Introducing the brain: consciousness from edge of chaos (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 16, 2025, 16:53 (3 days ago) @ David Turell

Latest approach:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQZVKDRSMzCWSBdLxPjsrlMVCJG

[Sabine again] "I want to talk about a group of researchers that looked at how humans can make decisions so quickly and now believe they have identified an essential ingredient to consciousness.

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"Think about catching a ball mid-flight. Your brain figures out where the ball is going, predicts where it will land, and tells your muscles to move—all in a fraction of a second. Yet, the neurons that power this process are super slow. It takes 10 to 20 milliseconds for a signal to travel from one neuron to another. Today’s computers, for comparison, perform hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of operations per second. So how does the brain do it?

"The new study reveals that the brain’s secret lies in its ability to teeter on the edge of chaos. And not only this, they say that the mathematics of quantum physics is a surprisingly good description for consciousness.

"The “edge of chaos” is the range in which a system switches from orderly behaviour to a chaotic one. This transition regime is somewhat less poetically called the “critical” range and it’s where interesting things happen. The critical range is where emergent features develop and where complexity arises.

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"This is the world that we live in: we seek a balance between order and chaos: This is what “criticality” means. And, here is the important bit, a critical system has long-range correlations, like those links between nations.

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"...back to the brain. It’s also a complex system, so if the idea of the “edge of chaos” is correct, then the human brain must also linger in the critical range between order and chaos. It can probably switch from one to the other and use the long-range correlations that come with the transition.

"In the new paper now the authors say that this criticality is why the human brain can make surprisingly fast and accurate decisions even though the individual computational operations are so slow.

"The long-range connections of critical systems let different parts of the brain talk to each other. It’s not just fast but part of the reason why the human brain can function with so little power. Your average supercomputer needs at least MegaWatts of power, whereas the human brain runs on typically 20 Watts, that’s about what it takes to power a dim bulb.

"Wilder still, they say they used the mathematics of quantum mechanics to develop a model for what’s going on in the human brain, and that allowed them to quantify how “critical” the state of a brain is. They then used functional MRI brain scans from over 1,000 people, and found that using this measure for “criticality” they could tell apart people who were awake from those who were sleeping. It seems that “criticality” indeed tells us something about consciousness.

"What does it mean that they use the equations of quantum mechanics? I don’t know. They use these equations because, well, they work. They don’t know why. But I am pretty sure that it doesn’t mean that the human brain is a quantum computer.

"I think that AI researchers haven’t fully appreciated the relevance of criticality for the emergence of complexity. Because if that’s right it means that to get to consciousness, you need a system that can descend into chaos."

Comment: Remember the Penrose Hameroff theory that the brain has quantum actions in little tubules in the brain. If NDE theories are correct, this is how the brain must work to receive consciousness and use it. This article DOES NOT give us any new information. It is just very theoretical. But I find it reasonable to consider. If the universe at its base is quantum mechanics, it is no surprise the most complex item in the universe runs at a quantum level.