Roger Penrose, a great astrophysicist, did some moonlighting in the worlds of neurology and neuropsychology in the late 1980s, and he developed a theory a quantum theory of consciousness. The idea behind it was (and is, in later more-developed forms) that microtubules, particularly those in neurons, are small enough so that quantum effects become pertinent in understanding their operations. Penrose contended that quantum physics allows for deterministic but non-algorithmic processes, and that these may be harnessed by the operations of the brain, resulting in consciousness. To put the idea crudely, using an old image, the microtubule is the closed box inside which a “cat” is both dead and alive. To refine that a bit: Penrose tells us that there must be a border zone where quantum effects still exist but are becoming of less salience as scales increase toward those of the world of Newtonian physics, the world of what Bertrand Russell once called "medium sized dry goods." The...
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think it would be great to come up with ideas that people were still trying to improve upon in a century. That is the situation with Einstein's structure of ideas, especially the general theory of relativity. Physicists are probing its limits not in the hope that they can somehow over come it and erase it from the blackboard of history -- that won't happen --but in the expectation that in time somebody will do to Einstein what he did to Newton. Roughly speaking, Einstein showed that Newton was right about a special case within a broader situation. Outside of this special case (a stable framework for observations, within which objects move at slow velocities) things work in non-Newtonian ways. Could even Einstein's understanding of physics turn out to be a special case within a broader situation. It is almost certain that this WILL happen. The question is: where do the Einsteinian rules break down? Find that out, and come up with the broader theory, and your name my frie...
I believe I may have mentioned at some point in the history of this blog, or its precursor, that at least one great physicist, Roger Penrose, believes quantum mechanics offers the key to the understanding of how consciousness arises within the function of the human brain. Today, I simply want to make the observation that quantum computing is no longer a hypothesis. It is a fact. Google declared its breakthrough this year. Some of the premier quantitative-analytic hedge funds in the world, including Renaissance and DE Shaw, have high hopes for quantum computing and expect that it will help them discover and make profitable use of now-invisible patterns in the markets. Let us be clear on what Google is saying. It says it has physical operating computers that make use of the quantum aspects of matter to outperform conventional (digital) computers for some specific tasks, a situation it grandly calls quantum supremacy. The qualifying phrase there, "some specific tasks,"...
What follows may appear to have been plagiarized from the wikipedia article on The Problem of Universals. It isn't though: I was the original author of much of that article, and the material that follows still survives there in roughly the form I originally gave it years ago. So I feel free to steal it back from myself. --------------- William James learned pragmatism, the way of understanding an idea by its practical effects, from his friend Peirce, but he gave it new significance. (Which was not to Peirce's taste - he came to complain that James had "kidnapped" the term and eventually to call himself a "pragmaticist" instead.) Although James certainly agreed with Peirce and against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in his ontology: From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato and Aristotle, philosophers should...