Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds [video]
backreaction.blogspot.com
backreaction.blogspot.com
It's hard to buy that their proposed stories are the simplest explanation for these few measurements. Much more boring phenomena can influence QY. e.g. simply occluding fluorophores from the bulk solvent can have a huge influence on QY and spectra. (I used to design biological fluorescent reporter reagents...)
> I’ve heard more than one person say that what a pity that Penrose fell for this crazy Hameroff person. But, well, I’ve met both Penrose and Hameroff and they’re both crazy of course, but neither of them is stupid.
So the paper then takes data transmission by light as a given, and goes on to hypothesize structures that direct light as fiber optics do, and from there goes on to "ultrafast" data transmission.
Comments from biochemistry people would help here. It's not at all clear what's an actual result and what's hand-waving. However, it is clear that this is an area where experimentation is possible. Further work should move this out of the range of speculation and either confirm or dismiss it.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10111...
A chemical system is necessarily QM. Chemistry is either purely empirical, or quantum.
Chemistry, on the other hand, is QM. All of it. You can empirically get around it like alchemists did for a while. But it sucks.
This is partially why chemists accepted the existence of the atom far (far) earlier than physicists who stuck with continuum theories - their empirical methods were banging against the wall.
If so, that's too restrictive. The interaction between two He atoms needs QM (dispersion forces). Heck, even two water molecules interacting is a QM even if you decide to classify the polar attraction as purely classical. You'd still be omitting a lot of the interaction energy.
I see no way I can simulate catalyzed (enzyme) breaking of a chemical bond without:
1. Direct or indirect use of at least DFT
2. An empirical solution (curve fitting to data)
Wouldn't users be more accurate?
Clearly it's quantum mechanics that causes these kinds of comments.
While quantum effects have been found to aid in photosynthesis, interesting uses in cognition or otherwise are in fact extremely rare in biology. I believe photosynthesis is one of the few documented examples. Also, despite the popularity of the quantum brain idea, no one has been able to show definitive evidence of it for decades now.
TLDR yes it would be incredibly novel if this claim were proven to be true.
Another way of thinking about it is that a picture is made up dots which are NOT lit up. So our memories, our soul is is not "physical". It does not have mass, because whether a dot is lit up or not does not change its weight. Memory is not made up of particles but by the information encoded by their positions.
How would you know that when we just started studying such effects?
The odd set of claims is that somehow biology has 1) figured out how to preserve long-range entanglement and coherent states at 300K in a solvated environment when we struggle to do so in cold vacuum for quantum computing and 2) somehow still manages to selectively couple this to the -known- neuronal computational processes that are experimentally proven to be essential to thought and consciousness.
This more or less amounts to assertions that "biology is magic" without any substantive experimental evidence over the last thirty years that any of the above is actually happening. That's why most biophysicists and neuroscientists don't take it at all seriously.
That at some level we have quantum phenomenon doesn't mean that everything occurs at the quantum level.
Seems that even Nature uses abstractions.
We haven’t even been able to reproduce abiogenesis.
It seems that the most powerful force in the universe is simply, survival of the fittest.
I interpreted it to mean that we can predict the outcome of it, you interpret it to mean that we can model it.
Either way, maybe it doesn't matter since the original proposal is that consciousness is a subjective experience and there isn't an obvious way to define how to programmatically create it i.e. compute it.
And of course all TMs are just theoretical models. Non-deterministic Turing machine equivalents in particular don't physically exist and may be physically impossible.
But of course if there is indeed true randomness in nature that needs to be modelled, that same randomness can be used a source of true randomness for computation, and you can then build computation that does have stochastically determined results.
What makes you think that? The overwhelming majority of functions aren’t computable. The evidence suggests, if anything, that the universe is uncomputable and at best some isolatable well-measured specific phenomena can have approximations computed to some arbitrary but inexact precision.
Because if it's physically grounded then you can build a physical analogue of it.
> overwhelming majority of functions aren’t computable
By Turing machines, not by any other type of machine. As I said, if hypercomputers exist then they can solve the Halting problem, which Turing machines cannot.
Not only is there no practical way of creating such a thing, most formulations of physics preclude any possibility of making one by placing finite limits of the amount of space or time accessible to us.
(Not to mention that almost all reals are [Turing] uncomputable in their own right, but that's a more complex thing to demonstrate.)
