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42 votes
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The first multi-behavior brain upload
35 votes -
Untangling the connection between dopamine and ADHD
31 votes -
Ig Nobel prizes moving to Europe because US 'unsafe' to visit
45 votes -
Chimpanzees are really into crystals
34 votes -
Photons that aren’t actually there influence superconductivity
15 votes -
Did Kellogg’s do the math on donut holes?
13 votes -
Chemist Hitler Louis nears three dozen retractions for image duplication, self-citation and more
32 votes -
The evolution of eyes began with one
11 votes -
UMD scientists create ‘smart underwear’ to measure human flatulence
21 votes -
A fluid can store solar energy and then release it as heat months later
22 votes -
'They've probably been untouched for 49 million years': The New Mexico cave expanding our search for alien life
21 votes -
Inside the lab that changed psychedelics forever (full tour)
16 votes -
Air to bread
4 votes -
The malignant degradation of trust in scientific work
24 votes -
What do dreams mean?
I don't mean this in the sense of "if I have a sex dream that involves my mother, does that mean I am attracted to my mother?", I know that dreams aren't a literal representation of our desires in...
I don't mean this in the sense of "if I have a sex dream that involves my mother, does that mean I am attracted to my mother?", I know that dreams aren't a literal representation of our desires in that sense.
What I mean more is, is there any study or anything that has been done to see if a dream's content indicates anything about what problem the brain is trying to work out?
Like does a dream about sex indicate that a certain lobe in the brain is particularly active at that moment?
Or like I have had negative dreams that cause me to feel anxiety when I wake up that involve my family or where I was in the middle of an ICE raid recently, does that indicate anything in particular about what my brain was doing while I was asleep that caused me to feel anxiety and that happened to manifest as ICE raids?
not sure if this was the right sub for this question.
25 votes -
Geologists may have solved mystery of Green River's 'uphill' route
15 votes -
No bull: This Austrian cow has learned to use tools
55 votes -
Let's talk orchestrated objective reduction!
My special interest of late has been something called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction the TL;DR is: One of, if not the, most missing piece of quantum mechanics is...
My special interest of late has been something called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction the TL;DR is:
- One of, if not the, most missing piece of quantum mechanics is answering the question "what is measurement"? You've probably heard of things like the double slit experiment which lead to weird things like quantum erasure where one can seemingly cause a photon to retroactively determine which path to take. Spooky stuff! However, these experiments all follow the basic idea of "when something is entangled, it follows probabilistic rules defined by the schrodinger equation, then a 'measurement' happens, and the entanglement 'collapses' and only a single, 'real' value is well defined"
- Roger Penrose, a nobel prize winning physicist, has, since the 1980s been arguing that because entanglement implies that a particle exists in two places at once prior to measure that this places gravitational pressure on the fabric of spacetime in two places at once and that measurement is a gravitational event where spacetime "heals" itself by collapsing the wave form, and making it so the particle is finally only in one place.
Penrose further expanded this, to enormous controversy, that consciousess itself is a measurement event. He wrote a book, "The Emperor's New Mind" then a follow-up "Shadows of the Mind", neither of which I've read, but have had summarized to further develop these arguments. - This was, for lack of a better term, a crackpot theory. There wasn't anything testable or falsifiable so it was brushed aside. Crucially, to the point it gets its own paragraph,
The overwhelming opinion of the physics community, to this day, believes that quantum coherence is not possible in "wet, warm, noisy" environments like the brain.
It is, to this day, believed that, the quantum world is a thing that happens only at extremely small scales, and that's why quantum computers all start with the assumption of cooling the material to near absolute zero with as few additional perturbations as possible. - However, there were 2 findings I find extremely motivating to combat this assertion. First, leaves. Leaves are quantum objects and photosynthesis is too efficient to be explained by classical mechanics alone: https://berkeleysciencereview.com/article/2021/11/30/plants-do-the-wave/ Second, birds. Birds that use the magnetosphere for orientation do so by becoming quantumly coherent with the ions in the magnetophere using a protein in their eyes so they literally see the earth's magnetic field using the blue cones of their eyes https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/birds-are-real-and-so-is-quantum-physics/
- Enter Stuart Hameroff. Hameroff was a working anesthesiology for some 20 odd years. He read The Emperor's New Mind and reached out to Penrose. He, of course, was very intimately aware of the deep biological processes that make the different between a conscious, aware, thinking human being, and a piece of meat that can be safely operated on. He believed that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule structures in the neurons were responsible for consciousness.
After further research, they both began to believe that these microtubule structures in human neurons were capable of what others believed were impossible.
Quantum coherence in a wet, warm, noisy environment. - This was still crackpottery until quite literally (IMO) last year. A group of biological researchers showed experimentally that the exact networks of tryptophan microtubule structures in neurons do exhibit super radiance (the same kind of quantum coherence leaves show) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
To me, this is the most exciting piece of science I think I've seen in my life. The implication is that human (and other) consciousnesses are literally a byproduct of our ability to maintain and calculate quantum states in a wet, warm, noisy environment. It feels like a genuine push for us to finally move past the age of information, past the age of computation, and into the age of consciousness.
Another aspect of this is I really, deeply, believe that the substrate necessary for AGI is either necessarily biological, or, at the very least, can only be done efficiently in a biological substrate. Notably, a human brain takes 20 watts to exhibit generalized intelligence. No nuclear reactors running data centers, just a Twix bar. This last bit I honestly leave mostly as a point of discussion, because there's an enormous amount of interesting implications and avenues thereof.
What y'all Tildeans make of this? Anyone else been thinking about this kind of stuff?
24 votes -
Cow astonishes scientists with rare use of tools
20 votes -
So this is 2nd grade subtraction
22 votes -
'Perfectly preserved' Neanderthal skull bones suggest their noses didn't evolve to warm air
18 votes -
AutoEnricher: System can diagnose infections in twenty minutes, aiding fight against drug resistance
12 votes -
Draw an iceberg and see how it will float
41 votes -
Quantum structured light could transform secure communication and computing
6 votes -
Flexoelectricity: Constant motion of living cells could be a hidden source of electrical power
9 votes -
We just turned down millions of dollars. Here is why. [YouTube private equity buyouts]
31 votes -
Sperm may pass traits via RNA, influenced by the father's life
42 votes -
The future of Veritasium
22 votes -
What are junk theorems?
4 votes -
Mathematically extra-complicated Secretest Santa 2025
14 votes -
Goodhart’s law is misunderstood
14 votes -
Science, large language models, and goal displacement
7 votes -
One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants
12 votes -
Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”
13 votes -
Frog gut bacterium kills tumors in mice. Promising for new cancer treatment.
20 votes