Should QM or QED be used?

Alfrez

After spending more than an hour searching the archives. I found out that only certain ideas were debunked.. esp. about quantum coherence in the brain. We know the brain is very noisy and wet and quantum coherence is out of the question. So the theories of Penrose, Hamerrof, Stapp, Eccles, even von Neumann are already debunked. No problem about that. But this Umezawa stuff about Nambu-Goldstone bosons is not debunked. But you may ignore it on ground that the bosons shouldn't affect the brain because there is no mechanism of interaction. But it is here that we must mention the work of Herbert Frohlich which is related to Umezawa's model in the literature of Quantum Brain Dynamics. Frohlich wrote a paper in the Journal of Quantum Chemistry quoted:

"H. Frohlich, Long Range Coherence and Energy Storage in Biological Systems, Int. J. Quantum Chem., v.II, 641-649 (1968)


abstract:
Biological systems are expected to have a branch of longitudinal electric modes in a frequency region between 10^11 and 10^12 per second... In section 2 it is shown quite generally that if energy is supplied above a certain mean rate to such a branch, then a steady state will be reached in which a single mode of this branch is very strongly excited. The supplied energy is thus not completely thermalized but stored in a highly ordered fashion. This order expresses itself in long-range phase correlations;"

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Well. According to QBD (Quantum Brain Dynamics), The Nambu-Goldstone bosons interact with these Frohlich modes and frequencies and the interact with the Dendritic network in the brain affecting the polarization and depolarization of the axonal network. Pls. debunk Frohlich theory and you can damage the overall theoretical structure of joint Nambu-Goldstone bosons-Frohlich Mode-Dendritic Network model.

alxm

No, I ignore it on the grounds that there is not one known chemical effect of Goldstone bosons. I mentioned that QFT methods are not typically used in Quantum Chemistry. That's not without reason; QFT effects are known not to be chemically significant in the vast majority of cases.
The said coherences have not been observed. And in 1968, we knew far less about decoherence than we do now.
I haven't proven Goldstone bosons don't govern the mechanisms of the brain. Nor have I proven that they don't govern the mechanism of billiard balls. I view the latter as only slightly less improbable than the former. I don't need to disprove it. There's an aphorism in medical circles: "When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don't expect to see a zebra". Meaning: You shouldn't expect the unknown to be something unlikely.

To further the analogy: In these kinds of cases it's even worse than expecting a zebra. We've seen zebras, we know what they are. What they're suggesting here is that it's not horses or zebras, but a mysterious hoofed creature nobody has ever seen before, on the grounds that they believe they have a theory that suggests such a creature might exist.

So the mainstream of quantum chemistry and biochemistry and neurology etc, are going to continue working on the assumption of horses. In other words, that biochemical and physiological phenomena are rooted in known fundamental chemical interactions, since everything they've discovered so far has been. There is no reason to assume otherwise until there's conclusive evidence that it's not "horses". Basically, what the 'quantum brain' ideas boil down to is: "The brain is weird, we don't really know how it works. Quantum physics is weird, we don't really know how it works. Maybe these two are connected!". Which is an absurd premise for scientific inquiry.