Sir Roger Penrose & Dr. Stuart Hameroff: CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE PHYSICS OF THE BRAIN

hello yes I should explain the title here I'm claiming that we need new physics to understand consciousness now well I mean new physics here I mean something outside the physics we know but it's not simply invented for the purpose of explaining consciousness it's something which I think we need anyway for quite other reasons and I'll come to that as part of the talk first of all there are various views about what's consciousness what comes what is the basis of consciousness and the current view is this basically well the brain operates according to a computer and many people believe this and computers are when they get powerful enough we'll do the same things that brains do and if brains make us conscious then these computers will be conscious and therefore computation itself is what provides consciousness that's one quite a common view these days if you don't have that view you probably hold the next view well this is the fourth one the next view which is that it's established science the science we work so well we have now that in some way this science comes together and some configurations produces consciousness oh there's a few third view that we are going to have to have a new broader view of the physical world physics of the world and that is what we need in order to explain consciousness or you might says nothing to do with science and something from comes from outside my view is number three now I need to try to go to the next one if we can there are many aspects of consciousness which I don't want to talk about which most people do talk about things like you know pain or love or perception of the color green or all sorts of things like that I'm only concentrating on one theme which is the concept of understanding and the reason I'm doing this is not that I think it's more important than others well maybe it is but that it's the only thing I can say anything definitive about and I claim it is definitive although other people may disagree with this I understand I'm ready point to three words here understanding and here we have awareness and there we have intelligence in normal usage of the word intelligence you have an object that could only be considered intelligent if it does have its quality of understanding different objects is not aware of anything you wouldn't normally say is understanding that's just normally using two products and I'm going to say therefore understanding is crucial somewhere like instructions it's just position which to some extent indicates the difference between understanding and simply computation now this position it is meant to when you see that the first of all I should explain that it's ooh it's a legal position even though there are three bishop black bishops on the same color and that's legal because in fact two pawns were bishops instead of Queens I should explain that it's important that this is a position that would never occur in an ordinary game that means that the computers never encounter such a thing as this but they are the point I want to make is that the black pieces are trapped behind these pawns here they can't be taken by the color on color and so they can't get out and all the bishop or the black can do is wonder there or I can wonder these pieces around a bit or the free bishop come wanted around to and it looks so pretty useless game the piece is just wondering I can't do anything it's obviously a draw however if you give this to fritz it is press ort of it Grandmaster level and you ask it to say what's the body's the scale my major win for black or white or a draw it says it's a win for black now I suppose I have no idea how these things a program but imagine what it does is it tries also to move one after the other randomly all possible combinations up to a certain point it has to run out and then judge is whether the position is improved or got worse or something and how does it do that well I suppose it gives a value to each piece and it concludes that that has a tremendous advantage okay well it gets back it goes on like that for a while but then after a while it comes up again the 30 move rule now the 30 move rule says that if no piece is taken or no pawn has moved then it's a draw and so the preview of this program considers that well since it's supposed to be a win for black a draw is a disaster so it doesn't something desperate to avoid its draw and this useful to keep the king in the run around the corner that it is and then the only thing that black can do to change this is to sacrifice the bishop which is what it does it sacrifices the bishop completely stupidly and it doesn't calculate enough moves ahead to see this is a complete disaster it just thinks doesn't think of course it just calculates that it is a win for black and so therefore it draws a disaster you've got to avoid that at all costs but then when the bishop is sacrificed you go and clean off a couple of would-be move the King around clean off the pawns make two queens you really knew to need two queens that passive this thing down you walk your cane here somewhere and you sacrifice one of your Queens and then the other one checkmates eventually you can see that white wins so it's rather curious that justice a little bit of understanding of the game of chess and you so horrendous amount of calculation that calculation loses in this case now you might say well chess is a finite game if you had so much power computational power you could win you could not lose this game you would calculate far enough ahead that that you could see that it was not a loss any disasters a sacrifice the bishop well chess is a finite game and so possibilities in principle now if you want something which is not finite you have to turn the mathematics so that's really what I want to do in this next slide you talk about the internet now people tend to think often if they don't know about mathematics that you can't really think about the infinite that's completely wrong I'll give you simple examples if you take any two odd numbers and add them together you always get an even number or any two even numbers you're gathering together always get an even number that's the statement about an infinite things the numbers the natural numbers when I said natural number I mean than non negative whole numbers 0 1 2 3 4 5 etc those are the natural numbers this is a statement about all natural numbers which you can understand the fact that it's infinite isn't a constraint against that let's have the next picture can we this is just to illustrate basically what a computer is like according to Turing or vertical cartoon which is a bit absurd it's really just a show that the device which does the computation is relatively small and finite where is the storage the potential storage has to be potentially infinite I mean it never is actually infinite but this is just to illustrate that you can do arbitrary long calculations backwards and forwards with these trucks that's that's an absurd picture it's meant to be observed that it gives the it sort of gives you the picture of the actual machine itself is finite even though you may have to call upon an unlimited storage can have the look next picture now one of the ways that we learn a school to talk about the infinite is this thing called induction now as I say the natural numbers of these things not 1 2 3 4 etc and it's low do you have a proposition which depends upon metal number I say P of n it's a different proposition for each natural number and that's an infinite number of things the only way you approve these infinite number of things at school is often you just say you prove it for zero that's the smallest natural number and then you prove if it's true for n then it's true for n plus 1 to find out things you do and that establishes number of things and this is the basis of what's called first-order let's not worry about that next slide please now this is a key to what I want to say it's a famous theorem due to curve go along and when I learned about this first I was absolutely blown off my feet it seemed to be the stomach you see what it shows this is the version kinetics slide please the inversion you deterrent basically which is simply to do with algorithms computations if you like no other and there's the same thing now this is to do with proving propositions and suppose you have a machine which proves propositions using a certain algorithm and the algorithm is our other thing is you have one of these statements about natural numbers and you feed that thing into your them and then it chugs away applying the rules of our and maybe it comes up with the answer yes it's true no it's false or it may not come up with any other so just goes on forever but the point is that you want to have your algorithm such that if when it says yes it's true you really do believe it this is a key point that ah is that you have to look at the construction of our and convince yourself that all the rules are things which you would agree are true first ah yeah you look at the first rule and you say you think that's okay you say yes it's okay the second I guess it's okay it may think a bit about the third one and say yeah oh yeah I see it's things like that that you trust every step of the rules that if it comes to the end and says yes it's true you believe it is true it's a proof it really establishes that it is true now what girl is constructs this wonderful statement out of the rules R which is another statement mathematical statement of the kind that our it is supposed to deal with you call it G of R and the way you constructs it you can see that it is not provable by the rules and it's true I found that amazing I can tell you you see if you understand what other things mean this is a key thing meaning is very different following the rules and what does G say how do you know that G says what I just said how does it is how do you know something that's true and it's not provable using rules well the clever thing is you have to this is a clever part you make a statement which is a state a mathematical segment is the kind that are applies to which when you sort of interpret what it says it says I am NOT provable by these rules now you see okay is it false if it's false it's provable that has to be true because you believe all the things that establishes are true and therefore that'sthat's contradiction therefore not they are so therefore it has to be true and it says it's not provable therefore it is not provable by the rules however you've established it true by means of knowing what the rules mean and that's the key thing you're just not just following the rules you know what they mean and you know that the meaning of the rules is such as to give you only true statements and that gives you the power to go beyond the rules itself I found that amazing when I first heard that because it's telling you that we don't just follow rules the meaning also has to be there has to be part of it and the meaning knowing that the rules are things which don't give you falsehood enables you to transcend the rules themselves and I find that stunning now being somebody who believed that our brains are things which obey the same laws of physics is everything else in the room or outside and galaxies and so on it's the same physical laws I began to wonder now what is it in the physical laws that could be things that could not be programmed into a computer well then out of course as I went to with one by Bondy about general relativity and I believe that general relativity is something you could put on a computer there's an issue about approximations and so on because the theory depends on a continuous parameters rather than discrete and there is an issue there but I didn't think that was the real point the real point is that general relativity that wonderful theory that at the time was not very well established but now beautifully established we see these black holes might say we see what I mean is this like a detector of gravitational waves tells us by calculations that people have performed on generativity what black hole spiraling into each other what kind of signal they would send and what a gravitational detector would see and so if you see these signals we infer that we're looking at black holes spiraling it to each other it's amazing thing but that is computation that's telling us the general relativity is a theory which you can you can mirror by means of computation what about the other big theory which I which I went to think of lectures by Dirac the great physicists and this told us that the Schrodinger equation which is the equation is the basis of the evolution equation this is the evolution equation of quantum mechanics that again is something that follow computer it's quite difficult because the number of parameters you have