46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful!, June 26, 2004
This review is from: The Quantum Brain: The Search for Freedom and the Next Generation of Man (Paperback)
Jeffrey Satinover has written a wonderful book here. What I find so impressive is the book's scope and accessibility. Satinover covers a wide variety of complex topics and explains them in ways that the lay-reader can easily understand. Essentially, the book serves as a wonderful introduction to problems in quantum physics, neural nets, computing, cellular automata, genetic algorithms, artificial intelligence, and some of the basic philosophy of mind problems.
If these kinds of topics have always interested you but you didn't know where to begin, Satinover provides a fun to read and easy to understand introduction. Readers who are already well-versed in these areas may find Satinover's approach to be a little "light-weight", but I think they could perhaps appreciate the manner in which he explains these things.
In the end, I was left somehow feeling a little skeptical of the author's contention of the brain serving to amplify quantum phenemonon to produce free will. But Satinover is weaving a complex argument and attempting to connect a lot of dots. Each of these dots is well-explained and I'm inclined to think that the failure to connect is most likely my limitation and failure and not Satinover's.
So to summarize I'd say this is a wonderful introduction to the discoveries in a broad array of fields such as mathematics, cognition, physics, and biology from the last 100 years. It's a pleasure to read and highly acessible. The index and bibliography are both extensive, giving the reader ample opportunity to further investigate these topics.
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Profound synthesis of quantum physics to neurobiology, March 15, 2003
One of the best books I have ever read. For those of us who have not followed the cutting edge research in quantum physics, neurobiology and artificial intelligence, this book provides an elegant and well-written overview and synthesis of these topics. Although the author may have a bias towards seeing God behind the cloak of quantum randomness, he does lay out the possibilties in a balanced way that can only leave the thoughtful reader further in awe of the miracle of sentience and wondering if free will and God do indeed express themselves through "quantum wierdness". This scientific treatise is a novel path to the BIG questions. Absolutely wonderful. Beware; you'll want to read it again once you've finished.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
HOW QUANTUM INDETERMINACY INFLUENCES CONSCIOUSNESS, August 8, 2006
This review is from: The Quantum Brain: The Search for Freedom and the Next Generation of Man (Paperback)
I first encountered Jeffrey Satinover by following a link from godhatesfag.com. Satinover claims to support freedom of choice for homosexuals, as long as what they choose is to be cured of homosexuality. I suspect that there are many heterosexuals who have been so messed up by life that they have come to believe that they are homosexuals, and such people should be helped; but for Satinover to insist that he knows this to be true of all homosexuals is, at best, professionally dishonest. Then I discovered that he wrote CRACKING THE BIBLE CODE. The idea that historical events might be predicted in the Bible vastly exceeds my capacity for open-mindedness. With this background, who would read THE QUANTUM BRAIN? Fortunately, I had read over half of it before I realized who had written it. Satinover points out that Roger Penrose's "SHADOWS OF THE MIND was quickly assigned to the growing heap of pop physics and consciousness books that few scientists take seriously." This is even truer of his book. However, Satinover's linkage of quantum indeterminacy and consciousness is far more credible than Penrose's, and does not deserve to be dismissed so readily.
In Part One Satinover presents a clear and concise history of the development of artificial intelligence by creating artificial networks that function by parallel processing in the way that neural networks do. Though some specific details may be difficult to fully understand, the gist is easy enough to follow and is quite compelling. The actual development would be difficult to adequately summarize in such a small place, but the crux of it is Edward Fredkin's of MIT conclusion "that parallel computational capacity is woven into the very fabric of matter itself; reality is a massive cellular automaton, and intelligence at every level a necessary concomitant." Mathematically, "neural networks and cellular automata are almost identical: Self-organization at one scale yields the capacity for self-organization at the next. From a computational perspective, physical reality is inherently like a cellular automaton, and thus facilitates computation and self-organization at all scales." Some scientists are seriously considering that evolution "may have little to do with the changing external circumstances and arise, rather, because of the natural dynamics of self-organizing processes." These are all purely deterministic, mechanical processes that lead to the necessary conclusion that man is a machine and that free will is a delusion. Since scientists are reasonably certain that quantum events are caused by nothing, as if particles "chose" which path to take, some have hoped that evidence of acausal quantum behavior in the brain would open up the possibility of free will and the intrinsic existence of consciousness. However, most biologists are convinced that quantum effects are so minute that they cancel out at the macroscale of living organisms.
While computers able to incorporate quantum tunneling - a sort of teleportation between different energy states - have proven to work faster and more accurately than those that can not, tunneling, despite the similarity of artificial and neural networks, is not possible at the brain's high temperature. But one way in which quantum tunneling does play a role in biochemistry is in the tertiary structure of protein. Thermodynamics dictates that a molecule will assume its lowest-energy formation, but "a modest-size protein will have 400 trillion different shapes within a hair of the correct one," yet proteins find the correct one with a speed and efficiency lying outside the range of known processes. Water molecules have been discovered to assume right- and left-handed forms, and to tunnel between them rotating the molecule through a fourth spatial dimension. Chaos theory has demonstrated that an infinitesimal difference in a system can cause a drastic change in the development of that system. A verified discovery of quantum chaos theory is that "quantum effects cause a complex, multiply iterative system of interacting quantum elements to become more orderly."
(Despite Richard Dawkins' stern warning that only people who aren't cool ask vacuous why questions, I cannot help but ask: Why should a purely mechanical universe just happen to have parallel computational capacity woven into it so that part of it necessarily evolves into humans who have the delusion of being conscious and having free will? Why should events "with no cause" induce greater order in a multiply iterative system)?
Satinover concludes the book with his thoughts on how these new discoveries might relate to morality and God, but he does not pummel the reader with his own conceptions. If it is possible for science and religion to be reconciled, this book is a large step in that direction.
(Peter Payne, author of Captain California Battles the Beelzebubian Beasts of the Bible)
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