Given that the brain is a physical object subject to all quantum effects, wouldn’t the novelty be that it doesn't use quantum effects? That it does sounds obvious.
Words are intended to cut up the world - this is how they get their meaning. If you’ve taken these words to apply to everything in the in universe, you’ve rendered them meaningless, which is not the intention. Projectiles are subject to quantum effects but you can model their behaviour classically perfectly well. A charitable reading would be something like “to model the operational behaviour of the brain, classical mechanics is insufficient”.
"Whatever it is" == the same neurophysical/genetic factors that cause high development of "STEM" intelligence is associated with inability to process social cues in a dynamic fashion, somewhat related to high function autism. A great preference for clear classification that is not self-contradicting.
There are plenty of spaces that have the type of people the thread is describing and yet almost none of them have the type of behavior that the audience of this website loves to exhibit.
I’m sorry, but your projectile example is just terrible. We’ve known for decades that the proper functioning of many (most?) enzymes depend on quantum effects. Your body would just break down otherwise.
Quantum mechanics is needed to explain any microscopic phenomena in chemistry and biology - that is not at all in dispute.
The odd set of claims is that somehow biology has 1) figured out how to preserve long-range entanglement and coherent states at 300K in a solvated environment when we struggle to do so in cold vacuum for quantum computing and 2) somehow still manages to selectively couple this to the -known- neuronal computational processes that are experimentally proven to be essential to thought and consciousness.
This more or less amounts to assertions that "biology is magic" without any substantive experimental evidence over the last thirty years that any of the above is actually happening. That's why most biophysicists and neuroscientists don't take it at all seriously.
I am a complete lay person, so I feel a bit silly challenging someone who is clearly an expert, but the idea that a physical process that has had countless trillions of generations of mutation and change, "figuring out" how to use an underlying feature of the universe to optimise, isn't far fetched at all.
It seems that the most powerful force in the universe is simply, survival of the fittest.
Yeah, a bit like when I try to lift my leg, I actually think about how to activate my neurons so that muscle fibers contract one by one...
That's definitely not what happens.
That at some level we have quantum phenomenon doesn't mean that everything occurs at the quantum level.
“Quantum effects” usually refers to coherent states of superposition. In an environment like the brain that is suffused with photons (it’s warm), if nothing else, superpositions decohere virtually instantly. It’s therefore implausible that quantum effects could play any appreciable computational role in the brain.
When these claims come up they don't mean that they are using quantum effects to do normal atomic and molecular things, but rather that somehow quantum effects are used in the process of "cognition" thus allowing us to believe that we are in fact more than biological machines and leave room for various magical properties we like to think we have (souls, consciousness, free will, etc).
While quantum effects have been found to aid in photosynthesis, interesting uses in cognition or otherwise are in fact extremely rare in biology. I believe photosynthesis is one of the few documented examples. Also, despite the popularity of the quantum brain idea, no one has been able to show definitive evidence of it for decades now.
TLDR yes it would be incredibly novel if this claim were proven to be true.
"Soul" I think is basically the memories in our brain. And memories are data, like a picture of bits some of which are on and some of which are off. Is there a picture or just random noise? If there is picture, there is soul.
Another way of thinking about it is that a picture is made up dots which are NOT lit up. So our memories, our soul is is not "physical". It does not have mass, because whether a dot is lit up or not does not change its weight. Memory is not made up of particles but by the information encoded by their positions.
Perhaps the title should have been "Brain uses Quantum effects in a useful/controllable way". Sabine explains it well in the video. To use quantum effects for computation, you'd need very controlled conditions and it was thought be to not possible in the brain.
If so, that's too restrictive. The interaction between two He atoms needs QM (dispersion forces). Heck, even two water molecules interacting is a QM even if you decide to classify the polar attraction as purely classical. You'd still be omitting a lot of the interaction energy.
I see no way I can simulate catalyzed (enzyme) breaking of a chemical bond without:
Well duh, my point is that Newtonian physics is a subset of QM, but doesn't need to be. In fact it's an important result in QM that QM becomes Newtonian in the limit.
Chemistry, on the other hand, is QM. All of it. You can empirically get around it like alchemists did for a while. But it sucks.
This is partially why chemists accepted the existence of the atom far (far) earlier than physicists who stuck with continuum theories - their empirical methods were banging against the wall.
