I show that the cloneability of information is the key difference between classical computer and quantum computer. As information stored and processed by neurons is cloneable, brain (human or non-human) is a classical computer. Penrose argued with the Gödel theorem that human brain is not classical. I demonstrate with an example why his argument is flawed. At the end, I discuss how to go beyond quantum computer.
I show that the cloneability of information is the key difference between classical computer and quantum computer. As information stored and processed by neurons is cloneable, brain (human or non-human) is a classical computer. Penrose argued with the Gödel theorem that human brain is not classical. I demonstrate with an example why his argument is flawed. At the end, I discuss how to go beyond quantum computer.
This paper is based on the book (O. Kupervasser, Application of New Cybernetics in Physics, Elsevier, 2017). Human brain has very powerful intellect. Indeed, it seems that its intellectual possibilities are much more than possibilities of usual computers using genetic algorithm and random search (A.S. Potapov, Artificial Intellect and Universal Intelligence, Polytechnics, Saint Petersburg, 2012 (in Russian).). Our brain has also such especial property as consciousness. Some researchers suppose that these properties are a result of special structures of brain. Really, may be our brain is a quantum computer (R. Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989, R. Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, Oxford University Press, New York, 1994)? We know that a quantum computer is highly parallel device with principally insuperable protection from external observation. A quantum computer can resolve some tasks that are inaccessible for usual computers. However, it can be demonstrated that continuous unstable classical computer has the same properties as a quantum computer (O. Kupervasser, Application of New Cybernetics in Physics, Elsevier, 2017). Moreover, it seems that the main properties of a brain (powerful intellect and consciousness) can be explained by invisible correlation with surround world. Similarly, clock’s gear wheel very accurately operates in spite of absence of any intellect only because the gear wheel is a part of the highly correlated clock. We usually suppose that our world is some random set of low correlated events. However, the world, may be, is some highly correlated device (L. Susskind, J. Lindesay, An Introduction to Black Holes, Information and the String Theory Revolution: The Holographic Universe, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2004). And human beings are its “gear wheels”. It seems that Big Bang theory suppose such point of view. This pure philosophical reasonings can lead to some practical conclusions. We suppose to use instead of usual random search for computers some random number generators which are in complex correlations with surround world. It can give to computers some prototype of the such especial “human intuition”, described above.
Based on a calculation of neural decoherence rates, we argue that the degrees of freedom of the human brain that relate to cognitive processes should be thought of as a classical rather than quantum system, i.e., that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the current classical approach to neural network simulations. We find that the decoherence time scales ( approximately 10(-13)-10(-20) s) are typically much shorter than the relevant dynamical time scales ( approximately 10(-3)-10(-1) s), both for regular neuron firing and for kinklike polarization excitations in microtubules. This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way.
In recent decades it has become common throughout the social sciences to think of the human mind simply as a very complex computer. Drawing on an older materialist metaphor of the mind as a machine, the “computational” model of the mind took off after the mid-century invention of the computer and subsequent cognitive revolution in psychology, and has since permeated the social sciences in the form of rational choice and other prominent social theories. The contributions of this model have been huge; but it has always been assumed that the computations going on inside our heads are classical. Quantum brain theory challenges this assumption by proposing that the mind is actually a quantum computer. Classical computers are based on binary digits or “bits” with well defined values (0 or 1), which are transformed in serial operations by a program into an output. Quantum computers in contrast are based on “qubits” that can be in superpositions of 0 and 1 at the same time and also interact non-locally, enabling every qubit to be operated on simultaneously. The idea of a quantum computer was first proposed in the 1980s and is still far from being realized technologically, but it has fired the imagination of scientists by raising the prospect of unimaginable increases in computational power, and other neat tricks besides. If quantum brain theory is true, then our model of the mind would be similarly radically altered, irrespective of the issue of consciousness. Quantum brain theory hypothesizes that quantum processes at the elementary level are amplified and kept in superposition at the level of the organism, and then, through downward causation constrain what is going on deep within the brain. On this view, information from the environment is continuously transformed from the macro- to the micro-level, and then channeled back upward into an “internal quantum state,”
Gödel appears to have believed strongly that the human mind cannot be explained in terms of any kind of computational physics, but he remained cautious in formulating this belief as a rigorous consequence of his incompleteness theorems. In this chapter, I discuss a modification of standard Gödel-type logical arguments, these appearing to strengthen Gödel's conclusions, and attempt to provide a persuasive case in support of his standpoint that the actions of the mind must transcend computation. It appears that Gödel did not consider the possibility that the laws of physics might themselves involve noncomputational procedures; accordingly, he found himself driven to the conclusion that mentality must lie beyond the actions of the physical brain. My own arguments, on the other hand, are from the scientific standpoint that the mind is a product of the brain's physical activity. Accordingly, there must be something in the physical actions of the world that itself transcends computation. We do not appear to find such noncomputational action in the known laws of physics, however, so we must seek it in currently undiscovered laws going beyond presently accepted physical theory. I argue that the only plausibly relevant gap in current understanding lies in a fundamental incompleteness in quantum theory, which reveals itself only with significant mass displacements between quantum states (“Schrödinger's cats”). I contend that the need for new physics enters when gravitational effects just begin to play a role. In a scheme developed jointly with Stuart Hameroff, this has direct relevance within neuronal microtubules, and I describe this (still speculative) scheme in the following.
The quantum theory of mind allows a shift from the Mind/Brain metaphysical problem to the Quantum Mind/Classical Brain scientific problem: how could systematic and coherent quantum processes - assumed to be the physical support of our conscious experiences - occur in a macroscopic system as the brain? I discuss a solution based on a neurobiological model that attributes to quantum computation in intra-neuronal signal-transduction pathways the role of directly supporting phenomenal experience. In this model, quantum coherence is created or prepared by classical mechanisms as recurrent neuronal networks, oscillatory synchrony and gated membrane channels, thus avoiding common theoretical constraints for the existence of quantum communication and computation, as ultra-cold temperatures and quasi-isolation from the environment.