Imagine attempting to understand consciousness by entangling the human brain with a quantum computer. The futility of this is not just the baseless science, but what it does not rule out.
Why would consciousness be a quantum process in the brain? What are the possible other candidates for conscious experiences in the brain that this quantum option has definitively ruled out? And with advances in cellular and molecular neuroscience, why is there no clear quantum observation, or microtubule medications?
Microtubules are said to be involved in anesthesia, but what else has an effect during anesthesia aside from microtubules? Why are microtubules not implicated in general functions, aside from anesthesia?
There are several drugs whose mechanisms are known to retain neurotransmitters in the synaptic cleft. There are several mental disorders that are known to involve the abundance or the lack of certain neurotransmitters.
Neurotransmitters [dominating chemical signals] are always involved in every explained function of the brain, and so are electrical signals [or ions]. If chemical signals can be induced or inhibited with an effect on conscious experience, how is quantum entanglement or superposition connected to chemical signals? If electrical signals are in transport, how do they relate to quantum qubits?
How does any consciousness theory strike out electrical and chemical signals responsibility for consciousness? How does quantum consciousness explain how stimulants work, how sedatives work, or how psychedelics work, SSRIs, or several other brain medications?
Quantum consciousness should explain why electrical and chemical signals should be ruled out, then present its influence on everything else before it should even cross a theoretical threshold, en route to [possible] future experiments.
Electrical and chemical signals, for example, exceed neurons as the final stops for how the brain works. Electrical and chemical signals have several formations or configurations for which functions are defined. As electrical signals travel in sets across clusters of neurons, they, conceptually, strike to access configurations of chemical signals that specify functions.
This means that a specific taste, sight, smell, and so forth are configurations that are accessed by interactions [or strikes] of [sets of] electrical signals on [sets of] chemical signals.
The distinct [possible] configurations for chemical signals allow electrical signals to know where to go, to avoid striking into the wrong configuration, so to speak. So, electrical signals, in relay, for the regulation of breathing go to a set where they fit differently from the ones that go for vision or for the regulation of digestion and so forth, conceptually.
Neuroscience is at the point where all that has been observed to be mechanized by electrical and chemical signals need an overall explanation or a postulation for how they do. For example, it is possible to theorize that the human mind is the collection of all the electrical and chemical signals, with their interactions and features, in sets, in clusters of neurons, across the central and peripheral nervous systems. It is by their interactions that they set up functions. It is their features that grade the limits or extent of those functions.
How does quantum consciousness define the human mind? Is there a relationship between consciousness and the mind? If so, what is this relationship, and how does quantum delineate the mind from the brain, within the cranium?
Are microtubules the mind? How do they configure a smell, in contrast to a sight? How do they shape memory, differently from how they define feelings?
What is subjectivity and what is experience? Is an experience possible without subjectivity? What is in the class of subjectivity that is different from experience? What answers has quantum consciousness ever presented to these questions in ways that are at least promising?
Subjectivity can be theorized to be a grader or qualifier for the interactions of electrical and chemical signals in sets. It is theorized that subjectivity is a grader that is more common among sets of signals, than control or intent, which is not in every set of signals.
Attention is also a grader, as well as awareness. These graders are different from functions like memory, feelings, emotions, and regulations, which are experiences. Graders, like subjectivity, attention, and others place how those functions are experienced.
Quantum consciousness is not progress for neuroscience, for mental health, for natural intelligence, against mental disorders, or for consciousness. The misplaced experimental plan would be a waste of research resources.
There is a recent article in IFLScience, Scientists Want To Entangle Human Brains With Quantum Computers To Learn About Consciousness, stating that,
“Let’s say we have ‘N’ qubits in our brain and ‘M’ qubits in an external quantum computer, with the letters referring to a certain number of qubits. If a person could entangle their brain with this quantum computer, they could create an expanded quantum superposition involving ‘N+M’ qubits. If we now tickle this expanded superposition to make it collapse, then this should be reported by the person participating in this experiment as a richer experience. That’s because in their normal conscious experience, they typically need ‘N’ bits to describe the experience, but now they need ‘N+M’ bits to describe it. I call this the ‘expansion protocol’, as it would allow us to expand consciousness in space, time and complexity. In an experimentum crucis, one would establish a physical link between a human brain and a quantum computer that would enable coherent interactions and mediate entanglement. If our conjecture is accurate, this should enable richer conscious experiences of the combined system, requiring more descriptive bits than the experiences the human reports without the link. Before the systems are coupled, their respective states exist in separate state spaces, known as Hilbert spaces, of dimension N and M, respectively. After they are made to interact, the wave function describing the combined system |𝜓𝐶𝑦𝑏𝑜𝑟𝑔〉 resides in an 𝑁×𝑀 -dimensional Hilbert space,” the team writes. “We conjecture that a superposition forming in this higher dimensional state space would be experienced by the subject as a richer experience as compared to a superposition state forming in the lower N-dimensional Hilbert space describing the isolated brain of the subject.”
There is a recent blog by Google, Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip, stating that,
“Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements. The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years. Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe. The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago. As part of Google Research, our team has charted a long-term roadmap, and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications. We tested ever-larger arrays of physical qubits, scaling up from a grid of 3×3 encoded qubits, to a grid of 5×5, to a grid of 7×7 — and each time, using our latest advances in quantum error correction, we were able to cut the error rate in half. In other words, we achieved an exponential reduction in the error rate. This historic accomplishment is known in the field as “below threshold” — being able to drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits. You must demonstrate being below threshold to show real progress on error correction, and this has been an outstanding challenge since quantum error correction was introduced by Peter Shor in 1995. There are other scientific “firsts” involved in this result as well. For example, it’s also one of the first compelling examples of real-time error correction on a superconducting quantum system — crucial for any useful computation, because if you can’t correct errors fast enough, they ruin your computation before it’s done. And it’s a “beyond breakeven” demonstration, where our arrays of qubits have longer lifetimes than the individual physical qubits do, an unfakable sign that error correction is improving the system overall.”