to involve if it's very large nevertheless it's still computational however indirects first lecture he described something I where he was talking about the superposition principle in quantum mechanics if one thing happen can happen and if another thing can happen then you have numbers of states in which this thing and that thing happen at once it's a very difficult thing if your particle can be here and here at the same time and you say that's you have to believe that's the sort of thing you can have and then you took out a piece of chalk and you talked about where this piece of chalk could be here and here at the same time and at that point for some reason my mind wandered and I was looking out of the window thinking about something that's the country of a while and when my mind came back to my attention came back to words if he'd finished the explanation of why you didn't see pieces of chalk in two places at once he said something vaguely about energy which I didn't follow what this has to do with anything I think it was a good thing I didn't follow his argument because it was presumably an argument meant to calm us down so we didn't worry about this problem and since I didn't hear the argument I worried about that ever since so this is a critical thing I'm still worrying about it but I want to explain can I have the next slide please about the worry in the mid let's quickly do this this is a just to show you something else that girl or Turing shows is that there are problems that cannot be there solve an algorithm and one of these is if you're given a set of polyominoes there's a love of squares in the plain or equal squares glued together along their edges and you're given sets of pollen or limb polyominoes can that finite set of polyominoes we use to tile the entire plane with no gaps no overlaps the top two with single one both of which can do it the middle one you see two different shapes both together will tile the entire plane but one or the other world the bottom one with one which will and the question is if you're given a it said the polyominoes will mate on the plane or not and it's a result due to Robert burger which says no there is no such algorithm and one of the things about this algorithm yes next one I want is that it shows that you could show that if any set of tiles which will tell the plane if they will tile a plane in a way which is non earth which is repetitive that is a in a repeating way in both directions then sorry if it will Tyler playing then it will root out Tyler plane in a repeating way and Robert Robert Berger showed first of all that there is no algorithms for deciding whether set of polyominoes will tail plane and secondly as a consequence of that there must be tilings which only tell the plane in a non repeating way and this is a set of three which I produced on the basis of a an idea due to Robert a man and you see that you can tile the plane would you can't see that because you really have to have go on forever and it never repeats if you in fact it's an interesting example if you gave a computer the problem of trying to tile the plane with these three shapes and it just did it by trying this way that way there may all different possibilities I rather doubt that it would be able to tie only in Tower floor here with tiles of that size with any computer that exists today I'm not sure if that's true if it's not true then you can just take a floor twice as big as this and then it probably is true so I think it's very unlikely that just try an arrow you would get this tiling to tile the planes it's not so easy it never repeats there is an algorithm for finding how to do this and that's look up my collected works and find where the house how to do it because it is an algorithm anyway let me continue to the next one this is just another example I quite like this I may do that later you just have these three shapes the square regular hexagon and a regular 12 sided figure and you have to match them so that the lines match and you have to one dodeca gate like don't deck again that's the only rule you have you have to have one of those and the only way you can fill the plane with these shapes is in a way next one please like this that's the lines on it never a piece this was drawn up by a computer but under the instructions of how this is supposed to tower you're given to the computer not to try one after the other it never repeats you can sort of see bits which repeat but they're always different as you go out bigger regions I grew this out a little bit and I didn't know how what it would look like and a colleague of mine program it's the program you can do once you know what the rules are it's just if you try it just trial and error that's not the way to do it I don't think a computer could get this far probably just trial and error I don't know an interesting question I'd like something to try it to see anyway that's what next one I think I'll give you this it's rather a nice example quickly there's not much time this is the theorem proved in 1945 by a medical good Stein and it's a nice example yes thank you without not without much knowledge of mathematics and what is it well it starts with just sort of but next slide please you could write and let's try it with an example of thousand seventy seven but it's the same applies to any natural number whatsoever thousand and seventy seven just an example let's represent that first in binary which means writing it is the sum of powers of Nonis we're going to first powers of two which are different and the usual thing is knots and ones the ones represent the powers of two which are there the north's was the past two which are not there so that's what the binary representation is okay now I want to represent the exponents this way too so you see that you've got a number at the top which needs to be represented binary which I've done and then you still not finish because there's a three up there let's do the next line here we go and this represents the number well you may have to go up as enormous tower before you get to the end but nevertheless it always runs out finished writing on the bonus in terms of and the exponent said the exponents if necessary in terms of positive two now it is quite to operations the first operation a is to replace all the twos by threes you see two is the base yeah and now you might think of a base three if this is exactly the same expression but now all the two is replaced by threes this operation a operation B is subtract one now operation a is replaced all the threes by fours and the operation B it's okay well so the tricky are here because it's like taking one from a thousand they get in 1999 but you see the threes and other coefficients for the nines and Kate boy beam for being the base and you just keep on going you subtract one next one and then you keep on going keep on going next slide you go some numbers get bigger and bigger until you get to zero that is good signs theorem it's a hare and the tortoise the beat or tortoise little bit of all here as I guess it's the tortoise which is the subtracting one it's a tiny little step just takes one office time and the hare you increase the base and the numbers just get huger and here gern huger next slide please it was proved by Paris and cobby that this is a girdle theorem that is to say the good stance theorem cannot be proved by ordinary induction an X rather um up you've jumped ahead too fast it's rather remarkable that you that you could prove that this thing goes to zero but you can't do it by ordinary mathematical induction you can do it by I think we'll transfer that induction if you know about that these spa days or represent the transplant at number Omega and that is the proof which I think would assignment but this is an example of a girdle theorem which shows you have to go beyond to a different step of mathematics it's quite interesting that even if you started with the number four you try it with three it goes up and comes down rapidly you try the number four I don't from recommend you programming programming on any computer whatsoever not even the most powerful computer in the world no chance with four if you just do the follow the steps you'd never get there if you did it with a piece of paper and pencil and think a bit you could probably see why it comes down again doesn't come down again for an awful long time okay next slide please now you see this there's my cartoon trying to show see the question is okay people tell me all right there is an algorithm in our heads it's such a complicated one you never know what it was and you have no way of doing good Steiner for girdle or whatever have you so that's the way out now my argument here is why I produce lots of complicated arguments but this is seems to me this is a clearest argument you can say well what was the quality that in a navel Peter people to be able to understand things like infinity and but Stan's theorem it'd be missing as well all those things well natural selection presumably a natural selection I've tried to argue in this picture in fact if we could have the next slide just to show you natural selection was not there to produce mathematicians that's the argument you see mathematicians about to be eaten by the saber-tooth Tiger the pictures try the show there's not much of a selective advantage perhaps it's negative I suspect being a mathematician however the cousins of this fella such as domestic domestic domesticating animals and building shelters and growing crops and all the sort of thing and building mammoths traps over here all these things were done by developing the notion of understanding doing deep level not to do with mathematics that's nothing so sort of offshoot of it it's not what the quality of understanding was selected for a natural selection but it happens to have this advantage that it enables us to do sophisticated mathematics let's go to the next picture please now here's the question you see the arrays where does this sort of non computer see computability come in and I say mathematical understanding whether slide before was just to show it's not just that human understanding generally well that seems to be a big thing but I don't think that understanding is the only quality for was certainly not the only quality of which consciousness is uses certainly one of as I argued yeah nevertheless I'm not going to draw a line between understanding and other qualities of consciousness so I put the line maybe here well here I guess it is what about animals I don't think the difference between humans and animals is that great that animals don't have it you can see many examples where animals seem to rip seem to show understanding I think that quality is there certainly people who own dogs are quite convinced that their dogs are conscious and quite I believe that prepared to believe that's true and so I don't think that's the place to draw the line so where is the line well I don't think it's to do with life and non-life the question is well the argument I'm trying to make is it's something in physics now as I said before when I would like can I go to the next slide please with the argument about Dirac and his piece of chalk is that something to do with why you don't get macroscopic superpositions in quantum mechanics you can have particles or atoms or quite complicated structures these things for buckyballs in two places at the same time and the experiments we show that that's what happens what about big things how big do they have to get before you can't make these super positions most people who think about quantum mechanics and don't want to change anything believe well let me just say what this mermaid is doing judo mermaid I drew this picture before a lecture I gave in birds and say in Denmark I had been asked to give a talk in on our hands Christian Anderson and I wandered a little bit why they were asking me to talk about fairy tales or something that is a bit wide scientists being asked to talk about fairy tales but then of course I remembered that I'd written the book called the emperor's new mind and the title was based on or it was a play on the story or the title of the story by Hans Christian Andersen the emperor's new clothes and so I had to think about another one of the hats Christian Andersen stories and I thought about the little mermaid well I'll tell you in a moment why but I did has a little joke in the story see the moment at the end of the story is lying and she when the Sun comes up the first photon the first ray of light which comes and hits the moment and she dies so I thought well I'll elaborate on that a little bit and I put a half-silvered mirror as the first photon from the Sun comes along and it splits in two and so one of it hits the moment and kills her and the other one goes out into space and this was my Schrodinger's mermaid but anyway if you know about Schrodinger's