Customer Reviews

The Quantum Brain: The Search for Freedom and the Next Generation of Man

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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.

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.

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)

It takes a psychiatrist trained in physics and well versed in modern
technology to understand the impact of quantum mechanics
and neural networks first on computation and then on the human condition.
Dr. Satinover reviews the history of perceptrons, the rise and
tribulations of symbolic artificial intelligence and
related subdisciplines of psychology and biology.
This is a sweeping book, broad in scope and
provocative in its thesis: quantum phenomena are not just a
curiosity for physicists, they underlie our very thought.
It's the kind of book that will, after
a period of gestatation, lead to new research directions
and new speculations in the philosophy of mind.

This book provides a picture of the brain as a learning machine. The latest understandings of how this process evolves, how it is relevant to technology, and what it can all mean to us in terms of our spiritual and biological place in the universe. No absolute answers on that, but lots of food for thought. Excellent book, with enough detail and science, but understandable.

This book is a triumph, there is just no other way to catagorize it. It reads smoothly while covering subjects from quantum uncertainty to von Neumann machines, and does so in an extremely accessible and capable fashion. If you want to get an orthogonal grip on the majority of important learning and technologies that will change human life in the 21st century, buy this book. It has become one of my "Krell brain boosters" - books I buy multiple copies of so that I can loan them out and increase the overall IQ of the planet (see thekrellmachine.com).

I am an MD and my wife is a DVM who graduated PHI BETA KAPPA, SUMMA CUM LAUDE from BAYLOR. We read this together. It required both of us to understand it. It was worth the effort. The reward was an introduction into a world of physics that we had heard about but truly did not have any way of understanding. We now know something about the arguments of the "quantum" / "deterministic" worlds of physics. After each chapter we agreed that we were reading one of the most important books we would ever read. I, being the slower of the two of us, intend to read it again. Thank you Dr. Satinover!

I can't believe this is the same guy who wrote "The Bible Code" - which I agree is a lot of hooey. Maybe it's just someone with the same name?

I find it hard to grasp the book fully but the parts that I can pick up definitely seems valid and the book offers a lot of almost-for-layman explanations concerning cellular automatas, neural nets, quantum physics and how they relate to AI. Jeffrey's writing style is also a joy to follow. He seems to be very critical of Fritzof Capra's 'The Tao of Physics' so one hopes he is more rigorous and takes less liberties in drawing conclusions from scientific literature. To me, both books are pretty interesting reads.

I have found this book very interesting. It is written in a readable and attractive style. A fascinating description of artificial neural network research, weird quantum phenomena, chaos theory and unexpected connection between those 3 fields... Although the relation between quantum computing and brain physiology is far from proven, the book comes with new and inspiring ideas that go beyond Penrose's suggestions. I consider this book as a prophetic one. There is much inspiration in the book also for philosophy and theology. Reading this book was for me one of my greatest intellectual experiences of the year.

