The article makes it sound like "quantum decoherence" was the "daunting obstacle that has plagued microtubules" as a concept. This is a lie. What has plagued the concept is that there is no evidence for it whatsoever. Microtubules are a basic structural building block of a wide variety of cells, and they have not been shown to take part in information processing (apart from sometimes acting as rails for molecules to travel along), much less have they ever been demonstrated to have any kind of "quantum" effect. Articles like the one here are lying to you.
Quantum consciousness is a presuppositional pseudoscience that starts with the assumption that cognitive processes (or "consciousness" whatever that means) cannot possibly be of biochemical origin, and then works through different scenarios based on that until the proponents find one that can't immediately be discredited for a while. Just because something can't be disproven doesn't mean it's true though, not by a long shot.
Do quantum effects play a role in chemistry? Yes, where interactions between molecules and actual quantum phenomena are expected, for example as postulated for the chlorophyl molecule. But nothing in actual, serious neuroscience has so far suggested that neurons use "fragile quantum states" to compute anything.
It's also important to understand what the people proposing the different flavors of quantum quackery are actually saying: their thesis is that there is a metaphysical property called "consciousness" inherent to the universe itself, and that brains act essentially as antennas for this cosmic phenomenon. Despite the utter baselessness of these claims, people are still vigorously believing in this ever since Roger Penrose famously lost his mind to it and Deepak Chopra started selling esoteric books about it.
Quantum quackery is an insidious new age philosophy aimed at exploiting the willingness of humans to believe they are special and beyond the mundanities of the rest of the universe.
What strangely passionate language in response to mere hypotheses which do actually suggest experiments the results of which may show 'it's time to give up on the notion of quantum cognition altogether' or not. The impression is that even suggesting such ideas is a form of moral turpitude. Weird!
I'm with you, stinks of classical scientific elitism, it's intended to dissuade challenges to the status quo, in denial that much of the great progress in science have been achieved by individuals who opened themselves up to criticism in order to progress thought by doing exactly that. Shutdown!
There's a difference between cognition and consciousness. It's generally accepted that cognition is caused by electrochemical processes in the brain, the exact details of which are still to be worked out. However, there's no generally accepted, or even widely accepted, theory of consciousness.
I think that consciousness might be necessary to make quantum measurements, though. So did Eugene Wigner. This suggests to me that consciousness might have something to do with quantum mechanics at a fundamental level. Exactly what the connexion is, I don't know. I don't think it's helpful to point to particular quantum processes (possibly) taking place in the brain and claim they cause consciousness, because that still wouldn't explain how quantum phenomena give rise to consciousness.
That's because consciousness - at least in the way it's being used here - is not a scientific term at all. What people think it might be isn't reason enough to postulate a hugely fantastical cosmological mechanism where so far none has been shown to exist.
I don't really protest against your belief per se, but since you're making claims about reality that are designed to sound scientific when they really aren't, I feel compelled to voice disagreement, unpopular as it might be in this environment.
> That's because consciousness - at least in the way it's being used here - is not a scientific term at all.
It's not scientific because it concerns subjective experience, i.e. qualia, which are not measurable or observable by someone else. All an observer can do is to observe how the subject reacts. We could either leave consciousness to philosophers (who haven't got much further than Plato did), or expand science to include subjective experience.
> What people think it might be isn't reason enough to postulate a hugely fantastical cosmological mechanism where so far none has been shown to exist.
Agreed.
> I don't really protest against your belief per se, but since you're making claims about reality that are designed to sound scientific when they really aren't, I feel compelled to voice disagreement, unpopular as it might be in this environment.
I'm not advocating any "new age" world view here. My position is similar to that of David Chalmers, namely that there is something which remains to be explained. I have no particular views on how.
There is no generally accepted definition of consciousness that is precise enough to begin forming a theory, so it's not surprising that there is no such theory.
As far as I'm concerned, "consciousness" is a bogus term that will disappear once we understand the brain better.
> I think that consciousness might be necessary to make quantum measurements, though.
What is the evidence for this statement, besides the tautological idea that consciousness is necessary to make any measurements, if we consider "measurements" to be a conscious process?
I'm not a big fan of this brand of dogmatic skepticism.
I've skimmed through the paper, and from my limited college level physics, it seems like a plausible theory. Plausible enough to be worthy of publication and a modest amount of funding for further exploration.
