Is there any good criticism or writings on this? I found the article on it on Rationalwiki but it turned out to be just some bullshit "hurr you cant comment if you dont know anything" circlejerk that's a recurring theme throughout the entire website. And likewise, the only big resource on it comes from that New Age piece of shit Chopra.
Can quantum physics explain consciousness?
>Is there any good criticism or writings on this?
Yes. Max Tegmark put that theory to rest a long time ago.
arxiv.org
>We find that the decoherence timescale s ( ∼ 10 −13 − 10 −20 seconds) are typically much shorter than the relevant dynamical timescales ( ∼ 10 − 3 − 10 − 1 seconds), both for regular neuron firing and for kink-like polarizatio n excitations in microtubules. This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way.
You have to choose between believing
A) Neuronal firing has something to do with consciousness or
B) Quantum computation has something to do with consciousness
Because decoherence happens way too quickly for quantum coherence to be able to influence regular neuron firing. Meaning the neurons are going to fire in exactly the same way regardless of what goes on at the quantum scale in the brain. And if the neurons fire in the same way regardless of what goes on at the quantum scale in the brain then you can't really claim there's any quantum computation going on given that everything we know about the brain tells us there's a very strong relationship between neuronal firing and consciousness.
>Can quantum physics explain consciousness?
Quantum physics has no place in explaining consciousness. It was shoehorned in there by people who thought it would be a good idea to explain one poorly understood / seemingly mysterious idea with another poorly understood / seemingly mysterious idea. The real "problem" of consciousness is that it's an abstraction of purely physical relationships between stimuli and behavior which people confuse with an actual thing that somehow needs explaining in the way electromagnetism gets explained. You'd have the same problem if you expected a physics based explanation for the convenient fiction of "money."
Tegmark also has stated that he believes consciousness is a state of matter, to add on to his mention.
Anyways, I wouldn't know whether quantum physics has an explanation to consciousness. Physics explains chemistry which explains biology, so it is somewhat logical to see how physics can explain biology, but not sure about quantum physics itself. I'm not qualified in either quantum physics nor neuroscience, so I'm not a final authority
If anything, whatever happens on the quantum scale shouldn't be seen as the absolute determinant in consciousness, it would make slight sense to wonder if anything at the quantum scale influences anything at the neurobiological level
Quantum biology is a thing, and it's a rising discipline.
Pretty sure quantum consciousness has been disproven.
I always call him Tax Smegmark for some reason.
Tegmarks results are not nearly as impressive as you make them seem. For starters an experiment performed on individual neurons cannot be reliably used to predict how the brain behaves as a whole.
Source?
>Can quantum physics explain consciousness?
No. It can explain the relation between forces and particles.
*cough* no biology mentioned *cough*