cats you know that that's playing on that idea but anyway that's not really what I was using this for can I have the next slide please you see the top part is supposed to represent the classical world can we go back a bit in fact you know the top part of the collateral work the bottom part is meant to represent the quantum world and the quantum world you'll find there's a thing called entanglement and never thing is nothing's are very really separate from other things you get these entanglements and see like look like all the seaweed down there entangling everything up so I had this next slide please the quantum world is represented by the bottom part and the classical world of the top part and what's a mermaid doing next slide please well she represents the collapse of the wave function of what happens with them measurement you see the way we understand quantum mechanics as we take the Schrodinger equation and this is an equation like say generativity or Newtonian mechanics or something where your state evolves in a continuous deterministic differential you've solved differential equation that's what it is and that tells you how the world evolves in the smooth way now that's true of the top view that's you if you like the Newtonian world or the world of general relativity classical world the bottom it's true also because this is the world of quantum mechanics that's the Schrodinger equation but the mermaid is this mysterious thing which really why the direct piece of chalk wasn't in two places at once and it's somehow too big to be in two places once why well the argument is that people normally use is what you when you make a measurement in quantum mechanics and somehow you make a and the quantum state makes something classical and the exalted example people have as a Geiger counter the part quantum particle enters the Geiger counter and it clicks and that means it either clicks and doesn't click and whether it clicks or not comes about from the evolution of a state and this tells you probabilities of whether it's going to click or not and that's a very funny thing because it's not a deterministic evolution following in the equation it's something quite different it does one thing what does the other thing and all you've got as probabilities which it does and that doesn't come from the evolution equation it doesn't come in the Schrodinger equation it doesn't really come from the theory at all if you say consider that your Geiger counter is a quantum thing just like everything else is made out of matter just the same as everything else so why is it supposed to behave classically and either click so doesn't click no it should behave like it ok the particle interested and doesn't enter it at the same time so it clicks and it doesn't click at the same time and you're still in the quantum world and the the mermaid hasn't done a job but that's not what happens what happens is the going of contrary says either click so it doesn't think so if something happens which is not following the equation and many people have all sorts of different ways of thinking about in this you think it's when you're conscious being looks at the state and then goes one over the other I don't believe that at all I believe that it's something the other way around so there can I have the next slide please now to try and explain that let me say well I think the difference is between following the Schrodinger equation and not following it when you have to do the other thing which is the collapse of the wavefunction the reduction of the state is it's called where you the state jumps from one thing to another it doesn't simply follow the continuous Schrodinger equation when you make a measurement it jumps from one thing to another and that's really strange now there are many people's theories which go beyond quantum mechanics or the whole industry of different kinds of ideas of how you extend quantum mechanics in one way or another now I have a slightly different view on this which is not to try and invent a completely new theory which extends quantum mechanics for one thing another but to take the two most important theories of physics developed in the 20th century both major revolutions one of them indeed quantum mechanics the other was Einstein's general theory of relativity the basic principle underlying jane-anne Stein's theory is the principle of equivalence and here I have an imagined Galileo dropping a big rock and a little rock from the Leaning Tower of Pisa I'm told that he probably never actually did it with he certainly talked about it and he knew felt for Falwell that if they were big rocks and little rocks the air resistance would slow the little rock up a bit more on the big rock that faster so he knew that he knew a few idealized situation with no atmosphere they would drop together and this is the principle of equivalence that Galileo put forward very forcefully and he on the right-hand part of this picture you can see a little insect sitting on one of the rocks looking at the other and during the fall this little insect doesn't think there's any gravity at all since like Stephen Hawking in the aeroplane when we started to plummet we have a futuristic Space Station and the astronaut here and the astronaut is falling for it you might say the earth don't fall down on the ground but that's not what happens was astronauts in orbit and being in orbit means it's like in freefall like the right big rock and the little rock and here we have the big rock and there's a rock if you like and they seem to fall together and so it's as though there was no gravity so if this is the principle of equivalence the basis of Einstein's general relativity led him to all these confusing ideas of our curved space-time and all that but the basic principle is this one and I'm just going to concentrate on this basic principle can I have the next slide please now I'm considering here an experiment which is done on the table talk so I put the right hand we imagine tabletop and there's an experiment being done there and there's some quantum physicists working out the quantum physics the Schrodinger equation hide evolves according to the experiment on the tabletop and that physicist wants to do is to incorporate the gravity the force of gravity if you like into the equation into the Schrodinger equation to incorporate that by doing what the experts will tell you it's putting a term into the Hamiltonian corresponding to the gravitational potential you know what that means it doesn't matter that's the procedure the normal procedure somebody would do if you consider gravitation as a force but I sandwich tell you that's not the right way of doing it what you do is you imagine that you're free falling on your coordinates or correspond to three before ly there isn't the gravitational field you do it all over again imagining that your coordinate system Falls freely and you're doing all over again what do you how do you get the same answer almost the green answer is the Newtonian one if you like that's where you put the term in the Hamiltonian you just treat gravity is just like another course the purple one is what the Einstein Ian one which is you say the three before anyone and there's no gravity they are almost the same the only difference is this thing called the phase factor if you don't know about quantum mechanics you won't know why that's such a critical thing but these things are completely the same except for this phase vector now the phase factor well it's a complex number of modulus one if you don't know what that means doesn't matter the key point is that whenever you make measurements you take what's called the square of the modulus and this thing drops away so you say who cares they are different but who cares because whenever you renovate your measurements the the factor that aren't here it doesn't make any difference but then you look more carefully at the factor then you see it's go to t cubed out here now again you have to know a little bit more about quantum theory or quantum field theory to see that's causing a problem because what is telling you is that if you do your quantum theory right the green wavefunction is in what's called a different face different Hilbert space from the purple one well again you'd have to know what Hilbert space means but what it really means is it's cheating if you try to add one of these things - yeah but you're not going to do that you've got these two things separately so who cares okay you could say who cares fine if it's just this experiment but now I'm going to change the experiment I'm going to have in the middle of this I'm going to have an object save this object here which I've gone is a sort of sphere and that object is being put into a superposition like t-rex chalk into this place and this place at the same time now this means now I'm going to imagine your little insect sitting up here I'm trying to do quantum mechanics it's a little hard for an insect probably but never mind the insect is trying to do quantum mechanics and the insects considers that it's getting rid of this gravitational field by falling freely in it but it's in a superposition of that one and it's can't be fall if you freely falling in both of them but the more serious point is that there are in these two different Hilbert spaces they're two different vacuums and other ways saying and you can't add the states together if they're in two different documents so you're stuck if you want to use the Einstein perspective you I genuinely stopped what do you do well if you're stuck you cheat so that's what I do is I cheat I say okay it's cheating to put the images the same hilbert space but let's try and do it anyway and keep track of the size of the cheek so that's what I do I keep track of the size of the cheat and I integrate the cheater over the whole space and I come an answer and I say the cheat is a measure of the uncertainty it comes out as a sort of energy it's the thing like eg that's an energy it's a measure of uncertainty in the actual energy of the system as a whole so there's some not quite certain element to the total energy of the system so that's what I come to and then I use a thing called the Heisenberg time energy principle now this uncertainty principle now that tells you usual way around is you have a share an atom which is unstable it decays and through this or decays into this and that atom as because of the lifetime it's the case after a certain average lifetime and that average lifetime is reciprocally related to an energy uncertainty in the nucleus so I'm using that the other way around I'm saying if you have an energy uncertainty then that's reciprocal related to a lifetime so I'm saying that this superposition of these two of this lamp on the slant is the same weapon in two different places at once is associated with an energy uncertainty and by the Heisenberg thing is reciprocal erase you a lifetime and what's the lifetime with a lifetime is it becomes one or the other so this gives you a guess as to how long this superposition of this lump in two places will last and the argument is you take Planck's constant divided by this energy uncertainty which is called eg and that gives you the lifetime so that's the idea you can actually say what it means the easiest way to strive describe it for simple situations is you imagine that the lump was that there were two lumps in that place of this one and then you move one of them away from the other and take only into consideration the gravitational force of course there may be all sorts of other forces but ignore all those just the gravitational attraction between the two and how much energy will cost you to separate them and that is eg so you can say what eg is in that sort of terms okay gonna have the next picture this is just a spacetime way of looking at the same thing now you see science theory says that mass deforms space-time so we put time going this way in space going that way spacetime is four-dimensional you put time together with space three dimensions of space going this way the time dimension going that way and the fact that you brought a lump of material warps the space that's what Einstein tells us if the space gets warped and then we as the lump comes put into two places at once you have to have two space times in two places at once and the argument is that when the separation reaches one unit in what are called Planck units they're very strange unit sees in ordinary physics the Planck length is 10 to the minus 33 centers Freddie's one over our number with 33 0 30 three digits and what's the time thank time also even time your time it's 10 to the minus 43 seconds so you take 1 / a digit with 43 number with 43 digits and that tiny fraction of a second is a Planck time so these funny units you use and when the separations between the space time reaches that Union that's the sort of time when the thing