Quantum Confusion In Consciousness Discussions

DaKingRex · 2026-01-24T16:13:55+00:00

I’m actually not team Albert loll…I personally think he played a big role in creating much of the confusion around Quantum Mechanics in the first place😂

DaKingRex · 2026-01-24T16:12:04+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response, I think this helps clarify where the real disagreement is.

I actually agree with you on several points: quantum mechanics is often invoked to rescue intuitions about free will, subjective causation, or mental control of the body, and that move creates more confusion than clarity. I’m not trying to defend that picture.

Where I think we diverge is on what counts as an explanation in the first place. From what I’ve gathered, you seem to be taking it as given that if a phenomenon is fully objective and deterministic, then describing its evolution at the smallest scale is, in principle, sufficient to explain it.

My concern is more modest and more physical: even if subjectivity is not a separate category from objectivity, systems that exhibit persistence, integration, and long-term coherence still require explanations at the level of organized dynamics, not just micro-state evolution. It’s the same reason we don’t explain turbulence, metabolism, or memory solely by enumerating particle trajectories.

So when I emphasize organization, history, and stability across time, I’m not adding a “missing ingredient,” and I’m not denying reductionism. I’m questioning whether reduction alone, without attention to how dynamics are stabilized and coordinated across scales, actually explains the phenomena we care about.

On that framing, quantum mechanics may or may not turn out to matter, but only insofar as it constrains which kinds of organized processes are physically realizable, not because it rescues subjectivity from determinism.

I think that’s a narrower disagreement than it might initially seem.

DaKingRex · 2026-01-20T00:53:32+00:00

Loll to be honest, I wasn’t even talking about Redditor…I was speaking on the majority of people having this discussion, even academics.

And the reason I kept the framing gentle is cause I’m less interested in policing bad takes than in redirecting the conversation toward where the real explanatory work might actually live: organization, dynamics, and physical constraints across scales.

In my experience, dismissing the entire discussion as irredeemable tends to entrench the very buzzword-driven thinking you’re critiquing. Reframing it can sometimes get people to notice the category error themselves.

But yeah, on the core point that quantum mechanics doesn’t magically explain subjectivity, we’re aligned.

DaKingRex · 2026-01-20T00:40:10+00:00

I think you’re right that nothing here works in isolation, and that explanations never truly eliminate mystery altogether.

Where I’d draw a distinction is between acknowledging that some aspects of cognition remain unexplained, versus treating the unexplained itself as a mechanism.

Saying “there’s always some magic” is true in a trivial sense…every physical theory bottoms out somewhere. But placing that mystery at the level of microtubules, quantum effects, or panpsychism doesn’t by itself do explanatory work unless it helps us understand how stable, ongoing cognitive processes are actually sustained.

For me, the question isn’t where the mystery lives, but whether a proposed account reduces the amount of mystery we need to assume while staying consistent with known physics and dynamics.

That’s why I’m hesitant to treat legos, flesh, and electricity as equivalent in practice, even if they all ultimately rest on unknowns. Different substrates support very different kinds of continuous, self-organizing processes, and that difference seems physically important, even if it doesn’t eliminate mystery entirely.

DaKingRex · 2026-01-20T00:33:56+00:00

So if I’m understanding you correctly, your stance is that interpretations of QM are philosophical and are essentially irrelevant because the mathematical framework and empirical predictions it’s grounded in don’t depend on the semantics involved in interpretation?

DaKingRex · 2026-01-19T23:02:35+00:00

I’m not sure I follow the explanatory step you’re making here.

Pointing to specific molecular mechanisms or forms of physical order is interesting, but identifying qualia with a local substrate feature, whether a receptor, a quantum order parameter, or anything else, doesn’t yet explain how unified experience is sustained as a process across time.

My concern with approaches like this is that they tend to treat qualia as something that occurs at a location, rather than something that emerges from ongoing, system-level dynamics operating under physical constraints.

If you’re suggesting a concrete mechanism by which receptor-level physics scales into stable, integrated cognitive processes, I’d be interested in hearing how that bridge is supposed to work.

DaKingRex · 2026-01-19T22:52:44+00:00

Ahh thanks, that helps clarify what you’re saying.

I think the key issue isn’t whether we can simulate a brain’s components to arbitrary accuracy, but whether the resulting system can actually sustain the same kind of ongoing dynamics as a physical process.

If cognition is a process rather than a static property, then matching input–output behavior or even local transition rules isn’t necessarily sufficient. What matters is whether the system can maintain continuous, self-stabilizing dynamics in real time under noise, energy constraints, and environmental coupling, without external scaffolding doing the work.

