Re: yes!

On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 21:42:12 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/08/2024 00:55, john larkin wrote:

 
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a61854962/quantum-entanglement-consciousness/

>
Popular Mechanics is *such* a reputable source of cutting edge QM theory.
>
When they publish it in Nature or somewhere reputable I'll take note.
They already seem to have grumbled to New Scientist about being dissed.

Well, they do cite a reputable rag:  "The study, published this month
in the journal Physics Review E, suggests...".

A hypothesis has to survive experimental testing to be at all credible.
If they are right then you should be able to alter consciousness by
flooding the interior of the brain with incoherent IR photons. Somehow I
can't see that working at all.

We'd already know if this were true for sure - direct sunlight (a
kilowatt per square meter) would knock us out, and critters whose
brain worked some other way would have had us for lunch while we were
out cold, well warm.

Quantum entanglement may be all the rage now but it is likely to be just
another variant of the "action at a distance" in Newtonian gravity that
will disappear once we have a complete grand unified theory of physics.

Isn't this circular?

So far it looks like consciousness is an emergent property of any
sufficiently complex computational network. The big super computer
networks are now getting close to the threshold where that might happen.

Not just _any_ really complex network, but OK.

Human brains and octopus distributed leg processing are wired entirely
differently but both show high intelligence and self awareness.
>
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-here-are-eight-examples-how.html
>
Some octopuses in research captivity also have a wicked sense of humour
throwing slightly dodgy fish back at their keepers and/or escaping with
monotonous regularity.

My favorite story is when it was discovered that an enterprising
octopus was clambering out of its own tank, crawling across the floor
to another tank, catching and eating some fish there, and then
returning to its home tank.  The mystery of the vanishing fish was
eventually solved by a hidden camera.

It turned out to have been known far earlier, like Lee 1873:

.<https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27379/did-an-octopus-visit-another-tank-to-hunt>

  A bit like parrots except they can't mimic talk
(or bite through mains cables, windscreen wipers and paint tin lids).

Parrots.  Bird brains are yet another model. 

All three kinds of critter seem to be conscious, but their brains are
built rather differently, so there is likely some common mathematical
and/or algorithmic structure from which consciousness arises.

On the matter of defining consciousness, while no widely accepted
definition has arisen, people seem to know it when they see it, and
everybody comes to more or less the same ranking of critters.  So
there is a unifying principle, even if we don't know what it is.

Joe Gwinn