becomes one or the other gonna have the next picture oh no yeah the next picture was the one you were just before the next picture now here you see what does this got to do with consciousness in the theory well the argument is that this moment when the choice is made so you goes happen universe goes happily along it gets a little uncomfortable because it's sort some bifurcates and then the universe decides to do one or the other in this sort of time scale which I've said but here's so hard the tie-up with consciousness is the idea here and it's the hypothesis of the theory is that whenever this happens whenever the state reduces whenever the wavefunction collapses that's what this is doing its associated with a moment of what we call proto consciousness I'm not saying it's conscious this is probably having you all over in the atmosphere all the time and I'm not saying the atmosphere is conscious but what I am saying that this element of proto consciousness is the building block out of which consciousness is constructed so we call this oh that's the objective reduction of the state and these orchestrate is oh ah that's or could we call it or go ah to the theory that Stuart Hameroff and I have developed is based on this idea that consciousness has as its building blocks this approach procedure here and when it's fitted together and sort of orchestrated waste a little bit vague what that means but nevertheless that's the idea if it's a sort of meaningful way put together that is genuine consciousness so that's the theory and let's have the next picture just to say one of the purest features of this theory has well I said there are many theories that people have other kinds of theories not vote but motivators from gravity necessarily but where you can have a thing I've got time going up here again and so you're a lump in one position it goes into two you hitted by a scream split photon which a little bit and then this one goes one way the other version goes that way and the point is that after this time it suddenly does one or the other and the point of view with our inducting here is a rather curious one I'm saying that it's I call it a Stalinist view you see when when Stalin got angry with wonderful people in the Politburo age isn't like had done dogs person done away with but you see also not the person removed from all the photographs in which he appeared before so it's as though that fellow never existed so the idea here is that an estate never existed and some weren't followed this month if you don't have that point of view you have really curious things as other people's Theory have where they jump from here to here from there two of them - the one seems to create a lot of energy and temperature and you have to get rid of that and it's a real problem in most of these theories you have other problems here and you might think this sort of retroactive but I don't think it's a contradiction with anything we see it's a curious view and it seems to be the sort of place where that you can have the next slide now what about experiments this is a sort of cartoon of an experiment due to dog Baumeister from conversations we had and he and the former cop common student we have will marshal and the idea is here you have a little tiny mirror which is a little cube about a tenth of the thickness of a human hair just a little too small to see but you here here we have a photon going along the photon hits this beam splitter half silver mirror it half goes this way half that way you keep it going between two mirrors and hold it there you know what's called a cavity you have it down here and you keep it going here this is their photons sort of it's like a diving board and it jumps up and down on this little cube and it gives it been a million reflect reflections gives enough just to displace it enough so they could detect this thing that goes to one of the other in seconds two minutes now that's one experiment which has been going on for almost two decades I think I think is pretty consistent because he I was invited in about ten years ago where he works one of the places he works in and he said without prompting in ten years have an answer I thought that the ten years is probably just a constant of nature and then too you know it'll always be ten years but when I saw him again two years later in another conference he said in seven or eight years we'll have an hour south while I thought that's consistent I was another conference just this last year in Marseille and he said in two or three years he expects to have an answer and I thought that's pretty good may have dropped a year but that's not bad so maybe he will see in about three years if this thing I'm saying is true or not there is another body of experiments which could could get there faster if they get funding this is an experiment due to the IDS duty veteran taze who works with these things from bose-einstein condensates which are sort of macroscopic quantum things they're they're pretty small but they're macroscopic and they're quant in single quantum states and you can split them into two and it seemed very promising for various reasons in a way see one of the problems this experiment you have to keep it very very cold and with the bose-einstein condensates you only have to keep it cold and that's a lot easier but so it's possible that those experiments will get there even before this I don't know it would be intriguing to know anyway within the next two or three years we may well see not this question then I have the next slide my way let's have the one after that I went into that this is just the connection with Stuart because he told me about microtubules and showed my ignorance and not knowing about these structures this is meant to be a picture of one and they inhabit the synapses and all sorts of other places and it may well me there now I was it very interacting attracted by this idea because there were their tubes and they're symmetrical on all sorts of features which seem to be promising for possibly having a large scale of quantum states which could hold the quantum coherence for long enough that the reduction of the state is something you make use of and that's really the idea that we have next slide quickly and that's it that's just a picture of a little bit more of the brain than the loads and loads and microtubules you need a more acting in some form of concerts in to have a big enough effect that you can have this orchestrated reduction actually taking place thank you very much hello everybody yeah thanks for being here it's always a difficult to follow Roger is a tough act to follow I'm going to speak about the neurobiology of the or kawar theory that he mentioned and what you see behind the picture is a neuron with stained by immunofluorescence to show the cytoskeleton and the surfaces with a black border that's the membrane you can see the nucleus in blue and then the yellow is immunofluorescence standing for tubulin the component of microtubules and red is actin so the neuron is not a bag of water in fact it's highly structured internally with the cytoskeleton including microtubules now modern science neuroscience AI and so generally think of the brain as a neuronal synaptic computer so on the on the left you see a bunch of neurons interconnected by synapses on the right you see a computer matrix with nodes and this is generally how the brain is thought of and it's all based on the HUD can Huxley integrate and fire neuron discovered or described the 1950s by hodgkin-huxley and here you see the cell body and dendrites which receive inputs from synapses and convey information signals by the surface surface membrane by ion channels pouring in and out of the membrane conveying a signal up to a threshold when the threshold was met here at the axon hillock or axon initiation segments then a all-or-none action potential is carried to the next to the next cell so it's it's the integrate and fire idea integrate in the dendrites and soma to a threshold for firing to the next neuron and most neuroscientists and AI people equate firing with bits and as an a digital computer and that's how they look at the brain I don't think that's right so integrate and fire now hodgkin-huxley predicted are predicted by hodgkin-huxley would be shown on the left where you have integration here with a very fairly narrow threshold when it's met there's a spiking and the spiking is at an angle and I'll explain that a second so you see you have narrow temporal and voltage threshold and the idea is that the ion channels open sequentially which is why you have the slope this is the predicted hodgkin-huxley integrate and fire behavior however if you put electrodes into pyramidal neurons of an awake animal as non Dorf and wolf did in 2006 what you see instead is a very wide threshold variability from spike - spike one one spike will sure get at one threshold the next one may be higher or lower and this is shown by a wide temporal variability and a wide voltage variability and this is precisely where consciousness could come in to regulate behavior otherwise everything is deterministic and there's no room for free well not to mention consciousness so I've shown this as Bing Bing not after Roger Bingham but being being meant to me consciousness and you can see that it correlates with the wide wide variability and this could come from a deeper level and a deeper level something like deep learning networks in AI and but a deep deeper level in the neuron where where might that be well it could be coming from the microtubules in the dendrites which as you see here are unique unique uniquely broken and interrupted and not continuous and they're of mixed polarity one pointing one way the other next to it pointing the other way so there are mixed polarity networks and we think that has significance whereas in the axon for example and all other all non-neuronal cells the microtubules are continuous and unbroken and go from the cell center to the periphery so it's curious why the microtubules and dendrites are interrupted and of mixed polarity obviously as part of the cytoskeleton you wouldn't break your bones for skeletal support so it has to be some other reason so the question then is this consciousness happen at the synaptic at the synapse or at the membrane as most people think or does it come from the microtubules as we think as I think so this also could be as I said like deep learning convolutional net works in a I now microtubules are very interesting and important they do many things James mentioned mitosis but in in a neuron here's a cell body here's the axon going down here and for synaptic plasticity to adjust a synapse that may be out here or here materials are synthesized in the cell body and conveyed along the dendrite by these motor proteins kinesin and dynein which could carry materials and then have to jump from microtubule in microtubule and then turn left in or right at branch points and they have to know where to get off to deliver their cargo they need some kind of FedEx code and it looks like Tao a microtubule associated protein Tao which is well-known for other reasons bounded specific locations on the microtubule are the traffic signals let's say hey get leave here and bring your your dopamine decarboxylase or whatever it is to this synapse because that's where it that's where it's needed and so Tao may be a signaling the placement of towel on the microtubule may be a coding mechanism for memory and synaptic plasticity now also when microtubules fall apart or and towel falls off we get Alzheimer's disease everybody knows about the amyloid plaques but it seems that the cognitive dysfunction correlates better with with loss of microtubules and tau and these neurofibrillary neurofibrillary tangles which is when the tau clumps in the corners of the selma microtubules disassemble the synapses lost the whole neuron shrivels shrivels up in the whole brain kind of atrophies and shrinks and so treating the microtubules is a more promising I think approach to Alzheimer's but the microtubules themselves this suggests that they may encode memory and this is something that struck me when I first learned of them in medical school in the early 1970s cancer lab studying mitosis and the microtubule structure is a cylindrical polymer of tubulin this peanut-shaped protein shown here in two states and i got the idea that they might be processing information like a computer I was just learning about computers in the in the early 70s and had the idea that treatments might change their conformational shape to represent information due to dipoles inside them and working with physicists and engineers I did some studies comparing them to for example the game of life a cellular automaton game shown here a very simple game with on a grid and applied a worth orthogonal grid and applied them to the hexagonal cylindrical lattice of