Roger Penrose - Quantum Physics of Consciousness

roger i did my doctorate work in neurophysiology and the assumption at the time was uh that if we're ever going to explain consciousness it has to be at the level of the neuronal activities that's where information seemed to be flowing it was spiking maybe there was some generalized electrical activity in the brain that that modulated it but one way or another that's what had to be at the synapse etc you've asked us to consider that real activity is happening at the quantum level and i i have to ask why do we need that because quantum effects are everywhere why is it so special in the brain to understand how consciousness works well the idea that i had because of my views about understanding being something which is not the computational activity i needed something which involved that part of physics which in my view had a hope of being non-computational and the only part of physics is that that i could think of then and consider only think of now is where you have a quantum system which becomes a classical system see this is one of the big puzzles of quantum mechanics how is it that you have these rules like you know schrodinger's cat being dead and alive at the same time which are what you get from quantum mechanics but you don't see them at the classical level so there's something missing in the gap between quantum and classical now the question is uh how my argument would be that the physics that we is missing about how the quantum world becomes the classical world is something which i think is the only place where you would have non-computational activity so if we think non-computationally we must be making use of whatever that physics is that goes from the quantum to the classical world now that's a big tall order because it means that in the brain we have to sustain a quantum system to such a degree that whatever this new physics is it comes in and becomes relevant whereas usually what happens is the quantum system becomes becomes entangled with the environment and you lose all what's people called environmental decoherence and when that happens you lose the information that would be relevant in in the in the new physics so you've got to keep your quantum system going for that degree so that the new physic actually comes in usefully now i wrote my book the emperor's new mind in a way trying to explore this hoping that by the time i got to the end of the book i would know what it was but i learned various things when i was writing my book about the brain and what people thought about it but i didn't get i just simply didn't get a good reason for what the thing is neurons clearly at least what i learned about neurons clearly the firing of a neuron will disturb the environment in the brain and there's no chance of of keeping this coherence so it needed something more so the book was a failure in that particular respect except that stuart hameroff read my book and you wrote to me and said i think you may not know about these things called microtubules and i said well actually i don't know about them in my ignorance i've never heard of them i thought you know is this another than that i get letters from various people that i i have to discard like this but then you know yeah pictures of them gosh they must be real and so i i said this sounds extremely interesting there's a much better chance you have these little tubes there's very symmetrical structures they're much smaller there's a reasonable chance i didn't see how in detail but a reasonable chance that here you have something which could preserve quantum coherence up to the level where the new physics would come in so the non-computational behavior at least there's a chance and so stuart came over to oxford and we had a long discussion and and yes it sounded like a really promising idea and the transition from the microtubules where you have the maintaining the quantum mechanical effects to the information being passed through the synapse and electrical activity doesn't the latter destroy the former well the way i the viewer had it then it may not be the view we would have now exactly but it was just that the strength of the synapses would be controlled by the cytoskeleton particularly the the microtubules and the microtubules would they'd be in in some kind of global coherence which would be what we think of when we're consciously willing something when you say global do you mean between different neurons or yes many neurons you see there wouldn't be enough of the movement you see if you have a quantum the scheme that needs to modify quantum mechanics in my view and i think there are good reasons for this the modification comes when there is sufficient mass displacement do you have a schrodinger's cap which is alive and dead the mass displacement between a dead cat and a live cat is way way more than unique so that just a tiny mass displacement on classical point of view but from a quantum point of view would be a big mass displacement that is where you would begin to see the the new physics coming in so the reasons for this come from thinking about general relativity and quantum mechanics and how their principles seem to relate to each other but let's not go to that now but but the uh this scale wouldn't be sufficient for a single microtubule it would have to be many microtubules within many neurons acting in in concert in a certain way and so the conscious uh perception or the conscious willing or whatever it is that comes in at that level will have to involve many many neurons but is it not ex has to be expressed in the neuronal impulse as opposed to some other way yes yes but this would be how the synapse is you see the strengths of synapses i think the view is a little bit different from what i've been hearing uh in recent things from aniban experiments and so on that maybe even the firing