Is Quantum Physics Necessary for the Account of Consciousness? The Lecture of Stuart Hameroff

thank you all for being here thank you for inviting me it's a great uh pleasure and privilege and honor and even though my grandparents came from Russia I apologize that I don't speak Russian so I'm going to talk about Consciousness and uh whether quantum physics is necessary to account for Consciousness in reference to a theory I developed over the past 20 years with sir Roger Penrose and what you see in the back oops what you see in the background is a nerve cell and most people consider only what's happening at the at the surface me surface membrane with receptors and ion channels at the membrane but we think we need to go inside the neuron here's the nucleus two structures of the cytoskeleton specifically microtubules that we think are quantum computers inside the neurons of our brains so what is consciousness we take it for granted that when we open our eyes the world out there appears inside our head and being is meant to imply having conscious experience phenomenal awareness uh as opposed to a robot or a zombie who might have complex Behavior without any conscious experience so being is meant to imply having Consciousness having awareness or experience the question of how the brain produces Consciousness and what Consciousness is is approached by many disciplines for example the neuroscientist who probes the brain with electrodes and MRI and so forth the roboticist or artificial intelligence person who tries to copy the brain and emulate uh brain functions in a computer the artist who attempts to capture the essence of experience in various forms of art the physicist with uh studies of reality for example Schrodinger's cat psychiatrist who probe the mind and the subconscious the anesthesiologist who looks suspiciously like me who studies how anesthesia takes away Consciousness uh meditators who go into to their own deeper levels of awareness and philosophers including Western philosophers and Eastern philosophers so let's begin with the question of when did Consciousness arise here we see a brief history of the universe since the big bang up until fairly recently and when did Consciousness arise Bing if you will did Bing occur fairly recently with tools and language as some people think or did Consciousness occur with the first animal cells UK carots a couple billion years ago or did Consciousness occur with the first life all does all life have Consciousness or did Consciousness occur even before the Big Bang as some Eastern philosophers and also Western philosophers such as mcin would argue let's boil this down to one question which came first Consciousness or life now most uh neuroscientists Western scientists and philosophers psychologists would say that life came first and that life gave rise to Consciousness that Consciousness emerged in living systems for example due to complex computation in the brain on the other hand pans psychist Eastern philosophers people with spiritual orientation uh proponents of Alfred North Whitehead and Quantum approaches including uh the category that I would belong in would say that Consciousness is intrinsic to the universe and preceded life now we'll come back to that qu that question but we should first address what is life because I think Consciousness and life are very closely related and there's basically four types of approaches one is functionalism that really is a list of the properties and functions of of life for example self-organization metabolism growth adaptation response to stimuli replication reproduction and evolution but non-living things have these properties for example weather patterns like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter Heth self-organization it evolves it responds to stimuli and so forth so I don't think that's the answer in the 19th century we had various forms of vitalism uh people who described a unifying energy field a life force or Elan vital pervading living systems and but that raises the question of what type of field electromagnetic fields didn't seem to work they postulated unknown Fields but were regarded as being unscientific and vitalism became taboo as molecular biology developed and we learned about DNA and molecules and so forth more recently people talk about complexity emergence scale invariance uh metabolism self-organized criticality edge of chaos but there are many non-living examples of these and finally Quantum vitalism proposed initially by Irwin Schrodinger who suggested life derived from Quantum coherence and that memory was stored in AP periodic Crystal luses but life was considered for many years too warm wet and noisy for delicate Quantum coherence people building quantum computers in the laboratory were plagued by uh any heat vibrations that would destroy the quantum coherence so it was thought very unlikely that living systems at 37.6 de Centigrade could have Quantum coherence but that has changed markedly in the last 10 years and we'll come back to that so in in Western philosophy the question of what is consciousness for example Plato uh the idea is and also modern Neuroscience that the world out there is all in our heads the world out there is a representation being is in our heads that seems like a a straightforward assumption but Plato realized that we didn't really know what reality was because of this and he used the allegory of Plato's Cave in which prisoners can only see two dimensions and for them two dimensional Shadows were reality they were unaware of three or four dimensions with time and this suggests to some people that there are more Dimensions or more uh levels of reality that we experience that we can experience so being here is in lower case because it's not the full form of Consciousness dayart realized a very similar thing the only thing of which he could be certain was that he was conscious I think therefore I am and he also realized that as far as he could tell or anyone could tell we could each be a mere brain in a that fed information by an evil genius so here's a brain in a that and uh it's thinking I'm walking out outside in the S Bing and for the brain in the vat that's as real as anything that we experience raising the question whether Consciousness and reality both may be an illusion is consciousness an illusion or or is reality illusion or are both so this is rather unsatisfying now in eastern philosophy Consciousness pervades a deeper level of reality being is everywhere like an ocean and people describe our individual Consciousness as being like a wave in a giant ocean of Consciousness but what is reality we don't really know what reality is even even in modern science and the best description of reality perhaps is of a hierarchical level extending from our classical World down uh going logarithmically down to the plank scale the basement level of the universe at 10us 33 cm if you if you plot the scale from the plank scale the very tiniest up until the size of the Universe on a log scale we human beings are precisely in the middle and uh that's an interesting phenomena which may have some implications modern science considers the brain to be a computer with Consciousness emerging from complex computation among on individual neurons so here's a bunch of neurons connected by synapses this is likened to a computer network with variable switches between nodes and the idea is that if we have sufficiently complex computation among neurons then uh Consciousness emerges as an emerging property in this view conscious perception occurs several hundred milliseconds after sensory input so here we have a brain and here's the thalamus and sensory inputs from the eyes from the ears from the S uh from our skin from all of our sensory organs go to the thalamus and then in three steps result in Consciousness for vision the information goes to the back of the brain in visual cortex V1 which is not conscious it then is sent to the front of the brain to the prefrontal cortex area and this is not conscious and then there's a third wave that results in Consciousness or correlates with Consciousness so Bing is in the third wave and in a great advance in Consciousness studies we've gone to emojis now instead of B now the third only the third wave uh is inhibited by anesthesia uh I'm an anesthesiologist and we actually use the first wave and the second wave in patients who are unconscious the first wave and second wave are still there but only the third wave is gone and we use these we we use um the third wave to uh sorry we use the first wave and the second wave to monitor the Integrity of the spinal cord in spinal surgery to make sure the spinal cord is intact the brain is still active under anesthesia what's gone fairly selectively is consciousness EEG slows but it's still there so only this third wave and this implies that the mechanism of anesthesia May hold the key to understanding Consciousness if we could figure out how anesthesia selectively takes away Consciousness sparing other brain functions uh we could have a handle on what Consciousness actually is and I'll come back to that point now the third wave when it gets to the cortex results in in another set of three ways so here's the lamic inputs or uh from the uh the back of the brain to the front of the brain and from the front of the brain to to other areas that go to the layer four and then from layer four uh it goes to layer uh five six or sorry to layer six one two and three and then from layer 1 two and three in the Red Arrows they Converge on layer five these giant paramal cells these pyramid shaped neurons in layer five that send their apical dendroides to the surface of the brain and when we measure EEG from the surface of the brain we're really measuring these apical dendroides because they're vertical and everything else cancels out so the paramal cells are responsible for EEG that we can measure from the surface and we'll come back to that point so it looks like Bing is occurring in layer five paramal cells it may be elsewhere but if you had to pick one place in the brain that would be it layer five paramal cells so there's there's our happy face uh in layer five now mainstream theories uh uh these include Global workspace uh uh predictive coding higher order thought integrated information Theory um these are all uh basically cognitive architectures uh they don't address the hard problem the hard problem is why we have experience at all why we're not robots or zombies we could have complex Behavior without any inner conscious