microtubules and show that they could indeed process information and are pretty good at it with interesting properties because of the cylindrical wraparound and so I published a number of papers in the in the 80s in early 90s and subsequently about classical information processing and microtubules you can see a sequence here of one of our models of information moving through them and then in the subsequent two teaming up with Roger a bunch of several papers from the mid 90s about quantum computing in microtubules so one thing that this would do is is increase the capacity of information processing in the brain tremendously for example the standard AI singularity approach a hundred billion neurons a thousand synapses per neuron about a hundred Hertz ten to the sixteenth operations per second per brain kurtzweil said many times they give us a bus a computer with ten to the sixteenth ops per second and we'll have brain equivalents and therefore consciousness well it hasn't happened and it would be much more difficult of course if you consider the microtubule computation where one tubulin State equals one bit where you have 100 billion neurons a billion tubulin spur neuron and about ten to the seventh Hertz ten megahertz because that's the frequency of us one of the frequencies of oscillation of tubulins microtubules this gives 10 to the 16th operations per second neuron the equivalent of the whole brain at the neuron level and 10 to the 27th operations per second per brain but it didn't explain consciousness it's just more computation as somebody confronted me when I was being obnoxious in an AI meeting and saying you guys are you know missing the target and they said okay if let's say it is happening how would that explain consciousness how would that explain love joy feelings emotions the so-called hard problem which came along later and I didn't know I was a bit stunned and I realized I had a something else was needed and fortunately this person suggested I read Rogers book the emperor's new mind which I did in about 1991 I was kind of blown away by it and he he as he said he needed a quantum computer in the brain and he didn't know of one and I wrote to him and said well microtubules may be what you need and we we teamed up and this is us and some other people including Dave Chalmers on the far left at the Grand Canyon after the first Tucson conference the science of consciousness in 1994 and we began to develop our theory now the first problem was that everybody said no way the because if you want to build a quantum computer in the laboratory you need absolute zero temperature to avoid thermal decoherence and the brain is too warm at 37.6 degrees and so we were skeptically treated to say the least however in about 2006 it was discovered that plants use quantum coherence and photosynthesis to make energy and food by superposition exit ons propagating among these aromatic groups in this light harvesting complex the FMO protein it's called and so that's been clearly shown and it turns out that the the arrangement of these aromatic groups are very similar to aromatic groups in tubulin and I'll come back to that point so basically what we wanted to do is take the space-time qubit that Roger had described where a position of a particle position of a particle is equated to its curvature in space-time and and a superposition would be separation of those curvatures and you can imagine that where these curvatures to continue without collapse that each would form its own University and you get multiple multiple worlds and we but we wanted to equate that of course that doesn't happen because the objective reduction or at least we don't think so and we wanted to equate that to a qubit a quantum bit in tubulin now quantum bit in quantum computer means that information could be not just one or zero but one and zero superposition and then collapse to one of the other as the solution so we needed a qubit in the in the brain and specifically based on tubulin pathaway it's not just individual initially we said each tubulin was a qubit but this this allows you to avoid decoherence because the cube limb pathway is error correcting so the task before us for to develop a theory was to define the quantum bits or qubits in microtubules and I just showed you that with the pathway and apply a sub G equals H bar over T which Roger mentioned to microtubules to quantify or Co our conscious moments and we also wanted to test sensitivity of microtubule quantum processes to anesthesia which would presumably dampen the quantum processes and psychedelics which might be expected to enhance the quantum process in some way and to show how or kawar can account for EEG and other correlates of consciousness so the basic idea was that we'd have a microtubule many many microtubules but one shown here with the grey superposition evolving to reach threshold at a time T and having a conscious moment a conscious now and Bing which was due to a process going on in the space-time geometry underlying this it's not necessarily the space-time geometry out there it's the space-time geometry in here where the microtubules are and so we want to know the sufficient orchestrated superposition occurs at time T among any among many entangled microtubules and orchestration the idea is that as Roger said the proto conscious moments that are occurring in the atmosphere randomly ubiquitously all the time which seems bizarre until you compared to pants psychism which is which is even more bizarre because that's a prep that's a state permanent state whereas this would be a process a sequence of events and but we wanted to orchestrate it and a metaphor that I uses is the proto consciousness - the proto conscious moments that Roger described are like if you go to the symphony and the musicians are warming up and each one is tuning his or her instrument and you hear these random notes and it's it's noise it's a cacophony what we wanted with some system that would organize all this and orchestrate it into something more like music in terms of consciousness having full rich experience so how many tubulins did we need well that depends on the time and that's the time at which collapse will occur but first we had to decide how we were going to get a sub G out of microtubules was that the whole protein separated from itself was it at the level of atomic nuclei or was the level of nucleons the protons and neutrons so we did the equation we did the the math actually Roger gave me the formula and I was very keen on I'm trying to go back to algebra and mathematics and we calculated these and we found the dominant effect would be if the superposition occurred at the level of the atomic nuclei and for that and forty Hertz and we picked a time T of 25 milliseconds for 40 Hertz figuring that's the best neural correlate of consciousness we want to have a conscious moment 25 times a second so this turned out to be about 2 times 10 to the 10th tubulins which isn't really very much if there are a billion turbulence per neuron only about 20 of all of them are used plus 25 milliseconds is a long time to avoid decoherence so subsequently when the structure of tubulin became known in 2009 2010 we revamped the theory and considered shorter intervals time the T with much larger Y sub G therefore faster frequencies which could give rise to interest interference speeds for slower processes because cognition and consciousness occur hundreds of milliseconds the specious moment or epochs or whatever paradigm you want to use or EEG tend to a thousand milisecond so we need to account for slower slower events and we can get that by interference speeds just like in music if you have two instruments slightly out of tune they will have interference beats at a much slower frequency now fortunately our cause was bolstered by the finding by anirban Banja patty I'll show you the data in a second but at the bottom of quantum coherence and microtubules in terahertz gigahertz megahertz and kilohertz frequencies so honor bond looked at microtubules with nanotechnology and and quantum looking for quantum resonances at the level of neurons with these nanoprobes at the level of an individual microtubule at the level of turbulence and found us and he would sweep the frequency stimulate with AC alternating current and sweep the frequency and then measure conductance and he found that at certain specific frequencies the microtubule became highly conductive in between those frequencies it was a good insulator and so he plotted those resonant frequencies here and he found these self similar patterns he calls them Triplets of triplets or octaves at the terahertz range gigahertz megahertz from turbulence and then gigahertz megahertz and kilohertz from microtubules and then megahertz kilohertz and Hertz from whole neurons so this is kind of like a Multi multi scale hierarchy almost like music and it led to this general idea of a multi scale hierarchy where we start from the neuron now most neuroscientists would go this way to larger networks of micro tube of miron's and and regions of the brain and so forth and that still is valid but we also want to go downward into the microtubule the rows of tubulin and the individual dipoles and eventually down to space-time geometry as Roger showed had much much smaller scales and here are the cell similar patterns seen at a terahertz gigahertz megahertz kilohertz and Hertz and anesthesia seems to work here in the terahertz range I'll come back to that point so we wanted to test sensitivity of microtubule quantum process to anesthesia and also psychedelics and and also show how orko work and account for EEG so the easiest way in my opinion to test from model of consciousness is how does it respond to anesthesia and during the 19th century a group of gases were discovered which when inhaled at low concentrations caused euphoria so these are ether frolics guys sniffing ether and getting high and giddy and dancing around and also laughing gas nitrous oxide was very popular and but when you go to a higher concentration these are low concentrations a higher concentration is these rendered humans and animals unresponsive and unconscious the blank slide actually there was supposed to be another slide there but never mind so subsequent studies showed that the anesthetic gases spared non-conscious brain activity so kana anesthesia is fairly selective at inhibiting only consciousness non conscious activity evoked potentials we use evoked potentials under anesthesia to monitor spinal cord integrity and so forth so the brain is still active under anesthesia the only thing that's really gone is consciousness also the the gases had the anesthetic gases had different potencies and required to render subjects unresponsive but for each gas the potency for any animal studied with was the same at equilibrium it would take the same amount of any anesthetic to put you or I to sleep an Anna a giraffe an elephant a fruit fly a salamander all have pretty much the same Mack a minimal alveolar concentration required that's still pretty amazing that that that consciousness and anesthesia are matched so well so that it applies equally to all organisms now the anesthetic gases are structurally very different they include ethers halogenated hydrocarbon carbons the inert gas xenon shown here so chemically very different but they have one common feature in polar region shown in gray these are filled electron orbitals which don't have a charge on them but are nonpolar kind of like oil and and this suggested a solubility region where anesthetics might bind so at the turn of the 20th century scientists sought a common factor which correlated with potency known as one over Mac one over the minimal alveolar concentration and they search for the proper solubility phase in which anesthetics dissolved and bound in the body I should say that anesthesia anesthetic gases bind by very weak quantum forces called van der waals London forces which are found and bind in all fat stores lipid membranes all over the place in the body often tell my residents that there's more anesthetic in in the patients rear-end than it is in his brain but the anesthetic is nonetheless working in the brain so why does it not affect anything except consciousness and I think that's because the quantum forces only perturb systems that have highly organized highly orchestrated quantum activities and that's what I think microtubules do so Meyer and Overton at the turn of the 20th century looked at a series of gases as to determine their anesthetic potency you know wide variety of animals and found that olive oil was the perfect solvent to correlate with potency so minimal alveolar concentration or Mac the lower you go on this the the more potent the anesthetic so the most potent anaesthetic is methoxy fluorine at 0.25% and nitrogen is an anesthetic at 50 or 60 atmospheres so and down here are where