We can of course move goal posts, redefine computability however we like, to get whatever conclusion we care for, but I think that Penrose effort is intellectually honest.
By which definition? Why does anything that is "physically grounded" and "achievable" be computable?
Meanwhile, I don't know what "physically grounded" and "achievable" mean in this context.
There is also a theory that quantum mechanics plays a role in olfaction[1].
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction>
People argue a lot about the "meaning of quantum" but nearly all the arguing is about the behavior of entanglement and wavefunction collapse. Tunnelling and coherency are pretty banal QM phenomena at this point.
As for Sabine... I don't find her popular science vides about biology to be particularly enlightening or accurate.
It seems every decade or so some closely held dogma of biological systems is proven wrong after they mock physicists, computer scientists or mathematicians who first suggest it.
I’m not sure I believe that the heat death of the universe really is the end of all things forever and for all time either, after reading Asimov’s The Last Question and a particularly fantastic manga oneshot adaptation by manga artist Ryul.
If you haven’t read it, I can’t recommend it more highly, and the manga version is a nice addition to the canon. I found a version narrated by the man himself on the Internet Archive, and I also found a fully voice acted audio version from the Drabblecast, also linked below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41230
Original publication:
https://archive.org/stream/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Ser...
Manga version:
https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/oo67iat/the-last-questio...
https://mangadex.org/title/f1e5d886-cc50-4cbf-ac8b-6914d9343...
https://archive.org/details/manga_The_Last_Question
Audiobook versions:
https://archive.org/details/IsaacAsimovAudioBookCollection/1...
https://www.drabblecast.org/2011/03/11/drabblecast-200-the-l...
Long story short, assuming an infinite universe post-"heat death", we'd expect to be able to find every possible arrangement of particles represented at some location, even very complex ones such as the entire universal state we observe today.
> Quantum foam or spacetime foam is a theoretical quantum fluctuation of spacetime on very small scales due to quantum mechanics. The theory predicts that at these small scales, particles of matter and antimatter are constantly created and destroyed. These subatomic objects are called virtual particles. The idea was devised by John Wheeler in 1955.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam
https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5yngp/the-universe-is-made-...
(Evolution itself can be described as a form of intelligence, but evolution is as different from individuals as humanity collectively is from a single thought).
1. Quantum effects seem mysterious.
2. Consciousness seems mysterious.
3. Therefore, quantum effects cause/are consciousness.
...which seems pretty weak.
That alone alone doesn't give determinism though. For that we still need to have some influence on the outcomes of quantum events. If there's a mechanism by which we can will for some quantum outcomes to be more likely than others that'd be nice. It'd fit with intuition that we aren't just observers of a series of events but actual participants that determine the outcome.
What you ate for breakfast January 3, 2024 could be what you always eat with those memories, that body, those resources etc. So saying yes once could very well mean you would say yes 100% in exactly that context without meaning you would always say yes in similar but not identical situations.
On the other hand if it’s random in identical contexts then it’s just random not free will.
In other words a deterministic universe is actually completely consistent with our experience once you realize that the mechanism of us “choosing” anything is really an illusion.
Highly recommend it.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-sense-with-sam-...
Defining free will: Compatibilists often define an instance of "free will" as one in which the agent had the freedom to act according to their own motivation. That is, the agent was not coerced or restrained. Arthur Schopenhauer famously said: "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."[14] In other words, although an agent may often be free to act according to a motive, the nature of that motive is determined. This definition of free will does not rely on the truth or falsity of causal determinism.[2] This view also makes free will close to autonomy, the ability to live according to one's own rules, as opposed to being submitted to external domination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
I guess it is technically true that they would be okay if it turned out determinism was false, since their argument is that determinism and free will CAN be true at the same time. Their line of argument is only really worthwhilein the first place if you believe it plausible that causal determinism holds. And I think most of them do (maybe it's telling that the position is also sometimes called 'soft determinism'). If they denied determinism from the outset, they'd probably be in the 'libertarianist' camp instead (not to be confused with political libertarianism).
The 'tree' of positions relating to determinism & free will is roughly: Do you believe determinism and free will to be mutually exclusive? If no: you're a compatibilist. If yes: you're an incompatibilist. -> In which case: do you believe determinism to be true OR do you believe free will to exist? You believe determinism is true: you are skeptical about free will, to you free will is an illusion. You believe free will to exist: You're a libertarianist and believe complete determinism not to be true.
