Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Mechanics Involved In Photosynthesis
Kristina at Science News writes "We all learn about photosynthesis in school: sunlight in, plant food out. Not well understood is how this process achieves its initial and uniquely high efficiency in capturing the energy of a photon. Quantum mechanics may be at work in the electron transfer process inside chloroplast, giving electrons the chance to consider many paths at once before choosing the best one."
We all learn about photosynthesis in school: sunlight in, plant food out.
Huh, apparently some of us learned about it differently than others. I seem to recall it having to do with water and carbon dioxide in and some extra oxygen left over?
Also, I think someone beat you to the punch back in 2007 when we covered this story the first time and we covered that part about the birds using quantum effects in 2008.
My work here is dung.
Quantum mechanics underlying a macro-level phenomenon? I'm shocked.
Now, it is quite interesting that we now might know more about specifically how it does so; but that is slightly different.
"'We can't tell nature to ignore quantum mechanics, so we might need to measure it and see what happens,' says Graham Fleming" Does this mean that Schrodinger's cat will be involved in the testing somehow?
The process involves photons that are absorbed while exciting the energy of molecules OF COURSE quantum mechanics is involved. Coming up next, thermodynamics may be at work in volcanic eruptions.
after learning about photodiodes in electronics class. Did I miss something? Or did the author?
Is there any way to incorporate string theory, membranes, dimensions, time travel, or wormholes into this explanation? Kaku has some speaking engagements and needs some buzz words along with the usual Star Trek references.
I thought quantum mechanics were at work in all reactions.
Quantum mechanics is always involved in everything. You just get decoherence as you get larger systems which gives you classical limits.
"Quantum effects" are ALWAYS at work, whether you are talking about dissolving salt in water, or causing nitrocellulose to go "boom". Saying that "quantum effects" may be involved in photosynthesis is like saying that water might somehow be involved in the oceans.
The article makes somewhat more sense later on, when they suggest that "weird" quantum effects might be involved... but initially the article gives the (incorrect) impression of scientific illiteracy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is it just me or is everything now being explained through Quantum Mechanics?
Don't understand why people make irrational decisions?
Quantum Mechanics may be at work.
Don't understand how photosynthesis happens?
Quantum Mechanics may be at work.
Don't understand contradictions in quantum mechanics?
Well, that is because sub-atomic paticles may have free will?
Can't we just credit God or something?
Quantum mechanics isn't some tool in nature's toolbox. QM is a way that humans describe all natural phenomena when we explain details of how it all works. QM is a universal framework for describing all the actions of everything that exists.
If scientists are coming up with a new QM description of a physical process like photosynthesis, it's not because they're just discovering that QM is involved. It's because they're figuring out how to describe the process in terms of QM.
In other news, physics turns out to be involved in how the brain works.
--
make install -not war
People like you are the reason geeks never get laid.
We've been teaching that in physical biochemistry courses for decades. With examples. This is like saying "gravity may be at work in planetary orbits."
It is not new at all that quantum tunneling is an important mechanism in the electron transport chain. The iron-sulfur centers are optimally positioned to optimize the tunneling rate of electrons between them. They knew about this several years ago, when I learned this in an undergrad biophysics class.
Man: "Ah, but look at quantum photosynthesis. That something so incredibly convenient to life (plant and herbivore and omnivore animals) should arise by accident is inconceivable. It proves you exist, so therefore you don't."
God: "Oh dear, I hadn't... <logic>puff</logic>
In Liberty, Rene
Science has now discovered that one of the more universal concepts in physics applies to... just about everything above the subatomic scale!
News at 11.
Quantum mechanics has something to do with nuclear bombs, don't it? Shouldn't we be screaming in panic, that our plants might explode like a nuclear bomb at any second? You can't trust those plants, sitting creepy still all the time, plotting our nuclear destruction all the time. We should destroy them all, before they get us!
Oops, forgot to take the blue pill. Take the blue pill now, not the red one.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
This research has science a step closer to showing that the brain functions as a quantum computer. Having a quantum computer in our head would explain why we're not like classical computers and have "intelligence", "free will" and "awareness."
Scientists who dismiss quantum processes at work in the body due heat and other quantum noise have little imagination to realize how exquisitely nature works on the molecular level to solve problems like these.
Nearly everything involving chemistry is governed by quantum mechanics...
