Freeman Dyson argued that "mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron".
[4] Victor Stenger characterized quantum consciousness as a "myth" having "no scientific basis" that "should take its place along with gods, unicorns and dragons".
[9] David Bohm viewed quantum theory and relativity as contradictory, which implied a more fundamental level in the universe.
[12] David Bohm also collaborated with Basil Hiley on work that claimed mind and matter both emerge from an "implicate order".
[15] Theoretical physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff collaborated to produce the theory known as "orchestrated objective reduction" (Orch-OR).
In his first book on consciousness, The Emperor's New Mind (1989),[18] he argued that while a formal system cannot prove its own consistency, Gödel's unprovable results are provable by human mathematicians.
[20] In the same book, Penrose wrote: "One might speculate, however, that somewhere deep in the brain, cells are to be found of single quantum sensitivity.
Dissatisfied with its randomness, he proposed a new form of wave function collapse that occurs in isolation and called it objective reduction.
He suggested each quantum superposition has its own piece of spacetime curvature and that when these become separated by more than one Planck length, they become unstable and collapse.
[21] Penrose suggested that objective reduction represents neither randomness nor algorithmic processing but instead a non-computable influence in spacetime geometry from which mathematical understanding and, by later extension, consciousness derives.
[31] In 2014, Hameroff and Penrose claimed that the discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules by Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan in March 2013[32] corroborates Orch-OR theory.
In a study Stuart Hameroff was part of, Jack Tuszyński of the University of Alberta demonstrated that anesthetics hasten the duration of a process called delayed luminescence, in which microtubules and tubulins re-emit trapped light.
[37] Nevertheless, University of Oxford quantum physicist Vlatko Vedral told that this connection with consciousness is a really long shot.
)[47]Ricciardi and Umezawa proposed in 1967 a general theory of quanta of long-range coherent waves within and between brain cells, and showed a possible mechanism of memory storage and retrieval in terms of Nambu–Goldstone bosons.
[54] Pribram collaborated with Bohm in his work on quantum approaches to mind and he provided evidence on how much of the processing in the brain was done in wholes.
[55] He proposed that ordered water at dendritic membrane surfaces might operate by structuring Bose–Einstein condensation supporting quantum dynamics.
[61][62] The hypothesis is based in part on the observation by many independent researchers that electron tunneling occurs in ferritin, an iron storage protein that is prevalent in those neurons, at room temperature and ambient conditions.
[70][71][72][73] The hypothesis also predicted that disordered ferritin arrays like those found in SNc tissue should be capable of supporting long-range electron transport and providing a switching or routing function, both of which have also been subsequently observed.
[77][78] A team led by Dr. Pascal Kaeser of Harvard Medical School subsequently demonstrated that those neurons do in fact code movement, consistent with the earlier predictions of CNET.
[79] While the CNET mechanism has not yet been directly observed, it may be possible to do so using quantum dot fluorophores tagged to ferritin or other methods for detecting electron tunneling.
For example, Daniel Dennett proposed a theory called multiple drafts model, which doesn't indicate that quantum effects are needed, in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained.
Erwin Schrödinger described how one could, in principle, create entanglement of a large-scale system by making it dependent on an elementary particle in a superposition.
Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics.
[87] But since Schrödinger's time, physicists have given other interpretations of the mathematics of quantum mechanics, some of which regard the "alive and dead" cat superposition as quite real.
[88][89] Schrödinger's famous thought experiment poses the question of when a system stops existing as a quantum superposition of states.
[94] The main theoretical argument against the quantum-mind hypothesis is the assertion that quantum states in the brain would lose coherency before they reached a scale where they could be useful for neural processing.
[97] Daniel Dennett uses an experimental result in support of his multiple drafts model of an optical illusion that happens on a timescale of less than a second or so.
You couldn't even attempt to build a quantum computer out of ordinary nerve signals, because they're just too big and in an environment that's too disorganized.
[102] Robert Carroll states that Chopra attempts to integrate Ayurveda with quantum mechanics to justify his teachings.
[106] According to Daniel Dennett, "On this topic, Everybody's an expert... but they think that they have a particular personal authority about the nature of their own conscious experiences that can trump any hypothesis they find unacceptable.