the clinically relevant and anesthetics are now there are also a couple of outliers and the Meyer overton these two gases TFM B and f6 which don't cause which bind in the same place but don't cause anesthesia so a good theory should explain why they do not but first the solubility phases of the body can be shown here and as you go this direction you can become more polar and this is nonpolar so this is oil and this is water and as you know oil and water don't mix so what they found was that the anesthetic action occurred and therefore consciousness occurred in the highly non polar regions olive oil like regions which correlated with dimethyl benzene methyl benzene and benzene which are basically organic chemistry it was known in the 17th century that the hell the hydrocarbons of hydrogen and carbon could be in two different forms cnh2n plus 2 or CN 2 n depending on whether there was a double bond or not but then they had c6h6 and they didn't know what it was they didn't know what the structure was and then Keckley dutch chemists had a dream that these hydrocarbons were like snakes and one of them swallowed its tail and formed a ring and this is also known as the hora boris and so he got the idea he walked but said ah benzene is a ring structure and sure enough he's right the six carbons make this hexagon there's three extra electrons and it's often shown by this if this figure right here of a hexagon with three extra bonds now what happens is that the electrons in the PI orbitals cope coalesce into these rings or pi cloud electron cloud covering the whole molecule this is a cloud of delocalized electrons therefore conducive to quantum effects including magnetic electric magnetic dipole oscillations exit ins charge transfer phonons fluorescence and so forth so this is where quantum stuff can happen regardless of the temperature now these benzene rings or phenyl rings will attract each other by van der Waals forces because that this electron cloud dipole here repels this one and then they oscillate at ten to the twelfth Hertz so and then they can form quantum superposition so this gives terahertz oscillations and the PI residence groups are also significant in terms of effects on consciousness because the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin the pleasure molecule and the mood molecule as well as all the psychedelics LSD DMT and sillas I had these very large PI residence groups so something's going on here with consciousness and pi resonance so the basic idea about anesthesia is that the oscillations of some pi resonance groups in the brain go on when you're conscious in an anesthesia comes in and by dipole dispersion dampens the oscillations and causes loss of consciousness the question is where in the brain where in the brain just has happened it was thought initially anesthetics binding lipids because of their fat solubility but it turns out they act directly in proteins and these guys Nick Franks and beliebe found this in the 1980s that they can act directly in inside inside proteins and non polar regions which have these aromatic rings they call them hydrophobic pockets composed of pi resonance rings composed of amino acids phenylalanine tyrosine and tryptophan and so it was assumed that an acai exact on membrane receptors and ion channels but after about 20 years of study there were no no sense could be made of anesthetic effects on membrane proteins gaba receptors serotonin glycine acetylcholine receptors all bind anesthetics but one will open them what another anaesthetic will close the channel some don't bind all the channels so there's no unitary effect so membrane proteins despite their obvious candidacy since they they are responsible for excitability of membranes are not the site of action of anesthetics it looks like eken Hoff's group did a number of studies in kind of looking a systemically systematically and and found for example 70 proteins in the neuron that binds and binds anesthesia and aesthetics about half in the membrane half in the cytoplasm and doing proteomics and genomics they pointed to tubulin in microtubules as the most likely site these other proteins also but they're not in any signaling pathway they also did a study on tadpoles where they use this fluorescent anesthetic anthracene which is only anesthetic when it gets illuminated by UV light they gave it to these tagged tadpoles let them swim around and then because tadpoles have conveniently transparent heads they illuminate him with ultraviolet light and they went belly-up and they were nested sized and when they ground up their brains after tadpoles donated donated them to science they found that the anthracene was was about to tubulin to microtubules so this study that I'll just touch on briefly Travis Craddock and colleagues and myself modeled all 80 so tubulin shown here has 86 aromatic amino acids tryptophan phenylalanine and tyrosine and here's also the the anesthetic molecules where they bind and we we simulated quantum dipole couplings among all 86 of these and found a spectrum at KT at room temperature a spectrum of collective dipoles dipole oscillations with a common mode peak at about 600 13 terahertz in the blue-green region of the spectrum Alvie and then we added anesthetics and all the anesthetics abolished the 613 terahertz peak and dampened all frequencies proportional to anesthetic potency non anesthetic gases that I mentioned which bind in the same place but do not cause loss of consciousness did not alter the terahertz spectrum so microtubule terahertz oscillations are an intra neural correlate of consciousness so the nine anesthetics had no such effects why not we looked at the pull we looked at the polarizability of all the Annis of all the anesthetics and the non anesthetics and we found that the nine anesthetics had higher polarizability so we think the anesthetics binded disperse the dipoles whereas the non non anesthetics are so highly polarizable they go along for the ride they oscillate right along with the system so that's our that's our explanation for why the non anesthetics don't have anesthetic efficacy despite being at the same place so here's the blue-green region of the spectrum where which is produced in the turbulence and just a couple comments here that the these pi resonance rings PI stacks remember there's 86 of them in tubulin and at certain number of angles there's only two stable angles a t-shape and a parallel displaced and it could be that the these positions correlate with qualia with feelings now this is obviously a bit of a joke but but qualia and feelings have to come from somewhere and it could be there's a superposition and then of these positions and then it collapses to a t-shape that's a bad feeling and if to the parallel displaced it's a good feeling speculation obviously but quality have to come from somewhere so we have 86 of these in in tubulin so maybe this is where quality are coming from and it might be something like 86 factorial possible feelings coming from one tubulin and then you got a lot of them in the brain so this is a possibility but what it would involve collapsing or objective reduction orchestrated objective reduction to these particular configurations so here's the the general scheme again that we have a multi scale hierarchy and consciousness or Orca work and occur and the terahertz are slower and kind of move around maybe even like music and possibly extending down to Planck scale geometry finally I want to mention that we just concluded a meeting in Tucson Roger came over from Oxford for that the Templeton Foundation Templeton World charity foundation has a project accelerating research on consciousness promoting what they call adversarial collaboration between or among theories so we were named one of the six major theories and we could pick one of the other ones and so I picked the integrated information theory of Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch who which is probably the best known theory they're very well known neuro scientists and they have this integrated information theory with this parameter called Phi which is a measure of integration and cause effect and so I designed a bunch of experiments that were supposed to distinguish between our theory and their theory and one of them for its was show demonstrate quantum vibrations and microtubules then use anesthesia and see if it's dampened see if the corner of vibrations are dampened and then do different anesthetics and compared their potency so if an anesthetic is twice as potent putting you to sleep it should require compared to another one it's you should need half as much to to cause to dampen the oscillations and quantum vibrations and Christophe said he didn't buy that and I said that would that would falsify IIT he said no they wouldn't because IIT can can apply to quantum vibrations in microtubules or v can apply 200 vibrations in microtubules which means it's pretty vague and pretty not nonspecific and comply to almost anything in Scott Aaronson pointed I could applied to a thermostat to be conscious so we'll see how that goes we're going to propose a these experiments and and the loser supposedly gets eliminated and the winner moves on to face another theory kind of like NFL playoffs coming up so some new things that came out it was magnetic vortices from on Urbana Bandopadhyay where microtubules generate these magnetic vortices which can interact with others to form something like a hologram we have evidence now from Horacio can see yellow that microtubules oscillate at 40 Hertz that might be the origin of EEG AG's been around for a hundred years but we really don't know its origin or significance and why we have these frequency bands and we think it's coming as a B frequencies from Mike from microtubules inside we're designing experiments for quantum vibrations and microtubules and the mixed polarity networks and dendrites are proving to be very important so we're going to look at them more closely so in conclusion quantum vibrations in microtubules support the Orca our theory that Roger and I developed by EC sub J equals H over T they are testable and could be therapeutic targets for mental and cognitive disorders a number of things came out in the meeting suggesting that aspects of microtubules in in brain neurons correlate with various disease states and other people are trying to use ultrasound into the brain to resonate microtubules to treat Alzheimer's and brain trauma and so forth anesthetics prevent consciousness by dampening quantum terahertz vibrations and microtubules inside neurons and psychedelics may enhance such vibrations we hope to test that also in the template project and finally cortical layer 5 pyramidal neurons are probably the best site of best bet for consciousness not to say that it can't be in other neurons these are large peer they have large pyramid shaped arrays of mixed polarity networks in account and can account for EEG and I mentioned there no pyramidal cells in the cerebellum because one of the big claims of IIT is that Phi is very low in the cerebellum and cerebellum has more neurons and cortex but isn't conscious and I think it's more simply explained by the fact that it doesn't have pyramidal cells and finally let me mention that we have a conference in Tucson every two years the science of consciousness it's been going on since 1994 the next one will be held in April and you can you can look it up or let us know we'll send you some information about it's going to be very interesting thank you very much [Music] okay so this has gone longer than we than we expected so I think what I'll do is actually cut my remarks to zero and function as a as a mic Bearer and see if you all got any questions that I will say one thing which is that there's a new book out by Joe LeDoux who's a very good scientist of NYU and he has a table in there which lists the contemporary physicalist theories of consciousness books that are out right now and that there are books by Michael Graziano and we'll tour the Mike Posner Danny Schechter Giulio Tononi Jerry of course the old one of Jerry Edelman's Christ Christophe coax Ned block has got something out there any bars get something out so consciousness is hugely a feel that's very important at this point but even in the case the one thing I do want to ask you is that even when I go back and look to those New York Review of Books pieces that you used to write long time ago even then you were saying my personal belief is that the resolution these puzzles can never be achieved within the theory as it stands quantum theory we must search for new fear with a mathematical elegance even greater than that of present-day quantum mechanics to which quantum theory can only be an excellent approximation we were looking at john bell at this point you're looking at all those other sorts of things and so on and and so and then more recently