Actually all chemistry is governed by quantum mechanics. In fact practically everything we can explain is governed by quantum mechanics, the only exception being gravity and even then we think it is governed by QM we just have not found the right model. Of course for things that happen at human scale it is often easier to use a continuum-based approximation of QM...but it is still an approximation of the underlying QM.
In Fact, it makes them wither and die. We need to stop people from looking at plants or our entire planet is DOOMED DOOMED!!!!!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
QM is a universal framework for describing all the actions of everything that exists.
Except for gravity. We can quantize this but only if we put in an artificial energy cut off. Of course most of us physicists believe that there is a proper QM description of gravity to be found but we have not yet do so so we cannot yet say that it is described by QM.
It's covered in physics, to the extent that photosynthesis and the photoelectric effect are used to demonstrate photons must have momentum. (The law of conservation of momentum requires that the momentum going in equals the momentum coming out, so if the electron has momentum, then the photon must also.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
God exists, because he told Joan D'Arc to attack the Brittons, and because Joan D'Arc was a real person, therefore God must be real, too.
Eivind, who don't doubt that there's quantum effects going on in the brain, but see no need for them for explaining "intelligence" or "awareness", and know enough psychology to not see any need for "free will" to describe how the mind works.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Quantum Mechanics is involved in everything!
(Except maybe gravity. And there's a good chance it's involved in that as well.)
To be honest, the result here, while important, is entirely unsurprizing. What you're dealing with here is bound electrons, moving from say, a chlorophyll group to a tyrosine amino acid residue. There's nothing knew that electrons, in particular bound electrons (such as in an atom or molecule) can only be accurately described quantum-mechanically. Electrons move through QM 'tunneling' quite a bit, so you simply cannot accurately describe electron-transfer kinetics (which is what's going on here) without QM.
No, it does not. First off, it spells trouble that you seem to view that as a desired end result. Hardly a good way to do science. Second, there is no good reason to believe that the brain cannot be described in terms of straight-up chemistry and biochemistry. We don't know how the brain works, but that doesn't mean it's unexplainable in terms of what we already know. There are plenty of things we haven't fully understood in biochemistry, but that doesn't mean they're generally believed to be unexplainable in the current framework of things. Occam's razor would dictate that that idea should be disregarded until there is some evidence that would make it necessary. No such evidence exists.
Further, your 'philosophical' points are simply invalid. Quantum mechanics says nothing about 'free will', or philosophical determinism for that matter. Quantum mechanics can be interpreted in either way, and has; e.g. the Copenhagen interpretation is nondeterministic, whereas the Bohm interpretation is.
I work with applying quantum mechanics at the molecular level, in biochemical systems, all day long. I have yet to find anyone in my field who thinks there are macroscopic quantum-mechanical processes going on in the human body. That is not due to lack of imagination, it's due to experience with actual quantum mechanics. All chemistry is inherently quantum mechanical. Physics cannot explain an atom even, much less a molecule, with classical theory. The relationship between chemistry and biochemistry is well-understood. The quantum mechanics of chemistry is fairly well understood (due to people doing what I do). And transition in the chemical domain from what is quantum-mechanical to what is classically describable is also well understood. There is simply no physics that explains how or why quantum mechanical effects would disappear and then re-appear orders of magnitude 'upwards' on the scale of matter.
I was expecting a remark about dingo's kidneys.
In Liberty, Rene
Quantum computers are Turing reducible. It doesn't matter if your computer is classical or quantum, they can still only solve the same kinds of problems. This goes for the brain as well. (For the philosophers, this means that we cannot so easily escape from Searle's Chinese room.)
All of this quantum mind nonsense seems to have stared with Roger Penrose and his ridiculous "theory". (Read: Shadows of the mind and The emperors new mind) He not only claims that the brain is a quantum system (possible, but totally unfounded) but also proposes a formula by which we can calculate how conscious something is! (He bites the ol' ontological bullet really hard, and goes on to claim that even an electron can be conscious, but only a little bit and only once in a great while.)
This article:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/287/5454/791?ck=nck
Very clearly outlines the biggest problems for the theory. This is likely where the "Brain is too hot" argument originated. It's a good one, and not likely to go away anytime soon.
