Was Penrose right? New evidence for quantum effects in the brain [video]

Going to eat my own foot here, but, as I see it, there are two different meanings of quantum in the brain.

1. Cells in the brain function quantum-ly. Honestly, most people shouldn't care about this, in the same way most people shouldn't care about the refractory period of neurons.

2. The brain simulates quantum calculations in situations of uncertainty, by bonding to/mirroring other people and the environment. This one everyone should care about.

How a group picks a leader, how people pick partners, important social decisions feel very quantum:

- uncertainty until they are suddenly resolved

- the "inside" view is different from the "outside" one

- spooky entanglement

This whole line of thought is just based on the not very well-supported assumption that classical computation can't give rise to conscious experience.

Just for background, the relevance is this: We have conscious/immediate experience. Things like the feeling of seeing the color red or feeling an itch. There seems to be no way to account for this in physics. It could be that there is some aspect of physics which only operates on brain like objects and produces these feelings.

The problem is that we are all here on hacker news talking about this, so somehow this aspect is not just observing, it’s affecting our brains enough that at least we know it exists.

So then the problem is that physics as we understand it doesn’t provide much room for an external force to affect things. The one area where there is maybe some wiggle room is wave function collapse. The state of a quantum system after collapse appears to be completely random, so it’s possible that an external force could affect it.

The brain evolved around quantum uncertainty the way life evolved around thermal sea vents. An extant quirk of the natural world that a complex brain could utilize for decision making in the macro-scale physical world.

With AI closing in on general intelligence, using just binary numbers and some calculations, I’m going to place my bet that quantum entanglement is not necessarily for general intelligence.

Really good explanation in this video.

tl;dr: New evidence weakens one of the arguments against Penrose and Hammeroff's ideas of consciousness.

We still have no idea if Penrose was correct when he wrote that his educated guess is that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. But new findings of "room temperature bigger-than-an-atom size quantum effects" are pointing to Hammeroff being right about the microtubules in neurons being capable of conducting such effects.

There's no further evidence for quantum computations in neurons or panpsychism (as one explanation of the Penrose-Hammeroff hypothesis seems to require).

At any rate, Penrose is someone that still should be taken seriously, whether or not Objective Reduction is a thing (Penrose's solution to the measurement problem).