Finding Spirit in the Fabric of Space and Time

[Balder]

I recently read an essay recently in the EnlightenNext magazine which might be of interest to some members here. 

 

Finding Spirit in the Fabric of Space and Time: An Interview with S....

 

Here are a few excerpts.

 

From the intro: 

 

"Although he holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Anesthesiology and Psychology at the University of Arizona and spends much of his time in surgery at the University of Arizona Medical Center, Hameroff is best known for his work in the arena of consciousness studies. In 1994, he founded the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference series, bringing together the world’s leading experts on consciousness every two years in Tucson, Arizona, to explore various shades of something called the “hard problem”—how and why subjective mind appears to arise from objective matter. And for nearly twenty years, Hameroff has collaborated with Oxford mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose to develop (and defend) a quantum-physics-based theory of consciousness that is impressive, original, and ambitious, to say the least. The theory is a fusion of Hameroff’s and Penrose’s distinctly different areas of expertise: Hameroff’s studies of tiny structures called “microtubules” within human brain cells and Penrose’s work on the relationship between quantum physics, gravity, and the geometry of space and time. In some sense, their work could be considered a “grand unified theory” of quantum physics and consciousness—a theory somewhat more sophisticated than anything you’re likely to find in the spiritual section of your local bookstore. After interviewing Hameroff, I found myself questioning my previous dismissal of what I’ve come to call “quantum mysticism.” And I’m sure others will find his arguments equally illuminating."

 

And from the interview:

 

SH: Penrose turned the Copenhagen interpretation around. Conscious observation doesn’t cause quantum wave-function collapse, as the Copenhagen interpretation says. Rather, he suggested consciousness is the wave function collapse, or at least one particular kind of collapse. It’s a quantum collapse that gives off fundamental units of conscious awareness, just like an electron orbital shift gives off a photon of light. And like photons, quanta of consciousness come in a spectrum of different intensities, frequencies and qualities.

 

EN: Wow! In this interpretation of quantum physics, superpositions naturally collapse themselves? And those collapses somehow produce consciousness?

 

SH: Yes, if decoherence or measurement doesn’t occur first. And that’s a fairly tricky thing, otherwise we’d have consciousness all over the place. If E is very small, t will be very long. So if an electron with a very small E in superposition were isolated from environment, it would have a conscious moment only after a very long time t—something like ten million years. And it would be a very low intensity experience—rather dull. A large superposition E, if isolated, would reach threshold quickly with a high intensity experience. We think the brain has evolved to isolate large superpositions E, but otherwise it’s very difficult to isolate large superpositions. So consciousness can happen whenever E=h/t, but in the universe it is fairly rare.

 

So how does it happen in the brain? That was kind of my job to figure out when Roger and I began to formalize our model in the mid-90s. I showed how synaptic inputs could tune, or ‘orchestrate’ OR-mediated quantum computations in microtubules, hence our theory became known as orchestrated objective reduction, ‘Orch OR’. There was the obvious issue of decoherence in the warm brain which I suggested was avoided by coherent biochemical pumping, microtubule resonances, ordered water and actin gelation encasing microtubules. Over the years we’ve had a lot of criticism about this, but recent evidence has clearly shown quantum coherence in warm biological systems. Another biological issue was how a quantum state isolated in microtubules in one neuron could extend to those in other neurons, for which I suggested gap junctions—window-like connections between neurons. In recent years, gap junctions have been shown to mediate gamma synchrony EEG, the best measurable correlate of consciousness. We also addressed how tubulin states could be regulated by weak quantum forces, be isolated from environment yet interact with it causally, and how it all fit in modern neuroscience.

 

So we had a reasonable story for how OR events—Orch OR—could happen in microtubules throughout wide regions of the brain. And when these collapses happen again and again, you get a series of conscious moments that is your experience of a stream of consciousness. So consciousness consists of a series of discrete events, yet is experienced as continuous. This is kind of like a movie appearing to be continuous yet being composed of individual frames, only with a movie you have an outside observer. In Orch OR, the frame itself has the observer built into it. The conscious moment and the quantum wave-function self-collapse are one and the same—a ripple in the fundamental level of the universe.

