Vitiello's Quantum Brain Working despite a bad tooth ache-- I am trying to understand Giuseppe Vitiello's ideas on the dissipative quantum brain. His key ideas of spontaneous broken symmetry, Goldstone modes, laser self-focusing etc. are familiar to me from my Ph.D. thesis and in my paper on Goldstone modes and the Jahn-Teller effect with Marshall Stoneham, Director of Theoretical Physics at Harwell in the 1966 Proceedings of the Physical Society of London (cited in the American Journal of Physics Resource Letter on Symmetry in Physics). I precognitively remote-viewed the importance of Yang-Mills ideas and the Goldstone theorem back in the late 60's when I was an assistant professor at San Diego State. In his talk, Vitiello said that the spontaneous breakdown of symmetry connects the microscopic quantum system to the emergent order of coherent macrostates characterized by "order parameters". For example, consider the order seen in the 40 Hz coherent electrical oscillation over widely separated parts of the brain found by Francis Crick. This suggests the clocking device in a computer. Crick, however errs, when he says we are nothing more than the sum of the firings of the individual neurons. The idea of spontaneous breakdown of symmetry in low energy solid-state physics was advocated by P. W. Anderson who summarized it by "More is different." This idea also plays a vital role in the high-energy unification of the fundamental forces that glue quarks into nucleons. The two-state electron that controls the shape of the protein dimer in the microtubule is, I think, Vitiello's "corticon". The electric dipole collective modes are obviously related to the ones predicted by Frohlich. Frohlich's frequency was about 10^11 Hz I think. So how do we get Crick's beat of 40 Hz?
... in spontaneously broken symmetry theories, the Lagrangian is invariant under some group G of continuous symmetry transformations; however, the minimum energy state or vacuum or ground state... of the system is not invariant under the full group G, but is under one of its subgroups... In this case .. the vacuum is an ordered state and collective modes (called Nambu-Goldstone bosons) propagating over the whole system are dynamically generated and are the carriers of the ordering information (long-range correlations) ... the quantum numbers characteristic of the collective mode acts as coding for the ground state: ordering and coding are achieved by the (Bose-Einstein) condensation of collective modes in the vacuum... the collective mode is a gapless mode and therefore its condensation in the vacuum does not add energy to it .... infinitely many vacua with different degrees of order may exist, corresponding to different densities of the condensate ... in the case of open systems these transitions (among vacua) may occur ... due to coupling with the external environment ... the value of the order parameter is related to the density of condensed Goldstone bosons in the vacuum ... the value of the order parameter may be considered as a code number ...

... following Frohlich... the symmetry to be spontaneously broken in living matter is the the rotational symmetry for electrical dipoles.... living matter is made up of water and other biomolecules equipped with electric dipoles.... The electrical dipole density thus plays the role of an order parameter and the associated Goldstone modes have been named dipole wave quanta (DWQ)..

Vitiello says there is a "lasering" and self-focusing propagation of the electric field in "ordered water" that is the mechanism for "the formation of microtubules". Vitiello says that there is a gap energy for the coherent long range correlations of the collective modes that is much higher than the random thermalization energy of 1/40 ev of our body temperature. Is this gap is similar to the Higgs mechanism in high quark-lepton physics? Do the gapless Goldstone modes get "eaten" by the electric dipole fields to form a "clothed" mode with an energy gap in the same way that the W-bosons of the weak force acquire rest mass? Perhaps not, since Vitiello says

the DWQ may acquire an effective nonzero mass due to the effects of the system finite size. Such an effective mass will then introduce a threshold in the excitation energy of the DWQ so that in order to trigger the recall process an energy supply equal to or greater than such a threshold is required. Unsufficient energy supply may be experienced as "difficulty in recalling". At the same time .. the threshold may positively act as a "protection" against .. thermalization and contribute to the memory state stability...
Water coherent domains are therefore protected against thermalization. ... external stimuli imprinting information trigger the spontaneous breakdown of symmetry ... The recall process is .. the excitation of the DWQ modes under external stimuli of a nature similar to the ones producing the memory printing process ...