awareness yet we do at least I do uh I assume you do but I don't know you could be zombies or robots trained uh to come to a lecture about Consciousness and from your standpoint I could be a zombie cleverly programmed to talk about Consciousness without having any but I have it and I assume you do but why the second problem with these theories is that free will is impossible regardless of determinism which is another uh issue because Consciousness happens 300 milliseconds after impingment of sensory information on our on our sense organs and yet we often respond to those stimuli at 100 milliseconds so if we're talking very fast and you say something and I answer back the activity in my brain that correlates with what you said happens after I've responded therefore U many uh Western philosophers and most neuroscientists would say Consciousness is epiphenomenal at least for Rapid interactions and that we act non-consciously and have this illusion that Consciousness that we were in conscious control we the activity that correlates with the unconscious activity they don't answer they can't answer that so I think this this this approach is wrong but the party line the the the the understanding in most western philosophy and Neuroscience is that Consciousness happens too late and we're responding quite often non-consciously and have an illusion this would be the position of Dan dennon for example finally these approaches view neuronal States as inanimate bits as simple onoff States at the neuronal at the level of neurons with Consciousness and cognition emerging from complex Network activities and people in artificial intelligence and the singularity would say that when we can uh if we have a computer built like the brain uh then we will have Consciousness in the computer I don't think that's right because this view is really an insult to neurons treating a neuron as a simple bit a one or a zero doesn't take into account that it's alive and we don't yet know what that means and there are other examples that show that this can't be right for example consider a different type of single cell a neuron is a cell and consider a parami it's one cell it swims around it it avoids obstacles uh it can learn it can find food it can find a mate here are two paramia fused having sex this is kind of x-rated I apologize for that and U whether parium is conscious or not we don't know but uh they may be and uh they are certainly clever enough to do these cognitive functions without having any synapses there's they're just one cell so if a parium can be this clever it's unlikely to me at least that our neurons are simple one onoff States one ones or zeros so how do parium do this how's how do they perform these cognitive functions whether they're conscious or not well um here's a parium uh and you can see that these hairlike projections on the surface are called cyia and a cross-section they're shown here and here's a coming out of a parium and in cross-section we see that there are nine pairs of structures called microtubules with an inner with an inner pair and in a Centrio they're very Sim similar this is a structure called a Centrio that is responsible for dividing chromosomes during cell division mitosis and that's what got me interested in microtubules 40 or 45 50 years ago actually so um these are found in in in in almost all biological cells and microtubules or similar structures are found in all living cells so how do they how do they do this how do the the cyia bend back and forth in a coordinated fashion to move the cell in a proper direction and if they bump into something they are distended and they transfer that information into the cell so what does this have to to do with with Modern Biology well here is how they do that um here's a uh psyllium and these things Bend back and forth by motor proteins called dine which contract and cause the psyllium to bend back and forth to cause it to move in a purposeful uh cognitive uh way and to do useful things well this turns out to be very similar to what's happening in our brains right now um so here is a neuron uh from a brain with its axon and several dendrites and synapses may be out here to receive input inputs from a different uh neuron and if we look inside the dendrite we see uh in this case one microt tual there's actually many of them and the same dining the exact same uh motor protein moving material along so uh material that is going to be used for this synapse is synthesized in the cell body body and must be transported to a particular place by these motor proteins and they have to jump from microt to microtuble have to go right or left at branching points and the question is how do they know where to go where to deliver their cargo and it turns out that a microt tual Associated protein called towel is bound at specific points on the microtubular lattice and is a traffic signal or a code to tell the the n or the dining where to get off to deliver its cargo to this synapse or that synapse or particular synapse that needs to be reinforced in synaptic plasticity so the placement of tow on a microtubule is specific uh and encodes a form of memory now what happens when uh we lose towel or we lose microtubular Integrity well that results in Alzheimer's disease so in Alzheimer's disease we have the amid plaques on the outside of neurons and then inside we have microtubules which are disintegrating and falling apart releasing their towel shown in the blue which form what are called neurofibrillary Tangles and we lose memory and we lose cognition and eventually we lose Consciousness the same thing happens in something called post-operative cognitive dysfunction or pocd when people usually very young babies or very old people need many many anesthetics and they get repeat anesthetics and over time they they begin to uh to lose memory and this is called pocd and it's a problem in my field of anesthesia and the pathology is almost identical to Alzheimer's disease and also to Down syndrome dementia now if we go back to where Consciousness is most likely to be happening in the in the uh paramal cells uh and we look inside the paramal cell we see microtubules which are interestingly are inter erupted and of mixed polarity they're they're in opposite polarity pointing different directions now in all other cells and in axons the microtubes are continuous and array like spokes of a wheel from the center of the cell outward to the periphery but in in dendrites and Soma and only in dendrites and Soma they're interrupted and of mixed polarity pointing in different directions so microtubules are part of the cytoskeleton which is thought to be the skelet structural support of the cell but if you wanted structural support for example in your leg you wouldn't break your femur bone and have it next to each other that's not good for support so there must be some other reason and we think it's to optimize information processing to have resonances from microtubules pointing in in different directions and here's a picture of a microtubule and as you can see it's made of these individual proteins called tubulin Peanut shaped proteins that can be in multiple States uh at the same uh multiple States and interact with neighbor States and therefore represent information as patterns now I got interested in microtubules uh when I was in medical school in the in the uh early 70s and uh uh was fascinated by them I learned about computers at that time and their structure was discovered and I got the idea that they might be processing information to account for mitosis and and processes in the brain by each tubulin representing a state for example a one or a zero black or white and that patterns could propagate and move through the microtubule so that microtubules were acting like computers and were some type of molecular computers and I published for example 1982 in the Journal of theoretical biology a model of information processing in microtubules wrote a book in 1987 about Computing and microtubules and so forth and then later with Roger Penrose develop further ideas of microtubules as quantum computers and we'll come back to that point so I mentioned uh memory so let's talk a little bit about memory and most views of memory are by synaptic plasticity so here's an axon at the top releasing neurotransmitter vesicles across the synapse to recept to bind to receptors on the on the dendrite on the postoptic membrane and most people would say that memory is due to the level of sensitivity at the synapse so that if you have a network of neurons the sensitivity at the synapse will Channel information through that Network and that's how you get cognition and Consciousness but the problem with that explanation is that these proteins are very transient they last only hours to days and then they're recycled by by microtubular related phenomena and yet memories can last lifetimes I I have memories going back to at least when I was four years old maybe maybe earlier and you probably do also and uh these proteins are long gone we think the following is happening there's an enzyme called camk2 that when uh neurotransmitters buy they release calcium it activates this enzyme which then binds to microtubules and and other proteins so uh what does that mean here's here's cam K2 it's a rather beautiful hexagonal molecule here we look at it on on the end and here from the side and when calcium comes in when the synapse is activated the cam K2 extends six kise domains like arms or legs upwards and and downwards and has phosphorilation domains and it phosphorites something inside the neuron which can encode and store memory so we got the idea that that this might be binding and phosphor microtubules to encode memory and in this paper in 2012 my colleagues Travis krack and Jack tusinski compared the geometry and size of Cam K2 with a microt tual lattice the a lattice or the B lattice and we showed that the match was perfect that the cam K2 perfectly matched the hexagonal lattice either the a or the B and suggested that memory is encoded in microtubular luses by cam K2 phosphorilation so the idea is something like this cam K2 comes in from the synapse uh binds to microtubules six kyes domains and can leave a memory Trace which might bind tow or change the microtubule State and then goes on its way leaving a memory Trace behind so this is our candidate for memory encoding in microtubules and I haven't seen a better explanation but of course I'm biased I like this one these patterns that have Happ in microtubules are similar to uh xar structures