not even wrong
Hah, too meaningless to even be wrong… I love how scientists think.
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Free will can only exist in the context of the individual self. When we observe that free will doesn’t exist, the implication is not that you are a pre-programmed automaton going through motions. The implication is that you are not.
Free will is just a poorly defined term with no useful meaning.
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Unless this is the simulation 
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What is “you” here?
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There may be macroscopic cases but they generally depend on having really uniformly low energy states, which makes their existence in a warm protoplasmic mixture unlikely. And I’d argue considering the material leads to an even larger problem with the idea of special quantum effects in the brain, which is that unlike in superfluids and condensates, they don’t seem to manifest in any smaller pieces of it.
We have a reasonably good idea of how cells like neurons work. They’re found in most animals, and microtubules in single-celled organisms too, and it doesn’t seem any biologists feel effects beyond regular chemistry are necessary to explain how they act. It’s true we may have less understanding of their aggregate behavior in people, but shouldn’t us not understanding the software make us less eager to claim it needs different hardware?
Combine this with just how bad most arguments supporting consciousness as a special quantum effect are – even the invoking of Gödel’s theorem can be discredited in one sentence – and I would say that while, sure, it isn’t necessarily disproven, there’s no reason to think it’s anything but a non-starter and good reason to suppose otherwise.
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It does if you think you chose the result when, in fact, it was chosen by a computer and you only, after the fact, determined that you “chose” the result that the computer selected.
None of this is really news. Variants of this have been seen for decades in experiments. Is says more about the nature of subjective sense of self, consciousness, and how our conscious mind isn’t the thing making decisions, as much as “we” like to pretend that “we” decide things.
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I think our conscious mind may not choose our preferences, but it totally CAN control our behavior.
If we consciously choose that for ourselves.
You’re probably right, but in terms of current human understanding and the amount of what we still don’t even realize we don’t know, I think it would be shortsighted to completely shelve quantum mind theory. Should it be a research topic that we are focusing scientific energy on? No. Hell no. Should we shelve it? No. Is it a fun theory to mess around with just in terms of thought experiments, why not? However, as it currently stands as a theory should it be taken seriously? Not really.
-The thoughts of a person with virtually zero education on quantum field theory [Me]
EDIT: Just a quick tad bit of information I remember seeing a while back in regards to quantum mind theory. I believe it was something about being able to pinpoint consciousness to a specific part of any creatures brain, but specifically complex thought in humans and instead seeing it jump around through virtually random clusters of neurons… I don’t know if that’s BS and I don’t have a citation so that could all be wrong as fuck but it’s something I vaguely remember.
I believe our consciousness is an after the fact illusion that all of the running routines in various parts of our brain create after these processes determine our actions. It is a layer of UI on top of the actual guts of the system.
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UI is for User control/direction of a system. Why bother with that if there are no choices to make?
I’ve seen it said that consciousness as we know it relies on language; it’s basically a serial app running on parallel hardware. Take it away and all you’re left with is awareness, minus self-awareness.
Sounds about right to me.
What makes you think we get a choice about whether to bother or not.
There are plenty of neuroscientists that say, no, there is no point in bothering, we’re just going through the motions.
You’re still making a categorical error though. It isn’t that there are no choices to make. It is that the “you” that the part talking to me here is doesn’t happen to be the one making those choices. It is a glaze on top of all of the other systems of your brain, the deep brain if you like, which makes all kinds of choices. We just pretend that your conscious self is driving the ship instead of largely being along for a read and writing a narrative of events that have just occurred after the fact.
See Philosophical zombie - Wikipedia for some discussions of some of this conceptually in passing. I ran into all of this in Susan Blackmoore’s work, which was a text for a program I was in:
While not proven in any sense, there is strong evidence that we aren’t conscious as we think of it and a strong faction supports this within neuroscience.
See also:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/do-zimboes-dream-of-electric-s.html
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Then why the Interface? Why not just a seat belt?
Lots of people wonder this too. I think Peter Watts wrote a whole couple of novels asking this.
Maybe it provides an evolutionary advantage. Otherwise, maybe it happened and hasn’t given us enough of a disadvantage to be bred out.
It isn’t like the universe cares about whether we are conscious or not.
Even if we are conscious to some degree, experiments seem to indicate we are very much not conscious in the way we commonly think we are.
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It isn’t like the universe cares about whether we are conscious or not.
I prefer Sagan’s take.
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Seems like a gloss on religion to me.
“We are too special! We are!”
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Is anything not a gloss on something truer?
maybe I wouldn’t call Sagan… religious. He didn’t think we were special. He thought it was ALL special.
I agree.
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Nope but he comes from a culture that is, that thinks the world has meaning, and that humanity has a central and important place in it.
I recommend reading Stross’ blog post, linked above.
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