When I first read about this year’s Towards A Science Of Consciousness conference, I really wanted to attend it. Good intentions were overtaken by other plans, and I wasn’t able to fit it into my schedule. Fortunately, NRO’s John Derbyshire was more pesistent, and his excellent account of the conference was almost as good as being there. At least I didn’t have to sit through all that nonsense about quantum consciousness. Derb captured the contradictions of this pseudo-argument. First:
It’s possible to explain [presentiment] via known quantum effects. You just have to drop some common-sense assumptions about time and causation! Sheehan argued that the explanatory power you get by bringing quantum weirdness into biology makes it worthwhile.
Well, yes. Bringing in poltergeists would explain a lot of things as well, wouldn’t it? But at what a cost…? And then:
Stuart [Hameroff] worked up a plausible model of the brain as a quantum computer, with the tubulin protein molecules of those neuron microtubules as the qubits — “Schrödinger’s protein”. There’s a slight drawback here: Far as we know, quantum computing can only work at temperatures near absolute zero, i.e. 590 degrees Fahrenheit colder than a working brain. Stuart phrased this objection as: “The brain is too warm and wet for delicate quantum-mechanical effects.”
Indeed. Not to mention the problem of scale: quantum effects get averaged out into the non-quantum models of classical physics at the submolecular level; where’s the causal mechanism?
Anyway, thanks to Derb for the blow-by-blow. Maybe next time.