which are suggested to be the structure of language uh gome chsky is a famous uh neurol linguist a language expert who believes that there's some biological structural basis for language and one way to to show this is by showing that sentences can be represented by these branching xbar structures that are hierarchical um where you have a noun phrase verb phrase and various uh uh phrases that can represent uh language and sentence structure hierarchically uh and I met with Chomsky earlier uh this year and he liked this idea that that I'm about to tell you that uh microtubules might might be the the site for these types of Exar structures because they have not been found at the level of neuronal networks so um for example here's a uh a sentence she studies physics at the University and uh these may be uh uh looked at hierarchically where the the meaning in the intention uh uh inflection phase leads to different levels that result in this sentence and yet the the in TimeWise the sentence is comprehended up here somehow this is somewhat mysterious so I've been working on an idea that microtubules in uh represent xar like structures um in their structure so here's this sentence represented in a micr tubulus and uh uh in a study earlier this year for Chinese and and English speakers uh ding at all working with a group at NYU showed sentence comprehension for both English and Chinese correlated with hierarchical levels of EEG now this is a rather uh complex slide so just look over here for the moment we have the hierarchical arrangement of a sentence the whole sentence with its comprehension is made of phrases each phrase is made of words each word is made of phones or syllables and somehow you get meaning and quala out of that and they show that the sentence is com uh comprehended fair at a fairly slow rate in the EEG at three Hertz phrases somewhat faster 10 Hertz and words in gamma synchrony to say 100 Hertz and uh I've suggested that uh you can go deeper inside neurons and this correlates with with the brain with neural networks and individual neurons and that we should go inside neurons to the cytoskeleton and even deeper into individual microtubules and faster and faster for for meaning and qualia so this is a work in progress and I'll be meeting with Chomsky uh uh in the spring and hope to develop this model further okay so stepping back a second we have brain computational capacity now people in artificial intelligence and the singularity would say the brain computation is based on neurons firing so we have 10 to the 11th neurons in the brain about a th synapses per neuron and acting at about 100 Hertz this gives you 10 to the 16th operations per second per brain now the singularity people and the AI people will say when we get to 10 to the 16th operations per second per brain we'll have brain equivalents in a computer so just give us a few more billion dollars and and we'll have it you know uh we just need to be build faster bigger computers but I don't think that's right because if you look at the microtubular level you have 10 to the 11th neurons per brain the same but you have a billion 10 of the nth tubulin per neuron operating at about 10 megahertz and I'll explain that a little bit later this gives you 10 to the 16th operations per second per neuron the same as they claim for the whole brain and 10 to the 27th operations per second per brain so this pushes the target for brain equivalence just on the computational uh capacity level way way Downstream further down the field so the AI people don't like this idea at all and have been very critical of it um but uh I think you know they're being very naive thinking that a neuron is a single bit however where is consciousness why would computation per se explain Consciousness we have big fast computers they're not conscious where's the Bing is something else required and is that quantum physics and I would say it is so in the early 90s I was going around to AI neural network meetings uh saying that you guys need to go to 10 to the 27th and uh they said oh go away you bother me they didn't like the idea but then one day somebody said to me well how would that explain Consciousness how would that explain feelings emotions qu what are known as qua now and what later came to be known as the hard Problem by Dave chers uh how would that explain Consciousness and I had to admit I didn't know I had become a reductionist and I was somewhat embarrassed by it because I didn't think that was the right approach something was missing well fortunately at that time I read this book by Roger Penrose the emperor's new mind and in that book Roger argued against the idea that Consciousness was merely computation he said basically uh using girdle's theorem that conscious understanding is non-computational it's something other than computation something uh something else was required um something outside the computational system for example a computer might be programmed to play chess and might beat us at chess but it doesn't understand the game and John surl famously described his Chinese room argument where uh someone is is given a Chinese characters and a lookup table to be able to translate into English or any other language but didn't really understand Chinese so computations could be done without any understanding and yet we have understanding so something was missing that something Roger concluded is most likely to be involved with Quantum State reduction and reduction here doesn't mean reductionist because it means uh Quantum State reduction or collapse of the wave function and having to do with a measurement problem in quantum mechanics and that this Quantum State reduction to make another leap was related to the underlying structure of the universe space-time geometry or quantum gravity so I read this book and I hadn't really thought about quantum physics very much and uh but I was really impressed by the level of his thinking and uh and that he had proposed a mechanism for Consciousness unlike anybody not only unlike anybody nobody had ever proposed a mechanism for Consciousness Consciousness was thought to be an emerging property without specifying at what level or may maybe fundamental without explaining how it could relate to the brain but he had a specific me mechanism and so I dove into trying to understand quantum physics and as Richard fan once said nobody really understands quantum physics uh Roger probably comes the closest so in a nutshell let me just say that uh our world that we experience or the world is divided into two Realms kind of like the yin Yin yangang with the quantum and classical Worlds the classical world is what we're familiar with uh everything everything is localized you see one of me I see one of each of you things are definite in particular States uh they act like particles and generally they're fairly large but at small scales and we don't know how small is small we have this weird situation called Quantum superposition where things can be in multiple States or locations at the same time this pointer could be here and here at the same time and yet we don't see that why why don't we see Quantum superpositions in the classical world this is known as the measurement problem in quantum mechanics why we don't see it and it's exemplified by a famous thought experiment by Irwin schinger um schroer cat being both dead and alive and the idea is that there's a Quantum particle like a a photon going both going through a halfs silvered mirror and being reflected and if it's reflected it goes into the box triggers the poison and kills the cat but because it also continues schroer concluded that the cat would be both dead and alive until some until it uh collapsed to one or the other now what that situation might uh how that might resolve I'll come to in a second but let's first address the question of how something can be in two states or two locations at the same time this is still a mystery the only explanation I've ever seen is from Roger Penrose who addressed the question of what superposition is how particles can be in two or more locations at the same time and to do so Roger connected quantum mechanics with general relativity two thing two branches of science that have been uh unable to be fused in any any meaningful way he we know that from general relativity that mass is equivalent to curvature in SpaceTime geometry in the structure of the universe so uh a prediction of that experiment back in the early part of the 20th century was that light from a distant star behind the sun would be bent by the mass of the Sun and could be visualized on Earth even though it was directly behind the Sun so Sir Arthur Edington went to the top of a mountain during an eclipse when the sun was blotted out and sure sure enough was able to see a star that he knew was actually behind the Sun so the the mass of the Sun curved SpaceTime so that he could see it so it works for large scale uh SpaceTime and large scale massive objects like the sun well Roger said the same thing must be true of small entities small particles so for example a particle in one location would be a curvature of SpaceTime so here he's taking four-dimensional SpaceTime and converted into a two-dimensional sheet so we can see it easily on a screen screen and uh a particle over here would be a curvature there a particle over there would be here so the particle oscillating back and forth would be actually space-time geometry curvature oscillating back and forth and then superposition the particle being in both places would be two curvatures in space-time geometry two simultaneous curvatures in the structure of the universe so let's we'll keep that in mind and come back to that that point and apply it to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics why don't we see definite States in our perceived World well one possibility is called the multiple worlds hypothesis or multiple world's interpretation and this is actually very popular it said that every possibility continues and it evolves its own universe so every possibility branches off and forms its own world and we have multiple worlds so in one world the cat is dead in one world the cat is alive Dead Alive Dead Alive so that there's this infinite number of overlapping universes this seems rather unsatisfying no nonetheless it's very popular another possibility that was put forth by Neil bore Eugene vigner Von Norman more recently Henry STA and David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen that conscious observation so here we see the