Although often much lengthier and more technical than Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has very well-vetted entries on philosophical topics, where the authors all are scholars in the respective topic and are asked to write introductory entries (potential downsides: English only and not always completely novice-friendly). There is one on compatibilism, too https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
A quote from it: "Other compatibilists show less concern in rebutting the conclusion that the freedom to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism. Compatibilists of this stripe reject the idea that such freedom is necessary for meaningful forms of free will (e.g., Frankfurt 1969, 1971; Watson 1975, Dennett 1984)—the “varieties of free will worth wanting,” (Dennett 1984). And even more notably, some compatibilists simply deny that freedom of this sort is in any way connected to morally responsible agency (e.g., Fischer 1994, Fischer & Ravizza 1998, Scanlon 1998, Wallace 1994, Sartorio 2016)."
This is the position of the paper above essentially. It references Dennett. The kind of freedom that matters, and that ppl are talking about in everyday life, is not the type of freedom incompatibilists reject. It still makes sense to talk about freedom, as in "freedom of opinion" etc, even if agents could not have chosen differently.
The paper explains this position from the perspective of reinforcement learning, and also gives a theory for why it is beneficial for intelligent agents to model themselves as being able to have chosen differently even if they actually could not.
In my mind, that the known laws of nature do not permit "free will" in the way incompatibilists define it is trivial. (regardless of whether the universe is truly deterministic or also has some randomness sprinkled on top)
Yep, philosophic aspect of the article one big facepalm.
Note though that in metaphysics/theory of mind determinism is defined as the state at a given moment being necessitated from the state at a previous moment. I think one could critique your argument by saying that you're just pushing back the question of determinism by one level (i.e. "what's responsible for your preference of apples in the first place?"). The fact that you always choose the same way can then be taken to be a proof of determinism instead.
A compatibilist line of argument for your position might go something like this: What we consider a free will would hardly be met by a will completely detached from any deterministic constraints whatsoever. If a necessary condition for free will was that it is free from any external conditions, what would there even be for it to 'choose', and on what basis could its choices be made? Only if your mind knows of apples and oranges (objects subject to deterministic systems) and can interact with them (is at least partly part of the same system) can it make a meaningful choice between them. (Again, this view is based on the assumption that determinism exists and that free will is possible.)
Isn't the concept of free will somewhat of a mysticist mental pleaser that it'll be the thing that save us in the end in doomsday scenarios? If we accept that the world is deterministic and so are our minds and behaviors, that will be quite depressing, and if we assume free will and our souls are real, that means decisions we make comes from trekky super-reality and therefore potentially infallible, which happy.
> Note though that in metaphysics/theory of mind determinism is defined as the state at a given moment being necessitated from the state at a previous moment. I think one could critique your argument by saying that you're just pushing back the question of determinism by one level
I think this is just tangential to free will. If a state_old -> state_new transition() was deterministic code, but code involved RNG sampling, it can be considered both deterministic and not. It cannot be ruled one way or another here.
> What we consider a free will would hardly be met by a will completely detached from any deterministic constraints whatsoever. If a necessary condition for free will was that it is free from any external conditions, what would there even be for it to 'choose', and on what basis could its choices be made?
This part looks like a strawman sandcastle made up to overload opponents. A lot has to be defined in your favor for that argument to work. What's wrong with rolling a dice(assuming it still works)? Is randomness make a choice laughable meaningless non-choice?
I'm starting to understand why "technically inclined people are non-compatibilist", everything is just way too under-defined that people are barely on same pages.
Free will as its commonly understood is an entirely religious concept and has little/no utility in explaining behavior. It is, IMO entirely unrelated to consciousness and a distracting subject that traps people into circular reasoning.
The interesting question is what are the myriad factors that contribute to the state of a system at a specific time. From hormones to shoe color to genes to what you ate for breakfast to how you were raised.
Like I said before the more interesting questions are about the interaction of a system with the rest of the world such as what brought the system to a state that it makes a certain choice, what are the dynamics of that state, how might that state change based on different stimuli, can we nail down what exactly is going on in all the relevant parts of the system at a given time etc and if not how close can we get.
