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Bird Navigation Based On Quantum Zeno Effect? [Birds are Weird]
Zilla360
21st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered User regular
21st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered User regular
The even more awesome thing about this is could lend support to some of the theories for the Quantum Mind, since before this the Zeno Effect was only observed at sub-zero temperatures. 8-)The intricate biochemical processes underlying avian magnetoreception, the sensory ability of migratory birds to navigate using earths magnetic field, have been narrowed down to spin-dependent recombination of radical-ion pairs to be found in avian species retinal proteins. The avian magnetic field detection is governed by the interplay between magnetic interactions of the radicals unpaired electrons and the radicals recombination dynamics. Critical to this mechanism is the long lifetime of the radical-pair spin coherence, so that the weak geomagnetic field will have a chance to signal its presence. It is here shown that a fundamental quantum phenomenon, the quantum Zeno effect, is at the basis of the radical-ion-pair magnetoreception mechanism. The quantum Zeno effect naturally leads to long spin coherence lifetimes, without any constraints on the systems physical parameters, ensuring the robustness of this sensory mechanism. Basic experimental observations regarding avian magnetic sensitivity are seamlessly derived. These include the magnetic sensitivity functional window and the heading error of oriented bird ensembles, which so far evaded theoretical justification. The findings presented here could be highly relevant to similar mechanisms at work in photosynthetic reactions. They also trigger fundamental questions about the evolutionary mechanisms that enabled avian species to make optimal use of quantum measurement laws.
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That looks more like a fetus, and it does not appear attached to the plank.
No not the fetus, the thing that talks that is on the board/wood/thingy
Regarding the article - so birds navigate through stuff that happens on the sub-atomic particle level?
Very basically, Yes.
Also, so. Hm, that's interesting. I don't think that the quantum theory of mind is at the moment anything but hand-waving and silliness, but it's interesting to see that an animal uses quantum effects at all.
I've done some reading already, and all I've seen is that none of the writers took statistics, or at least skipped the part about confidence intervals, as the first thing the teacher tells you is that a 95% confidence interval does not mean that there's a 95% chance that the true value is withing the interval, but instead means that there's a 95% chance that a sample rendering those results will reflect a true value withing that interval (I think, all I know for sure is what it's not). The true value is either in the interval or outside it. How is quantum uncertainty different?
I'm not sure I understand your question, but if I do, the answer is here. Basically, it's possible to show through clever algebra that a particle having a definite but unknown state is not equivalent to a particle with an undetermined state, and equally clever experiments have exploited this to show that unobserved states are undetermined (as conclusively as such a thing ever could be established). In other words, in QM there's no distinction between the browned and greened parts of your statement. Or perhaps the brown part simply is incoherent in QM, depending how you look at it.
Also, what are you reading that prompted this?
http://www.physorg.com/news127665881.html
Dem's lernin's hurtz, gettin' all up dem synapses, W3rb!
d00d i no!!!!!!
Oh look, some mysteries it must be quantum! It completely glosses over the actual hard problems of explaining mental life using physical causes in favour of "look QUANTUM!".
And also, I'm with ELM, this doesn't seem to support the hypothesis in any way.
Of course you're right about that, but what exactly do you mean by 'Physical causes'? The Electrochemical model?
By physical causes I simply mean any materialistic explanation of consciousness - so Quantum Explanations would count as well, I didn't have anything in particular in mind.
ELM is 100% correct, but only addressed 75% of what I was referring to - so here's the remaining bit.
The hard problems of consciousness are still "How do you get intelligent thought/mental life/intentionality out of unintelligent matter?" - the answer is of course a computational one, whether the computations are chemical or quantum is really rather irrelevant, determining the natuire of the computation is what is important. The extremely vague models of Quantum Consciousness expounded by Penrose, Hammerhof et al offer no explanatory advantages over the more classical explanations and get all of their intellectual steam from the reputation that anything invoking QM is automatically profound.
Well damn. Birds may be weird, but between this and and finding out yesterday that birds can see ultraviolet, I'd say it's a good weird.
Now I wish even more that I was a tetrachromat. Trying to imagine what it'd be like to see more colors is mind boggling.