Hello ToKers,

I’d like to query the readers of this article on Quantum Mechanics, to see how much support there is for what is being described.  Does anyone question anything in the article?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201901/quantum-mechanics-and-you  

For example, it states: “a number of modern theories for consciousness invoke quantum mechanisms”  But I only know of one, championed by Penrose and Hameroff: “Orchestrated Object Reduction Theory”  (Orch OR) There is a camp for this on Canonizer.com, submitted by Stuart Hameroff: (see: https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Orch-OR/20 ).  But as you can see, there isn’t a lot of support for this, and a significant number of neuroscientists and quantum mechanics researchers scoff at ideas like in vivo microtubules, in a warm wet environment, having any quantum effect on any neural functionality.  If there are more theories, it would be nice to get them canonized, so we could no more about them, and see if any of them have any more support than Orch OR theory.  I’m not an expert in quantum mechanics, so could be way off in my opinion.  An important part of amplifying the wisdom of the crowd is being able to measure, whether or not there really are “a number of modern theories” and so on, and what everyone thinks about this kind of stuff.  How many people think much of this is “fake news”?

And for me, statements like this don’t even pass the laugh test:

The geneticist Mae-Wan Ho noted that the ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) transfer that permits coordinated muscle contraction, such as moving your arm, requires the coordination of an astronomical number of cells. The scale of distances spans nine orders of magnitude. It ranges from approximately 10-9 at the level of inter-molecular spacing, to nearly one meter for our arm length. Simple arm motion requires the coordinate splitting of more than 1020 ATP molecules. Only non-local quantum correlations can account for this instantaneous physiological responsiveness.

It is well known that there are lots of creative engineering going on in all this to compensate for the speed of neural conductivity.  Things like reflex neural crossover and controlling mechanisms near the muscles, Multiple Draft theories of consciousness, giving the brain time to construct our awareness of reality, a bit after it really happens, yet still managing to appear to us like it is “instantaneous” and so on.

In other words, it seems to me there is far more expert support for Substance Dualism theories of consciousness, including multiple supporting competing sub camps (see: 

https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Substance-Dualism/48 ) than there is support for quantum effects having significant causal effects on neural behavior.  I understand that “substance dualism” wouldn’t belong in the Tree of Knowledge, at least not on the core levels.  So I’m wondering how much this kind of stuff belongs in the ToK?  And what methodology might be used to determine what belongs, and what doesn't?  It might be possible to only allow information that has a certain amount of "expert consensus", as measured at canonizer.com, for whether such ideas should be included in the core ToK, or not?

Brent