I’m not sure I understand how quantum events could have an appreciable effect on chemical reactions once decoherance has occurred. Could you point me somewhere with more information? It’s very possible I misunderstood a sequence, especially the QM sequence.
I could also see giving different estimates for the population of Australia for slightly different versions of your brain, but I would think you would give different estimates given the same neuron configuration and starting conditions extremely rarely (that is, run the test a thousand times on molecule for molecule identical brains and you might answer it differently once, and I feel like that is being extremely generous).
Honestly I would think the decoherance would be so huge by the time you got up to the size of individual cells that it would be very difficult to get any meaningful uncertainty. That is to say, quantum events might be generating a constant stream of alternate universe brains, but for every brain that is functionally different from yours there would be trillions and trillions of brains that are functionally identical.
If you include electrons a single water molecule has 64 quarks, and many of the proteins and lipids our cells are made of have thousands of atoms per molecule and therefore tens of thousands of quarks. I am having a hard time envisioning anything less than hundreds of quarks in a molecule doing enough to change the way that molecule would have hooked into its target receptor, and further that another of the same molecule wouldn’t have simply hooked into the receptor in its place and performed the identical function. There may be some slight differences in the way individual molecules work, but you would need hundreds to thousands of molecules doing something different to cause a single neuron to fire differently (and consequently millions of quarks), and I’m not sure a single neuron firing differently is necessarily enough for your estimate of Australia to change (though it would have a noticeable effect given enough time, a la the butterfly effect). The amount of decoherance here is just staggering.
To summarize what I’m saying, you’d need at least hundreds of quarks per molecule zigging instead of zagging in order for it to behave differently enough to have any meaningful effect and probably at least a few hundred molecules per neuron to alter when/how/if that neuron fires, or whether or not the next neuron’s dendrite receives the chemical signal. I would think such a scenario would be extremely rare, even with the 100 billion or so neurons and 100 trillion or so synapses in the brain.
You may be right, I don’t really know what’s involved in chemical reactions. A chemist knowing enough theory of a physicist would likely be able to reliably resolve this question. Maybe you really know the answer, but I don’t know enough to be able to evaluate what you wrote...
I’m not sure I understand how quantum events could have an appreciable effect on chemical reactions once decoherance has occurred. Could you point me somewhere with more information? It’s very possible I misunderstood a sequence, especially the QM sequence.
I could also see giving different estimates for the population of Australia for slightly different versions of your brain, but I would think you would give different estimates given the same neuron configuration and starting conditions extremely rarely (that is, run the test a thousand times on molecule for molecule identical brains and you might answer it differently once, and I feel like that is being extremely generous).
Honestly I would think the decoherance would be so huge by the time you got up to the size of individual cells that it would be very difficult to get any meaningful uncertainty. That is to say, quantum events might be generating a constant stream of alternate universe brains, but for every brain that is functionally different from yours there would be trillions and trillions of brains that are functionally identical.
If you include electrons a single water molecule has 64 quarks, and many of the proteins and lipids our cells are made of have thousands of atoms per molecule and therefore tens of thousands of quarks. I am having a hard time envisioning anything less than hundreds of quarks in a molecule doing enough to change the way that molecule would have hooked into its target receptor, and further that another of the same molecule wouldn’t have simply hooked into the receptor in its place and performed the identical function. There may be some slight differences in the way individual molecules work, but you would need hundreds to thousands of molecules doing something different to cause a single neuron to fire differently (and consequently millions of quarks), and I’m not sure a single neuron firing differently is necessarily enough for your estimate of Australia to change (though it would have a noticeable effect given enough time, a la the butterfly effect). The amount of decoherance here is just staggering.
To summarize what I’m saying, you’d need at least hundreds of quarks per molecule zigging instead of zagging in order for it to behave differently enough to have any meaningful effect and probably at least a few hundred molecules per neuron to alter when/how/if that neuron fires, or whether or not the next neuron’s dendrite receives the chemical signal. I would think such a scenario would be extremely rare, even with the 100 billion or so neurons and 100 trillion or so synapses in the brain.
You may be right, I don’t really know what’s involved in chemical reactions. A chemist knowing enough theory of a physicist would likely be able to reliably resolve this question. Maybe you really know the answer, but I don’t know enough to be able to evaluate what you wrote...
See my comment.