Why Are We Here? : George Ellis

The problem is that every time someone comes up with strong evidence of an afterlife, someone comes up with an objection which makes the research harder and harder to perform.

This line of argument could lead a reasonable person to conclude that an afterlife is less and less likely.

Thus most reasonable people would say that people who give every impression of being unconscious and are being resuscitated would not be capable of hearing what is going on around them, or seeing what is going on from the vantage point of the ceiling!

However this preposterous suggestion meant that Sam Parnia had to try to set up an experiment involving placing shelves in a busy hospital so that only people viewing from the ceiling would be able to see what is on the shelf. I would bet that even getting the agreement of the hospital for such an experiment would consume vast amounts of time!

Well, the most recent version of the AWARE study used electronic devices to display images on a screen. It did seem to me to be making a great many assumptions about the nature of consciousness - as well as assumptions about the typical interests and preoccupations of a disembodied consciousness which were very much at odds with the average NDE report.

In my opinion interviewing patients is itself useful. But trying to place limits in advance upon what activities a patient must perform without ever telling them in advance how they must behave during their cardiac arrest just seemed daft. We can't force patients to behave in the specific way we might theorise about. That's just silly.  Instead we must deal with what we have, take whatever the patient reports and use it.

Changing tack a bit, do you have any feel for how quantum computing is getting on behind all the hype? Looking at the best such computers, how many qubits do they successfully couple together? I ask that way because it is possible to imagine a  computer built out of a number of smaller quantum computers coupled together classically.

David

I can't tell if they ever will be able to build a 'classic' quantum computer having many qubits or they will accomplish distributed quantum computing using few qubits per quantum chip instead (or nothing at all). Distributed quantum computing seems ridiculously complicated involving concepts like quantum teleportation and entanglement swapping. But maybe it's impossible building a physical device entangling thousands of photons (or whatever particle they use) and keeping and manipulating that state and then maybe distributed quantum computing could be the answer. I don't think "quantum supremacy" can be achieved with classic coupling (maybe for some qm algorithms).

So the issue with that is, how do we know that NDEs are even relying on brain cells in the first place? We hardly understand the human brain and there's the hard problem of consciousness. I think if we 100% prove a workable theory for non-local consciousness through quantum entanglement it would be reasonable to assume NDEs are the real deal and not relying on the brain. It would also explain terminal lucidity

I think that somehow developing a workable materialistic theory for non-local consciousness using quantum entanglement or any other physics phenomenon is totally unnecessary in order to conclude that "NDEs are the real deal", and anyway such a materialistic theory is probably impossible.

To conclude that NDEs are the real deal is more than just reasonable simply based on an unbiased assessment of the existing data from investigations of veridical NDEs, veridical NDEs during brain dysfunction, and the scientific controlled AWARE (especially II) study results re. heightened consciousness occurring during deep brain dysfunction.

I can't tell if they ever will be able to build a 'classic' quantum computer having many qubits or they will accomplish distributed quantum computing using few qubits per quantum chip instead (or nothing at all). Distributed quantum computing seems ridiculously complicated involving concepts like quantum teleportation and entanglement swapping. But maybe it's impossible building a physical device entangling thousands of photons (or whatever particle they use) and keeping and manipulating that state and then maybe distributed quantum computing could be the answer. I don't think "quantum supremacy" can be achieved with classic coupling (maybe for some qm algorithms).

I always find it hard to know just how many qubits they can couple together because the hype means they may be talking about classically coupled subsets of qubits. I wonder what is the largest number of fully coupled qubits you personally know about?

In my experiments many many years ago (nothing to do with computation) it seemed as though about 6 nuclear spins (i.e. qubits) could be coupled before the spectrum turned to mush. NMR spectrometers have improved quite a bit since then so that number is probably an underestimate now, but even so, it is waay less than anything that would be really useful.

On the face of it quantum computation could, I think, only be understood in terms of the Many Worlds interpretation of QM. This might offer a way to rule out the MWI if a fundamental limit could be established. Of course, people working on quantum computation may not want to find such a limit because that would interrupt the money flow! (I am a cynic about modern science).

David

I think that somehow developing a workable materialistic theory for non-local consciousness using quantum entanglement or any other physics phenomenon is totally unnecessary in order to conclude that "NDEs are the real deal", and anyway such a materialistic theory is probably impossible.

To conclude that NDEs are the real deal is more than just reasonable simply based on an unbiased assessment of the existing data from investigations of veridical NDEs, veridical NDEs during brain dysfunction, and the scientific controlled AWARE (especially II) study results re. heightened consciousness occurring during deep brain dysfunction.

Yeah I think there is value in quantum biology being able to show even the brain requires quantum-level properties to manifest our consciousness, but I don't think this means that physics is the arbiter of what is real...I mean current physics has no good way to account for the present tense and as Feynman noted there's a circularity to explaining Force - a criticism that I feel extends to physics' under-explanation of causality to say nothing about the question of Fine Tuning suggesting material reality is designed in some way...