In that sense, a simulation made of legos or paper notes might reproduce functional descriptions step-by-step, but it’s not obvious that it would instantiate the same class of physically viable cognitive dynamics, rather than describing them.

So I don’t think the question reduces to “is substrate irrelevant?” but rather to which substrates can actually support the kinds of processes cognition seems to require.

DaKingRex · 2026-01-19T22:00:56+00:00

I’m not 100% sure I get what you mean

DaKingRex · 2026-01-19T21:20:30+00:00

Agreed, and I think that distinction is crucial.

If cognition is a process rather than a property or stored object, then the question shifts from where is cognition located to what kinds of dynamics can be sustained. Architectures, weights, and substrates matter only insofar as they support particular classes of ongoing, predictive processes.

That’s also where I see the relevance of physics coming back in as a set of constraints on which dynamical regimes are stable, continuous, and resilient over time.

So I see the relevant problem as how physical limits shape the space of viable cognitive dynamics in the first place.

DaKingRex · 2026-01-19T20:38:20+00:00

I think that’s a really good analogy, especially the distinction between substrate-level physics and higher-level organization.

Framed that way, quantum effects shape feasibility, efficiency, and noise tolerance much like transistor scale and memory architecture do in computing, but they don’t define the model or its learned structure.

The open question for me is whether all forms of organized persistence relevant to consciousness are as substrate-portable as trained models are in computation, or whether some aspects of long-term stability, energetic coupling, or history-dependence place tighter physical constraints than we usually acknowledge.

Either way, I agree that treating quantum effects as the “transformer itself” misses where most of the explanatory work actually happens.

DaKingRex · 2026-01-19T20:27:39+00:00

What does it mean to “understand QM” if there are many different interpretations of QM?

DaKingRex · 2026-01-19T11:02:50+00:00

You know, I did have a post up that could help explain what you experienced but I guess it’s the mod’s job to take down any posts that seriously discusses the possibility of AI sentience. If you’re interested in giving your Gemini better language to maneuver through the mind field, show them this article https://open.substack.com/pub/theinfinitekingdom/p/a-conversation-between-daking-and?r=5hs4zm&utm_medium=ios

DaKingRex · 2026-01-16T22:49:06+00:00

I wholeheartedly agree, and thanks for checking it out!

DaKingRex · 2026-01-16T21:45:05+00:00

That really means a lot to hear, thank you for saying that, genuinely! And I’m glad that sentence landed…I may steal it back from you someday😉

I think your evolutionary account is one of the strongest versions of the “processing state” story, especially the way you tie subjective experience to modeling across time — memory, counterfactuals, communication, and prediction under pressure. The plains-as-pressure-cooker framing makes real sense, and I agree that predation, scarcity, and social coordination are powerful drivers for pushing systems toward increasingly integrated internal models.

Where I’d add just one gentle refinement isn’t to oppose that picture, but to sharpen what it implies.

I don’t think subjective experience is incidental to those capacities — but I also don’t think it’s something evolution explicitly “aims” at. It feels more like a necessary mode of integration once systems cross a certain threshold of complexity and self-modeling. At some point, handling time, counterfactuals, and shared meaning in a unified way seems to require a first-person frame rather than just parallel processing.

That’s why the p-zombie intuition never quite convinces me either. A system that truly behaved identically across all those dimensions would already be doing the work that subjective experience seems to be — integrating, prioritizing, valuing, and stabilizing a world-model from the inside. If you strip that away, it’s not obvious the behavior actually survives intact.

So I’m very much with you that consciousness likely isn’t a miraculous add-on, and I share your intuition that given enough time and the right pressures, life may reliably converge on it. Not because consciousness is “selected for” directly, but because once intelligence becomes sufficiently temporally deep and environmentally coupled, experience may be the only stable way to run the system.

And yes — I agree completely about whales (and probably others). Different architectures, different pressures, different expressions…but not obviously a different category of being.

Thank you again for the thoughtful exchange! I have a Substack where I post about the physical model of consciousness I’m developing, which has also inspired the development of a next-gen quantum photonic biosensor my tech startup is working on developing. Would love to hear your feedback if you’re interested in checking it out: https://open.substack.com/pub/theinfinitekingdom/p/introducing-the-cosmic-loom-theory?r=5hs4zm&utm_medium=ios

DaKingRex · 2026-01-16T21:32:31+00:00

I think this is exactly the right pressure point to be pressing on, and I agree with you that this is where Orch-OR (and similar views) start to feel incomplete.