More importantly, even if mother nature managed to work around the problem of a hot brain, it still doesn't get us any closer to consciousness. (See my first paragraph above) In the Penrose-Hameroff model, consciousness appears magically during collapse of the wave function. How they came to such a conclusion is beyond reason. That isn't science, it's mysticism.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Nothing science has put forth even attempts to explain why I have a sense of me.
We can observe all we want, and fully map out the behavior of the human brain, and end up proving people are just complex machines. We'd still be left with the question of what our consciousness is.
Should the brain end up being nothing more than a complex machine (and I believe it is), we'll eventually figure it out completely. Once this happens, we'll hit a wall until we can define ourselves (or maybe the rest of you are all machines, and I'm the only "real" person!).
If we manage to figure that one out, the next step would be to explain why anything exists at all.
In other news, Kansas has passed legislation to allow the teaching of alternate theories of photosynthesis, including Intelligent DeShine. This theory argues that plants produce food from sunlight by the mediation of "christons", which have the mystical property of being three particles in one, allowing them to convert the sunny warmth of the 6000-year-old Sun into original sin-free gluten.
You didn't think the Eucharist was made out of wheat by accident, did you? Heathen.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Don't ask questions that you don't want a stupid answer to. Especially in the middle of the US. Or on the interweb.
You just never know where the next creationist is these days. I even heard stories about how they have no toes, but just this square ending on their feet...
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Although, as some commenters have pointed out, everything in the world can be explained in terms of quantum mechanics, until now pretty much everything that is relevant to life on earth didn't seem to need quantum mechanics (QM)... it would work just as well with a chemistry based on a classical physics.
Yeah, we have proven that underneath all that it's really something else by splitting the atom, but aside from the social implications of the atom bomb, nuclear power, and a few more obscure technologies based on the radioactive decay, most of QM seemed to be ever so far removed from the reality of life even today. So to most people, including most natural scientists, the counter-intuitive weirdness of much of QM seemed both unreal and irrelevant.
But there are a few unexplained little problems in the natural sciences, such as the efficiency of photosynthesis... and some rather larger puzzles such as the nature of consciousness. If it turns out that purely quantum physical effects, i.e. ones that cannot be explained by any classical physics underlie something as basic to life as photosynthesis, then suddenly QM becomes highly real and relevant and we'll have to consider it as an option in anything difficult that we try to explain in the natural sciences.
I.e., maybe Roger Penrose was right and no classical computer can ever duplicate the human mind even with arbitrarily large computing power. (Penrose first wrote about this before Quantum computers were even conceived of).
And, even stranger, maybe plants can actually create elements by transmutation... there are scientifically plausible explanations for how this could work, but they've been relegated to fringe science because they require QM-effects and those don't play a role in Biology, right?
In short, if it is true that photosynthesis requires QM-effects, then we'll need to be looking at all of nature through a different, if not entirely new lens. And we may find that much of what we thought we knew well suddenly looks very different.
It's just 99.99..9% of the time the result is the same as if classical mechanics were in play.
How many 9's is that? Sorry, guess higher.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I thought this was obvious after learning about photodiodes in electronics class.
It's not about the quantum nature of the absorption of the photon and its conversion to an excited electron state.
It's about the efficient propagation of that excited electron state, once created, from one molecule to another until it gets to a place where it can be used. "Picking the path" in a non-random way, without losing energy in the process, seems to be using quantum weirdness as well.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Quantum mechanics says nothing about 'free will', or philosophical determinism for that matter. Quantum mechanics can be interpreted in either way, and has; e.g. the Copenhagen interpretation is nondeterministic, whereas the Bohm interpretation is.
Maybe stating the obvious...the reason two interpretations are possible, is the system defined by QM is incomplete or underdetermined. What's left is in fact "free", at least in terms of physics theory.
Of course, as you suggest, that may still have nothing to do with "free will", since a person can experience their own will as being "free" or not depending on how they model their own thought process.
Personally I don't think either the Copenhagen or Bohm interpretations are correct. Though of course neither is wrong within the scope of current physical theory, since they are outside of it.
As a quantum physicist, perhaps I can enlighten those of you whose ignorant "of course it's quantum physics! clearly this research is the st00p1d" comments have gained unseemly amounts of modpoints.
