The first basic mystery is that the brain can react extremely rapidly in situations, which require rapid action such being in jungle and suddenly encountering a tiger. This rapid reaction extremely difficult to understand in the standard neuroscience framework. A lot of signalling inside brain and between brain and body is required and the rate of neural processing of information seems to hopelessly slow. You could not generate a bodily expression of horror before you would be dead.
Second mystery is the extremely low metabolic energy rate of the brain: about .1 kW and extremely small as compared to the power needed by ordinary computers. Supercomputer uses a power which is measured in Megawats. This is one of the key problems of the AI based on classical computation: nuclear power plants are proposed of being built to satisfy the needes of large language models. The extremel low dissipation rate of the brain suggests that long range quantum coherence is involved. But this is impossible in standard quantum theory.
For decades (since 1995 when I started to develop TGD inspired theory of consciousness) I have tried to tell that quantum coherence in the scale of brain could be part of the solution to the problem. The entire brain or even entire body could acts as a single coherent whole and act instantaneously.
Unfortunately, standard quantum theory (or should one say colleagues) does not allow quantum coherence in the bodily nor even brain scale. Quantum coherence at the level of the ordinary biomatter is not needed. Nonquantal coherence could be induced by quantum coherence at the level of field body, the TGD counterpart of classical fields in TGD, having much larger size than the biological body. This would explain EEG, which in neuroscience is still seen often as somekind of side effect although it carries information.I t is difficult to see why brain as a master energy saver would sent information to outer space just for fun. But so do many neuroscientists believe.
Quantum criticality induces ordinary criticality in the TGD Universe
Quantum criticality implies long range quantum fluctuations and quantum coherence: the entire system behaves like single quantum unit. The TGD Universe as a whole is quantum critical fractal structure with quantum criticality realized in various scales. The degree of quantum criticality and its scale depends on the parameters of the system and can be assigned with field body of a system carrying heff> h phases of ordinary matter at it. These phases behaving like dark matter (but not identifiable as galactic dark matter in TGD) have higher IQ than ordinary biomatter and control it. Field body itself is a hierarchical structure.
Quantum criticality is perhaps the basic aspect of TGD inspired theory of consciousness and of living matter. The number theoretical vision of TGD predicts a hierarchy of Planck constants heff=nh0, where h0 satisfying h=(7!)2×h0, is the minimal value of heff. This gives rise to a hierarchy of phases of ordinary matter behaving in many respects like dark matter but very probably not identifiable as galactic dark matter. The role of metabolism is to provide the energy needed to increase the value of heff, which spontaneously decreases. The physiological temperature is one critical parameter.
The complexity associated with the quantum criticality corresponds to the algebraic complexity assignable to the polynomials determining the space-time surface. The degree of polynomials equals to the number of roots and the dimension of extension of rationals corresponds to the order of Galois group given by n=heff/h0.
Algebraic complexity can only increase since there the number for systems more complex than a given system is infinitely larger than the number with smaller complexity. This reduces evolution to number theory and quantum mechanics. For the mathematical background of TGD inspired quantum theory of conscious and quantum biology, see for instance this , this , this , this , and this.
Classical signaling takes place with light velocity
Also the classical processing of information might take place much faster then in neuroscience picture. The existence of biophotons has been known for about century but still neuroscience refuse to take them seriously. TGD indeed suggests also that neuroscience view about classical information processing is wrong (see for instance this , this this, this). Nerve pulses need not be the primeary carriers of sensory information. The function of nerve pulses could be only to serve as relays at the synaptic contacts. This would make possible the real information transfer as dark photons (photons with large value of heff) along monopole flux tubes associated with axons and also leading to the field body of the brain. Biophotons, whose origin is not understood, would result in the transformation of dark photons to biophotons (see this).
The brain could use dark photon signals propagating along monopole flux tubes carrying information. The information would be coded by the frequency modulation of the Josephson frequencies associated with the cell membranes with large value of heff making the Josephson frequency small. The signal would be received at the field body of appropriate subsystem of the brain by cyclotron resonance and the signal would give rise to a sequence of pulses, which would define the feedback to the brain and possibly generate nerve pulses. Light velocity is by factor 106-107 higher than the velocity of the nerve pulses about 10-100 m/s. This allows a lot of data processing involving forth and back-signalling in order to build standardized mental images from the incoming sensory information (see this).
In TGD, this would allow classical signalling with a field body of size scale of the Earth in time scale shorter than .1 seconds (alpha frequency), which is roughly the duration of what might be called chronon of human conscious experience. After this signal is received by the field body, a phase transition generating quantum coherence at the level of field body takes place and induces coherence in the scale of brain or even body.
Zero energy ontology predicts time reversals in the counterparts of ordinary state function reductions
Also zero energy ontology in which "big" state function reductions (BSFRs) as the TGD counterparts of ordinary state function reductions change the arrow of time can make the information processing faster and the proposal is that the motor responses involve signals propagating with the reverse arrow of geometric time so that the response would start already in the geometric past. Libet's findings that volitional action is preceded by brain activity support this view.