you told Steve Paulson who asked you some questions about the state of quantum mechanics quantum physics at this point what I'm saying and this is my Leap imagination which people boggle at I'm saying that what's going on in the brain must be taking value not just of quantum mechanics but where it goes wrong it's where the quantum mechanics needs to be superseded Paulson said so we need a new science that doesn't yet exist and you said that's right exactly so where are we going with that there are currently experimenting two of them experiments to test whether the reduction of the quantum state can occurs at the level that we anticipate and that experiments first of all I mentioned the Baumeister experiment also experiments using bosons and concert bose-einstein condensates which is an idea due to event for in tase shoes at Nottingham she's at Nottingham yeah and I think they're very promising is my view is that the effect of gravitation on quantum mechanics put it like that is something which is just around the corner within the next several years I expect to see experiments which could well demonstrates this a lot of people talk about quantum gravity but that's the other way around that's looking for quantum mechanics effects gravity and that's way off the picture I don't expect to see any experiment of that sort but that's not the way that I think is useful right for progress at the moment I only quit any numerous scientists in the audience any but yeah okay right so this for dr. Hameroff really related to the marker tubules could the effects that you're talking about the outside of the pyramidal cells like into the peripheral nervous system peripheral nervous system maybe elsewhere in the brain probably I it can happen anywhere as Roger said proto consciousness can happen anywhere I the pyramidal cells are ideal because you have mixed polarity microtubules and you have them in these very large pyramidal arrays can consciousness be elsewhere yes it could but if I had to bet on one particular type of cell that would be it there is a very ignored class of aromatic compounds in our that the fact that their aromatic is often ignored in our biology and those are the nucleotides guanine at the scenes that are seen as I mean and also yourself and people are so used to looking at what it's like these little lock and keys that they forget that they have aromatic structures and very complex resonances which are probably too complex for anybody to calculate which I think why they get ignored have you done any work looking at these stacked aromatics just a bit you're talking about the PI stack inside yes so if if you go straight down you go just go through all these pi aromatic rings actually in in a chapter around 2007 I had an appendix about quantum computing and DNA based on these based on the PI stack and at the the temple of meeting which we just attended I need to go well the nano biologists from MIT and Harvard who's been doing a lot of nanotechnology work on making these these little motors that run along DNA is very keen on quantum aspects of DNA so that is a big area and I you know I'll stick to microtubules but I think that's that's an area that I basically I think life is life is a quantum process this despite the fact that you know you can't you can't do it it can be attention temperatures for a quantum computer if you go into the non polar regions in the PI stack that you just mentioned in the regions inside proteins particularly microtubules because if the if the pi regions of wine connects to the other you spiral around and you get a macroscopic quantum state extending the length of the microtubule and in fact Jack Jasinski Travis Craddock and I wrote a paper about the fact that what we call the quantum underground that there are these non polar regions inside nucleic acids lipids and proteins that's pretty much all the types of biomolecules we have so inside all of these are a regions that could be supportive of quantum and could be entangle with everything so life may turn out to be a quantum system sorry oh I think I don't have any more to say no hi I have a question regarding the non computability of consciousness you seem to touch upon the fact that there are non computable mathematical statements which is fair and and proven I don't quite see the logic jump that you go from that point into the understanding of mathematics to be a non computable entity can you further elaborate that logical step you make well it really goes back to the girdle theorem which tells us that I understand I mean the way I read it and I don't see anything wrong with this is that the way we understand mathematics is not a computational process and that was the argument I was trying to make if I didn't make it clearly enough well then I didn't it's certainly the point is that we see from the girdle theorem and things like it that our standing of mathematics isn't the following of rules and because the following rules always a subject to theorems of that nature and therefore since we can understand the truths that are not part of the following of those rules how do we do it well we do it by understanding that's the argument an understanding therefore the argument goes is not the following the rules so it's not an algorithmic process I know a lot of people argue about this and the argument that I was trying to address with my cartoon of the our ancestors was that okay some people say it's such a complicated algorithm but how do we know what the girl fingers and so on sure but the argument that I tried to make there is that no algorithm that could come about in my natural selection where the selection is not to do with sophisticated mathematics how does that algorithm deal with sophisticated mathematics which it seems to be capable of doing and that's a mystery if it's just algorithmic I mean that's the argument if it's not clear I apologize I also say that knowing understanding is a feeling that that's how I look at enough Roger agrees with it but if you once you you know something it's you understand it it's a feeling and that's consciousness and that's quality and that's something that's not in conventional neuroscience my question is what accounts for the unity of consciousness in the microtubule quantum view how how do non separated in space through the brain managed to unify come together to create a holistic conscious experience and also what accounts for the bits of brain even if you look at layer five cortex even if we just focused on that question what accounts for the bits of that that are not conscious that are not part of our qualia like low-level visual processing for example well your first question what accounts to the unity I think that's a quantum effect it's quantum coherence and entanglement and initially we were worried about quantum coherence entanglement between neurons jumping the synapse up in the membrane but on Urbana has actually shown quantum coherence between neurons so and we had postulated gap junctions that quantum parents might tunnel across but you probably don't need that according to his findings and but it's absolutely necessary and it's a much bigger problem for classical approaches because as you probably know if if you see a visual object the shape color motion and meaning are processed in different parts of visual cortex go from back to front at different times and yet if you look in the sky and you see something that's triangular and red and whipping around it's a kite you know it immediately you don't see the shape you don't see the color you know the meaning you know what it is instantly altogether so there's not only spatial entanglement that must be happening but temporal because of the different timing and there's a whole whole long story about Temple Mount locality going back to lipids experiments and many other experiments so I would say it's entanglement coherence and entanglement which can include spatial and temporal I think clashes I mean my view would be that consciousness is not specifically localized in one place or another that it depends what you're thinking about then it can be localized in one place for another and it's not to be thought of as you know individual microtubules is something which surpasses the individual and it's well there are also other aspects so this is that certain parts of the brain don't seem to be conscious at all such as the cerebellum which has many more neurons than the cerebrum and so it's not just a question of neurons and what they're doing and how many computations they're carrying hours and all that sort of thing it really depends on the structures and Stewart has the idea that these pyramidal cells which have the special special characters of the non polar microtubules may be really major parts but they're not localized at one particular place so if one's ones consciousness for some particular thing it may be the activity is more there or whenever the other place is but it's not something which is sort of localized in one region that's the view I have and that relates to your second question about whether it's just what about the non pyramidal cells and so I think at any one time not all the pyramidal cells are involved and that consciousness as Roger said can quite literally move around the brain and one of the celling one of the key points of integrated information theory is they claim that consciousness can only be in the back of the brain and there in another competition with global neuronal work space where it's supposed to be in the front of the brain and they're spending five million dollars on a bunch of MRIs to decide whether consciousness is in the front or the back and I think it's context dependent it can be in the front sometimes the back sometimes it can be a mixture can be a so it could be some turbulence here some turbulence there some microtubules here that I'll that I'll get entangled because for something particular to their state and that's how you get a conscious moment at any one time say thank you say I'm here thank you for the talk I had kind of a two-part question which is related so firstly you were able to demonstrate well or conjecture that quantum chemistry of quantum effects would change the chemistry of the brain and would be related to all sorts of molecules but I couldn't quite get the jump of how that would come together to perform consciousness and also like related to the previous question consciousness would have to be an emergent phenomena based on all of the interactions that are taking place in the brain so why should we be focusing on the underlying elements but rather looking at how the emotions might occur and how do you think that the emotions might occur you're putting words in our mouth I don't think either of us mentioned the word emergence and so nonlinear dynamics you know a lot of people have said well consciousness emerges at some magical much and say magical at some threshold at some critical threshold due to spontaneous activity axons firing or dendritic or whatever that you get a critical level of something in consciousness emerges we're saying the opposite we're saying that consciousness is actually a fundamental property it goes all the way down in the structure of the universe access through quantum activities in microtubules so we're not emergentist at all and it's not that consciousness affects the chemistry that then goes on to perform consciousness consciousness is consciousness affects the the neuronal activity to then fire an axon to move your move your hand or speak a word so consciousness you know Christophe has the idea that that consciousness is and spikes is in the firings and I think it's in the dendrites at the end of integration they have the integrated information theory of and I think it's it is integration but it's in the dendrites and when you reach threshold for or kawar collapse you also select tubulin States microtubule states which will trigger the axon to fire and that enacts behavior so consciousness is fundamental and that leads that it's not emergent it's a question here but and consciousness does it exist across brains I mean is is at the notion of hyper brain if more than you know one brain exists in doing entanglement would that be something called totally different and what the theory explained it I don't think well if you want you know nonlocality something like parapsychology or anything in that area you definitely need a quantum mechanism no we're not claiming that we have enough things to worry about based on our claims but I will say that if you believe in parapsychology or precognition or any of that stuff quantum effects are a must because you have nonlocality but whether they exist or not is another question I don't hi sorry I guess it's a question for both of you really and kind of a personal question I guess a lot of people alive today and alive throughout history would say that