I’ve speculated for many years that biology is harnessing quantum computing in some way and that this is one of the simplest explanations for how the brain can do what it does so quickly on so little power. It only consumes around 40 watts and does things an entire AWS data center can’t do.
Quantum compute could be being leveraged to do things like accelerating search for gradient descent. This would allow very rapid learning in polynomial time. There are also quantum algorithms that can more or less serialize parallel search, etc.
The objection is usually that biology is hot and noisy and wet and that this is a poor environment for QC. This assumes that it’s doing QC in a remotely similar way to how the quantum computers we are trying to build would do it. Billions of years of evolution might have found ways to harness quantum phenomena for information processing that are quite radically different. It’s all analog for starters, so nothing like a “qubit” or rigidly defined circuits.
Maybe some biochemical reactions are structured so as to invoke and amplify useful quantum effects that allow things to happen informatically that would be much slower or more costly without those effects.
Without understanding what’s happening this would just look like noise and luck to us. I do know that there are “unreasonably effective” enzymes and reactions involved in things like DNA repair, though it’s been a while since I read about this. I think there are cases where repair complexes find DNA errors more effectively than can easily be explained by basic chemistry and chance, and we are not sure exactly what’s going on. Maybe there’s something involving quantum information processing happening somewhere.
This feels a lot like a standard line of muddy thinking we see in youtube videos about consciousness (for example): "we don't understand brains, and we don't understand quantum mechanics, so they're probably related."
It's easy to speculate, but it's not easy to find any evidence at all to back up those guesses. It's still not clear that this has anything to do with consciousness or information processing or AWS datacenters.
There's evidence that biology takes advantage of quantum effects on all levels - all the way from individual chemical bonds and interactions of molecules (quantum biochemistry) up to cellular and multi-cellular. Mostly because there's no way it could work on such small scales and be so energy efficient if it didn't.
So one thing is certain - the brain does use quantum mechanics just like the rest of the body, because otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have so much done inside such a small volume, with such small amounts of energy.
Of course this question is actually meant to be "is brain a quantum computer?" and we don't have any idea.
Meh, down voters have no idea what they're talking/reading about and yet they down vote. Not everything about quantum mechanics is voodoo. Sorry, not in the mood to talk about this here any more.
The Wikipedia page is a good start, it has some relevant references to research articles in the Enzyme catalysis and Energy transfer sections: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology
Quantum effects are also used inside cells to convert chemical energy to motion. It wouldn't be possible otherwise at that nanoscale.
Quantum compute could be being leveraged to do things like accelerating search for gradient descent. This would allow very rapid learning in polynomial time. There are also quantum algorithms that can more or less serialize parallel search, etc.
The objection is usually that biology is hot and noisy and wet and that this is a poor environment for QC. This assumes that it’s doing QC in a remotely similar way to how the quantum computers we are trying to build would do it. Billions of years of evolution might have found ways to harness quantum phenomena for information processing that are quite radically different. It’s all analog for starters, so nothing like a “qubit” or rigidly defined circuits.
Maybe some biochemical reactions are structured so as to invoke and amplify useful quantum effects that allow things to happen informatically that would be much slower or more costly without those effects.
Without understanding what’s happening this would just look like noise and luck to us. I do know that there are “unreasonably effective” enzymes and reactions involved in things like DNA repair, though it’s been a while since I read about this. I think there are cases where repair complexes find DNA errors more effectively than can easily be explained by basic chemistry and chance, and we are not sure exactly what’s going on. Maybe there’s something involving quantum information processing happening somewhere.