There have been interesting conjectures in mainstream science about useful quantum effects in biology. Even neuroscience. (magnetic senses in some birds, for example). And since we don't know the tinest bit about how the brain functions, simply ruling out quantum effects is as ignorant as saying the brain solves P=NP. Just admit we don't, as a species know.
Also, I would suggest you read the article and the paper. There's little in there about consciousness.
The article is more upfront about it. The reason why the paper doesn't lean on that too heavily is so it can evade scrutiny.
> I'm not a big fan of this brand of dogmatic skepticism.
I don't understand why skepticism about most things is okay, but when it comes to doubting claims about a supernatural "quantum" effect without any experimental evidence pointing to its veracity, that's suddenly considered too skeptical?
> Just admit we don't, as a species know.
Exactly! That's why it's not okay to just make stuff up and assert it must be true because it jibes with your spiritual worldview. We don't know if the proposed quantum effects exist, and until someone shows they do, there is no reason to believe so.
It's also worth noting that the proposed quantum woo doesn't solve any outstanding problem in neurobiology, they just love to make it look that way by having it address self-referential issues. All that crap boils down to proclaiming that the actual open questions in neurobiology are unanswerable because an inherently inscrutable magical field does all the real work.
I think people are attracted to "quantum consciousness" because it's currently the only plausible physical mechanism of free will. Essentially all of society is structured around the assumption that the participants have bona fide choices to make.
That could be wrong, but it's certainly not a fringe belief. Combine the belief in free will with the belief that physics is mostly on the right track, and it leads directly to quantum phenomena being a necessary part of the explanation.
That's a grossly ungracious summary, but yes: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You need to show some evidence of specialness first, otherwise it's just wishful thinking.
I suspect the "quantum brain" movement is in part so popular because it tricks people into thinking its claims are not extraordinary. That's why I speculated that its insidiousness comes from the fact it's a New Age pseudoscience which caters to people's pre-existing sense of superiority over the rest of the cosmos. I contend that quantum spirituality holds little appeal for materialists.
Like literally 100% of all humans -- billions of people -- have attested to the experience of consciousness. Directly. Constantly. Not in a vague, "sometimes I think I feel something" way, but literally everyone feels it.
The claim that it must not exist [1] despite that overwhelming experience, is the extraordinary claim. I don't know what consciousness is or does, and perhaps it doesn't actually exist, but the belief that it must not exist because if it did exist that would make reductive statements about the brain a little harder, is a religious belief. It's "I can't explain this and it's inconvenient to what I want to believe, so it must not exist."
[1] Or de facto not exist, as in the hand-wavey claim that consciousness is some kind of byproduct of any sufficiently complicated system that arises from a totally unclear mechanism to no purpose or result.
Why the particularly unsubtle strawman? Nobody in this thread has made a claim that remotely resembles "consciousness does not exist" or "consciousness is a byproduct of any sufficiently complicated system". Those are both totally different from "consciousness is, or results from, a biochemical process".
I think the argument you're making is much more reasonably applied in the opposite direction. The fact that we don't know exactly how consciousness works is no reason to jump to conclusions like "oh, it must be quantum-mechanical and/or incomputable", just like the fact that we don't know exactly how life evolved is no reason to say "oh, God did it."
Quantum consciousness is a presuppositional pseudoscience that starts with the assumption that cognitive processes (or "consciousness" whatever that means) cannot possibly be of biochemical origin, and then works through different scenarios based on that until the proponents find one that can't immediately be discredited for a while. Just because something can't be disproven doesn't mean it's true though, not by a long shot.
Do quantum effects play a role in chemistry? Yes, where interactions between molecules and actual quantum phenomena are expected, for example as postulated for the chlorophyl molecule. But nothing in actual, serious neuroscience has so far suggested that neurons use "fragile quantum states" to compute anything.
It's also important to understand what the people proposing the different flavors of quantum quackery are actually saying: their thesis is that there is a metaphysical property called "consciousness" inherent to the universe itself, and that brains act essentially as antennas for this cosmic phenomenon. Despite the utter baselessness of these claims, people are still vigorously believing in this ever since Roger Penrose famously lost his mind to it and Deepak Chopra started selling esoteric books about it.
Quantum quackery is an insidious new age philosophy aimed at exploiting the willingness of humans to believe they are special and beyond the mundanities of the rest of the universe.