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Ugh, what a load of tripe. First, there's no strong evidence that biological brains make use of quantum phenomena except insofar as those phenomena drive norma
by wyager 11y ago
Ugh, what a load of tripe.
First, there's no strong evidence that biological brains make use of quantum phenomena except insofar as those phenomena drive normal chemistry.
Second, if brains do make use of quantum phenomena in weird ways, the effect would not be visible at a level as abstract as decision making. Such processes operate at the level of hundreds of millions of neurons, at which point classical approximations are quite accurate. Any strange quantum phenomenon would operate at the level of single neurons, outside of which the quantum numbers grow so large as to approach classical statistics.
This quantum mysticism needs to stop. There are much better ways to explain psychological effects like indecision than a (horrifically tenuous) analogy to quantum physics.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jedharris 11y agoYou are pattern matching very loosely. None of the work suggests any quantum phenomena affecting behavior. The papers go out of their way to reject that idea in detail.
- wyager 11y agoI'm not complaining about the paper; I'm complaining about the article.
- jedharris 11y agoThe article says Wang "emphasized that her research program neither assumes nor proposes that our brains are literally quantum computers. Other research groups are working on that idea; Wang and her collaborators are not focusing on the physical aspects of the brain, but rather on how abstract mathematical principles of quantum theory can shed light on human cognition and behaviors." That does not support your complaint.