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Thank you so much for your reply!

Betty casts Western Civilization as in opposition to Pinker and Pinker as a parvenu. In my opinion, Pinker is squarely in the center of the stream of Western Civilization, and Betty, and what she stands for, are out on the fringe. That's not necessarily bad, mind you. Western Civilization is now predominantly naturalistic; it has been moving in that direction for 500 years. It is also scientific and skeptical.

... and falling behind scientific progress in countries that aren't yet saddled down with the materialistic mindset.

He clearely believes strongly what he's written.

Indeed, and that's why I find Pinker - in a word - hilarious.

And let me reiterate, as a scientist who does quantum chemical calculations for a living, that I find the idea of quantum fields having an important role in brain activity to be ludicrous on its face. The decoherence times are too short; the couplings too large. The brain is a classical object on time scales six order of magnitude shorter than the shortest time relevant to neural processing.

I'm not surprised you feel this way because of the scope of your inquiry and the standards of Western scientific materialism. As I recall, Western science will not consider any notion of photons being a factor, superposition, geometry or space/time relativity in the functioning of the physical brain.

And yet, from my point of view, who threw up a wall and made the physical brain a "safe zone" from physics which are otherwise applicable to the universe?

Rats, I forgot to mention my last point... sorry about that!

The overarching clue that Western science is missing the boat on the physical brain is the dimensional limitations of vision and thought. Our eyes and brains are wired for three spatial and one temporal dimension.

And yet from Kaluza-Klein to Vafa Cumrun, we are much aware of extra dimensional causes as the best explanation for myriad observations in these four dimensions.

Why the limitation? Why this choice of coordinates? What is physically "real"?

... and falling behind scientific progress in countries that aren't yet saddled down with the materialistic mindset.

Those would be? As I recall, Western science will not consider any notion of photons being a factor, superposition, geometry or space/time relativity in the functioning of the physical brain.

Of course photons are a factor; we radiate and absorb them in the infrared. 'Biophotons' are another matter. As I've explained, they appear to be chemiluminescence, a non-functional byproduct of chemical reactions. It would be fairer to say we've considered them and discounted them.

As for superposition, I've spent a great deal of time thinking about how some coherent states could last for relatively long times in organic matter. And I've concluded that there is no plausible mechanism for such persistence. In general, the sorts of collisional events that cause decoherence of quantum electronic, vibrational and rotational states do not obey selection rules, and therefore tend to be the means by which unusual long-lived, high symmetry quantum states decohere. And in the brain, which is condensed matter and mostly liquid, collisions happen on a time scale of picoseconds.

As I recall, Western science will not consider any notion of photons being a factor, superposition, geometry or space/time relativity in the functioning of the physical brain.

I personally don't see how these are hugely relevant beyond technical questions of biological construction. Assuming all manner of odd quantum phenomenon and physics still leaves one with something that is mathematically equivalent to a finite Turing machine. The apparent assumption that this is not the case seems odd, as you have to hypothesize bizarre and pretty imaginary mathematical spaces to make this not the case.

Even though it is a strange notion, quantum functionality would not change the abstract computational behavior the brain from if it was vanilla wetware. It would change our notion of how it is put together, but not the fundamental capabilities and properties.