For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.
For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.
5 comments:
You reference microtubules as potential sites for quantum vibrations. Can you propose a quantum optical experiment (e.g., using spectroscopy or coherence measurements) to detect TGD-specific effects in neuronal microtubules, and how would heff manifest in the results?
Another question: In TGD, you propose that the field body induces non-quantal coherence in ordinary biomatter via quantum coherence at the level of magnetic flux tubes. Can you specify the mathematical structure of the Kähler action that enables this coherence over macroscopic scales, and how does it avoid decoherence in the warm, wet environment of the brain?
Another question: In TGD, you propose that the field body induces non-quantal coherence in ordinary biomatter via quantum coherence at the level of magnetic flux tubes. Can you specify the mathematical structure of the Kähler action that enables this coherence over macroscopic scales, and how does it avoid decoherence in the warm, wet environment of the brain?
This mathematical structure seems to be high degree action independent.
a) Long range coherence is assigned to long range fluctuations characterizing critical systems. Conformal invariance implies the criticality in the models of critical systems in statistical physics. This generalies to the quantum case (string models).
b) In TGD, holography= holomorphy principle extends the 2-D conformal invariance to 4-D case by and solves the classical field equations. Generalized conformal invariance means that space-time surfaces are roots of function pairs f=(f_1,f_2):H=M^4xCP_2-->C^2 such that f_i are analytic functions of 1 hypercomplex and 3 complex coordinates of H. The analytic functions g: g(1,g2):C^2-->C^2 act as dynamical symmetries.
The extremely nonlinear field equations reduce to a purely algebraic condition that the trace of the second fundamental form vanishes and various other traces vanish because the contracts tensors of type (2,0)+(0,2) and (1,1). Tensors have no common index pairs.
c) This applies to both volume action and Kahler action and seems to apply to any classical action which is general coordinate invariant constructible in terms of induced geometric quantities (induce metric and induce gauge fields). Quite universally, space-time surfaces are minimal surfaces apart from singularities at which the details of action are visible via boundary conditions.
Therefore this has very little to do with details of the action. The value of action however appears in the exponent defining the vacuum functional. Even this might be an apparent dependence. If the action is expressible purely number theoretically as the generalization of Langlands duality stating that geometric and number theoretical visions equivalent, the coupling constants must be such that the exponents of the action as vacuum functionals are the same geometrically and number theoretically. This would determine coupling constant evolution. Holography= holomorphy principle would give rise to completely universal dynamics.
d) Quite concretely, the size of the space-time surface corresponds to the scale of classical and quantum coherence. The number theoretic hierarchy of effective Planck constants h_eff gives rise to a hierarchy of quantum coherence scales giving rise to what I call field bodies. The magnetic body, or more generally field body becomes the controller of the biological body.
The thermodynamic effects are not completely avoided. Aging would correspond to a gradual thermalization and heating of the field body as the temperature of field body gradually rises due to the heat flow from biological body and its temperatures approach to the analog of Hagedorn temperature: see https://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/aging.pdf .
Can you propose a quantitative prediction for the coherence length or correlation time of these dark photon signals in neural tissue, testable via biophoton emission spectra or EEG cross-frequency coupling, and how would this differ from standard quantum electrodynamics predictions?
You reference microtubules as potential sites for quantum vibrations. Can you propose a quantum optical experiment (e.g., using spectroscopy or coherence measurements) to detect TGD specific effects in neuronal microtubules, and how would heff manifest in the results?
I am not an experimentalist so I see my role as an explainer and thinker rather than a planner of experiments. What comes to mind is as follows.
a) Biophotons, whose origin is not understood, would emerge when dark photons transform to ordinary photons. Biophoton emission is a signature of dying for plants and is used as a tool to determine how old the vegetables are. What happens to the claimed quantum coherent radiation assigned with microtubules as the system dies? Can one detect biophotons? In TGD death is universal and sleep is analogous to death. Microtubules would also have a sleep-wake rhythm. Could the quantum coherent radiation (emission of biophotons) accompany the analogs of wake (sleep) periods?
b) For dark photons one has E= h_eff*f.Large value of h_eff gives rise to the long scale quantum coherence. Very low frequency photons can have quantal effects. This was found to be the case for ELF photons and this actually led to the notion of h_eff. Cyclotron transitions induced by h_eff>>h was the proposed explanation.
c) Quantum criticality is also a signature. The continual variation of the microtubule length scale would be a signature of quantum criticality. Large values of h_eff and the quantum coherent radiation should appear only for special values of the parameter. Does the radiation disappear when control parameters are changed so that the length variations disappear. What about microtubules which are stable: is there any quantum coherent radiation?
d) The electric Planck constant h_eff is proportional to the total electric charge of the system (cell, DNA, even Earth) and the quantum criticality could reflect itself as values of h_em. Microtubuli are polarized systems and thus involve charges. Could length fluctuations correlate with the fluctuations of charges?
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