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By zapping complexes of photosynthetic molecules with lasers, the authors of the paper were able to show that the excitons use quantum mechanics to make their journey through the photocomplex more efficient. The experimental evidence was strong and compelling. The authors also speculated that the excitons were performing a particular quantum computation algorithm called a quantum search, in which the wave-like nature of propagation allows the excitons to zero in on their target. As it turns out, the excitons were performing a different kind of quantum algorithm called a quantum walk, but the “crackpot” fact remained: Quantum computation was helping the bacteria move energy from point A to point B.
How could tiny bacteria be performing the kind of sophisticated quantum manipulations that it takes human beings a room full of equipment to perform?
Your Android phone (or iPhone, if that's how you roll) is an impressive machine, with computing speeds and storage capacities thousands of times those of desktop PCs from only years ago. If Moore's Law holds up, your smart watch may outshine today's phones the way today's phones eclipse old PCs.
But no matter how powerful these machines become, they may never develop true intelligence if we continue to rely on conventional computing technology. According to the authors of a paper published in the journal Physical Review X last July, however, adding a dash of quantum mechanics could do the trick.
Quantum walks, on the other hand, describe a walker who doesn't exist at one spot at a time, but instead is distributed over many locations with varying probability of being at any one of them. Instead of taking a random step to the left or right for example, the quantum walker has taken both steps. There is some probability that you will find the walker in one place or the other, but until you make a measurement the walker exists in both.
That's not to say you'd need to make a full-blown quantum computer to build a truly intelligent machine - only part of an otherwise classical computer would need to be supplemented with a bit of quantum circuitry. That's good because progress toward developing a stand-alone quantum computer has been about as slow as the progress toward artificial intelligence. Combining artificial intelligence systems with quantum circuitry could be the recipe we need to build the HAL 9000s and R. Daneel Olivaws of the future.
It is therefore not correct to assume all superpositions are destroyed after the decoherence time. One needs to clearly specify in what basis the environment acts and what is its influence in other bases. We usually care about superposition in the computation basis, where useful interferences happen. Below, a few simple examples with more details are provided. Some understanding of density matrix theory is required to follow the details.
Decoherence is a process through which quantum superposition in a system is washed out due to coupling to an environment. It is a basis-dependent phenomenon, therefore, decoherence in one basis does not necessarily destroy superposition in another basis. In the weak coupling limit, when the Hamiltonian of the system is dominant and the environment is a perturbation, decoherence happens in the energy basis. In the strong coupling limit decoherence may destroy superposition in other bases.
Light-harvesting components of photosynthetic organisms are complex, coupled, many-body quantum systems, in which electronic coherence has recently been shown to survive for relatively long timescales, despite the decohering effects of their environments. Here, we analyse entanglement in multichromophoric light-harvesting complexes, and establish methods for quantification of entanglement by describing necessary and sufficient conditions for entanglement and by deriving a measure of global entanglement. These methods are then applied to the Fenna–Matthews–Olson protein to extract the initial state and temperature dependencies of entanglement. We show that, although the Fenna–Matthews–Olson protein in natural conditions largely contains bipartite entanglement between dimerized chromophores, a small amount of long-range and multipartite entanglement should exist even at physiological temperatures. This constitutes the first rigorous quantification of entanglement in a biological system. Finally, we discuss the practical use of entanglement in densely packed molecular aggregates such as light-harvesting complexes.
So because of things like entanglement, superposition and non locality, you have to accept things like life after death, near death experiences, psychics, ESP, telepathy and more.
You're thinking in terms of a single plant having to "trial and error" all future possibilities itself, and get it right first time... that's not how evolution works... because it wasn't "one plant" that had to luck onto the ability... it was a beneficial trait that revealed itself as a more efficient system than the rest of the population when it occurred.
t will be interesting to see how this is applied not only to manufactured solar cells, but may be possible to utilise in biological computing!
originally posted by: FlySolo
a reply to: neoholographic
You need a video to explain the quantum photosynthesis.
eta: except I don't buy the narrator's last sentence. "Evolution's trial and error " Something really occurred to me after watching this video. It's the chicken or egg thing. How, can a plant or even a basic chlorophyll molecule via "trial and error" develop a system to move photons down every possible path if it never existed??? There is no trial, only error, once. See what I'm getting at? It would have to be correct first shot and this to me begs a HUGE question which leads to me to only one possible conclusion. What came first, the quantum system to move photons or the plant? The quantum system did. It MADE the plant. dun dun dun duuuuun
Cognitive decisions are best described by quantum mathematics. Do quantum information devices operate in the brain? What would they look like? Fuss and Navarro (2013) describe quantum lattice registers in which quantum superpositioned pathways interact (compute/integrate) as ‘quantum walks’ akin to Feynman's path integral in a lattice (e.g. the ‘Feynman quantum chessboard’). Simultaneous alternate pathways eventually reduce (collapse), selecting one particular pathway in a cognitive decision, or choice. This paper describes how quantum walks in a Feynman chessboard are conceptually identical to ‘topological qubits’ in brain neuronal microtubules, as described in the Penrose-Hameroff 'Orch OR' theory of consciousness.
A review and update of a controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness published in Physics of Life Reviews claims that consciousness derives from deeper level, finer scale activities inside brain neurons. The recent discovery of quantum vibrations in "microtubules" inside brain neurons corroborates this theory, according to review authors Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose. They suggest that EEG rhythms (brain waves) also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations, and that from a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions.
originally posted by: neoholographic
One of the reasons there's this objection is because a Quantum Mind explains all features of consciousness even what we call paranormal. So because of things like entanglement, superposition and non locality, you have to accept things like life after death, near death experiences, psychics, ESP, telepathy and more.