theory of quantum consciousness, he says, is unaffected by Tegmark's arguments.)

Physicists outside the fray, such as IBM's John Smolin, say the calculations confirm what they had suspected all along. "We're not working with a brain that's near absolute zero. It's reasonably unlikely that the brain evolved quantum behavior," he says. Smolin adds: "I'm conscientiously staying away" from the debate.

Collections under which this article appears: Neuroscience
Volume 287, Number 5454 Issue of 4 Feb 2000, p 791 ©2000 by The American Association for the Advancement of Science
Copyright © 2000 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

[peterhuybregts]

sounds like : a mind is pressing it's (electronical) thoughts against the magnetic field of the sky wich pounds it trough to wherever in the Universe, in reverse I'd call it a big quantum conciousness.

Peter Pan.

if huh? Universal brainwaves caused by us searching for us. (intelligent sky)

[dankomed]

Hello guys!

I think that Quantum Consciousness idea is not at all realizable option in the form presented above [Hameroff-Tegmark debate, the pseudo-scientific arguments by Dick Bierman et al., Libet's speculations etc.].
This however does not mean that there is not something rational in the idea to use quantum theory to study consciousness. Some of the quantum effects are already found in biology i.e. multidimensional tunneling in enzyme catalysis, something that is hard science, and not pseudo-scientific speculation.
Possibly you can find something interesting on my web

http://freewebhostin...com/d/dankomed/

and possibly you would be surprized that there is way the idea of Q-mind to be tested. Currently I am trying to organize experimental setup, but some preliminary physical calculations must be done. So it is scientifically testable idea and cannot be immunized with suggestions like "mind is not observable". Indeed in area called psychophysiology info about the conscious states is obtained via reports of the experience by volunteers, or via observation of the induced via conditioning behavior in animals.
And a final precaution: neuroscience and possibly Q-mind has nothing to do with PSI-phenomena, telepathy, "presponse" etc. "idiotic" things. All of the experiments quoted above [Bierman, Libet] are fraud and consciously done "misinterpretation" of the authors in order to "get" the sensation.

Danko Georgiev, M.D.

[dankomed]

Something on the "presponse".
A will explain what exactly is Bierman doing:
1) he shows images with sexual content to a volunteer [I was told by a friend that on a lecture he boldly gave an example of the type of pictures showing a woman with c**k in her mouth. I have been on Bierman's lectures, and I will say that Bierman's moral values are so pathologically chaged that I trust my friend's words at 100%]. Thus it is too obvious that such sexual image will have great impact upon the volunteer's psyche and will lead to neural activation.
2) He uses what is called "gambler's fallacy" i.e. the unconscious neural excitation continuously INCREASES with every next image shown that is not sexual one. The subject has the impression that the CHANCE the next image to be sexual one is INCREASED after a series of non-sexual images. This subjective feeling for "increment of the chance" is indeed manifestation of the increment of the neural unconscious excitation.
3) Bierman registers the neural arousal BEFORE each image has occured. But because the neural excitation GROWS IN TIME, he obtains PSEUDO-PROOF OF A PRESPONSE.
In order to explain why it is so let's estimate the neural arousal before each image in arbitrary units say x. In time the arousal will be x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x etc. When a sexual image is shown the subject gets a kind of satisfaction that he has guessed the occurence of such image and his neural excitation drops to an arbitrary value, in order to start increasing again in time e.g. drops to 2x and then again increases 3x, 4x, 5x and so on.
Now we easily can see that the neural arousal before a sexual image is ALWAYS greater than before a non-sexual one. AND WHAT IS EVEN MORE OBVIOUS IS THAT IF WE APPLY PSEUDO-STATISTICAL ESTIMATION OF THE AROUSAL we will obtain that before the sexual images the neural arousal is ~ 2 times greater.
This is simple mathematical FRAUD:
the mean value of x, 2x, 3x, ..., (n-1).x
expressed as [x+2x+,...,+(n-1).x] / [n-1]
IS EXACTLY (1/2).n.x !!!

So my advice is NOT TO READ THE RESULTS OF BIERMAN'S PAPERS BUT TO READ HOW HE HAS PERFORMED THE EXPERIMENTS AND HOW HE USES THE "STATISTICS". I would say he has never studied such a discipline.

Danko Georgiev, M.D.

[al8zz8]

Danko,

your remarks on what you call "presponse" could only be serious if those erotic images were distributed non-randomly. To make it simple for you: your "logic" already fails if after dropping to 2x, you accidentally get an erotic image again.
Besides that logical pitfall, 2 issues are essential:
a) Neural excitation does not increase linearly!
b) "Gambler's fallacy" is actually a conscious, mental process but we're talking about subconscious effects here, so putting this into context is just speculation, Danko!

Thanks for your attention.
Al

[dankomed]

Al,

I know very well what happens when you present 2 erotic images one after another. However I try to explain from where Bierman's error comes and not to teach you in statistics. You have of course many such cycles, and exactly when you make the mean appearance of the erotic image increase (i.e. 1 per 10-12 images) then you make the "presponse" more evident. Bierman's logic is exactly the opposite, he thinks that such kind of "dilution" makes his experiment better.
Also Bierman's different experiments does not produce the same manifestation of the presponse, only shows that IT IS.
On the point a) I pretty well know that there is non-linear response, I just make my mathematical sketch simpler for understanding. I nowhere have seen Bierman to investigate the NATURE OF THE NON-LINEARITY.
On point b) I would say you should read some neurobiology, and there would be too "technical" to explain you here the mechanisms of "signal transduction". Your reasoning is just EXAMPLE how the shortness of knowledge in the topic leads to incorrect conclusion. YES, UNCONSCIOUS NEURAL ACTIVITIES CAN AFFECT OR MODULATE CONSCIOUSNESS!
I do not intend to make you not believe in the presponse. I even suggest that your unconscious presponse has already occurred while I was reading that message.

Regards,

Danko Georgiev, M.D.