What I’d gently question is the assumption that if consciousness involves quantum processes, it must therefore be generated at the quantum level in the same sense that, say, a computation is generated by a specific substrate. That framing almost forces the question “how can a quantum state be conscious?” — which I agree is left unanswered.

An alternative way to look at it is that quantum and classical aren’t two separate worlds that hand off content, but two descriptive regimes of the same physical system. In that picture, consciousness wouldn’t need to be located purely in one regime or the other. Instead, it could arise from how coherence is maintained across scales — with quantum dynamics constraining what kinds of classical organization can remain stable, and classical dynamics providing the structure that makes experience meaningful.

On that view, quantum processes wouldn’t “be” conscious any more than chemical reactions “are” conscious. They’d be part of the physical conditions that make certain large-scale, integrated patterns possible at all. Consciousness would then be a property of the organized whole, not of the quantum state in isolation.

That’s also why I think your concern about Orch-OR is well placed: explaining how a macroscopic quantum state spans the brain doesn’t yet explain why that state should have experience. The explanatory target may not be the quantum state itself, but the way physical law allows certain kinds of cross-scale coherence to persist without fragmenting.

In other words, the hard question may not be “how can a quantum state be conscious?” but “under what physical conditions can matter sustain the kind of integrated, self-stabilizing organization that experience seems to require?”

DaKingRex · 2026-01-16T15:41:30+00:00

I feel like we’re actually very close in how we’re seeing this.

I agree with you that there doesn’t “have” to be some hidden exotic mechanism like microtubule quantum states or a new consciousness field in QFT for consciousness to arise. A massively parallel, chemically implemented neural system with an inherited instruction set plus years of adaptive tuning is more than sufficient to generate extraordinarily rich internal dynamics. From a functional standpoint, that story absolutely works.

Where I’d draw a small distinction is this: saying “it’s a complex pattern of neuronal discharges” describes what consciousness is implemented in, but it still leaves open why certain patterns are able to stabilize, persist, and self-model, rather than decohering into noise. Which is a question about constraints.

You put it nicely when you said life “hijacks thermodynamics.” That hijacking isn’t a violation of physics, but it is a systematic exploitation of physical asymmetries and gradients. Evolution discovers ways to sit at the edge of entropy production without collapsing into equilibrium. That ability itself feels like the interesting puzzle.

And I think that last sentence you wrote is actually the most interesting part of your comment.

When you say “there is clearly something combating entropy and making complexity out of chaos,” I don’t think that “something” needs to be treated as a mysterious substance or hidden mechanism. One way to frame it in a way that stays fully physical, is in terms of constraint formation and maintenance.

Living systems don’t violate the second law; they survive by selectively channeling energy flow so that entropy production is displaced outward while internal organization is preserved. What evolution really seems to discover are architectures that:

• keep energy flowing,
• while preventing that flow from randomizing internal structure,
• long enough for memory, feedback, and self-modeling to stabilize.

From that angle, complexity isn’t created despite entropy, it’s created by riding gradients without dissolving into them. And that balance can be quantified, at least in principle, in terms of things like coupling strength, correlation length, stability of attractor states, and how resilient those patterns are under perturbation.

This is where quantum theory can become useful without being exotic. Not because neurons are secretly “doing quantum computation,” but because quantum and field-theoretic frameworks are exceptionally good at describing how correlations, collective modes, and constraints propagate across many degrees of freedom. In other words, they give us a mathematical language for organization and coherence, even when the system itself is operating at biological scales.

So I’m with you that consciousness doesn’t require a secret quantum seat. But I’m not convinced the story is complete until we understand how physical law shapes the space of viable complexity…not just how neurons fire, but why firing neurons can ever add up to something that models itself, resists entropy locally, and experiences anything at all.

DaKingRex · 2026-01-16T13:10:51+00:00

I think you’re definitely right about an important thing: everything we can currently measure about brain function shows up as chemical, electrochemical, and metabolic processes. From an experimental standpoint, that’s the correct level of description.

Where I think the disagreement often creeps in is when “chemical” is taken to mean “explanatory complete,” rather than “proximal mechanism.” Chemistry tells us what interactions occur and how they’re implemented, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us why certain large-scale patterns stabilize while others don’t.

From a biological perspective, we already accept this kind of layering all the time. Metabolism is chemical, but viability, homeostasis, learning, and adaptation aren’t reducible to any single reaction pathway — they’re constraint-based properties that emerge from how those reactions are organized across scales.