of the neurons are influenced to some degree by microtubules but the idea that i had then was simply in the in the synapses the strengths of them in sort of some global way would all be influenced together so they become stronger or weaker whatever it is and and this would therefore influence how the neurons actually and this global coherence caused by the quantum mechanical uh effects all working together would would bring very large numbers of neurons into a a different kind of coherence yes yes i mean it would be classical at that stage yes because the neurons themselves the firing of the neurons right would have to be classical that's what's way too too big and de-coherent right but since you have the expression in a classical way um i'm not sure the value of the quantum mechanical effect in in creating that you could have any other different ways if you're expressing the ultimate consciousness and neuronal impulses why does it matter that the there is a quantum effect beyond the normal quantum effects we we see everywhere well it has to be coherent yeah i mean if the if it's simply quantum mechanics acting incoherently then there's no sort of global right it has to be coherently that's why we call it awk or you see or stands for objective reduction that's the where the quantum state collapses to one alternative or another and the awk part it says it's orchestrated so you have to have this global um control or something that the thing is organized in some global way so the different productions of the state actually do make a big difference to to to what happens to the the way the network of neurons uh acts so sure it has to be the neurons because they influence how we how we're moving my hands around things like that but that's that's controlled in detail by the individual strengths in which the synapses have as i say it's a little different perhaps now but that was the view i had then some people would do the reverse and say that you need consciousness somehow in the universe uh acapella by itself in order to explain quantum physics yes well it was a view expressed by a number of people most particularly the distinguished physicist eugene wigner who suggested that uh it was consciousness in a sense which reduces the stake so you see uh if you've got trouble with shredding his cat is it you have to worry about his consciousness let's work not worry about that the cat would be a superposition of being dead and alive until somebody else comes along and looks at it right and it's the very act of looking at it in a sense which violates the superposition principle and becomes one or the other so the consciousness is what does it this view is basically the opposite it's it's what does consciousness that's right right so it's something out in the world which happens physically anyway and it is what is the basis of our conscious perceptions but it's an opposite view now the opposite this view we're talking about this opposite view is a justification by some people that consciousness exists as a as a fundamental reality of the world and maybe even more fundamental than the physical world and it's one of the arguments used to defend this view of the fundamental irreducible nature of consciousness that is needed in quantum mechanics yes yes well the need is just that the arrow goes the other way it's it's needed in a sense because it comes about on our view whenever the reduction happens but you need another theory which primarily has nothing to do with consciousness just purely a physical theory which uh does actually come from current accepted physics so there's there's the quantum mechanics on the one hand einstein's general theory of relativity on the other hand you see there's a clash and this clash says something new has to happen and in that new thing the state of reduction of the state spontaneously no mention of consciousness comes about then i say consciousness itself is a feature of that physics that we need for other reasons and the other people would use the the need for conscious intervention and quantum mechanics in order to justify this concept that consciousness is the most fundamental thing that exists yes i suppose is the sort of thing always used to worry about this suppose you take some planet on some very distant star there's no conscious being anywhere near maybe a distant galaxy where there's no consciousness on it and what happens to the weather on that planet where you see little quantum effects will make the weather a great mess and stuff nothing like an ordinary weather then you a satellite comes along and has a peek at it sending a signal to us you see the weather suddenly changes to be one or the other and that doesn't make any sense so it's really doing itself right nothing to do with any organized consciousness or anything well some people would go way beyond and say there's some consciousness uh present in the universe whether it's god or or some cosmic consciousness that affects this and this is a way to induce a belief in that yes i suspect you don't subscribe to that i don't subscribe that but but it's it's not an uncommon view that's right yeah but as you point out it's completely the opposite really

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Keywords: Roger Penrose, Quantum Physics of Consciousness, quantum mechanics, quantum theory, quantum physics, penrose interview, what is conciousness, closer to truth, philosophy of science, consciousness, brain function, quantum consciousness, roger penrose nobel prize, roger penrose consciousness, roger penrose nobel, penrose nobel prize, sir roger penrose, penrose physics, emperors new mind, neuroscience consciousness, new phyiscs, microtubules consciousness, microtubules

Id: 43vuOpJY46s

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/gousey]

Patented Penrose tiles, so nobody can use them for decorative art.