Given that the brain is a physical object subject to all quantum effects, wouldn’t the novelty be that it doesn't use quantum effects? That it does sounds obvious.
Wouldn't users be more accurate?
Clearly it's quantum mechanics that causes these kinds of comments.
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.
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?
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)