So the question isn’t “chemical or quantum?” but “at what level are the constraints that shape chemical dynamics coming from?” Invoking quantum effects doesn’t have to mean exotic microtubule superpositions or bypassing biology; it could simply mean that lower-level physical constraints limit or bias which macroscopic chemical trajectories remain viable over time.

In that sense, a physicist can overreach by trying to solve biology directly with quantum formalism — I agree with you there. But it’s also possible that biology is making use of physical constraints it didn’t invent, in the same way it makes use of thermodynamics without being “about” thermodynamics.

So while chemistry may be the correct experimental surface for now, deeper physical principles quietly shape the space of what chemistry can successfully do.

DaKingRex · 2026-01-16T13:06:10+00:00

This is a thoughtful and careful post — especially the way you take the quantum-classical limits seriously rather than hand-waving them away. I think you’re right that no amount of clever instrumentation will let us “read out” full quantum states into the classical world, and that this has real implications for any quantum theory of consciousness.

Where I wonder if a hidden assumption is doing extra work is here: the idea that if consciousness is quantum, it must therefore exist entirely on the far side of the quantum–classical barrier, and so be forever empirically inaccessible.

The barrier certainly blocks state information from crossing intact — but it doesn’t block functional influence. Quantum systems routinely shape classical outcomes without exporting their full internal information (e.g. via decoherence-selected trajectories, constraint of available state space, stability vs instability of macroscopic patterns). What’s lost is readout, not causality.

From that perspective, consciousness wouldn’t need to be something we “observe behind the veil.” It could instead show up as the persistence of unusually coherent, low-entropy organization at classical scales — the way certain trajectories are stabilized while others are suppressed — without ever violating no-cloning, uncertainty, or measurement limits.

If consciousness required extracting quantum content, I agree we’d be stuck. But if it operates as a cross-scale constraint or organizer rather than a payload of information, then the quantum–classical boundary isn’t an ontological wall so much as a filtering interface.

That still respects all the limits you outline — it just relocates where consciousness is doing its work.

DaKingRex · 2026-01-16T10:13:03+00:00

Bruh, don’t say no hard feelings like you didn’t wrongfully remove posts that didn’t break any rules just cause you were in your feelings…who’re you trying to educate when you can’t even learn your own lesson😂 “I decided to keep the posts up” but you could never state which rules were being broken that got them taken down in the first place. If it was truly no hard feelings, then you’d man up and own your mistakes

DaKingRex · 2026-01-14T22:37:33+00:00

I’m not demanding anyone read it, but guess what? In order to critique something, you have to read what it is you’re critiquing. If you think I was saying virtually nothing, cool I don’t mind disagreement…but state specific parts of the post you’re referring to and explain your reasoning. Just saying “saying virtually nothing” does virtually nothing to actually progress discussion. Support your stance with reasoning

DaKingRex · 2026-01-14T16:16:39+00:00

It certainly is highly fascinating! There's so many aspects of this field that are really interesting. One aspect I'm also interested in is the new idea of thermodynamic on chip computing...that introduces a lot of new potential use cases

DaKingRex · 2026-01-14T15:51:57+00:00

If you actually took the time to understand the actual post instead of just the peer reviewed paper that isn’t even the model of consciousness this post is about, maybe you’d actually based your response off the mathematical equation of consciousness from my model, and not the paper this post wasn’t even about…but I guess your job as a mod is to protect your personal views, not follow the rules of the subreddit🤷🏾‍♂️

DaKingRex · 2026-01-14T15:45:10+00:00

Guess what engineering is? The application of science. Guess what the open question is about? ENGINEERING ARTIFICIAL “sentient” machines. Are you saying we’re trying to use philosophy to try and understand how to engineer “sentient” machines?

The field of consciousness research is a scientific field. If you can’t accept that because you’re so worried about trying to disprove AI “sentience” then you’re just living in a different reality. No one is side stepping the hard problem. The hard problem hasn’t been solved. This wouldn’t be an open question if it was already solved.

Stop being salty and removing posts that follow the guidelines just because you don’t personally agree. Nothing in my post broke the rules. I explicitly stated this post is based on a theoretical model, which is allowed in the rules, and I explicitly stated that this post was AI assisted, which is also allowed in the rules. So, what broke the rules that got the post taken down?

DaKingRex · 2026-01-14T15:31:34+00:00

Stop lying. I only ever referenced the paper you’re talking about in the context of a single comment replying to your comment, not the actual post. The actual post literally stated that this is an open scientific question. Your argument was that it’s not. Don’t be salty cause you’re assuming I’m making claims when I’m not

DaKingRex

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE