The idea, more or less, is that there is a big ball of quantum entanglement somewhere in the brain, and that’s the locus of consciousness. It might involve phonons in the microfilaments, anyons in the microtubules, both or neither of these; it’s presumably tissue-specific, involving particular cell types where the relevant structures are optimized for this role; and it must be causally relevant for conscious cognition, which should do something to pin down its anatomical location.
You could say that one major prediction is just that there will be such a thing as respectable quantum neurobiology and cognitive quantum neuroscience. From a quantum-physical and condensed-matter perspective, biomolecules and cells are highly nontrivial objects. By now “quantum biology” has a long history, and it’s a topic that is beloved of thinkers who are, shall we say, more poetic than scientific, but we’re still at the very beginning of that subject.
We basically know nothing about the dynamics of quantum coherence and decoherence in living matter. It’s not something that’s easily measured, and the handful of models that have been employed in order to calculate this dynamics are “spherical cow” models; they’re radically oversimplified for the sake of calculability, and just a first step into the unknown.
What I write on this subject is speculative, and it’s idiosyncratic even when compared to “well-known” forms of quantum-mind discourse. I am more interested in establishing the possibility of a very alternative view, and also in highlighting implausibilities of the conventional view that go unnoticed, or which are tolerated because the conventional picture of the brain appears to require them.
The idea, more or less, is that there is a big ball of quantum entanglement somewhere in the brain, and that’s the locus of consciousness. It might involve phonons in the microfilaments, anyons in the microtubules, both or neither of these; it’s presumably tissue-specific, involving particular cell types where the relevant structures are optimized for this role; and it must be causally relevant for conscious cognition, which should do something to pin down its anatomical location.
You could say that one major prediction is just that there will be such a thing as respectable quantum neurobiology and cognitive quantum neuroscience. From a quantum-physical and condensed-matter perspective, biomolecules and cells are highly nontrivial objects. By now “quantum biology” has a long history, and it’s a topic that is beloved of thinkers who are, shall we say, more poetic than scientific, but we’re still at the very beginning of that subject.
We basically know nothing about the dynamics of quantum coherence and decoherence in living matter. It’s not something that’s easily measured, and the handful of models that have been employed in order to calculate this dynamics are “spherical cow” models; they’re radically oversimplified for the sake of calculability, and just a first step into the unknown.
What I write on this subject is speculative, and it’s idiosyncratic even when compared to “well-known” forms of quantum-mind discourse. I am more interested in establishing the possibility of a very alternative view, and also in highlighting implausibilities of the conventional view that go unnoticed, or which are tolerated because the conventional picture of the brain appears to require them.