I do wish the ever increasing stigma around it in serious conversations would hurry up and increase so we could stop wasting our time with it though ;)
If it's the will itself, that's circular, and sounds like a feedback loop. If it's something else, great...tell me about it. And how it's free.
See: Bell's theorem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
It appears to be completely random.
Hidden variable theory is what you were describing initially. It basically says that there must secretly be deterministic rules to quantum mechanics, and that the randomness we observe is just due to our ignorance of some "hidden variables". Einstein was a fan if this theory because he believed "God doesn't play dice".
John Stewart Bell discovered that quantum mechanics would actually behave a little bit differently if there were secretly variables out there, and proposed experiments that would show if there were hidden variables or not.
The 2022 nobel prize was awarded because these experiments were finally completed, and they showed conclusively that there were no hidden variables in quantum mechanics.
>local
That's an important modifier.
>The 2022 nobel prize was awarded because these experiments were finally completed, and they showed conclusively that there were no hidden variables in quantum mechanics.
Nah, from the same article:
"The exact nature of the assumptions required to prove a Bell-type constraint on correlations has been debated by physicists and by philosophers. While the significance of Bell's theorem is not in doubt, its full implications for the interpretation of quantum mechanics remain unresolved."
1) If we allow information to be non-local, i.e. we allow information to travel instananeously. Allowing this would just be such a hit to the foundation of theories like relativity and quantum field theory that most physicists don't really believe this could be an explanation. These theories rely on nothing traveling faster than the speed of light.
2) We could allow for "superdeterminism". One of the assumptions of Bell's theorem is that a researcher is free to choose any measurement they'd like, independent of the particle they're measuring. However, if the universe correlated everything from the Big Bang onward, a.k.a "superdeterminism", then the researcher is actually NOT capable of choosing a measurement independently of the particle. Everything is pre-scripted from the initial conditions of the Big Bang. If I go and measure a photon from the CMB (the earliest light in the universe we can measure), superdeterminism implies that this photon emitted 14 billion years ago somehow "knows" exactly how it'll be measured in 14 billion years, and has hidden variables that ensure it won't contridict my measurements or quantum theory. This seems to open a whole can of worms about the feasabilty of all scientific experiments, and it doesn't actually make any predictions about the randomness anyhow.
Out of curiosity I went digging to see if there were hard numbers for what physicists believe, and I found a 2011 poll from a conference about the nature of quantum mechanics. Surprisingly none of the respondents believed that random quantum events have some sort of underlying determinism. I'm not saying you should always follow the crowd, but it, combined with all the laboratory testing of the Bell inequality, shows that your initial statement "randomness is an incorrect interpretation of quantum mechanics" is not something you'd say to a group of physicists without having very compelling and detailed reasons to back it up, because it's very much a fringe idea. The majority of physicists subscribe to theories of quantum mechanics that don't involve hidden variables, and treat the randomness as inherent to theory.
Link to the poll if you're interested: arxiv.org/abs/1301.1069. I'm talking about question 1.
They actually ask later in the poll which interpretation is their favorite (Q12) and 42% pick Copenhagen. But the only deterministic one on that list is the pilot wave theory, and that got a 0. Some did pick "other", so that might include something deterministic, but based on the results of Q1 I'm assuming not.
It doesn't tell you there are hidden variables involved or not. Whether light travels fast or not. Whether there's determinism or random chance involved. It's only an if clause, if you may; but a very important one, I'm not detracting from it. Please take time to understand that.
>These theories rely on nothing traveling faster than the speed of light.
There's a lot of phenomena that could be perceived as "faster than light" (i.e. a shadow's projection) and yet they aren't. Information should also not travel faster than light, that put an end to many entanglement paradoxes out there that seemed to imply faster than light travel from a first glance.
If a hidden variable is involved, there could be a not-yet-understood part of the system that allows for it to work in spite of this apparent non-locality.
Does the Bell theorem tell us that? No. Do I know the answer to that? No. Do you know the answer to that? No. No one knows. Hence why I wrote, yesterday,
>A deterministic process being behind it cannot be ruled out (yet?).
> actual participants that determine the outcome.
Nobody disputes that we are (well, almost nobody). But we as participants are ourselves an outcome of processes that are somehow determined, and our decisions have causes. And assuming that they’re instead random doesn’t improve the situation.
A purely deterministic mind is a movie. You watch it. There's no way to influence the outcome or it wouldn't be deterministic. You're just a long for the ride.
