Neil Gershenfeld

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1,202 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2023 last heard May 2023

Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication · 28 May 2023 podcast

And there's a lot of muddled thinking about like collapse of the wave function and claims of quantum computing that garbles just quantum coherence that, that, that, that,

You can think of it as a wave that has very special properties, but these wave-like properties.

And so there's a small set of places where biology uses quantum mechanics in that deeper sense.

One is how light is converted to energy in photo systems.

It looks like one is olfaction, how your nose is able to tell different smells.

probably one has to do with how birds navigate, how they sense magnetic fields.

That involves a coupling between a very weak energy with a magnetic field, coupling into chemical reactions.

And there's a beautiful system.

Standard in chemistry is

magnetic fields like this can influence chemistry, but there are biological circuits that are carefully balanced with two pathways that become unbalanced with magnetic fields.

So each of these areas are expensive for biology.

It has to consume resources to use quantum mechanics in this way.

So those are places where we know there's quantum mechanics in biology.

In cognition, there's just no evidence.

There's no evidence of anything quantum mechanical going on in how cognition works.

Well, I'm saying cognition, I'm not saying consciousness.

But to get from cognition to consciousness,

So McCullough and Pitts made a model of neurons that led to perceptrons that then through a couple boom busts led to deep learning.

One of the interesting things about that sequence is it diverged off.

So deep neural networks used in machine learning diverged from trying to understand how the brain works.

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