Yes, of course quantum mechanics is what is ultimately responsible for everything that happens in the world (at least, as far as we know, though general relativistic phenomena are so far an exception to this). However, despite this fact, it is remarkably the case that the world we perceive on our own macroscopic level does not behave in a quantum way at all, but instead seems to obey classical mechanics. Essentially what it comes down to is that at some point, things start interacting with their environment so much that they start being constantly measured, and so the quantum behaviour disappears. What is not so clear is at exactly what level the world stops being quantum and starts being classical.
In general, the cutoff seems to be somewhere around a molecule. That is although atoms and bonds between atoms are quantum effects, molecules tend be very well modeled using classical forces that were obtained from the quantum models of the bonds.
Because of this, before this research was done, a very reasonable educated guess for one to have made was that the first step of photosynthesis, where an electron essentially is knocked into walking from one part of the molecule to another, would be a classical process, since it happens on the scale of a molecule. Put another way, one might have guessed that when the electron walked from one part of the molecule to another, it did so in a classical (but non-deterministic) fashion by choosing one of the paths available to it and walking down that.
However, what this research has shown is that this is not the case. The electron in fact takes several paths at once. This was detected by performing experiments which showed that there were interference effects; this is the standard approach to take to determine whether something is quantum or classical by the following rough chain of reasoning: you can only see interference patterns when you have cancellations, and you can only see cancellations when something has taken two paths simultaneously but with the opposite phase, so ergo if you see an interference pattern then something quantum must be going on.
This is actually very remarkable because it means that nature specifically engineered a molecule that manifests quantum behaviour on a larger scale then it usually appears. This is a non-trivial thing to have done because, again, the fact that we don't usually see quantum behaviour on this scale implies that it is typically precluded by interactions with the environment, so the fact that this molecule accomplishes this means that it somehow evolved to isolate the electrons involved in photosynthesis from their environment in order to allow them to act in a quantum fashion.
It turns out that the gain from doing this is small, but notable; I didn't read the article, but I did talk to some of the people involved in this research at a couple of meetings and if recall correctly they said that according to their simulations, by doing this nature gained an efficiency of about 10% over what it would be able to get if it were only using classical phenomena. Thus, this effect is actually important for us to understand because it may give us insights into how we can engineer our own devices to use large-scale quantum phenomena to more efficiently harness energy from the sun.
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Nothing science has put forth even attempts to explain why I have a sense of me.
People put way too much importance on that. Your brain is telling you that you have a sense of yourself. Take some of the right drugs and suddenly you can have your brain giving you a sense that you're everyone and everything else too. Doesn't make it true.
It's possible, and in fact likely, that what you perceive as free will and consciousness is an illusion of very complex, but completely deterministic behavior. You haven't offered anything to explain why that wouldn't be the case.
If we manage to figure that one out, the next step would be to explain why anything exists at all.
The question of "why does anything exist at all" is utterly meaningless. If nothing existed at all, the mystery would be "why is there only nothingness?" except there would be nobody to ask the question. The mysteries are still equivalent.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
That's a claim I've never seen before. (And I've published and refereed journal articles on free will.) Are we off topic, or does your claim have a quantum angle? Can you provide instructions on how to model my thought processes so as to not experience my will as free? Or does that require some psychological state - say paranoid delusional - which requires more than just a change in modeling assumptions to realize?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
And the rest of you would do well to remember that the authors of articles very seldom have any say in the article's headline.
I piss off bigots.
Quantum computers are Turing reducible. It doesn't matter if your computer is classical or quantum, they can still only solve the same kinds of problems. This goes for the brain as well.
Doesn't Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem show that the mind is not a Turing machine?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Not believing in free will could negatively impact the potential to exercise it.
Just because there is a reciprocal does not mean it is meaningless. As far as Qunatum mechanics and the brain. No there isn't evidence. However, I would nout be suprised if the two most whacked out phenomena we've encountered (quantum mechanics and consciousness) are functionally related.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Are we off topic, or does your claim have a quantum angle?
It doesn't have a quantum angle.
Can you provide instructions on how to model my thought processes so as to not experience my will as free?
Yes, sort of. I wouldn't take it that far though.
Or does that require some psychological state - say paranoid delusional - which requires more than just a change in modeling assumptions to realize?
The 'model' is not entirely arbitrary, and is apparently involuntary to different degrees for different people. Changing your 'modeling assumptions' would be an exercise in voluntarily manipulating your psychological state. And I do think you would qualify as delusional at the point of experiencing yourself as having no free will.