conscious observer looks at the cat you open the box and then and only then does the cat become either dead or alive and this was the the point that Schrodinger was kind of was making because this was a popular back then uh how absurd this situation was that the cat could even be both dead and alive until observed nonetheless this is a fairly uh uh popular uh still a very popular interpretation because it's pragmatic it allowed bore and others to continue to do experiments but it raises the question question of what is consciousness because it puts Consciousness outside the system outside science and uh it's it's a dualist position because it doesn't say what Consciousness is it's some mysterious entity out there that causes collapse uh uh in in our scientific world so it's un it's also unsatisfying now Roger himself came up with a third possibility that I think is most likely to be correct he turned the Copenhagen interpretation that the Observer causes collapse he turned it around upside down he said that rather than Consciousness causing collapse collapse causes Consciousness or collapse is consciousness but he needed a way for conscious for collapse to occur on its own and what he said was that these superpositions of possibilities which are equivalent to space-time geometry would be unstable or before I get there he if we consider that um that each pus the separation SpaceTime geometry uh if these separations were would continue we'd get multiple worlds so this this possibility would form Universe one this possibility would form Universe 2 um so that's that's a way of explain of accounting for the multiple worlds but I don't think that's right but instead he said that these superp positions are unstable and will self- collapse uh and undergo objective reduction Quantum State reduction by an objective threshold or o at a time T given by the indeterminacy principle basically H bar over e subg where e subg is the gravitational self energy this is the only equation I'll show so that the the superposition of separated SpaceTime continues until time tal H over G and objective reduction occurs and he said that this would be accompanied by a Moment of conscious awareness Bing B would happen when collapse occurs whenever collapse occurs wherever it occurs and it would in in inevitably occur because these separations are unstable and uh the universe doesn't want to fly apart it it it self collapses to maintain one un one Universe with separations here and there now some of these may be pleasurable some of these uh feelings some of these beings may feel good and uh and some not they would be random uh these would be occurring everywhere they'd be occurring in in the Lecter in the floor in the air in in all the cells in our body other than uh outside the brain um but would be random and disconnected and what we call protoc conscious so these would be occurring everywhere all the time kind of like pan psychist believe that Consciousness is everywhere as a property of matter this would say that Consciousness is occurring or protoconsciousness is occurring everywhere as a result of of the self- collapse all around us but um these moments of awareness are of experience are disconnected and lack meaning and cognition so they don't amount to anything but they're there nonetheless it puts Consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe specifically due to collapse uh which which forms the the material universe and then each particle goes into superposition again this would be occurring in the universe all along um now if that's the case we might ask the question remember we asking which came first Consciousness or life did the oops did this o mediated Proto pleasure uh Proto pleasurable feelings spark the origin of life and I think it may have um we know that life on Earth apparently began in What's called the primordial soup proposed in the 1920s by Oparin and helan Oparin was a Russian and and helan was British and uh the uh primordial soup was said to be a simmering mix from which biomolecules emerged 3 to four billion years ago in the 1950s two scientists at the University of Oregon in the in the US uh simulated the primordial soup in a in an experiment adding the materials that were known to exist at that time with some lightning it was Sparks to act as lightning and energy and uh and then looked in the collecting trap to see what kind of molecules they had uh they had found they could find and what they found were what what are called amphipathic molecules amphipathic refers to the fact that these molecules had two two types of uh of of entities a non-polar end kind of like oil uh like Benzene and a polar end kind of like water so this end would be soluble in water but this end would be oil likee and oil and water don't mix these molecules look a lot like dopamine which is the pleasure molecule in our brain very very similar to dopamine which is an aopathletics like tryptophan and phenyalanine they have non-polar oil-like Rings which are Pi resonance clouds at one end and polar water soluble tails on the other now let's take a minute to consider Pi resonance this is the basic building block of organic chemistry most uh most or many of the molecules that make our make up our bodies are like this and have the this organic uh molecule which has three extra uh delocalized p orbital electrons that are Unbound and they they they get together and form these electron clouds so they form uh uh non-local electron clouds where the electron three electrons are spread out over the whole molecule they're not in any one place they're delocalized in a Quantum State and these support various types of uh dipole oscillations exons and so forth which are quantum Quantum uh happenings Quantum events so raises the question did life and Consciousness derive from High resonance in biomolecules since these are key molecules in our in our bodies and brains uh oh we're missing something here uh so let me just tell you what's missing in this slide is that if two of these if two of these uh uh py resonance clouds get together they're attracted to each other and the the electron clouds dip uh dipoles oscillate back and forth in terahertz which is infrared so they tend to have these natural oscillations in the infrared region so these amphipathic molecules because oil and water don't mix the non-polar ends tend to attract each other by these Vander attractions and oscillate back and forth and the polar ends stick out to become water soluble and this is exactly how proteins fold and form so aromatic amino acids in uh when proteins fold attract each other and form regions inside the protein which are non-polar and can support quantum events where and the polar ends the water soluble ends stick out into the exterior and are soluble in water that's how uh uh proteins are soluble in water because the exteriors are charged but the Interiors are non-polar so the oil likee molecules are segregated from the water and these are form what are called my cells and this term was coined by the Russian operan which were thought to be precursors to biological cells and uh and also to biomolecules uh my cells self-organized with oil-like non-polar interiors and polar Polar water soluble exteriors this is how proteins are soluble in the blood for example and proteins fold in this way also lipid membranes lipid Bayers have the same structure with the non-polar oilite interiors and uh po through the for example cholesterol molecules and polar charged entities sticking out inside the cell and outside the cell to be soluble in water nucleic acids like DNA have the same structure with an interior pie stack uh in DNA and RNA so pretty much all biomolecules are organized in this way to have non-polar Interiors which can support quantum effects and uh uh my colleagues and I jack tusinski and and kak have called this the quantum underground underlying biomolecules so inside all of our biomolecules our membranes our proteins our nucleic acids are these Quantum friendly regions pervading our bodies so we call that the quantum underground and that can explain how Quantum events and Quantum coherence can occur uh at warm temperatures it's also noteworthy that that uh neurotrans psycho itive molecules for example the the neurotransmitters dopamine which is the pleasure molecule serotonin and the mood molecule have these py resonance clouds and psychedelic drugs which cause hallucinations and the Psychedelic effect like LSD DMT and psilocybin also have these more complex uh aromatic non-polar regions and uh pretty much all psychoactive molecules have these py resonance groups within them okay back in the primordial soup when life began um I've suggested in a recent paper that uh these my cells uh would form and the non-polar uh py resonance clouds would get together and there would be more than three there would be hundreds maybe thousands would reach threshold for objective reduction and Consciousness by this uh uh formula uh H bar over e subg and Bing Consciousness would happen a very primitive form of Consciousness uh because it was connected to the Fine scale structure of space-time geometry so raising the question did this type of phenomenon this primitive pleasure spark the origin of Life did life form in order to uh have and optimize pleasure as I said before some of these uh would would feel good and would be what we call protoc conscious and uh raising the question or I proposed that life evolved to feel good that uh these these Pro these these um my began to have simple protoc conscious moments and this led to uh uh provided feedback for self-organization to uh to optimize pleasure and I think um so I've published uh this this chapter just came out the quantum origin of Life how the brain evolved to feel good and if anybody wants uh it's in this book on human nature or send me an email and uh I'll send you a copy of it because I think uh um well how how would the feedback work uh how would mental States affect uh uh how would a system optimize Consciousness and one way would be because these P these Pi resonance uh rings have only a few uh optimal a few possible uh uh uh states that are stable the sandwich is unstable the T and the parallel displaced are stable and uh these are alternate possibilities and it could be something like this uh where uh this Arrangement feels bad and this Arrangement feels good and so the feedback to optimize pleasure would be to put them in this configuration to optimize pleasure now um this relates to evolution of course and uh darwinian evolution is