It's basically another 'woo' claim -
Non-materialist neuroscience is one of the latest fronts in the
war on science. The battle has been a long time coming and it is surprising it has taken so long to get going. Modern
neuroscience is rapidly reducing much of
human thought, emotion and behavior into component pieces of neuronal interactions. The combination of computational modeling and non-invasive imaging of living
brains has allowed researchers to begin describing how complex thought emerges from the firing patterns of neurons. In a way, neuroscience is the death knell of
dualism. When
materialist causes become both
necessary and sufficient to explain all of human thought then
parsimony dictates that references to a
soul or other
supernatural entities can be tossed out.
Mangled quantum physics
Beauregard's "Quantum physics in neuroscience and psychology"
[15] is published with co-authors Jeffery Schwartz and Henry Stapp. Schwartz and Stapp, like Beauregard, come with credentials. Schwartz is a research psychiatrist at the UCLA School of Medicine, where he studies self-directed neuroplasticty
[21] Stapp is an emeritus theoretical physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has worked with Pauli, Wheeler, and other greats, and has published hundreds of scientific papers
[22]. Their argument hinges on two ideas: first that quantum effects must be accounted for in how thoughts emerge from the brain and second that quantum effects can not be accounted for unless a “mind” outside of the material causes of the brain is included in the calculations.
''Schwartz et al. argue that quantum effects must occur in the brain by bringing up the size of ion-channels that mediate signaling between neurons. He and his co-authors propose the idea that they are small enough that quantum effects must dominate over “classical” effects. The idea that the size of a given area in a neuron is with in the realm of quantum effects is not new. Other theorist and philosophers have tried to place quantum effects in other areas like the microtubules which form the cytoskeleton of the cells.
[23] These ideas have more than passing resemblance to
Rene Descartes' attempt to seat the “mind” and human soul in the
pineal gland. Descartes idea is snickered at in Freshman neuroanatomy and philosophy courses alike, but the idea of seating the human soul in the microtubules or ion channels is just as snicker-worthy.''
''There are several major problems with trying to place quantum effects in neuron structures. The first is that quantum effects dominate not just in small spaces but in really small time scales and the time scales that operate in the brain remove any basis for quantum mechanics to have any significant effects.
[24]
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Non-materialist_neuroscience[/sup]
