[1] https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2024/novemb...
There have been studies this year implying that some brain functions rely on quantum interactions.
I'm not in the camp of "the brain is solved science", but come on. All of chemistry depends on quantum interactions and that didn't stop us from understanding a lot of it. It just means we're solving a different set of equations.
It's a big leap to go from "brain electrochemistry is described by quantum mechanics" to "the essence of consciousness / human soul is hiding in the quantum realm and therefore can't be measured or replicated".
I agree with you in rejecting this hypothesis. The point isn't that it's unmeasurable. Just that it should be clear, given we can't completely model a brain, that it's not currently measured or replicated.
There is a group proceeding on the assumption that the limiting factor is computation. I'm sceptical, given how badly we're failing at modelling simpler neural clusters. (Counterpoint: we're still shit at modelling a proton. That, too, may be computationally restricted.)
Two years ago we discovered astrocytes release glutamate, a neurotransmitter [1]. The same year we discovered creatine is also a neurotransmitter. We don't yet know what are the parts to critically include in a brain model, and which can be simplified. Do the number of neurotransmitters matter to the unit? Do the spins on their electrons? When? To what degree?
That is what I think GP is getting at by suggesting quantum effects. Less voodoo. More that we don't know what we don't know, and that which we don't know is vaster than popular science suggests.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/breakthrough-brain-cell-discovery-s...
But what we can describe using known science doesn't describe the system. That doesn't mean the vacuum is voodoo. It's just a strong hint something more is going on. (Like the photoelectric effect.)
We know more about dark energy and matter than the dark essence that separates our leading electrochemical models from consciousness.
Occam's razor? We should work with as few assumptions as possible to get a model with the largest scope. Otherwise we get stuck with a hard to falsify mess.
My point was I don't think that's happening with neuroscience yet. We might not have a complete map yet, but we know where thoughts come from in the organ, we can watch them. Or can we? It's an open question, if people think there is more science to be done to sort out fundamentals, and we're not just in the stage of iterating on our base assumptions more, I'm OK with that, but it's not my understanding today.
Ah, we might say, maybe there is an unknown science - we did not know about so much before, like electricity, like X-Rays, like quantum physics, and then we did, and the World changed.
The difference is that we observed something that science could not explain, and then we found the new science that explained it, and a new science was born.
It's pretty clear to me - but you may know more - that we can explain all brain activity through known science. It might be hard to think of us as nothing more than a bunch of electrochemical reactions in a real-world reinforcement learning system, but that's what we are: there's no gap that needs new science, is there?