Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?
After the mildly clickbaity title, I have to start out with some honesty: we don’t really know if the brain is a quantum computer or not.
But as with many a question we don’t know the answer to, thinking about them can still be worthwhile in their own right. And I believe there are good arguments indicating that the brain isn’t a quantum computer, so the answer is more like we don’t know, but probably not.
Nevertheless, there are many theories that in some way relate the brain to quantum physics, and the fact that the brain is not a quantum computer does not mean that there could not be quantum effects playing some kind of role in the brain. Parsing through the different perspectives and several layers on this question may seem like a daunting task, but I think on some aspects of it clearer, scientifically more grounded arguments are to be made than on others.
I’ll begin the first half of this article with a computer scientific and evolutionary perspective on the title question. In the second half, I venture down the rabbit hole into the strange and more speculative realm of quantum minds, Schrödinger’s synaptic clefts, and consciousness.
