[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.