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.
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.
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.
As far as I'm concerned, "consciousness" is a bogus term that will disappear once we understand the brain better.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.