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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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I'll seize upon your post to address your claims as well as the claims of /u/BahRamYou below since he claimed my education was amiss, and since they somewhat overlap and I won't end up repeating the same arguments. I'm also not a proponent of the Hidden Variables Theory which I got saddled up with earlier. I'm a supporter of Many-Worlds.

First, what you and him are doing to a degree is drawing light to the distinction that's already been known between quantum consciousness and quantum 'cognition'. Quantum consciousness is garbage. Quantum cognition is not. My conclusion as maybe an informed layman, or statistically/mathematically literate student is right in line with what the cutting edge of science gives you in popular format or an undergraduate textbook:

The human brain is a classical scale system and as such can't really be guided in any meaningful way by quantum phenomena. Because even a single perception or decision involves the operation of millions if not billions of neurons, which are massive systems already (even just one neuron is a cell comprised of trillions of atoms). So any quantum indeterminacy that's there will be completely washed out by the system as a whole. This is exactly the reason hardly anyone (and especially experts actually in neuroscience, rather than other fields who are nosing in) buys the quantum consciousness thesis beyond the role of analogy, which is what I was alluding to earlier. And this is the difference between the Weak vs. Strong forms of quantum cognition.

Even if quantum effects became relevant somewhere within a single molecule within a single neuron, and even if this were somehow pertinent to the I/O protocol of the neuron (and had any effect at all on computation) and that’s already two “ifs” for which still no evidence exists, that still would not explain consciousness in any way. All it would explain is how each neuron runs its I/O protocol (which is all to say how the neuron decides what the output signals should be, given the input signals). Single neurons are not conscious. And there won’t be any shared quantum states between neurons, because any molecule doing anything meaningful quantum mechanically in one neuron will be separated by any other neuron by trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms chugging right along as a classical system.

So there cannot be any superposed macrostates in the brain. Moreover, anything the proposed quantum effect “does” to determine a neuron’s I/O protocol can be replaced by a classical circuit doing exactly the same thing and therefore won’t even be necessary to the output of the neuron, much less the whole brain. This is why consciousness can never and will never be explained by quantum mechanics. All sorts of classical systems can replicate quantum outcomes (well weighted dice are just as random and classical waves do many of the same things as quantum waves; when I was in high school we were replicating matrix mechanics with any classical algorithm).

This is also why quantum consciousness can't do what some of it's advocates claim and rescue contra causal free will (which doesn’t exist, and no one should want to exist anyway). For quantum indeterminacy (if that even exists) to change the output of the otherwise deterministic system of the brain, it would require spontaneous coordinated events across trillions of atoms, which even at most (at literally the most ridiculously most) won’t happen but maybe once in a trillion decisions. Which at a decision a second is once every thirty thousand years or so. This is the problem with vast macrosystems like the brain: quantum phenomena simply can’t cause or explain anything relevant about them.

I've read Penrose's book years ago as well as the claims of many of his supporters and the ensuing criticism of his work. There's already a real good summary of this school of thought and it's why only the advocates of the 'Weak' end of quantum cognition (which is to say those who use quantum mechanics as an analogy) are worth taking seriously. The people on the other end of that argument are all cranks. Even the best supporters of legitimate quantum cognition are all rooting their work firmly in classical mechanics by viewing neural computing as a geometric process (an exploration of a vector or concept space) rather than a linear process (say a hand calculation on paper or a Turing machine, although the latter isn't entirely accurate I recognize).

So legitimate researchers can say the brain functions 'like' a wave tank that can produce analogous circumstances of superposed wave-forms, interference patterns, and quantum switching between binary states without literally being quantum mechanical. We know the human brain cycles at around 40 Hz for instance, which seems related to our conscious perceptual threshold of about 20 Hz (that's why film and television media shoot to exceed that in frame rates to get our visual system not to notice). But even then, individual perceptual events often involve waves of coordinated signals across neural nets in the brain, hence entertaining two thoughts simultaneously, and using interference patterns to locate and determine outcomes. So obviously we'll get some analogous phenomena to wave particle duality; but none of this is quantum mechanical, it is all entirely explicable with classical mechanics, just like waves and sound (even hydrons and phonons, though no analog to those has been discovered yet in neuroscience far as I know).

Real quantum cognition research doesn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics and postulates no strange or mysterious physics like indeterminism. It is classical and deterministic through and through. It deviates from classical probability theory (which is linear), not classical physics. Wikipedia even provides a good summary for why thinking the alternative is bunk.