a pillar of modern science but the notion that life evolved Behavior to promote Gene survival for example doin's idea of The Selfish Gene uh I don't think is right it it's an assumption it doesn't make any sense um for the following reasons behavior is driven by reward by Pleasure if you do experiments in psychology uh pavlovian experiments or any type of experiments reward mediated by dopamine is usually uh well is always the driving mechanism and in uh in our life in our lives um we're driven by Pleasure also not necessarily Hedonism a type of pleasure but also altruism it feels better to give than to receive spiritual uh pleasure uh resonance Harmony with the universe these all feel good so our behaviors are also driven by by Pleasure and I think there's no reason to think that this wasn't happening all the way from the beginning for example there were no genes in the primordial soup so it was I don't know a billion years between the simple my cells and when we had DNA so how did we get from point A to point B how did these molecules and systems self-organize so I think uh it uh I think this is a a possibility and darwinian evolution uary Theory ignores Consciousness and feelings uh Consciousness is assumed to to emerge at a higher level of com of of complex comput computation but um uh it's more likely that Consciousness is is intrinsic I mean the Eastern philosophical uh uh approaches would say Consciousness is everything it's Consciousness preceded life so I think this takes advantage of of both possibilities and that um that uh yeah evolution is driven by uh op towards optimizing pleasure and everything organisms do they eat organisms because other organisms because it they taste good they avoid uh pain they mate because it feels good so I think that that uh feelings and optimizing pleasure is the driving force in evolution and as shown in this uh cun but after the primordial soup then what happened how did Proto pleasurable o moments become orchestrated to full Rich conscious experience can there be Quantum coherence in warm wet biology I mentioned that this was a problem because it seems because technological quantum computers must operate at Absolute Zero temperature uh to avoid decoherence and this is a big objection to our Theory because people said well to build a a quantum computer in the laboratory it needs to be an absolute zero and the brain is too warm however about 10 years ago it was shown that plants were uh utilize Quantum coherence uh by exaton transfer among what are called chromophores which are py resonance groups so here's a part of a a a plant protein and not shown here is the part of the of the complex that absorbs photons from the Sun and the energy is converted to exons propagating through all these chromophores simultaneously in superposition Quantum coherent superposition of the energy going through all these Pathways simultaneously for the most efficient transfer to get the energy down here where they're converted to food so without this highly efficient energy uh transfer uh there wouldn't be food production and we may not exist there may not be uh plants would not produce food and we wouldn't be around to eat uh animals and US wouldn't be around to eat eat the plants and life May not exist so if a potato or a or a carrot can utilize Quantum coherence it seems likely that our brains could and so the question is could such a mechanism support cognition and Consciousness in animals and I think the answer is yes uh for example uh oh I skipped over this part okay so and I think we're it's happening in the in the microtubules so um uh when I read Roger penrose's book uh in 1991 uh as I said he was looking for a uh for uh he had a mechanism for Consciousness in the subjective reduction but he didn't have a biological quantum computer uh to implement it and so I suggested to him that it was microtubules and we met in the early 1990s and here we are after the first Tucson conference at the Grand Canyon there's Roger there's me there's Dave ch some of you may know him and uh here we are a few years later uh at a conference in Stockholm where Roger was being mobbed literally and I was protecting him a little bit worried that he was going to get crushed by his admirers and uh we began to develop our theory of orchestrated objective reduction uh where the o u mediated conscious awarenesses that occurring everywhere would be literally be orchestrated uh by microtubules that was uh I brought the microtubules as the quantum computers that can mediate uh uh objective reduction and as we saw before uh that's the structure of microtubules so the basic idea is that you had microt actually many many microtubules with superposition evolving and reaching threshold for for Consciousness and having a moment of being and a moment of Consciousness uh which is actually due to processes in the underlying level of space-time geometry that was creating uh the the structure of the microtubules specifically the P resonance and the idea is that um uh basically that the the uh the structure of uh that the percept the qualia of the redness of the Rose where most people would say it's the pattern of information processing in the brain is because the the quala of the Rose is actually a pattern in space-time geometry that is reproduced in the brain and B is occurring the brain because the same uh Spa patterns of space-time geometry here is shown as three curvatures but it would be much more much more complicated is occurring uh in in in our brains and therefore we have the qualia in our brains now how does this happen in microtubules well here we see one tubulin and we look inside and we see that it has these eight tryptophans which are py resonance clouds uh that are distributed throughout the tubulin and and this is very similar actually strikingly similar to the array of chromophores in uh the photosynthesis protein they've actually discovered in eth and so the same sort of propagating of quantum energy Quantum uh uh entities through this may be happening in microtubules in a tubulin except there's another tubulin and another tubulin and so can go on for for macroscopic distances now each tubulin actually in addition to the eight tryptophan has a number of py resonance clouds in in phenyalanine and tyrosine and there are 86 of them 86 py resonance clouds in each tubulin in a microtubule about a billion tubulin per neuron and then 100 billion neurons per brain and so uh each of these the relation to each other could uh could give a moment uh could give a a Cho or a feeling so this is a cartoon obviously but the the possib ility of various emotions and feelings even in one tubulin is pretty large considering the permutation so I'm using emojis there to represent uh the possibility of feelings and emotions so the basic idea in our theory is that there is the Quantum dipole oscillations through the microtubules which can also go in superposition of multiple possible States and in a in a fractal like hierarchy so you might say okay that's good theory is there any evidence for for that and actually there is this is uh the work from work from the lab of Honor ban bip in uh in Japan National Institute of Material Sciences where he studied Quantum resonances in microtubules so he started with two neurons so here's one neuron here's the second neuron and then he went down and scaled with microt tual and then to tubulin and he applied these Nano electrodes to stimulate the first neuron to see what combination of fre quencies would result in activity in the second neuron and what he found was that specific patterns called Triplets of triplets so we had three three uh peaks in each uh frequency area and each of those Peaks had three inner Peaks so Triplets of triplets and then that repeated at megahertz kilohertz and Hertz for the whole neuron level so kind of like a fractal hierarchy and if he he then repeated at the level of individual microtubules and got similar Peaks at faster at gigahertz megahertz and kilohertz so as you go smaller you get faster and then at the level of individual tubulin you got terahertz which is infrared which is the pi resonance oscillations gigahertz and and megahertz now if you put this all together we get a picture that looks something like this where uh the whole brain would be over here way over there and then you have uh one neuron and inside the neuron you have a microtubule and inside that you have these tubulin Pathways with dipole oscillations and inside there you have the pi py Cloud dipole oscillations and this is where anesthesia works and I'll come back to that point but if you plot these resonances on a log scale uh you start from the very slow EEG and then when you get into microtubular bundles you get into 100 to a th000 Hertz and then you get 10,000 Hertz at microtubules and then you get megahertz millions of Hertz and then billions of Hertz in in uh in tubulin and I guess that'd be trillions or quadrillions of Hertz uh 10 the 12 terahertz which is infrared so we have this hierarchical uh fractal like arrangement of oscillations kind of like music in where you have a high frequency different octaves except these octaves are separated by about two to three orders of magnitude and I think that the brain is a a fractal like hierarchy resonance system more like an orchestra really than a computer it may do Computing but I think Consciousness is more like music metaphorically and the brain is more like an orchestra operating at different resonant frequencies so and that anesthesia works at this fast frequency so this is kind of the the big picture where Orco uh uh is occurring um starts at this fre at this uh very fast frequency and Cascades upwards and we also think that EEG uh which is brain waves which are you know U from a few Hertz to up to 100 Hertz are actually and and EG has been used for a 100 years or so but nobody really understands where it comes from and why it's what it's really what the real meaning is and we think that uh EEG is actually beat frequencies interference beats interference patterns of faster vibrations for example of of microtubules in Mega Herz range so if you know you have two musical instruments that are very closely tuned but slightly off they'll interfere and give a beat uh at a much slower frequency so we think that this is one hierarchical fractal-like system with the EEG being the very slow end now uh if you go this way you go into the into the the whole brain and so forth well what happens if you go the other way faster I guess I don't have that slide okay