A non deterministic mind could be nothing more than randomness with no ability to influence outcomes still which makes it little different to a movie. Again you're just a long for the ride even if the ride has random events.
But non deterministic and the ability to actually influence outcomes? That's the intuition I suspect most people have for free will right there.
Even in this thread you’ll note that there’s a very vocal group of people who would happily shout down any idea that there’s any sort of free will in the universe and that the universe is anything other than a cold mechanistic computation that was determined billions of years ago. They’ll shit talk Penrose, or shout about pseudoscience, and very few of them will critically engage with the topic in good faith. They’ve already made up their minds. Not only that but some of them (troublingly) will even talk how we’re not even conscious at all. As if we are all just meat computers or something.
Now, I don’t know if we’re conscious or not and I don’t know if the world is on rails either, but it certainly feels like I have free will and it certainly feels like I’m responsible for my actions and it qualitatively feels like I’m conscious.
Obviously, not all of my choices are made freely, but some of the ones that matter to me at least seem to be made freely. But a lot of people seem absolutely sure that we’re not making anny choices and we have no free will. It’s weird to me, because literally every day I get increasing evidence suggesting I have free will within some limits and the universe is unfathomable and unpredictable.
Not to be an ass, but if I can be honest I kinda pity the folks that don’t have that experience. I reckon if you’ve never made a decision that really mattered it would be easy to feel like it all wasn’t your choice. Maybe that’s too harsh, but anti-free will and determinism are just as untestable as any other philosophy I suppose, but I do wonder what kind of life can lead to people thinking that they’re not making any conscious decisions.
But universe doesn't work tat way. Universe is non-deterministic because quantum effects happen randomly. They cannot be predicted, only their probabilities can.
Few problems with this, the state that a particle can be in after the collapse of the wave function follows a probability distribution, so if all states are equally real then why does it seem like some states are more likely than others? Why would probabilities be such a powerful mathematical tool, and how would it work in a MWI.
If all points of the universe branch out into several universes after each particle interaction, where does all this energy come from? If all branches are equally real why even have the wave function in the first place?
Because some states are more probable than others. That is what the wave-function tells us. It does not give equal probability to every possible outcome.
One of Penrose's foundational arguments is that the random element of quantum collapse is deeply unsatisfactory; he thinks it's a defect in the theory that must eventually lead to its replacement by a better theory.
Now if the tiniest elements behave that way non-deterministically and we can assume they do have an effect on the world around them, then it seems to be the whole world is more or less indeterministic. Probability distributions can be observed that's all.
Further credence to the idea of non-deterministic world is given by Chaos Theory. A butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can cause a storm in Kansas. Therefore the indeterminism at the atomic level is amplified to the macro-level, as predicted by Chaos Theory.
And if that is the case then we can assume that what happens in our brains is also indeterministic. Thus you could say we have "free will", our wills and thoughts and likes are a product of something indeterministic. Thus you can say that "our will is free", more or less. I'm not sure what "Having a Free Will" would mean, but I can understand that our will is not wholly determined by history.
I know very little about QM, so I could be completely off here, but, not being able to predict the outcome of an experiment could be completely different to the outcome being deterministic.
Lay person point of view. Rewind the universe by an hour and replay. Does QM have anything to say about that? I'm inclined to think not, but I really don't know. In other words, does QM say:
1) The result would certainly be the same.
2) The result could certainly be different.
3) The theory doesn't tell us one way or another, meaning it doesn't exclude either 1 or 2 being true.
If it is 1, then we have determinism. If it is 2, then we have randomness. I don't think either of those are compatible with what people think of as free will (mysterious ability to choose outside of physics).
I think it's impossible to rewind the universe, so no sensical theory should say anything about that. A theory that theorizes about what happens if something impossible happens would seem to be waste of time. :-)
But I think the answer is: The outcome of a quantum experiment is random. So if the same experiment is repeated, it should most probably give a different answer, unless the answer is always the same, or one of only a few possibilities.
Penrose would agree!
I think that in The Emperor's New Mind, he sets out a scheme for classifying the quality of different theories, e.g. quantum mechanics, darwinian evolution. He classifies quantum mechanics (quantum chromodynamics?) as a "Superb" theory, because of the accuracy and precision of the predictions it makes. But he still says it's fundamentally flawed.