consciousness is something that can't be explained by science like we're attempting to put this like mechanistic view on it and like I wonder what it would take for either of you to accept or believe that consciousness won't be explained by science like do you think it's inevitable that it will be explained by science if we work hard enough or it's an open-ended question well it certainly has an awful lot to do with Stuart's job as an anesthesiologist clearly turning consciousness off with particular gases and after all these are substances which I mean it's very hard to see that it doesn't certainly is strongly influenced by science and by physical processes and so on and that's that's obviously the case so to take the view that it's something independent of science is very hard view for me to see I mean maybe I try to argue that current science is not sufficient to accommodate consciousness within it but I'm not trying to say that science as a whole will ever be able to of course you may say that's a face just as much as it would be afraid to say a car to be explained by science but I'd like to think that science I don't see any reason why it's beyond science it certainly you can turn it off as Stewart does when he does his anaesthesia you can turn it on again there's it's part of the job too that's what we built for these are clearly connected with physical processes we may not understand them all very deeply we think we do a lot better than we used to and I just don't see why there should be a limit it's something very different I certainly agree that there is something very different about consciousness from unconscious processes how about to say just because it's very different to say that it cannot be explained by science it seems to me to be a bold snake step to take well that's certainly a view that people I think held in the ancient times much more than they do not you actually have two questions if I may and please accept my apologies in advance if my questions seem to be the direct consequence of my misunderstanding of your ideas so my first question is how do you explain experiments where or you know humans that have damage to their brain in particular areas where some disturbance to a critical part of the brain actually causes a disruption and consciousness areas like fruit unius and so forth so that's the first question and the second question is how do you actually you seem to be suggesting that because of the physical quality of consciousness you should basically expect to see this you should expect a similar quality of consciousness in different species for example because they're all built from the same blocks and if we're conscious at this level that means that you know a human baby is conscious at the same level it doesn't matter that their brain has not developed because they still have the same microtubules and so on and mice should have the same level of consciousness and so on and every other part of this universe that possesses such vibrations that you were talking about I don't think we ever said it was the same level of consciousness and my view there can be very different levels of consciousness even in one individual if I'm asleep and dreaming then I have a degree of consciousness but I don't think it's anything like the degree which is I possess when I'm awake and then likewise I don't think that a mouse probably has such a big degree of consciousness as a normal human being so why is that why do we have a different level of consciousness or quality of consciousness when you're sleeping as opposed to when you're awake I think there's lots to be explained there which we don't know but I just don't see why you expect them to be the same level I mean the expectation would be it's very different levels I'm sorry yeah but you could have more blocks than cake I mean you know brick is the same as a brick I mean there are different kinds of bricks but say now we're gonna say let me let me answer your first question now why specific lesions give right can cause loss of consciousness for example if you have a thalamic stroke you get locked-in syndrome so you got to be careful saying they're not conscious they could be conscious but unable to to communicate and it also depends when the lesion occurs for example there are many cases of people who as adults have been discovered to have massive hydrocephalus and yet they're perfectly normal there was a famous case somebody at Oxford or some place it was a very good student and got an CT or an MRI and the brain was almost all fluid with a very thin cortical mantle and the difference there is that if that happens is the baby and it doesn't cause other problems due to increased pressure that the neurons do adapt thanks to microtubules which grow and extend and make new synapses so if it happens congenitally or early on you can adapt and make new connections whereas if you're in a adult and then it's hard because neurons don't divide so the microtubules can only do so much so specific lesions first you got to be careful that they are truly unconscious and not just locked in and also it depends on when the lesion occurs I think we have to maybe take one more question than that or I will take to that one and that one then go into unconsciousness Thanks thanks for the excellent lecture my question is in congenital brain disorders is a frequency different have you come across the experimenting and at that level like I suppose it's the microtubules that have certain frequency frequency yeah this actually goes back to the question about the levels of consciousness in a simple organism might have whereas we have let's say 10 million conscious or kawar events per second a simple organism because e sub G is so much smaller my only have a few per minute or a few per second so they're still having conscious moments but at a much much slower rate and without the intensity so it would be lower intensity lower frequency so there wouldn't be they would be conscious but not conscious as conscious as we are thanks for this thought-provoking presentation and for in Theon for response rate I was wondering about in the world condensed matter physics what experiments if any would further this these theories and there's lots of if you know I speculate about the residents phenomenon that happened oh is there a correlation does that help to explain any of this or is there an experimental verification that would apply to this are we thinking about the physics or about to do with consciousness the physics the condensed matter physics is it the ultra low temperatures how does that apply to this level of quantum I mean in the brain is not absolute temperature right yeah sure no well I mean when superconductivity was first discovered you had to have extremely low temperatures and it was thought to be a process which only existed at very low temperatures and then high temperature superconductivity was discovered okay not quite at the level of a brain but if you consider the whole scale of possible temperatures it's much it's up there almost so I think the more we discover the more we find that phenomena which we believe can only exists with very simple or very cold systems that with when the structure is we don't always understand it very well but we see events circumstances under which these phenomena which seemed to exist only theoretically at first only very low temperatures are playing a role at much larger temperatures I think I refer to experiments which did require very low temperatures but that's really the begin to see that these phenomena they're tall and the current view of quantum mechanics if you look at these sort of yeah you what people think among physicists as a whole they tend to think there can't be anything wrong with quantum mechanics it's such a wonderful theory that you don't expect to see violations of the type I'm talking about but the theory itself is self inconsistent as I've tried to describe I mean the evolution of the quantum state if the Schrodinger equation is something inconsistent with what happens when the measurement is made and it's written this is crazy trying to understand that and people attempt also to apply quantum theory to circumstances which are extremely different from the very small things we have observation for for example black holes and people talk about the black hole paradox information paradox which is something that comes about where somehow you destroy information in the black hole and yet you couldn't because a quantum system can't destroy information and so this is regarded as a great paradox but you're looking at a huge thing on the one hand and to believe that the quantum mechanics that we hold to today is going to stretch to that level without change seems to be an enormous assumption and just particularly because there is this evidence in the very way we use quantum mechanics the two processes they as I tried to point out the quantum evolution according to the Schrodinger on one hand and the process which seems to take place when measurement is made when the wavefunction collapses on the other hand and people worried about this for decades and usually they don't think that quantum mechanics could be wrong because it works so well in circumstances under which he does work and explains lots of things which weren't understood previously but it's not the whole story and we need to look beyond theory as we have it at the moment and I don't think it's going to last in its current state my prediction is the experiments will show their quantum mechanics isn't quite right this will be a big step I think it's probably a minority prediction but it's certainly what I expect if I can comment on that question there's a phenomenon called Froelich coherence Herbert Froelich was a biophysicist in the 60s and 70s and he proposed that if you have a biological molecules in a geometric array and he referred specifically to membrane proteins in a membrane so they were constrained in a in a geometry and they were oscillating coherently due to voltages in them that they were that they would oscillate coherently due to the heat bath ambient temperature the heat surrounding would pump them and they would oscillate coherently and this has actually been shown in in systems recently and I met Froelich in the 80s and I asked him if microtubules would also be good candidates and he didn't know about them but when I explained them too he said yes and so kind of what we're talking about of the out of the coherence among tubulins in a microtubule and microtubule in microtubule is kind of a form of role of coherence I think didn't your brother work on something like that with Onsager well he worked he did work without second I'm not sure he works on liquid helium and things like that where you have very cold temperatures and you have behavior which certainly people thought we'd only exists at very low temperatures and sure it's a challenge I think this is one of the reasons people have trouble with the point of view that Stewart and I are putting forward because it does require that you have quantum coherence at a very high level compared to what people would do in the lab but the more I learn about biology and I'm still very ignorant about it the more I'm impressed by the extraordinary kind of effects which take place was do seem to depend on quantum effects and of course we have a long way to go because as was commented earlier the fact that we what we need is not just quantum effects in the brain but beyond quantum effects that is to say that consciousness we claim is taking advantage of where quantum mechanics isn't quite right so that's that's a bold thing to say I think we have good reasons to suggest such a thing but I can also understand where there's a lot of opposition to that view we need the quantum coherence to get to Rogers new physics so that comes first and when we started people were skeptical and worse than that but then in 2006 the plants were discovered to have photosynthesis and it's it's much briefer but it's a much shorter path line quantum effects of quantum effects quantum effects in in plants so if a potato can do it our brains can probably do it alright so that was very kind of you both to give us this discussion and thank you all for your patience there is I'm told to let you know that there's a some food and drink outside on the terrace and thank you very much

Channel: The Qualcomm Institute

Views: 59,991

Rating: 4.9011626 out of 5

Keywords: Qualcomm Institute, Calit2, UC San Diego, UCSD, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, QI, Penrose, brain, INC, Hameroff, institute for neural computing

Id: xGbgDf4HCHU

Length: 112min 48sec (6768 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/gripmyhand]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhAVbX3K5Q4

[u/gripmyhand]

2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_sgFETJzak