I'm not trying to imply that people have no free will. I'm saying that what I experience as free will is largely imagined, and with effort I can alter it. And I've seen other people alter it, apparently, sometimes to their own detriment. By way of analogy, the objects in the room I'm in are real, but what I 'see' is a cartoon representation of those things. Most of us habitually think of the two as being the same, and tend not to recognize all the implications, even though on its face the point seems fairly obvious.
I do think that the subject of quantum mechanics is relevant to free will, though I wouldn't say that QM can "explain it". Its relevant in the sense that QM leaves space for will by leaving it out, by NOT explaining it. There would be no free will in a purely classical world. But then, as many posters have pointed out, atoms wouldn't even be possible in a purely classical world.
I don't think that saying something is "random", or that there may be "infinately many worlds" is really an explanation of anything. In a sense these are not really even "interpretations" of QM, which is quite specific and verifiable, as far as it goes. They are assertions at the boundary where QM stops, almost like answering questions with "God did it".
I realize I've left a lot of my thought here unexplained, and I didn't offer any 'instructions'. If you would like to discuss further, please suggest an e-mail adress.
Not believing in free will could negatively impact the potential to exercise it.
Yes, definately. Over-believing in it can cause pretty serious problems also. Try flying off a building.
After all, if most people can't understand quantum physics, how can a fucking squash possibly...
Oh, wait, never mind.
This ain't rocket surgery.
No, it shows that the mind is inconsistent or incomplete (or both).
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
Can you expound a little bit? Doesn't it show that the mind is capable of doing something that a Turing machine can't? Namely 'perceiving' the incompleteness theorem itself?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Well, no. As far as I know, Godel never bothered with the subject at all. John Lucas was the first (as far as I'm aware) to use Godel's theorem to argue that the human mind is capable of doing more than any computational system.
Penrose uses a similar argument to achieve the same end. He often get's the credit for it, as he made the idea popular. (I'll skip the description, you can read all about it online.) It's not a terribly good argument, as he presents it, as there are two possible conclusions you can reach. (1) the human mind is beyond mathematics (it's not a Turing machine, if you will. This is what Penrose wants us to accept.) OR (2) we cannot know that the human mind is consistent (a far less exciting finale).
It may be convenient here to sum up the Penrose book I mentioned earlier (Shadows of the mind): (1) Convince the reader that the brain (hence, mind) cannot be a computer via Godel. (2) Propose an alternate view mixing a bit of biology up with some quantum mysticism. (3) A bit of speculative physics (which we're not concerned with here) called Objective Reduction necessary for (2).
That is, Penrose wasn't trying to separate the mind from the brain with Godel, he was trying to show that the classical brain model is inadequate.
Further, he wasn't trying to claim that the brain is a quantum computer. He knows how pointless that would be (better that just about anyone, I'll bet.) He just needs the brain to be a quantum system to promote his whole collapse-causes-consciousness idea.
A far better argument, for your purpose as I assume it, is John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. It's not just hand waving (it's more subtle than it appears at first, honest!) and it's defiantly easier for a lay audience to understand.
Required reading for internet skeptics
This research has science a step closer to showing that the brain functions as a quantum computer. Having a quantum computer in our head would explain why we're not like classical computers and have "intelligence", "free will" and "awareness."
No, it does not. First off, it spells trouble that you seem to view that as a desired end result. Hardly a good way to do science.
Attempting to ratify an incredibly strong intuition (or, if you prefer a less philosophical and more scientific term, 'hypothesis') isn't a good way to do science? Certainly, scientists should be open to all possibilities, and shouldn't be so tendentious as to ignore a conclusion because they want to believe the contrary, but can it honestly be said that scientists don't have a hunch (or 'intuition' or 'hypothesis,') that they attempt to confirm or disconfirm via scientific experiments? Moreover, if something coincides with said intuition, doesn't that at least prima facie give it more credibility than a position that does not?
Further, your 'philosophical' points are simply invalid. Quantum mechanics says nothing about 'free will', or philosophical determinism for that matter. Quantum mechanics can be interpreted in either way, and has; e.g. the Copenhagen interpretation is nondeterministic, whereas the Bohm interpretation is.
