Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- by jdkee
- People don't like it, but the "weirdness" of life, as it relates to physics, just completely evaporates if the universe is superdeterministic.
And that's actually overkill. Plain vanilla determinism would do it. As would a universal-wavefunction/no-collapse conception of quantum mechanics. (i.e. the universe has its own wave function.)
Point is, what the author decries does not require New Physics. It should suffice to re-evaluate different interpretations of existing physics. These matters are, after all, by no means settled.
by A_D_E_P_T - The implication that biology defies physics is just incorrect on many levels. There is no "truth" to ignore. The claim that life requires information that is otherwise not defined by physical laws is a misinterpretation of what defines information. A tree "bending toward the sun" is an emergent property of underlying physical laws--not a creation or demand for information.by jschveibinz
- Thought this thread wouldn't mind knowing about this given the topic of the article. Many points raised by Frank are referenced in a documentary I just made, even if only implicitly.
A scientist from Denmark purported to have found evidence for tunneling in the brain as part of a prestigious Systems Neuroscience program at Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK, paid for by the Wellcome Trust. Link in the comment below.
The scientist now purports to have an experimental design to test for the physics he thinks is happening in the brain, albeit outside the brain, in various quantum tunneling setups. So I put this scientist and his idea in front of the world's top experimental physicists and hit record. What follows is a deadpan documentary about either a breakthrough experiment or a sociological view of academic absurdity.
Here is the link: https://youtu.be/yTQa3O7Qlm4.
It may be helpful to watch this 3 min primer first for context: https://youtu.be/vF_g5Uh5MEg.
This story may be relevant given how the mind comes from 20w is unknown. If I understand the AI boom is in part based on the idea that the brain does not solve hard problems and is not using quantum effects (it can be simulated on a Turing machine). If the scientist in the doc is right, these assumptions are false.
Happy to share what little I learned in the process of making this. Although as I say in the 3 min video this story is orders of magnitude above my pay grade. I just thought it would be a funny story to try to tell.
The scientist argues that explanatory power of the human brain is a required feature of any physics theory that can try to unify the open questions.
- This article is profoundly wrong. Physicists and chemists know exactly what life is.
It's a historical contingency, a strange and unlikely one. The reason we're here is that we could equally well not be here, and the universe would get on fine without us. For most of its history, it did. In most places, it still does.
The interesting question is why so few other people know that.
by thisrod