The underlying assertion of most of these goofy new-age claims is that consciousness is a quantum process. Of course, in a trivial sense it is quantum insofar that every process in the physical world seems to obey quantum mechanics. The exact claim is that something "essentially quantum" is behind the phenomenon of consciousness, that the computations of the brain actually exploit uninuitive quantum behaviours that cannot be explained by a classical physics picture -- the claim is that we're quantum computers.
Although I am no expert, I think your quantum computing comments are incorrect. To explore branches, retaining all histories, you need a "nondeterministic" computer that branches freely. This gives an exponential (2^n) speedup over a classical computer. Quantum computers apparently give only a polynomial one. For more detail, check out Scott Aaronson's blog "Schtetl-Optimized": http://scottaaronson.com/blog/
1Liron
Wow, this comment is incredible. Thanks for solidifying my previously vague understanding.
6MichaelHoward
Levskaya, if this first comment is anything like your usual standard, please post more!
The underlying assertion of most of these goofy new-age claims is that consciousness is a quantum process. Of course, in a trivial sense it is quantum insofar that every process in the physical world seems to obey quantum mechanics. The exact claim is that something "essentially quantum" is behind the phenomenon of consciousness, that the computations of the brain actually exploit uninuitive quantum behaviours that cannot be explained by a classical physics picture -- the claim is that we're quantum computers.
You build a quantum computer by e... (read more)