The fact that quantum mechanics even has such a credible indeterministic interpretation certainly does say something about philosophical determinism: viz. it gives the position a level of credibility that was precluded by classical mechanics. Granted, indeterminism is insufficient for free will; nevertheless, it certainly seems to be necessary. Thus, since quantum mechanics at this point seems to have revealed that one of the necessary conditions for free will is not necessarily false, it has to that extent said something about free will. This isn't to say that quantum mechanics has all of the answers, nor is it to say that it can at this point be used to unequivocally demonstrate the truth of indeterminism or the existence of free will (as a matter of fact, my intuitions are deterministic, but that's neither here nor there;) regardless, to say that quantum mechanics says nothing about free will or determinism is less than charitable.
In conclusion: your physics knowledge is excellent, but don't beat up on us humble philosophers!
Quantum Mechanics Involved In Photosynthesis
Haha what? Of course it's involved in photosynthesis, it's quantum mechanics, it's involved in everything. FYI I'm still laughing.
I am the lawn!
FTFA: "Until a century or so ago, nobody had any idea that there even was such a thing as quantum physics. But while humans operated for millennia in quantum darkness, it seems that plants, bacteria and birds may have been in the know all along."
Lost me right there. It is an utterly stupid statement anyway, and reading something like this in every third 'science' article nowadays makes we want to puke.
"It doesn't matter if your computer is classical or quantum, they can still only solve the same kinds of problems"
:) ).
But in different time.
There are problems that quantum computers can solve faster than classical computers (at least in theory
Your brain is probably recursively simulating itself.
:).
:).
It's useful for a creature to be able to model and predict the external world.
And often that requires creating models of other entities.
If those entities also try to model and predict you, you'd have to model them modeling you
Running simulations and predictive models might be better on a computer that can handle infinite states at the same time. Even if it's a bit sloppy and noisy
Maybe "consciousness" is what happens when you hit the limit of recursively modeling and predicting yourself by one of those "new fangled quantum computers".
Drop acid; then try to stop hallucinating. That'll pretty quickly shatter your illusions of free will.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Recently I saw Nova's "The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies". Given your die-hard-determinist mindset, the new-age-y flavor of the two-minute "Watch a Preview" video at the site http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/butterflies/ is guaranteed to cause cognitive dissonance. I would compare stuff like this to facts like photoelectric-emission-before-quantum-theory, it doesn't fit, it causes cognitive dissonance, it demands a better model. I would like to know if science has more to say about the Monarchs than mumbling stuff like "Natural Selection". I don't even know the figure for the typical mass of a monarch brain, or how many neurons it has, BUT buried in the full Nova episode is a key experiment - they captured some southbound Monarchs in Kansas and released them near Washington D.C. Initially they vectored fairly due-south BUT THEN they changed course towards Mexico, presumably being unfamiliar with any landmarks near D.C, after all they were born in Canada and never went to college. Navigationally LATITUDE is a problem, its why chronometers were invented, how did the butterflies know they weren't being released in Berkeley - I want to see that experiment someday.
My brain is telling WHO that WHO has a sense of myself?
Illusion? Sure. Like I said, I do believe it's all a complex (deterministic) machine. (We just haven't figured out quantum mechanics fully.)
That doesn't explain why I perceive the illusion, or what I am.
It's a perfectly valid question. If we could get an answer to it, I seriously doubt there would be anything meaningless about it.
Drop acid; then try to stop hallucinating. That'll pretty quickly shatter your illusions of free will.
Of course that's only if your definition of free will demands you have complete control over what happens to you both physically and mentally.
My definition of free will is the ability to precieve and respond to both internal and external stimuli how I see fit, even when this ability is not absolute. Therefore, hallucinagenic drugs would not undermine my belief in free will.
of the death of Rene Descartes. After a particularly large meal, he was asked if he cared for desert. He replied, 'I think not.'
Think global, act loco
This is actually very remarkable because it means that nature specifically engineered a molecule that manifests quantum behaviour on a larger scale then it usually appears. This is a non-trivial thing to have done
Hmm, nature engineered it? Just about every day, I see more evidence of Intelligent Design. TFA even uses this phrase, but I'm pretty sure in an ironic sense.
Physics cannot explain an atom even, much less a molecule, with classical theory.
Here is a software package that does exactly what you say is impossible, with smashing success. Give it a spin (download the free trial): http://millsian.com/
Obviously quantum effects are involved in every physical effect, from boiling water to a car's acceleration, but these can be 100% explained with simplified models not involving quantum mechanics and (according to the article) photosynthesis can't.