Naked Science Forum
General Science => General Science => Topic started by: smart on 18/06/2016 12:01:50
-
Non-classical hypercomputation in living processes is poorly understood by science. Can the speed of consciousness be measured through neuronal activity? Thus by measuring the speed of quantum coherence and energy transfer (exocytosis) in microtubules, it may be possible to better understand the mecanism of neuronal hypercomputation in brain activity. More importantly, a experimental method to detect synaptic quantum tunnelling in neurons should be developed to measure the effects of synaptic exocytosis inhibition on conscious activity.
-
Can the speed of consciousness be measured through neuronal activity?
The roughly 20cm between your retina and visual cortex would take about 2ms, at a typical nerve conduction speed of 100m/s.
That is if there are no synapses in the way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity#Normal_conduction_velocities
a experimental method to detect synaptic quantum tunnelling in neurons
Experiments with Electro-EncephaloGram (EEG) show that it takes about 300ms for a visual stimulus to elicit a conscious reaction. That is enough for about 30m of nerve transmission (if there were no synapses in the way).
But there are very many synapses on the path from visual input to conscious recognition.
So if synapses use some form of quantum tunneling, it must be a fairly slowly-acting quantum effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_(neuroscience)
Non-classical hypercomputation in living processes is poorly understood by science.
That may be overstating it a bit. Does science generally even recognize "Classical hypercomputation", let alone "Non-classical hypercomputation"?
-
Does science generally even recognize "Classical hypercomputation", let alone "Non-classical hypercomputation"?
I think a living organism is not a Turing Machine (TM), however it can certainly hypercompute. It is a fallacy thinking that living and conscious organisms do not have the biological capacity to compute beyond the TM paradigm, in a non-classical way:
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1210/1210.4819.pdf
Consciousness is self-organized and emergent. Therefore biological hypercomputation is perhaps a requirement for consciousness to emerge naturally in living systems:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00408/full
Self-organized criticality (SOC) in brain dynamics offers a perspective on the non-classical computational capacity of the brain:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00166/full
Thus, is the speed of conscious activity dependent on the emergent properties of biological hypercomputation, and does all living organisms have the capacity to hypercompute and self-organize through consciousness ?
-
Considering how quickly electrons move, our consciousness is dreadfully slow. In fact, it fascinates me how directly linked to your speech center it is.
Try saying something in your head more quickly than you can say it aloud. You can't. You might think you are but you're not. You can only think thoughts with the same speed you can say them out loud, even though no physical limitations are present. Kinda weird, ain't it?
-
I often wonder why our subconscious can be the worlds greatest supercomputer, doing so many calculations a second and processing so much information every second, yet our consciousness can only have two streams at any given moment (one speech track and one music track at a time only), and is so slow in its ability to grasp concepts and translate data.
I think about that a lot actually, how undeveloped our consciousness actually is, how our subconscious rules pretty much everything, takes care of everything, guides everything, hell, even knows our decisions before we consciously make them! (putting the concept of free will in question), and I then wonder if our consciousness is nothing more than a crumb given to us by our subconscious to keep us content as we figure out ways to keep ourselves alive. Kinda like a "here's a crumb, now go get me some food and build me a better house" lol.
-
Various studies conducted in various ways indicate that the delay between detection of a stimulus and its presentation to consciousness is about one third of a second. In other words, a subject's brain activity changes more than 300ms before they actually report that they are aware of something taking place. So our conscious selves are existing about a third of second behind reality. Looked at another way, a tennis player at Wimbledon is reacting to balls flying over the net far faster than their conscious brain can operate...
-
Hypercomputational consciousness may collapse the wave function at speeds faster than light (FTL). Discrete quantum computations in microtubules might provide evidences of biological quantum coherence/entanglement in brain activity.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1080/03640210701704004/full
-
All known instances of consciousness have been in somethings brain.
What the fastest brain has been depends on what you take as a reference, but the local surface of the earth is a common datum for this sort of thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record
which takes the fastest consiuosness to roughly the speed of sound.
Space travel adds roughly another order of magnitude.
Why do you ask?
-
All known instances of consciousness have been in somethings brain.
What the fastest brain has been depends on what you take as a reference, but the local surface of the earth is a common datum for this sort of thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record
which takes the fastest consiuosness to roughly the speed of sound.
Space travel adds roughly another order of magnitude.
Why do you ask?
I'm looking for evidences that synaptic quantum tunnelling may transmit information at faster than light speeds. The biological mecanism of neuronal hypercomputation could also explain how water activity in microtubules generates conscious experience through orchestrated objective reduction of the wave function.