Digital Philosophy and Religion

[Angrboda]

Quantum effects may very well play a part in the behavior of microtubules. What would remain unproven is that the behavior of microtubules plays a relevant and coherent role in the creation of the behaviors of consciousness and mind. Conventional science, until shown wrong, presumes that the macroscopic properties of neuronal and glial matter play such a role, while microtubules do not.

The mathematical and scientific basis of Orch-OR is rejected by mainstream mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists.

[Rayaan]

It is a possibility, but a testable one. The idea being that a simulation would need to be Turing computable. If we found phenomena that wasn't computable or if we found a computer that could compute Gödel unprovable statements, it would be a violation. According to the Penrose Hameroff conjecture the brain is a candidate for being such a computer. Though orchestrated objective reduction has many criticisms, recent experimental evidence has shown quantum phenomena does exist in brain microtubules.

First of all, I think that the idea that a simulated reality entails that all physical systems in reality must be Turing computable, is false.

The Turing computational view of nature assumes that information processing is formal, finite, and definite; it assumes that the information processing in nature is digital. But is that really the case? My answer to that would be, no. Why? Because the very definition of computation as it applies to physical processes at different levels of physical reality, ranges from the digital to the quantum. So, taking that into consideration, the universe and everything it contains has to be not just Turing computational but also quantum computational.

There are also those who believe that nature not only performs digital computation (as is the view of Zuse, Fredkin or Wolfram, all contributors to A Computable Universe), but is itself the result of quantum computation (Lloyd, Deutsch and Cabello, also authors of chapters in A Computable Universe). According to them, the world would in the last instance be rooted in physics, particularly quantum mechanics, and would reflect the properties of elementary particles and fundamental forces. Lloyd, for example, asks how many bits there are in the universe, offering an interesting calculation according to which, given the properties of quantum particles, the universe cannot be rendered in a description shorter than itself–simply because every elementary particle would need to be simulated by another elementary particle. A computer to simulate the universe would therefore need to be the size of the universe, and would require the energy of the actual universe, hence making it undistinguishable from a (quantum) computer, the computer and the computed being in perfect correspondence.

Full article: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.0376.pdf

Roger Penrose argues that the human brain can compute things which a Turing machine cannot, by somehow harnessing quantum mechanical processes. I don't disagree with that view, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the simulated reality theory will have to be discarded if such a reasoning is true indeed. As I mentioned before, the universe allows both digital information processing and quantum information processing, so I don't really see what's unique about "quantum phenomena existing in brain microtubules." Quantum phenomena already underlies within the entire fabric of our physical reality, thus they exist everywhere, all the time, not just in our brains. Those are all a part of the universal computation as we see around us.

Plants and bacteria perform quantum computations as well. I read in an article that the photosynthetic transfer of energy (or the conversion of sunlight into energy) in plants may involve a special type of quantum computation known as a "quantum walk." Researchers believe that during the photosynthetic process, an exciton, which is a quantum particle of energy, does a weird "quantum walk" in the forest by taking many possible paths through a forest simultaneously. The exciton doesn't just take a single path as we would expect, but takes many paths at the same time. See the article below:

When sunlight hits the part of the bacteria that collects sunlight, it creates a quantum particle of energy called an exciton. That exciton must travel through a complex that Lloyd likens to a gigantic forest in order to get to a place where it can be turned into chemical energy.

"If you look at kind of a classical way of getting through some forest in the dark, surrounded by trees with no notion of what the direction is you're supposed to go, then you just wander around at random … and you just get completely lost," Lloyd said. Consequently, scientists were puzzled about how the exciton ever arrived at its destination.

The answer turns out to be a special kind of computation.

"If it uses quantum mechanics, it's not limited to just taking just one path through the forest," Lloyd said. "It can take all possible paths simultaneously. In quantum computing, this is what's called a quantum walk."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/quantu...s-1.912061