And in my opinion, whether you’re “responsible for your actions” isn’t a question about the nature of reality (ontological), rather a question (or one of several) about how we should act in it (moral).
That’s not my definition it’s almost verbatim from the Oxford English Dictionary. Still, it’s exactly how I feel.
But morality is important to this discussion I think but I cannot put my finger on “why” it is.
What I want to focus on is what leads you to conclude that your will, or your discretion, is not deterministic. Forgetting, if we may, arguments for or against determinism from a physics perspective: what’s the argument from your personal experience? As for morality, I would make the case that ontology should inform morality but not the other way around.
Why do you say this? How do you define free will here?
I find the whole subject fascinating, but I am not an expert. I break it down for myself in this manner, so perhaps you could give your view.
If we rewound the universe by an hour (as an example). Literally, every single thing, particle, what have you in the universe is exactly as it was an hour ago. Then you started it again (1). Would you end up where everything in the universe happened exactly as it already did? Faced with the same choices, would *you* make the exact same choices, to end up exactly as we are now?
If the answer is yes, then that implies determinism, and would probably reject what you think of as free will (I'm taking a guess, because you didn't explicitly define free will).
If the answer is no, then it appears that the choices are just random. You have all the same information, all the same moral conindrums, etc, and yet, you just chose something different. Why? In this case, if it is just random, then that also seems to reject the idea of free will.
If there is some other mechanism involved here, could you describe whether it would make the same decisions or not. And if not, then on what basis would the decisions be different?
(1) I'd really prefer to avoid nitpicky arguments about the arrow of time and so on. This is just a thought experiment.
I think the best attitude is that a. We have no clue what causes consciousness and b. it's probably much more widespread that we previously assumed. We assume that other humans, cats and sufficiently advanced AI are conscious based on observing behaviors similar to our own. But why should self awareness be tied to specific behavior? Why not a star self aware of being a star, without having any of the same senses, drives and capabilities as a human? At best we can assume is that some other animals/things might be self aware of similar occurrences as we are.
As for quantum effects, if brain is able to leverage them in computation, that's an obvious evolutionary advantage. One obvious person of a brain is to simulate many possible potential actions and their real world outcomes. If it's able to use quantum states to model multiple scenarios simultaneously, that's quicker/more detailed modeling with less energy use.
But as far as quantum effects causing consciousness, how could we possibly tell and what useful insights have we gained by making this assumption?
Basically: what is conscious is quantum, what is unconscious is classical.
Vast majority of brain activity is unconscious, what surfaces as experience is a global state of the entire system.
I guess that someone was me.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-024-00796-z.epdf?shar...
Quantum compute could be being leveraged to do things like accelerating search for gradient descent. This would allow very rapid learning in polynomial time. There are also quantum algorithms that can more or less serialize parallel search, etc.
The objection is usually that biology is hot and noisy and wet and that this is a poor environment for QC. This assumes that it’s doing QC in a remotely similar way to how the quantum computers we are trying to build would do it. Billions of years of evolution might have found ways to harness quantum phenomena for information processing that are quite radically different. It’s all analog for starters, so nothing like a “qubit” or rigidly defined circuits.
Maybe some biochemical reactions are structured so as to invoke and amplify useful quantum effects that allow things to happen informatically that would be much slower or more costly without those effects.
Without understanding what’s happening this would just look like noise and luck to us. I do know that there are “unreasonably effective” enzymes and reactions involved in things like DNA repair, though it’s been a while since I read about this. I think there are cases where repair complexes find DNA errors more effectively than can easily be explained by basic chemistry and chance, and we are not sure exactly what’s going on. Maybe there’s something involving quantum information processing happening somewhere.
It's easy to speculate, but it's not easy to find any evidence at all to back up those guesses. It's still not clear that this has anything to do with consciousness or information processing or AWS datacenters.
So one thing is certain - the brain does use quantum mechanics just like the rest of the body, because otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have so much done inside such a small volume, with such small amounts of energy.
Of course this question is actually meant to be "is brain a quantum computer?" and we don't have any idea.
That's interesting. Could you share your source?
The Wikipedia page is a good start, it has some relevant references to research articles in the Enzyme catalysis and Energy transfer sections: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology
Quantum effects are also used inside cells to convert chemical energy to motion. It wouldn't be possible otherwise at that nanoscale.