never mind um um the mechanism of anesthesia holds the key to uh understanding Consciousness as I said so as I showed you previously we think uh uh well let me just say that that um uh if we go faster uh I I often get asked about outof body experiences and the possibility of afterlife and if Consciousness is happening at the level of space-time geometry uh which I believe it is normally the space-time geometry in the brain in the microtubules then um it it could be that when uh for example in a near-death experience when the blood stops flowing and and uh and the microtubules lose their energy Supply that the quantum information reverts to space-time geometry but remains entangled as an entity uh and so the and if the patient is revived comes back and says hey I was floating above my body or I had this experience and uh and uh that could actually be happening uh even afterlife if the Consciousness remains entangled as a unit unitary entity a Quantum Soul if you will outside the body so I've speculated on that in a in a paper with Deepak Chopra called the quantum Soul as a scientific hypothesis it's just a suggestion so as I said before the mechanism of anesthesia holds the key to understanding Consciousness and uh uh how does that work so um in the in the 19th century uh it was discovered that a group of gases could cause animals to stop functioning if a a salamander or a mouse or or a rat or a fruit fly or a dog or a cat or a horse or a human breathe these gases uh at sufficient concentration they would fall over and become anesthetized you can't tell if they're conscious or unconscious uh but it it's what we now call anesthesia but the gases were all of different structures they were inert gases like Xenon halogenated hydrocarbons uh ethers and so forth and uh uh but they were all all different structures and for any gas the exact same amount was required to anesthetize a horse or a fly a salamander or a human at the exact same concentration and this was very strange so scientists began to search for a common factor among these anesthetic gases that could account for their ability to anesthetize uh animals and these two guys Meyer and Overton Overton in 1901 and Meer in 1897 working separately both came to the same conclusion they PL they found that these anesthetics plotted here going downward as more potent so this is one over potency so as you go down you need less and less of the anesthetic to cause loss of consciousness or loss of purpose purposeful behavior and they found that the potency correlated over many many orders of magnitude with solubility in olive oil in a in a solvent called olive oil uh now olive oil includes a lot of py resonance uh Benzene like molecules so if you take a a body a human body or any any animal body and look at it in terms of its solubility phases the anesthetics are binding in the non-polar so here's polarity going this way in the nonpolar aromatic rings with different types of benzene like molecules the P resonance clouds that I was showing earlier now um so the idea was that the more potent the anesthetic the more soluble they were in olive oil so what did that mean well scientists at the beginning of the 20th century knew that uh lipid membranes had cholesterol which were P largely fat-like molecule or py resonance molecules and so they thought initially that anesthetics acted in lipid phase of neuronal membranes but in the 1980s uh two scientists in England Franks and leeb showed that anesthetics acted in the non-polar hydrophobic water avoiding regions that I showed you in the my cells inside inside the proteins and that anesthetics acted directly on proteins because membranes were excitability of membranes were shown to depend uh on on proteins ion channels and re and so forth so which proteins for many years people thought the neuronal membrane receptor and channel proteins were the prime candidates for example the Gaba receptor shown here and they do bind anesthetics and in fact uh the gas anesthetics bind to these different types of receptors and propop tomate and ketamine bind to these receptors so the anesthetics do bind to these receptors but the results of studies on the anesthetics on IND individual ion channels and receptors were were inconclusive and inconsistent so one anesthetic would cause a channel to open another would cause it to close some anesthetics wouldn't bind to this receptor so there was no consistent uh unitary story and eventually in 2008 this this view was kind of shown to be incorrect so could it be microtubules well I would have hoped so and it turns out that indeed it looks like anesthesia does act on microtubules and and this is known uh known due to the work of of eckenhoff Rod eckenhoff and his group at University of Pennsylvania and for example they they use radiolabeled anesthetic in Mouse brain and show that it binds to 74 different proteins in the mouse brain half membrane proteins and half in cytoplasm including tubulin the component protein of microtubules so they knew that the anesthetic binds all these proteins but which was mediating the functional effect and the way to ask that is to do proteomics and genomics to see which of these proteins had their gene expression changed and that's an indication that of a functional effect and so proteomics and genomics pointed to cytoskeletal microtubules mediating functional anesthetic effects and so they came out with this uh uh this this paper in 2008 and I've done uh several other studies and for example patients who are on a drug called taxol which is an anti-cancer drug which acts by stabilizing microtubules uh causes these patients to need more anesthesia because the taxol binding the microtubules prevents the anesthetic to getting to their their binding site they also did a study on uh using this anesthetic which is a uh fluorescent anthene which binds to uh which they gave to which is only anesthetic when it fluoresence when you add ultraviolet light so they gave gave it to tadpoles this is a bit hard to see and the tadpoles uh would swim around they were fine but then tadpoles have transparent heads which is uh convenient and when they would shine ultraviolet light at them the tadpoles would go belly up they would become unresponsive essentially anesthetized and they then ground up their brains and analyze where the anthene was and it was bound to microtubules and they were kind enough to say that this was consistent with our Theory which they call Quantum Mobility Theory but basically the same thing so this indicates that anesthesia is acting through microtubules so we were very happy to to hear that so um and this is consistent with what I showed before that anesthetic is preventing these dipole oscillations in the tubulin in microtubules and that prevents Consciousness so my colleagues uh Travis CR and Jack chinski and their students uh are uh did another study which is computer simul ation of we got rid of uh of the complications of a whole animal and just looked at at a two benzines uh in simulations that would oscillate back and forth due to these dipole oscillations uh in and at room temperature at ambient temperature uh they oscillated 68 terahertz for a pair of py resonance clouds we then simulated the presence of a hopane molecule nearby which is an anesthetic and we showed that hopane increased is the frequency above available energy effectively dampening the terahertz oscillations so when the when the anesthetic is there the system vibrates too fast for the available energy and just stops it just shuts down and we think that's what causes anesthesia well that was for for one anesthetic uh We've since done it for uh a bunch of anesthetics a weak anesthetics going progressively uh stronger and getting a pretty good Meer overt type uh curvature uh correlating between their oil gas partition uh and uh and their oscillation frequency and you can plot it versus uh anesthesia potency and there are two gases that are oddballs they are they follow Meer Overton but they're are not anesthetics they cause seizures for example and uh and they are not on the curve and we think this is supportive of the idea that this effect is what causes anesthesia that the anesthetics affect the the very fast terahertz oscillations in the py resonance clouds um in the tubul inside the microtubules which slows everything down okay uh the last point I want to make is that um if this idea is correct if microtubules are vibrating in these different frequencies including uh uh for example megahertz then affecting their megahertz vibrations uh should affect mental States so um um there are V various types of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques you may have heard of trans cranial magnetic stimulation trans uh shown here transc cranial electrical stimulation which have effects on mental States so electrical stimulation is supposedly like a a double espresso and uh magnetic stimulation kind of knocks out certain parts of the brain but they don't really know how it works well what about meah mechanical vibrations into the brain megahertz mechanical vibrations and we know microtubules uh resonate in megahertz is ultrasound and ultrasound has been used in in medical imaging for almost a hundred years for example looking at a fetus in the uterus we use it in anesthesia to look for the jugular vein when we're trying to put a line in or nerves when we're doing a nerve block and so we're quite familiar with it we have ultrasound machines uh sitting around and uh I went to the literature and found that uh uh a scientist named Jamie Tyler had been doing studies of ultrasound on uh on animals showing behavioral effects and also electrophysiological effects and uh started a company was making these ultrasound devices uh although we hadn't got to clinical trials yet and raised money uh to change mood with ultrasound and electricity although he went into electricity uh electrical effects first but uh you can see that these uh these headsets uh make you sexy and beautiful apparently just by putting them on um so I we decided to try it and I suggested to my colleagues in anesthesia we should try this on our chronic pain patients who are depressed maybe they'll improve their mood and they my colleague said well we don't try it on anybody until we try it on ourselves first this was your idea you got a shaved head you go first and so uh there I am and uh I tried on myself first and then my colleague did it for me and this is quite literally my brain on ultrasound there's my skull and there's my uh my frontal and temporal