I guess it makes a sort of sense. Eyes sense photons, touch detects physical force, tongue and nose give useful attributes of chemical properties, and neuron clusters adjudicate probability, the navigation of all the possible paths for the organism. "This happens when you go there, go here instead"

I think it doesn't matter in either point. We don't really understand the quantum world nor how life sparks. I think it's a path worth exploring.

Actually, I think the relevant one that people care about is "Quantum behavior in the brain means we can stuff all the hard problems of consciousness under a carpet conspicuously printed with the word 'Quantum' and call it solved".

Even if we find some brain structure somewhere using some sort of large-scale entanglement to do something, all that has proved is... the brain is using entanglement. So what? Even Penrose, someone who is definitely very intelligent, seems to have fallen at least a bit prey to the idea that showing that entanglement is in use is sufficient to demonstrate... something... about... something... maybe consciousness?

But even if you accept that entanglement is "spooky action at a distance", "spooky action at a distance" is an exceedingly large class of phenomena. And the dominant "null-hypothesis" guess that QM would yield at the moment is that it is a source of true randomness, which is not particularly different than the wide variety of classically-random effects the brain (and biology in general) is already working with.

Yes, it has not escaped my notice that if there is a such thing as a soul, that if it has some sort of non-physical existence, and if it can still impact the physical world through our body, that quantum collapse is definitely a place in our physics where there could be a reasonable mechanism for such influence to be exerted in a way that does not violate any physical laws but still allows for "external" information to be conveyed into the physical universe. But from where we stand scientifically, it is a long, long way to get to all of that. Huge, huge amounts of work to be done. The work might even be impossible. But it seems like a lot of people, even smart people, seem to think that chasm isn't there, and all we have to do is just establish "quantum", and we're done.

To put it another way, there is an exceedingly great chasm between someone saying "electricity!" and a modern computer, CPU, GPU, and all. Yeah. Modern computers use electricity. But just sending that fact to someone back in the 19th century would give them no useful information in building one. By contrast, give them information about how to build a transistor and maybe an example of a logic gate, and they'd be off to the races just the same as 20th century scientists and engineers were, even if they'd have farther to travel before they really understood the physics.

Maybe the brain "quantum"s... but how? What is different about the brain's quantum versus in-the-wild "quantum"? By what mechanism does organized information of any kind, from any source at all, emerge from the "quantum"? What kind of information can emerge? What kind can't? How is this information from "quantum" converted by the rest of the brain into anything useful? (That is, I'm not calling for anything as high as "human-visible changes in behavior"; I'll settle for any useful effect.)

From my perspective, that's just one step across a Grand Canyon-sized chasm. About all it does is fail to disprove that long chain of "ifs" above.

I'm not a secular humanist and I'm quite open to a wide variety of ideas... but scientifically, just showing "quantum" in the brain doesn't seem to carry anywhere near the amount of water a lot of people think it does.

Just a layman here, but isn’t it pretty well established that there is no hidden variable? Is the suggestion that something like a “soul” is the hidden variable? How would you ever demonstrate such as thing?

The Bell experiments are widely misinterpreted, but for an understandable reason. What the Bell experiments actually do is establish that if there is a hidden variable, it is irreducibly quantum. It can't be a "classical" hidden variable.

Since the point of hidden variable theory at that point in time was to reframe "quantum weirdness" into "classical sanity", if not outright "classical determinism", and the Bell experiment proved there was no way to do so, the hidden variable theory was then unfit for purpose, and was dropped.

However, it is simply impossible to demonstrate that a particular waveform collapse was not influenced by something beyond science. Consider that if we could prove that, we would therefore also have a proof that reality is not a simulation, but is somehow irreducibly "real" in a non-simulatable way. But we can't prove that; it's too much. (Heck, we can't even really define what that means.)

So the common interpretation that the Bell experiments prove a lack of any external influences beyond randomness whatsoever is not correct, which even a non-quantum physicist can verify by observing that such a claim is simply impossible to ever prove. It is beyond the bounds of what a scientific experiment can prove, even conceivably, so clearly, that scientific experiment did not prove that.

As for how would you ever demonstrate such a thing... well, back down from the loaded term "soul" and let's go with "information source". You prove that an external information source is affecting quantum collapse precisely by demonstrating some set of quantum collapses that demonstrate the existence of information. Of any kind whatsoever, doesn't have to be consciousness; science fiction is full of instruments that extract completely mechanical, physical information from such hypothetical processes. There's nothing really impossible about this, it would just mean our best science and math are incomplete, which is a known thing anyhow (though that doesn't mean that it is unknown in this particular way, but, in general, we know QM is missing something). It's just we've never seen even a hint of such a thing, other than at the fringes of science where the p-hacked phantoms are constantly dancing in front of us but never quite materializing. (See experiments like trying to measure the "world mood" through measuring radioactive decay times; I class this in the p-hacked phantom category.) If I set up a classical double-slit experiment, and instead of the usual interference fringes they started pulsing left and right in a clear Morse code that said something meaningful, that would be that. But we've never seen such a thing, which is why as I said, the default null scientific hypothesis even if we did demonstrate some larger-scale use of "entanglement" in the brain would be that it is still not an information carrier, until demonstrated otherwise.

By contrast, if we lived in a hypothetical world where pretty much every time we set up a double slit experiment it started sending us Morse code messages, and in fact it was only the rare experiment that worked like it does in our universe, we would be somewhat more entitled to assume that whatever our brain is doing might be related to those information sources. But that's so not the world we live in it it is hard to even speculate where we'd go from there. Depends on what the information is. And again, let me emphasize I'm not trying to backdoor consciousness here. Maybe the Morse code is information about the current state of the fusion reactions in the sun or some complicated, but purely physical, galactic resonance of this or that that happens to work out to a Morse code pulse pattern that spells YNK but actually still means nothing much. This is not impossible because it is an intrinsically impossible idea and no universe could possibly run that way. It is instead an idea that does not correspond to what we see.

> Just a layman here, but isn’t it pretty well established that there is no hidden variable?

It's been repeatedly experimentally 'proven' that there are no hidden variables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test

No hidden ~local~ variables, as stated in the first paragraph of your link.

Yes I know. 'Local' as in 'localism' aspect of deterministic classical physics which got 'disproven' by bell. It's why modern physics is a nondeterministic quantum physics variety.

It seems like you are disagreeing with me but no 'local hidden variable' is exactly my point. It's obvious you don't even have a basic introductory grasp of the topic at hand and yet you bothered to comment.