Then to add to that I think all causation is mental causation...At which point we get into questions about the Hard Problem, or what kind of consciousness can grasp Mathematics if one believes like I do in Mathematical Platonism...

To me these priors make NDEs / CORTs / etc quite plausible, and it's already rather bizarre to think every evidential case is based on lies or even unintended errors.

I do think quantum biology will open doorways in close-minded academia, but that is more a PR consideration than a necessity for reasoned belief in the afterlife.

I think that somehow developing a workable materialistic theory for non-local consciousness using quantum entanglement or any other physics phenomenon is totally unnecessary in order to conclude that "NDEs are the real deal", and anyway such a materialistic theory is probably impossible.

While it is probably impossible and unnecessary to develop a theory of nonlocal consciousness, it is reasonable to ask for a theory of how nonlocal consciousness couples with the brain. The physicist Henry Stapp does exactly that. One version of his ideas is based on the mathematical fact that a quantum state subject to gentle random perturbations can be locked into a given state by frequent observations. This effect has been dubbed the Quantum Zeno effect".

David

Well, the most recent version of the AWARE study used electronic devices to display images on a screen. It did seem to me to be making a great many assumptions about the nature of consciousness - as well as assumptions about the typical interests and preoccupations of a disembodied consciousness which were very much at odds with the average NDE report

That is interesting, because one BIG assumption that makes is that electronic screens are visible without a physical eye.

David

I always find it hard to know just how many qubits they can couple together because the hype means they may be talking about classically coupled subsets of qubits. I wonder what is the largest number of fully coupled qubits you personally know about?

In my experiments many many years ago (nothing to do with computation) it seemed as though about 6 nuclear spins (i.e. qubits) could be coupled before the spectrum turned to mush. NMR spectrometers have improved quite a bit since then so that number is probably an underestimate now, but even so, it is waay less than anything that would be really useful.

On the face of it quantum computation could, I think, only be understood in terms of the Many Worlds interpretation of QM. This might offer a way to rule out the MWI if a fundamental limit could be established. Of course, people working on quantum computation may not want to find such a limit because that would interrupt the money flow! (I am a cynic about modern science).

David

IBM has a quantum computer, Osprey, having 400 qubits. The issue is however not the number of qubits but coherence which is still measured in microseconds. Quantum computing doesn't impact the philosophical interpretation of QM. Only by measurment can the result of a quantum computation be read out. To cite my lecture notes: "Most physicists would argue that the only “real” quantities are those that can be observed, and, in particular, the quantum mechanical state itself is not real. Rather it is a device from which one compute the results of measurements. From this point of view, it is not valid to claim that all 2n values of the function have actually been evaluated."

IBM has a quantum computer, Osprey, having 400 qubits. The issue is however not the number of qubits but coherence which is still measured in microseconds. Quantum computing doesn't impact the philosophical interpretation of QM. Only by measurment can the result of a quantum computation be read out. To cite my lecture notes: "Most physicists would argue that the only “real” quantities are those that can be observed, and, in particular, the quantum mechanical state itself is not real. Rather it is a device from which one compute the results of measurements. From this point of view, it is not valid to claim that all 2n values of the function have actually been evaluated."

The major flaw in the foundations of modern science. It seems they are very wrong in that assumption (which deliberately excludes consciousness), due to the obvious reality of consciousness and its various components, which cannot even in principle be physically observed. Shades of Chalmers' Hard Problem.

IBM has a quantum computer, Osprey, having 400 qubits. The issue is however not the number of qubits but coherence which is still measured in microseconds.

Well an ordinary chip processes several instructions per nanosecond (even without using multiple cores) - so I suppose the IBM machine could be used for something, but presumably the hardware for manipulating quantum states may not be as slick as modern chips. I suppose the bottom line is to find how well it performs on one or other of the famous quantum computer algorithms - such as Shor's algorithm.

This brings me to another doubt I have about quantum computing - it seems to depend on such incredibly devious programs that you make your name by writing just one short program!

Quantum computing doesn't impact the philosophical interpretation of QM. Only by measurment can the result of a quantum computation be read out. To cite my lecture notes: "Most physicists would argue that the only “real” quantities are those that can be observed, and, in particular, the quantum mechanical state itself is not real. Rather it is a device from which one compute the results of measurements. From this point of view, it is not valid to claim that all 2n values of the function have actually been evaluated."
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I seemed to remember that you set N different calculations going, and only one of those can return a result, and then you collapse the wavefunction and extract the answer - but I don't remember for sure. I never had access to a QC to motivate me to make the effort!!!

However, a quantum computer must do something in parallel otherwise what is the point of it - even theoretically?

David