cortex shown here and we published this paper in 2013 transcranial ultrasound effects on mental States and we showed that 15 seconds of right uh frontal temporal ultrasound at very low intensity we don't want to heat the brain um resulting in about 40 minutes of improved mood and I noticed the same effect when I did it to myself I didn't feel any anything initially but after about a minute I felt pretty good for about an hour and then we did it in patience and and we saw an improvement now since that time a number of things have happened ultrasound has been chos to remove amalo plaques and restore memory in in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease from uh from Australia uh recently at UCLA they use ultrasound to wake somebody up from a coma by focusing on the thalamus and uh we I already showed you our study and we're currently doing a study of brain ultrasound effects on Alzheimer's and brain injury at the University of Arizona so uh we'll I'll keep you posted on how that turns out so to wrap up I want to say that uh that the our Theory Orco R has been uh uh in 1998 I published a list of 20 testable predictions and uh and uh I'm not going to go through them they're a little bit detailed but um uh in several categories and in our 2014 paper Roger Penrose and I reviewed these and we uh we counted that of the of the 20 six or seven have been validated and shown to be true the other 13 or 14 are still um undetermined and nothing has refuted the theory so I think this is more uh experimental verification than any other Theory Of Consciousness it's it's not conclusive certainly but it's better supportive than any other Theory as as far as I can tell and I follow this pretty closely so let me conclude but F but first thank my collaborators uh orara Roger Penrose who by the way has a new book uh not about Consciousness but about physics in general uh challenging some of the modern ideas in modern physics called uh fashion faith and fantasy in modern physics uh my collaborators in the anesthetic action and py resonance oscillation work Travis ktic Jack tusinski and our students the trans cranial ultrasound for Alzheimer's and brain injury uh at the University of Arizona and then microt tual research by Honor Bon ban partti in Japan and we'll be visiting honor ban in December so to conclude let me just say the following that um Orco is a rigorous scientific theory uh of Consciousness with explanatory power spanning Neuroscience cognitive science philosophy physics and Medicine which may underly other approaches including Global workspace integrated information higher order thought and predictive coding because these are cognitive architectures and would not be inconsistent at all with Orco going on inside them um Quantum coherence times of microtubules experimentally shown to be 0 point milliseconds or longer suitable for physiology and uh and uh uh able to account for Consciousness possibly through beat frequencies so the idea that the brain is too uh uh uh uh warm wet and noisy for Quantum coherence is is incorrect experiments have shown this primitive o protoc conscious pleasure in the primordial soup may have sparked the origin of life and driven Evolution toward orchestration and full Rich conscious experience and uh uh I think that evolution evolutionary theory should consider this and be Aug augmented by the possibility by putting Consciousness into biology where it where it surely exists and Orco may also account for the structure of language and non-local effects including parapsychology outof body experience and Afterlife by existing in in U in the structure of space-time geometry and finally resonating microt tual megahertz vibrations with trans cranial ultrasound May treat Alzheimer's disease and traumatic brain injury and I think of the various transcranial uh therapeutic mod ities it's the most promising and uh Roger and I uh wrote a review of our uh theory in 2014 and you can see it here or if you send me an email I'll be happy to send you an electronic copy and we have a new version coming out in a book in 2016 so all in all I think uh I think our theory is is doing quite well and uh uh although we're kind of drowned out by a lot of noise uh because there's more people looking at it strictly from the cognitive architecture but I think Quantum biology is real and will explain a lot of things pertaining to both the nature and origin of life and Consciousness and so I thank you very much for your [Applause] [Music] attention thank you um and I didn't say this but anesthetics bind by very weak Quantum forces lond the London Vandal forces they don't form chemical bonds they don't form ionic bonds they don't form calent bonds they act just by these very weak Quantum forces so the idea is that they are that they are affecting Quantum interactions and nothing else which is probably why they don't cause other effects in the brain the the membranes can still uh be active um the patient can have other brain activity the brain is still quite active under anesthesia so basically the only thing that's missing is consciousness and formation of memory so uh therefore the conclusion is that anesthetics act by Quantum forces on Quantum activities in the brain without affecting other types of activities okay [Music] bypass I see um he gives an alternative to that I think that uh it shows how Consciousness can be real and how we can experience reality uh directly rather than uh than um being a mystery so um if you're asking could we still be a brain in a that uh I suppose that's true but even then we have the problem of Consciousness in the brain if the Evil Genius is putting information in we still have the question of how we're having the conscious experience in the brain you like that answer [Music] okay um the first question uh I I think relates to what we call post-operative cognitive dysfunction patients who have multiple anesthetics uh sometimes uh lose memory and they get basically Alzheimer's and if somebody has Alzheimer's it can be triggered or worsened by anesthesia and the pathology of post-operative cognitive dysfunction from too much too many anesthetics is is essentially the same as Alzheimer's they both seem to involve disruption of the microtubules they destabilize I the towel protein falls off the microtubules gets hyper phosphorilated or gets hyper phosphorated and then falls off but either way you get the towel protein off the microtubules the microtubules destabilize because the towel seems to stabilize the microtubules we don't know whether the microtubules destabilize first and then the towel falls off or the towel falls off and then the microtubules destabilized but either way the pathology is that the the microtubules is destabilized and the towel protein is not doing its job it's over it's making clumps in the corner of the brain so um we hope in the future to attempt to treat that with ultrasound uh because we think it's it's going to we we hope that it will also help in Alzheimer's and it should help in in post-operative cognitive dysfunction because we know from experiments I didn't show you from honor Bond bip's work that stimulation at 2 megahertz promotes the polymerization of microtubules and we think that the ultrasound may help treat Alzheimer's and post-operative cognitive dysfunction by causing the microtubules to reassemble and become more normal again and the tow would then go back on it what the the other question oh was something about beyond our imagination um I'm not sure I understand your question but if you go if you go back to that slide I showed with the uh uh from the neuron down to the microtubules a spectrum of of Dynamics if you go further to the right faster I think meditative States Altered States maybe even out of bodying experiences are occurring at faster frequencies uh that which could be independent of biology so meditators for example their Baseline frequency shifts to become faster and I think in in certain Altered States and meditative States uh beyond the imagination as you say we go further to the right to go faster and deeper uh you know the Beatles once Sayang uh the deeper you go the higher you fly the higher higher you fly the deeper you go and I think that that applies here that as you go deeper into the structure of the brain into the microtubules into the quantum level of the microtubules and then into the structure of SpaceTime geometry uh the more intense the experience the more of uh you more in touch you are perhaps with platonic wisdom embedded in the universe and more like Eastern spiritual approaches so I think I would put it on that Spectrum as you go further to the right faster and deeper into the structure the universe what well I don't think neural network explain it all whatsoever I think neural networks fail to explain the hard problem they fail to explain real time conscious control because Consciousness comes too late they fail to explain binding how we have all disperate information coming in that gets unified into one common uh common conscious experience so I don't agree that neural networks explain it all in fact they hardly explain anything uh because it's just an assumption that Consciousness emerges at a high level of complex computation and in any case those neural networks have microt and Quantum processes going on within them so if if anything is explained by the neural network it might depend on activities going on at a deeper level Quantum processes and the microtubules within it which also gives you binding uh a unitary conscious experience and the the ability to respond in real time as opposed to Consciousness being Epi phenomenal so it gives you the possibility of Free Will acting in real time so I wouldn't agree with the the assertion that neural networks explain explain it all I don't think they explain much at all I don't I don't think they explain it okay thank you it's impressive and after all we are talking about qu about quantum physics how and its effect so the difference between multiword and Copenhagen essentially so there is no observable differences so it's more between what I'm sorry between multi-word collaps well between kopenhagen collapsing model and multiword model it's all about collapsing it's all about collapsing well there's no collapse in multiple worlds yeah right right it's okay the explanation of the effect so but there is no no visible difference between those models so it's more philosophical than scientific discussion however for well I have to disagree with you because multiple worlds you