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Comment by aeonik | Hacker News Reader

I think you are right, but this is a straw man.

There are some quantum consciousness cults out there, but plenty of people are interested in investigating the quantum nature of biological effects including consciousness that aren't quacks.

There is also a tendency for some scientists to react dismissively to hypotheses associated with pseudoscience, even when the narrower scientific question is perfectly legitimate.

Reminds me of the visceral reactions in history, like the Rejection of Continental drift (i.e. high level idea was right, but mechanisms hadn't been pinned down yet).

Not claiming that the quantum hypothesis is right, just saying we didn't jump to conclusions.

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The issue is there’s zero debate that something very close to QM applies to every single interaction between atoms. We glow in the infrared because of quantum mechanics so does a brick. Similarly chlorophyll works because of QM as does ATP, protein folding, etc etc.

The question is does any of the interesting counterintuitive QM effects apply to very large structures and that’s where humans being hot dense objects kills most of the more interesting bits of QM.

> didn't jump to conclusions

Thus people aren’t jumping to conclusions, QM itself is saying no here. For the effect people want to apply means QM itself must be wrong. That’s obviously possible but means you need a completely new theory of physics and evidence to support that.

It's perfectly legitimate to investigate any theory in the scientific manner of falsifiable experimentation, but I'm not aware that can be said of anyone looking for a quantum explanation of consciousness (which is anyways a rather odd quest given that there doesn't seem to be anything needing explanation).

Roger Penrose certainly appears to be a quack when it comes to quantum consciousness and/or brain operation - it seems that he wants to believe it, so waves his hands vaguely in the direction of microtubules as a place it could be hiding, despite zero experimental evidence, or any falsifiable theory. It's not the fact that this flies in the face of everything we know about quantum effects at classical scale and room temperature that makes this quackery - it's the fact that this is just wishful thinking, not science - not the application of the scientific method of falsifiable theory followed by experimentation.

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