[Retric]

> He’s a physicist, mathematician, and logician

You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse. Just the size of the structures involved, temperature, timescales, and distance between neurons alone is a serious problem with his theory here.

If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea, but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works. Which is always the hard part of science, you’re not just fitting a single curve but thousands of different datasets.

[sarchertech]

>You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse.

For biology he had a collaborator. You aren’t likely to find many biologist / quantum physicists.

The term neuroscience wasn’t even coined until after he finished his PhD. You could probably name many other relevant sub specialties that doesn’t have formal training in.

If any of his theories are correct, you wouldn’t expect a neuroscientist, or biologist to be equipped to come up with them.

>If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea

He is. His first book essentially had no proposed mechanism. Then an anesthesiologist and researcher read it and contacted him with the proposal that microtubules might provide an environment that is insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain.

His next book investigated that idea, but he’s repeatedly said that this is just an interesting place to investigate and he has no idea whether it’s true.

>but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works.

How does it fail? I’ve read quite a hit about it and plenty for people are skeptical but I’ve never seen anyone showing how it “utterly fails”.

[Retric]

> The term neuroscience wasn’t even coined

The first car wasn’t called a car by the people who built it, but we back date terms. He’s not a neuroscientist because he’s not studied the brain’s physical structures.

> insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain

? The tube is made of atoms at the same temperature as what’s outside the tube, there’s no isolation here.

> How does it fail?

It fails in many many ways. Individual neurons are vastly too small for consensus to occur on that scale you need something involving millions of them at body temperature at the very low end. Local quantum effects are obviously going on but they don’t scale.

[sarchertech]

The first car wasn’t built by an “automotive engineer” either. But by someone from another discipline who decided they were interested in applying the knowledge from other disciplines to the this new one.

Penrose has certainly studied the brains physical structures. He has 40 years of books and papers published on the subject.

>same temperature

No one is proposing that they are literally thermally insulating.

> on that scale you need something involving millions of them at body temperature at the very low end. Local quantum effects are obviously going on but they don’t scale.

That sounds like a good problem for a Nobel Prize winning physicist to investigate. If a neuroscientist were investigating it, I’d expect them to bring in a physicist.

[Retric]

The first car wasn’t by definition engineered by an automotive engineer?

> That sounds like a good problem for a Nobel Prize winning physicist to investigate.

No that’s a fairly trivial problem anyone with an understanding of QM can investigate. Atoms are atoms here it doesn’t really matter what biological structures are involved they are floating around in warm water.

[sarchertech]

> The first car wasn’t by definition engineered by an automotive engineer?

If that’s the definition we’re going with, then anyone who does research that touches on neuroscience is a neuroscientist.

>trivial

Calling it trivial is hand-waving. Tegmark’s fast-decoherence bounds hinge on specific parameter choices; change the dielectric, charge model, spacing, or geometry and the timescales move into a regime that might matter. Temperature equality doesn’t erase structure. Ordered environments and collective modes can suppress decoherence without “insulating the brain.” Microtubules are a testable hypothesis, not a creed.

If you think they fail, point to a concrete model that rules out coherence under corrected parameters or shows a clash with measured neural dynamics and energy budgets. “Warm water, case closed” is an assertion, not that model.