When the DWQ modes are excited the brain "consciously feels" the pre-existing ordered pattern in the ground state.

The last remark in italics is crucial, and it corresponds to my back-action idea and my postulate that the quantum pilot wave is intrinsically a field of potential qualia.

To review: I use Dangerous Dan Dennett's definition of "qualia" as the immediately experienced "qualitative properties of mental states". The raw feel is elemental in the Universe, and I make the postulate that Bohm's pilot wave is Libet's field of sentience or Sir James Jeans field of "mind-stuff". Changes in the field of mind-stuff induced by back-action form the qualia. Non-zero back-action violates the Born probability rule and corresponds to a nonthermal distribution of nonlocal hidden variables (as enunciated in a paper by Valentini), perhaps of the Nanopoulos "superstring" or "W2 Global state" type. Back-action is zero in ordinary quantum mechanics. This is consistent with Penrose's claim that a really new physics is needed to explain consciousness. My theory is compatible with Penrose's idea of "orchestrated reduction", but there is an apparent conflict with Stapp's theory which purports to derive qualia from the ordinary unorchestrated collapse which obeys the Born probability rule. Stapp is only ready to violate the Born probability rule for anomalous phenomena like telepathy, psychokinesis and precognitive remote viewing.

Unlike the Bohr- type interpretations, there is a clear ontological distinction (in the Bohm pilot wave theory) between the electrical dipole wave (whose domain is in physical space) and its attached quantum pilot wave (whose range is in Hilbert space and whose domain is in classical configuration space). The Hilbert space is a fiber outside of or beyond physical space, but projecting into it. The excitation of the DWQ measurable in physical space must back-act on the pilot wave in Hilbert space to generate the quali or "feel". It is the change or perturbation in the pilot wave attached to the physical DWQ which must be the conscious feel or quali. The change in the mental pilot wave patterns is a mirror or homomorphic image of the corresponding change in the configuration of the particles and electrical fields of the brain to which the pilot wave is inseparably attached. Note, however, that teleportation of quantum states is possible, and this may imply the possibility of transference of qualia between widely separated brains or artificially conscious quantum computing machines. This quantum teleportation may even portend a kind of immortality in spite of Jaron Lanier's trepedations about AI expressed at this conference. Jaron is correct about classical AI, but I am talking quantum AI.

Vitiello keeps talking of a strange "time-reversed mirror" mode in the environment that pairs off as a nonlocally quantum-connected Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky (EPR) twin or doppelgaenger to a DWQ quantum. In other words, Vitiello has a nonlocally correlated pair of quanta one in the dipole wave and its time-reversed twin in the "environment". He claims that this nonlocal quantum connection or entanglement between the two quanta, one in the Frohlich wave the other in the external environment, "can be seen as a self-interaction term" of the Frohlich mode in which the environmental twin is part of the "self-recognition" process.

Vitiello has a detailed mathematical model of dissipative damped quantum oscillators, in which the coupling to the environment undergoes the "superconducting" Bogoliubov pair transformation yielding a double mode or paired squeezed Glauber-coherent "memory state". Squeezed states are able to operate at very low noise fluctuation levels in the sensing degree of freedom. The sensing degree of freedom has a canonically-conjugate noise degree of freedom with a compensating very large noise fluctuation level. Squeezed states are proposed by Braginsky for use in quantum engineering as ultra-sensitive detectors of, for example, the ultra-weak gravitational waves. The squeezed Frohlich membrane states might be able to detect Penrose's "single graviton" for his "orchestrated collapse." This is formally a theory of non-equilibirum biological superconductivity. There should be analogs to the Josephson tunnelling effect in neutral superfluid Helium which might explain the 40 hz Crick oscillation as well as something corresponding to the Meissner effect. This would be a kind of bio-SQUID effect built into our microtubule membranes.