know posits that there all these infinite number of universes and The View I take is that there's not there's only one Universe well let me continue so there is no visible differences observable differences uh how however for the subject for the objective collapsing there is V visible difference as far as I understand when for example light the H SCE is far away then at some point after after the delay the the interference should stop the question is at which time times at which delays as you explained the interference should should stop we should stop observe interference of coherence site I'm not sure I'm following but but the if you're saying interference meaning Quantum superposition it would terminate when the when uh the the threshold for objective reduction is met by equals H over T well so what time is it well T is the time and uh time T equals H bar Plank's constant actually the plank dur plank direct constant over e subg where e subg is the magnitude of the superp position okay so so for example what's the time for one GV Photon for one for one GV Photon we have photon with energy one well photons are massless so I I'm not sure how to answer that okay for for one GV electron for what for one GV electron electron for one electron okay by equals over T the uh we actually calculated this and it would be something like uh 10,000 years because e is very small T would be very long whereas a 1 kilogram cat is very large and it would self collapse in something like 10 to Theus 25th seconds something like that so something very small like an electron in superp position assuming it didn't interact with any other superp position wouldn't reach threshold for collapse for 10,000 years and the intensity of the experience will be very very weak whereas if something is if you have a large mass in superposition like a 1 kilogram object it would self- collapse very quickly and the experience would be intense so it's a spectrum it's kind of like photons you know you have high energy photons at high frequencies uh that have high intensities and uh slower uh uh photons lower lower frequency longer wavelength okay and for those tubulus what is the the time of collapsing for tubulin um you know that's a that's an interesting question because when we first came up with our Theory uh we we wanted to uh we had to consider whether the tubulin were in superposition at the level of the whole protein separated from itself or from uh the level of the individual from the atomic nuclei inside the protein or from the protons and neutrons Rons uh inside those atomic nuclei and we actually did the calculation it's in our 1996 paper and we calculated for all three and the highest energy and therefore the dominant effect occurred with atomic nuclei so in the middle not the largest not the smallest but the middle one had the highest energy and it turns out that the atomic nuclei just need to be separated from the themselves by their their their diameter so a nucleus just needs to be separated from it which is feters so 10us 15 M so very very slight it also turns out that the the pi resonance the movement of an electron by 1 nanometer by the Moss power effect in recall affects the movement of its Atomic nuclei strictly by its diameter so that works out very well in the theory that the pi resonance oscillation of a of a nanometer would affect the displacement of the nuclei just by their diameter so it works out perfectly may just first jump jump onto your defense because actually gentleman isn't correct when saying that there's no testify about differences between the multiv uh I agree with you I I think there's a huge difference yeah there is it yeah uh now the question I I wanted to explore in the same direction about the uh the measurement problem but again jumping to your defense what I'm questioning is uh the relation with with with Penrose interpretation uh which you I see are using as the sort of a validation for your theory which is brilliant by the way I'm really enjoying it's very lightening what I'm trying to say is that uh P Rose interpretation one of the U conditional collapse theories uh it uses a sort of an ad hog condition which for causing a collapse uh what it will in reality will mean that uh the the object can uh exist in superposition States and also that uh there are collapses and there collapses in in in in those brain tube this is what you need for a theory to work now what I'm failing to see is that why do you really need this theory of a conditional collapse instead of any theory of objective collapse for example GW which also work and it maybe even better with your theory right well first of all grw doesn't posit Consciousness as part of it and and grw is ad hoc I think at 10 to the 17th particles causes collapse that's just you know from some measurement so I don't think I don't think penrose's objective reduction is ad hoc I think it's a logical deduction uh based on uh some something outside the system and the need for something uh to account for the measurement problem and uh if you want to ascribe awareness to something fundamental and irreducible in the structure of the universe you need to connect quantum mechanics to uh general relativity or quantum gravity whatever you want to call it and that's exactly what he's done at least at least uh conceptually and also mathematically in in in some other papers so I think the objective reduction connects general relativity and Quant mechanics puts Consciousness into the universe into science as a fundamental property of the universe due to this instability in SpaceTime geometry I mean Mo many people you know you know Toni and and all these other people with with their cognitive architecture theories realize they can't explain Consciousness so then they bring in pan psychism well it must be pan psychism but that's ad hoc because they don't say whether it's at the level of the whole brain the protein the neuron the atomic nuclei the protons the neutrons the quarks whatever we we've done that calculation as I told this gentleman and it occurs to the level of the atomic nuclei being being separated so I would say grw is ad hoc but I don't think penr is ad hoc although it is a postulate and but it's a testable postulate because um you in fact it's being tested right now there are experiments underway where you put a mirror that has a a in superp position uh boom meisters group is doing this and they they hope to have sufficient Mass to be in superp position to collapse in a time time frame they can measure so the objective reduction by equals H overt is being is being tested now if that proves to be true that wouldn't that wouldn't prove that that collapse causes Consciousness you wouldn't know whether the mirror and the is is having a moment of awareness so that part remains to be uh to be tested and uh you know that's a really difficult question to prove the that's probably liter quite literally the hard problem of trying to prove it the best experiment I I could come up with is is if you have a system for example Quantum resonances and microtubules show that it's inhibited by anesthesia by an one anesthetic say halane and then you know that another anesthetic is twice as is is half as potent then it would take if you do the same experiment with the other anesthetic isof Florine it takes twice as much anesthetic and then you do with another one then you plot the effect kind of like the Meer Overton curve what we showed for the effect on U on on the P resonance oscillation and show that there's a correlation between the potency of the anesthetic and the effects on Quantum resonance going away that that that it's proportional to the potency of the anesthetic I think uh that's the best you could do in the near future until or unless we get to a point where we're able to download Consciousness in some system you put and then you come back and say yeah I was in that brain in aada or I was in that computer and it was this and that but I think that's way in the way in the future if if at all possible and and you you were not put off by the fact that if uh if if P Rose's interpretation is correct then Consciousness will be uh in indeed intrinsic quality of the SpaceTime itself the intrinsic quality of collapse which is an intrinsic property of space-time geometry so mass and space time are constantly going into superp position and constantly collapsing like look like waves in the ocean but everywhere all the time so it's happening here happening everywhere and it's an intrinsic property of the universe and but those types of protoc conscious events to be orchestrated to the kind of conscious we and that's where biology and micr come in okay one more question in different direction a little so you mentioned that this sort of feel good I don't know protoc Consciousness yes so it has a a a sort of it's a mechanism for uh development okay I'll step back normally we consider that there is something called U past hypothesis which past hypothesis which that means that entropy was very low and some you know previous part where was the event which talking about the universe or it doesn't have to be the universe but for for because it's the deterministic theory it's it is per se reversible so to make sure that we have past and the future we need an additional hypothesis which typically called pass hypothesis which you're talking about the arrow of time exactly exactly well I was I actually have paper on that and and what I would say is that as you know uh uh there's nothing in physics that that that uh says that you can't go backwards and forwards in time except you know the second law thermodynamics but and you can get around that in various ways but what I think is that collapse is irreversible and once you have collapse you have a definite State and you can't go past through you can't go backwards through the collapse so I think Consciousness creates the eror of time Consciousness creates the eror of time yeah I'm very sorry to interrup yes but I have to say it uh we out of time and it was last question and we have to stop uh Q&A session uh but if you can have an opportunity to ask uh startart other questions after that thank you so much for the lecture thank you so much thank [Applause] you

Channel: Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies

Views: 75,137

Keywords: quantum physics, physics, consciousness, mind, brain, neuroscience, MCCS, psychology, philosophy, philosophy of mind

Id: 2_sgFETJzak

Length: 103min 17sec (6197 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2016