 

What is fundamental spacetime geometry? If we were to shrink smaller and smaller, much smaller than atoms, the medium of spacetime would appear smooth and featureless until we eventually reached the incredibly tiny Planck scale—the basement level of the universe—where patterns and webs of information exist. What it might look like is approached theoretically through geometry arising from string theory, twistors, spin networks or quantum gravity. Roger is one of the world’s experts in these areas, and he suggested that information embedded at this level, and repeating holographically, contained mathematical truth, as well as perhaps other Platonic values. Roger suggested that pure form and truth arise from information intrinsically encoded in the universe. This led to his noncomputability.

 

When superpositions decohere, or are measured as in standard quantum physics, the quantum possibilities collapse or choose a definite state randomly—like flipping a coin. But when decoherence and measurement are avoided and OR conscious threshold is reached, Penrose suggested that the choices of definite states—the conscious choices we make, or perceptions we experience—are not chosen randomly from among possibilities, but are influenced, or guided, by Platonic information embedded in spacetime geometry. He called this influence noncomputable because the Platonic influences were outside the system, built into the universe. Consciousness does sometimes involve choices or perceptions which appear to be noncomputable, e.g., intuition, instinct, divine guidance, enlightenment, or “following the way of the Tao.”  

 

EN: So according to Penrose, gravitational effects at the quantum level are causing wave functions to collapse automatically, emitting little bursts of consciousness that somehow result in our own continuous, moment-to-moment experience of being conscious, aware, and alive?

 

SH: That’s right. I don’t know how familiar you are with the early-twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, but his thinking was very much along these lines as well. He said that consciousness was a sequence of what he called “occasions of experience occurring in a wider field of proto-conscious experience.” In his view, the universe isn’t made of things or particles. It’s a process. It’s made up of events. In the early nineties, physicist Abner Shimony pointed out that Whitehead’s occasions of experience are very much like quantum wave-function collapses, or quantum state reductions, so our view seems pretty consistent with Whitehead’s. But what about his “wider field of proto-conscious experience”?

 

When Roger and I first came out with our theory, we didn’t directly address the hard problem—why we have conscious experience. But when the Journal of Consciousness Studies did a special “hard problem” issue in 1996, we took a stab at it. And we basically followed  Whitehead, saying that the “wider field of proto-conscious experience” was the fabric of the universe at the Planck scale—quantum gravity, or fundamental spacetime geometry—and that OR events were “occasions,” or ripples, occurring in that wider field. Fundamental properties of matter such as spin, mass, and charge are irreducible components of the universe that are somehow embedded in this Planck-scale geometry. So Roger and I proposed that the primary components of consciousness, of awareness, or at least their precursors—are also fundamental, irreducible, and built into the basic structure of the universe. After all, why should precursors to matter be present at that level but not the precursors to mind?

 

EN: Good question. You’re saying it’s possible that at least some basic level of consciousness may be as fundamental to the universe as the laws of physics?

 

SH: Yes. The laws of physics must include consciousness, or its precursors. I wouldn’t say the universe is conscious, just like I wouldn’t say the universe is entirely yellow, or purple, or wet or whatever. But under the right conditions, any of these can be true for small regions of the universe. The un-collapsed, still-superpositioned precursors of consciousness are somewhat like dreams. When OR occurs, the universe—at least a tiny portion of it—wakes up.

 

GAMMA FREQUENCY & ALTERED STATES

EN: We began by talking about microtubules, so please tie these together for me. How do these quantum wave-function collapses relate to what is happening with the microtubules in the brain?

 

SH: Well, the best measurable correlate of consciousness is a type of EEG—that is, electroencephalography, or brain-wave measurement—called gamma synchrony at around forty times per second, discovered in the 1980s in Germany by Wolf Singer. Typically with EEG you get a mess of squiggly lines, but if you break them down into frequency ranges you get various types of waves—delta, theta, alpha, and beta. These indicate electrical waves in the brain ranging from zero up to about thirty hertz, or thirty waves per second. But Singer discovered a higher, perfectly coherent frequency that came to be known as gamma synchrony, which ranged from thirty to ninety hertz, or even higher, though forty hertz is typical. Gamma synchrony is the best marker we have for consciousness in the brain. This suggests that conscious moments, or Whitehead “occasions,” occur roughly forty times per second.

 

EN: You’re saying that by monitoring someone’s brain with an EEG, researchers have been able to isolate a certain frequency of activity that only correlates with conscious experiences?

