To Understand the Brain We Need to Consider Multiple Realities, with Frank Wilczek | Big Think

To Understand the Brain We Need to Consider Multiple Realities
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Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek argues that understanding basic physical laws is sufficient to grasp how the mind works, but that may not explain everything about the mind. Borrowing principles from quantum mechanics, Wilczek claims that reality may not be suited to full understanding with a set of principles from any one discipline. Taking the case of free will as an example, it may be possible to understand humans both as having free will and being entirely determined by physical laws at the same time.
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FRANK WILCZEK:

Frank Wilczek is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and a Nobel laureate. He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Wilczek, along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Future of Life Institute. His new book is titled A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Frank Wilczek: There’s every reason to think that physics provides the underlying fundamental laws that describe how mind works. That’s the working hypothesis that Francis Crick calls the astonishing hypothesis that I think basically every serious neurophysiologist assumes that by understanding at a molecular level how nerve cells worked and understanding at an architectural level how they’re wired together and understanding the logic of the processing as you might try to understand how a computer works that that will give a rich and in a sense complete understanding of how the brain works, that there’s nothing missing. That program is very, very far from being accomplished and so it’s logically possible that something will go wrong. But so far that seems to be on track and there don’t seem to be any show stoppers as far as I can tell. The previous history is that at one time people thought that there would be some kind of special animism or vital principle that was necessary to understand how metabolism works or to understand how heredity works or to understand how other basic biological processes work.

But in those cases I think it’s fair to say that we’ve actually achieved a molecular understanding. It’s not absolutely complete but it’s – I think the conceptual outlines are quite clear of how metabolism works and how heredity works and it is firmly based on the principles of physics. Now that being said there’s a very important concept that as I’ve – the deeper I’ve studied the more I’ve come to appreciate that Niels Bohr introduced called complementarity. This in quantum mechanics is a theorem but I think it has much more general applicability. It’s the concept that there can be an underlying reality that you address questions to in different ways that are meaningful and give informative answers but require processing the underlying reality in different ways. So that the ways that you have to do the processing might be mutually incompatible. In quantum mechanics that’s just something that’s a theorem, a mathematical theorem that if you want to know where a particle is you have to process its most basic reality, it’s wave function in one way. If you want to know how fast it’s moving, its velocity or momentum, you have to process the wave function in a different way. And you can do either one of those and get good answers for where it’s going to be or how it’s going to move.

But you can’t do both at once because the kind of processing that’s involved is incompatible. I think that’s a much more general phenomenon that when you try to address the nature of things you may find that asking different questions requires different ways of processing the underlying information structures, the underlying reality so that, for instance, in understanding the human mind which is what we were talking about, to understand it physically requires one kind of processing and there’s every reason to think that we already have the .....

[ahmedkasapi]

Frank is by far one of the most brilliant people I ever listned to, he puts all the pop culture half scientists to shame.

[rodp]

We do not need the concept of free will to have law. Sure with out the freedom of will there is no one to punish but we still have real world concerns about dangerous people, they must be segregated and rehabilitated when possible. With a deterministic world view, we can analyse a persons behaviour and the causal mechanisms which produces it, allowing us to potentially correct where error is found.

[Time-Eraser]

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand them.

[eliziskin]

Fascinating ideas. It's generally agreed that any of the branches and sub-branches of cognitive science can claim to have a comprehensive understanding of the brain. Similar to claim to understand how software X and software Y works by deducing it down to hardware behind it. Or that the whole field of medicine could be understood through solely principles of physics, yes and no.

I'd think the quote "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" would be appropriate for this sort of discussion, and to openly accept the idea that we need a more established field of cognitive science. We all love our own subjects of study, but it's the integration that may be more important in producing insight and replicable results. Increasingly difficult as departments become more isolated, and increasingly easy with advancements in communication.

[JamanWerSonst]

His last sentence just means "There probably is no such thing as free will, but lets just pretent there is because thats convenient."

[robertflynn]

Glad to see you out explaining nature, frank wilczek. I may not agree 100% but I am open. Compl ementarity is a good start . Solitons are complementary objects of waves or particles, yes?

[Rockysbeats]

I wish he would explain it more like michio kaku would have coz I don't understand most of his terminology

[mackdmara]

Do you have free will? I have come to understand a few things on this subject.
1. You choose the action you desire.
2. You will always be you.
3. Should you go insane, you still react as you would given the perceived stimuli.
So, the resulting actions you take in your life are freely chosen by a person forced to have only one point of view, their own. Much like a computer, you follow your personal program chosen by your creator. In essence you are free to chose only the things you would choose. So you are on a predetermined course set out at your birth. So is everyone you come in contact with. Physics is written the same way. So given any situation, you react in a specific way. The world around you reacts in a specific way. Everyone you meet reacts in a specific way. All have free will, and all actions are accounted for before they happen.

[atypical_moto]

Right, the computer model fails to recognize the qualitative experiences of the individual. However, I don't think we need to assert "Free will" in order to explain it.

[JaredJanes]

Quite the conclusion to jump to, '...if we are dealing with issues of law, we really need a concept of free will."

This is a question that moral philosophers are quite torn on. I think it would be more accurate to say that "It's obvious our personal and cultural intuition is to act as if we free will. In the same way our our intuition is to eat that sugar'y piece of cake. Now, it's time to actually test this assumption thoroughly."

[kaleemullahnizamani]

how profound relation physics has with universe and human mind is remarkable. physics might seems mathematic base set of rules but if you ponder it everything religion, science, relies any how on physics

[wroscor]

sounds like me when I try to explain quantum mechanics to others. you have to get into so much detail and explain things so specifically that they're just barely understandable.

[SerenityReceiver]

What "apparently" suggests that one would "need a different way of processing" other than the laws of physics to understand a human brain? @3:47

[danielfahrenheit]

So, he is saying our brains process mainly the positions of particles and velocity processes are another reality? I oon't understand!

[cryHAVOC]

Theoretical Physics: The science of understanding what people are saying, while having no gaddamned idea what they're talking about

[muttleymutt]

We will never fully understand how the mind and consciousness emerge from the brain.

[MacroPheliac]

I feel like this guy took five minutes to basically say "be mindful of variables when testing/making scientific observations". Did I miss anything?

[CDeruiter]

To those of you that believe this video to be about Social Justice in any form, is, I think, to miss the message of the video. I believe that what Mr. Wilczek was trying to address was the way areas of study (the area of study here being the mind) have become so specialized that they adopt specific lenses with which to view topics through. The problem then becomes: Which lens is appropriate for which topic? In the case of the mind, Mr. Wilczek purports that physics is the right lens. From there the question becomes: Is he right?

[dlbattle]

It's not that the physical systems that you comprise are making decisions for you and therefore undermining your freewill. You *are* those physical systems, free to make decisions.

[Jypr]

Seems like we haven't moved a philosophical inch from where Kant was 200 years ago and I don't think thats much of a bad thing at all