Originally posted by David Hayward
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The second half has more meat: Shermer quotes (the fellow rabid New Atheist, I note) Victor Stenger's claim that he has demonstrated "that for a system to be described quantum-mechanically the <product of the> system's typical mass, speed and distance must be on the order of Planck's constant", and that in the case of the brain connections this quantity is one thousand times too large for quantum effects to be influential. If you look at the interesting discussion at Appendix A (Page 17) in the paper you will see that Max Tegmark calculates it as 10^12 times too large, so Shermer's/Stenger's 10^3 figure is actually quite generous. But I would caution that until only recently everyone would have been adamant that quantum effects could play no part in photosynthesis, so perhaps the idea that quantum effects cannot play a part in the brain is similarly a misconception; also, that quantum mechanics is, for all its much-vaunted accuracy and confirmation, not fully understood, and that Lawrence Krauss says, "...quantum theory predicts this <dark> energy is some 120 orders of magnitude greater than that calculated by cosmological observations. The energy of empty space should be roughly a gazillion times the energy of everything we see. That is the worst prediction in physics." Compared to a mis-prediction of quantum effects of 10^120 in cosmology, a mis-prediction of quantum effects of 10^3 or 10^12 in neuroscience looks like peanuts.
David
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