SH: There has to be a critical amount of it, but yes. And it can occur in different parts of the brain, kind of moving around. For example, if somebody smells a rose, they have this gamma synchrony in the olfactory cortex, the part of the brain dealing with smell. If you’re having visual consciousness, you’re going to have gamma synchrony in visual cortex, and in frontal cortex. For sexual pleasure, there is gamma synchrony in a part of the brain called nucleus accumbens, and so on. Gamma synchrony goes away with general anesthesia while other brain neuronal activities continue.

 

So Roger and I proposed that gamma synchrony correlates with OR quantum-state self-collapses happening roughly forty times per second among coherent, organized networks of the brain’s microtubules. Using E=h/t, we set time t as twenty-five milliseconds, the time duration for forty events per second, and calculated E in terms of superpositioned microtubule subunits. We came up with roughly nanograms of superpositioned tubulins, occupying roughly one hundred thousand neurons worth of microtubules, a number which matched other estimates for consciousness coming from conventional approaches.

 

Now, I should note that the frequency of conscious events can vary. In heightened or altered states, we seem to be having more conscious moments per second, which would mean that our perception of the outside world would be slower. For example, in a car accident when the car is spinning, people often report that time seems to slow down and the outside world appears to be moving half as fast as it usually does. This could be because their rate of gamma synchrony is changing from around forty hertz to eighty hertz. And similarly, someone once asked the great basketball player Michael Jordan in his prime how he was able to outperform the other team so well. He said when he’s playing well, it’s like the other team is in slow motion. So maybe Michael Jordan was experiencing sixty, seventy, or eighty conscious moments per second and the opponents were only experiencing something like forty.

 

We also see it in meditation. Buddhist texts describe flickering in pure awareness which have actually been counted—something like six and a half million in a day, which comes out to be in the gamma synchrony range. A few years ago, the Dalai Lama sent some monks to a lab in Wisconsin. They found that while meditating, the monks had the highest gamma synchrony ever recorded. They were actually operating at about eighty to one-hundred hertz, with control subjects at forty. And even at baseline, before they would meditate, the monks showed an unusually high rate of gamma synchrony. Years of meditating had changed their brains so that they were just normally in this higher-frequency gamma range. That suggests they’re having a richer and more intense conscious experience more frequently than the average person. You could perhaps also say they were having higher energy, frequency and intensity OR conscious moments, or quanta. They go deeper into the quantum world.

 

[Read the full interview here.]

[Edward theurj Berge]

A couple of excerpts:

"Roger...suggested that information embedded at this level, and repeating holographically, contained mathematical truth, as well as perhaps other Platonic values. Roger suggested that pure form and truth arise from information intrinsically encoded in the universe…. Penrose suggested that the choices of definite states—the conscious choices we make, or perceptions we experience—are not chosen randomly from among possibilities, but are influenced, or guided, by Platonic information embedded in spacetime geometry. He called this influence noncomputable because the Platonic influences were outside the system, built into the universe…. So Roger and I proposed that the primary components of consciousness, of awareness, or at least their precursors—are also fundamental, irreducible, and built into the basic structure of the universe."

Hmmm, skeptic radar activated...

[Balder]

:-D Yeah, I noticed that part, too. I think there are some interesting / intriguing ideas in the article, but as a whole, their vision doesn't satisfy my "postmeta" predilections, either.

[xibalba]

H Balder

I red two books of Penrose,... emperor´s new mind and shadows of the mind... I found them very interesting. Third person language is sometimes refreshing, particularly when it is about intersection between matter and consciousnessor interiority seen from teh outside in other words. It is good for the growth of consciousness studies to have a very creative scientist like Penrose. Some sort of mathematics must lie somehow behind that kind of stuff if we are to describe in 3th person language this relationship. That can be in the same way Hawking´s idea of a self-enclosed universe is for the so called big bang theory, and an idea of "a beginning" in imaginary time, or for Cantor mathematics or a representation of various magnitudes of infinities. At least they can highlight some complex issues in mathematical and empirical terms the "hard problem" instead of a lot of not so productive Moebius strip like sort of reasonements done by so called philosophers of mind like Dennett or Chalmer. Because in this sense, these dudes way of thinking is even more abscond and too predictable.

cheers