Let’s first note that many of these quantum theories about consciousness were formulated many decades ago, when our knowledge of neuroscience was still embryonic. But things have changed a lot since then, as I’ve tried to show in this post It hardly touches all neurobiological theories of consciousness that are now based on so much empirical data. which, in a certain way, applies the well-known principle of simplicity, economy, or miserliness Occam’s Blade, which means that we first prefer the simplest sufficient hypothesis. Basically heuristic in science, without clearly implying that the hypothesis that seems the most obvious is necessarily the correct hypothesis.
I have also often insisted that new characteristics occur at multiple levels of organization in neighbourhoods. As a result, the most interesting analogies between conscious thoughts and brain activity are often in the higher levels of the general dynamic activity of our brain networks, rather than at the level of nerve impulses along an axon, ion channel opening, let alone, I’m afraid, at the level of quantum states. Superimposed or collapsed wave function.
True to theory Quantum decoherence It allows us to understand in a satisfactory way the transition from the level of quantum phenomena to the classical physics that we experience daily and that governs all neurological phenomena. But on this account, we can of course say that “everything is quantum”, including consciousness, but in such a trivial way that we can then classify a rock or a molecule of water as a “quantum”.
Can the explanatory power of quantum decoherence survive? Specific repercussions at the molecular or higher biological level as some believe? This is still highly speculative and the experiments envisaged to prove are of immeasurable level of technical difficulty.
For the word “quantum” essentially defines only the discrete nature of the phenomenon of infinitesimal smallness, a property that no longer has currency at the level of classical physics that underlies chemical and biological phenomena whose properties can very well produce by themselves the emergence of our conscious processes.
Then we can always, if it amuses or fascinates us, go on to do metaphysics in the first sense of the term, that is, to search for such things as implicit order that might exist outside the realm of hitherto known physics. But to paraphrase Laplace on the subject of consciousness this time, I have the feeling that we can replace God with whatever we call “quantum” and repeat with him that we don’t necessarily need these hypotheses to formulate scientifically coherent explanatory models of the thing.