The damping term in the second-quantized Frohlich dipole-membrane Hamiltonian emits and destroys the "mirror-in-time" EPR pairs. It is formally similar to the bottom-up GRW-Nanopoulos back-action term which gives an objective collapse time that depends on 1 over the number of particles N forming the complex system. It also corresponds to the term in Prigogine's top-down phenomenological theory that gives self-organization of dissipative structures. The mathematics here is similar not only to superconductivity theory, but also to the Unruh effect in semiclassical quantum general relativity in which a uniformly accelerating observer sees a thermal distribution of photons (which have EPR linked twins in a faraway region of spacetime on the Penrose diagram) analogous to the Hawking radiation in exploding mini-blackholes. There is an EPR pair in both cases. Vitiello does not make this connection. I just noticed it. In addition, Vitiello's brain state is definitely a massively parallel quantum computer.

... we thus conclude that the memory state and its time evoluted state are squeezed coherent states ... the resulting dissipative dynamics cannot be worked out without the introduction of the time-reversed image ... of the original system... the brain ground state may be represented as a ... superposition of infinitely many degenerate vacua or memory states ...each of them labelled by a different code number and each of them independently accessible to information printing without reciprocal interference. Many information storage levels may then coexist thus allowing huge memory capacity ... Memory states have also been shown to be squeezed coherent states. ... association of memories may ... occur ... due to the realistic finite size of the system, (boundary effects) making the memory states not exactly orthogonal.
Asher Peres has an argument that distinguishable non-orthogonal states (due to dissipative back-action in the above case) permit using nonlocal correlations as a superluminal communication channel in which precognitively remote-viewed messages can be locally decoded before they are encoded in a strong violation of Einstein's postulate of retarded causality. The dissipation corresponds to a non-thermal distribution of the nonlocal hidden variables which violates the Born probability rule of orthodox quantum mechanics and evades Eberhard's "no superluminal signal" theorem for nonlocal quantum correlations. These ideas give more detail to Brian Josephson's hypothesis that all living matter uses quantum nonlocality in a way that transcends orthodox quantum mechanics. There is a strong conflict here with Stapp's claim that the qualia of ordinary consciousness is completely explained within the Born random collapse of the state in orthodox quantum mechanics. I shall keep coming back to this conflict. It bugs me.

the recall process is... the excitation of DWQ modes under an external stimulus which is essentially a replication signal of the one responsible for memory printing. When DWQ are excited the brain "consciously feels" the presence of the condensate pattern in the corresponding coded vacuum. The replication signal thus acts as a probe by which the brain "reads" the printed information.
Vitiello needs to give a detailed toy-model of how a replication signal might work. Compare Vitiello's detailed dissipative model for qualia with Stapp's much more vague model based on Bohr's "collapse" which also purports to explain how the brain has a "conscious feel". You see Vitiello, like me, Josephson, Penrose and Nanopoulos contra Stapp are saying that consciousness must be something extra beyond orthodox quantum theory requiring as Penrose puts it some really "new physics" that he calls "OR" in Bohr's paradigm and that I call "back-action" in Bohm's pilot-wave paradigm.
we have seen that the [environmental twin] A tilde-system is the time-reversed image of the [Frohlich collective dipole] A system. Thus [the former] is the "mirror in time" system. This fact together with their role in the self-recognition process.. .... leads us to conjecture ... accepting the literary image of consciousness as a "mirror"
Held up to Nature according to Professor Abrams of the Cornell English Department in the 1950's when I was there.

that the [environmental] tilde-system is actually responsible for consciousness mechanisms: Consciousness emerges as a manifestation of the dissipative quantum dynamics of the brain.
Reference: Dissipation and memory capacity in the quantum brain model. Int. J. Mod Physics B, 9 (1995) 973-989, World Scientific

Return to main document