Quantum consciousness...

[The Grand Nudger]

You don't have access to my context.  That's what "subjective" means, and no amount of double talk gets around that fact.

....?

If you want to do science of the mind,  you need some access to multiple mental contexts.  But you have direct access to only one: your own.  Your solution is to call a physical correlate the thing it correlates to, and move on.  This is a flawed methodology, for pretty obvious philosophical reasons.

You're not commenting on an inability to observe consciousness, Benny- you're commenting on an inability to fully interpret it. Voltimeters don't directly observe electric current - they also have a fudge factor (called tolerance, btw, lol), so I guess we're just sol on pretty much every front. / shrugs

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I came across this article recently and it has been immensely refreshing to see someone else argue that we should not attempt to explain the brain as if it was a computer.

The empty brain
Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer

What isn't refreshing, is to see that he argues by means of strawmanning the computer analogy, rather than commenting on any computational theory of mind, after a long series of "we've been wrong befores".  That the presenter then goes on to make absolutely incompetent arguments regarding dollar bills as though this established, of all things, that we do not possess or store memories - here again strawmanning computational theories of mind by arguing against the notion that a memory must be stored in a single neuron - that we will never find a dollar bill in a neuron.  That former is not true of human beings -or- of computers, nor is it a necessity of comp mind...and the latter is almost comically true in it's inanity - no one expects to find a dollar bill in a neuron. I'm guessing he couldn't find one in the machine he used to make that image, either....

I argue that the brain is a biophysical, chemical self organising system, and like all other naturally occurring self organising systems it settles into a stable state by minimising disturbance of free-energy. So in the same way we won't get a useful understanding of consciousness if we see it merely as a form of computation. But it makes sense if we understand it as a way of helping the organism settle into a stable state over time.

 I'm not sure what the "just"s and "merely"s so commonly employed in reference to this should be taken to mean?  There's plenty going on in a brain that we do know about - think of all the processes that maintain the cells, for example -alongide any number of non-conscious processes and involuntary this or thats.  We know that these also have an effect of cognition ( the greatest scientific experiment ever will establish this for any interested party - getting drunk).  So, if it's things like that which (and much more, ofc, even things we don't know about - for what that's worth) that you would add as what lies beyond the merelys, then yeah, sure ofc.  A comp mind proponent (or theory) isn't telling you or anyone else that computation is all that's going on in a brain, but that computation - information processing, is chiefly and meaningfully responsible for the organization of what we call a mind.  What you argue the brain to be and what comp mind theories argue that consciousness is are complimentary, not contradictory - right?

We can understand both life and intelligence this way. Life is thermodynamically far from equilibrium, yet it self organised by minimising free energy. This is because an organism can produce more entropy over time by producing off-spring than by existing for a finite time and then dying off. In my last paper I demonstrated that a self organising agent that performs temporal sequence learning rather than a stimulus / response agent can choose costly actions that increase disturbance in the short term to settle into more stable states in the long term. In other words intelligence increases entropy over time even if it needs to minimise it in the short term.

How did you propose that the agent perform temporal sequence learning?  How does it learn to predict an event, or perform an action, for example?  Having done so, what then accounts for it's ability to do so again - to recognize some pattern, accurately classify it as an indicator of a previously categorized outcome, and take appropriate action?  In short, where are these plans of action, these algorithms.... stored? Juxtapose the idea of sequence learning with the author of that papers stated view that brains do not store, access, or recall - that they do not have memory, and that they do not leverage algorithms.

Seen this way consciousness aids in increasing in entropy over time and is a natural result of the development of complexity through the arrow of time (e.g first there was radiation, then matter,  stars, chemistry, planets, biology, life, intelligence, consciousness, societies, economies etc)

Explaining it in terms of quantum mechanics has no explanatory power at all and is a homunculus argument in that it pushes the explanation away to an ever smaller scale in order to avoid trying to understand it.

That's the fundamental criticism of quantum consciousness as an argument.  However, explaining it in terms of unspecified complexity or temporal sequence learning absent a mechanism has no explanatory power, either.  

This is -why- computational theories of mind are dominant, why IP metaphors are used.  Regardless of what we think the aim of the brain is, or even what consciousness, itself, is - a comp/ip framework offers us a method by which that aim or that product at least could be achieved.