"The exceptional man," Schopenhauer one remarked, "is like an archer who can strike a target others cannot, the genius is the one who can strike a target others cannot even see." It is a thought worth bearing in mind while reading 'The Quantum Brain,' the remarkable, often enthralling, new book by Jeffrey Satinover. Satinover's aim in this book is to map out a highly detailed account of how mysterious quantum properties - such as quantum indeterminacy - may be harnessed or amplified by the nervous system to allow for the exercise of free will. The course traversed by Satinover to reach this destination is not always an easy one, and it includes challenging passages on: physics, biochemistry, computer science, and chaos theory. It helps a great deal that Satinover's style is sharp, succinct, and sprinkled with elucidating metaphors. However, Satinover has the tendency to jump immediately into difficult terrain on such a wide variety of topics that a broad scientific literacy is a virtual prerequisite. That said, Satinover handles such topics as well - if not better - than a host of competing books -- like Roger Penrose's 'Shadows of the Mind.' Penrose, of course, generated considerable notoriety with his thesis that intra-cellular "mechanisms" called microtubules were a "bridge" linking the quantum realm and our everyday macroscopic world. The appeal of Penrose's view, at least in part, had much to do with his intuition that the quantum realm was somehow closely identical to a Platonic realm of mathematical Forms, thus appealing to the mystically and religiously inclined. The schema Penrose proposed - that of the macro-scale quantum field-states being generated in the brain - as well the one his collaborator Stuart Hameroff put forward - have not held up to scientific scrutiny, and Satinover convincingly shows why. But contra the arch-materialists Satinover demonstrates that the iterative architecture of the brain at different scales is conducive to amplifying quantum level uncertainty so that behavior at the classical level is non-deterministic. What I've mentioned here, of course, is a necessarily condensed summary of a much more elegant presentation. I'll add but two important details however - namely, that Satinover makes the case that quantum level "effects," such as quantum tunneling, are both ubiquitous and necessary to understand classical level phenomena, and that lowest scale quantum level "effects" influence the initial state of the next scale, while adaptive pressures of the next higher levels shape the boundary conditions of the lowest scale. This amounts to a mutually adaptive feedback loop - an idea closely allied to what the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, in his masterful 'Godel, Escher, Bach,' called a "tangled hierarchy." We shall return to this idea shortly. But first I'd like to set my sights on some of Satinover's philosophical conclusions. It's hardly a quantum leap (or is it?) to suggest that quantum level "events" - events which have no cause - bear at least a superficial relationship to the ancient Greek and Scholastic notion of God as the "uncaused cause" of matters material. Or likewise, as Satinover suggests in passing, that quantum level events "function" as the source of a continual "creation" that sustains the universe at every instant. (This too, is a Scholastic notion expressed by the idea of the "exnihilating preservative" action of God -- exnihilating means continual creation). But Satinover's theological speculations do not extend much further than this. This is an ironic disappointment, particularly since Satinover laments the possibility that mankind risks severing its cultural roots in the race towards the future. And there is indeed, a wealth of concepts and ideas to found in mankind's spiritual, artistic, and philosophical traditions, which might situate and illuminate the implications of Satinover's findings. That is to say, philosophy may be blind without the aid of science, but science may not know what too look for without the help of philosophy. Here is something of what I mean in this regard. Satinover has gone to considerable lengths to produce an argument within the empirical tradition in support of the notion of free will. It is a laudable and welcome achievement. But consider this: Science has hitherto assumed a methodological and metaphysical determinism. In a deterministic framework it is difficult - if not impossible - then, to have conceived of an experiment taking place on the wholly classical level that would disconfirm determinism (the double slit experiment, of course, is the exception). And given that the essence of a scientific theory is that it should be susceptible to disproof we are left to conclude that metaphysical determinism wasn't scientific at all - it was an article of faith (of a rather peculiar sort). More to the point, metaphysical determinism was similar to Newton's notion of an absolute frame of reference - part of the intellectual scaffolding that supported and constrained what questions made sense in a given paradigm, yet lay unexamined as the un-provable assumptions within that system. That such esteemed scientists - the Churchland's, Dennett, and Dawkins, to name a few - could manage to bully and harangue so much of the scientific community into accepting what are ultimately dogmatic assertions is a symptom of a gross philosophical illiteracy among the highest strata of empiricists (many scientists will, no doubt, take this as a compliment). Reading Satinover's concluding chapter, "Quantum Ripples," I can't but help feel that some of these hidden assumptions are still at work, hampering, perhaps, a deeper appreciation of the implications of his preceding discussion. Some quantum theorists have suggested that the collapse of a superposition to an actual state isn't just a case of matter going from a state of potentiality to actuality - to use Aristotle's terminology - but that the potential for "experience" is inherent quantum level, but it is only through collapse of the wave function from potentiality to actuality that "experience" of a sort occurs - that is, quantum measurement is experience. Though presumably the amplification of the quantum capacity for experience through a human (or artificial) nervous system would be necessary for the richly textured sense of experience we as humans experience. In this case, the fundamental energy behind the universe - the quantum realm - would be conscious only adventitiously - through us. And our consciousness - our "I" - would be but an attribute of the noumenal - the un-conceptualizable ground of existence. William James expressed an idea not far from this - about the reciprocal relationship between man and God -- where humankind contributed to the evolution of God. Which brings us back to the notion of tangled hierarchies. A tangled hierarchy is a set of nested hierarchical levels that contain a "strange loop." The idea is captured most intuitively by thinking about the famous wood carvings of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher - most notably his 'Drawing Hands' in which each hand seems to give rise to or draws the other - or his 'Print Gallery' in which a young man in an art gallery stares intently at painting that curves and twists around so that it contains both the man and the gallery. It is a theme of ancient origin, arising in the 'Ramayana,' composed in the 3rd century B.C. by the Indian poet and sage Valmiki, in which the principal characters, after heroic and arduous adventures, retire to a hermitage to study the very book in which they make their appearance as fictional characters (The device also makes it appearance in one of Woody Allen's most creative films, 'Deconstructing Harry'). The iterative is implied in these examples. And so to the notion of self-similar scales within scales, as well as the mutually adaptive feedback loop and self-reference. Douglas Hofstader called the tangled hierarchy a "strange loop" because following the loop tended to lead to unexpected results - i.e., following an apparently outward course one is brought back to one's starting point. The idea is important in this context, I think, because, as Hofstader notes, the paradoxical nature of the tangled hierarchy requires an inviolate, discontinuous, or transcendent level without which the other levels could not exist. It is ideas such as this, dovetailing with Satinover's biological/quantum model, which could form the basis of a richer ontological framework - one in which transcendence not only fits, but is necessary. T.S. Eliot once wrote that art often anticipates revolutionary ideas later discovered by pioneering scientists and thinkers. Perhaps this is a further indication that Satinover's aim has been on target. Satinover has drawn on a vast array of disciplines to make his point. But the inherent tension of stringing together so many diverse interests has helped propel his argument. If we cannot yet tell whether he has scored a bulls-eye, a near miss, or whether others shall score the cleaner shot it is only because the target is still beyond the horizon.