Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Stuart Hameroff on Penrose, Self-Similar Consciousness, and Time Travelling Free Will (technical)

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/uLo0Zwe579gStuart Hameroff is an American anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness and contention that consciousness originates from quantum states in neural microtubules, partnering with Roger Penrose to explicate on the physics involved.TOE Clippings: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdITf9DoFmndXy7nXWIoa7g Discord Invite Code (as of Mar 04 2021): dmGgQ2dRzS Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverythingPatreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44 iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id152175880200:00:00 Introduction 00:02:18 For 73, how does Hameroff stay fast and adroit? 00:02:58 On Hameroff's personal beliefs of God 00:03:44 How did Stuart come to the idea that consciousness arises in microtubules? 00:08:55 The non-computational nature of consciousness and the hard-problem 00:11:56 Gödel's theorem and quantum gravity / superposition 00:16:54 Quantum computers and Frolich resonances 00:19:25 Roger Penrose enters in the picture where / when / how? 00:23:45 David Chalmer's legendary talk was at the conference Hameroff organized 00:26:33 Penrose modified Hameroff's ideas 00:28:04 The vibrations of consciousness (Gamma) 00:32:00 Details on the calculations of the collapse time of tubulin and microtubules 00:38:07 The myth of the 1% of the brain 00:41:33 Firing rates of neurons during psychedelics and how the brain seemingly "decreases" 00:46:42 Which comes first, cognition or consciousness? 00:48:27 Anesthesia and "truth serums" (disinhibition revealing inner truths?) 00:50:04 What's it like to work with Penrose? What's an example of a problem you're working on? 00:57:00 Free-will as travelling backward in time (Libett's experiments) 01:01:36 Dennett won't comment on his theories 01:02:33 Agreements / disagreements with Penrose 01:06:16 Explaining terms: Isolated systems, phases of quantum computing, gamma synchrony 01:11:40 Explaining terms: Benzine rings, non-polar, and hydrophobic 01:13:08 Structure of the microtubules 01:17:33 Tau proteins and Alzheimer's 01:17:00 Fractals / self-similarity and its relation to consciousness 01:20:06 Quantifying consciousness with anesthesia 01:21:42 Glial cells vs neurons for consciousness / computation 01:24:08 Can quantum computers be consciousness? 01:28:55 Is periodicity required or is aperiodicity a prius? 01:29:41 IIT vs Global Neuronal vs Orch OR 01:33:57 Falsifying Hameroff's and Penrose's theory (Orch OR) 01:37:00 Koch's thought experiment on the ridiculousness of Schrödinger's cat being alive and dead 01:38:01 How do Platonic Forms come into this? 01:40:12 What Curt likes most about Orch OR 01:42:52 Experiencing "nothing" 01:43:55 Comparing Wolfram's theory 01:45:00 How does Penrose's theory solve the Hard problem of consciousness 01:47:07 Does there exist free will 01:48:15 Strong vs Weak anthropic principle and and an explanation for the ratios of nature

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Today's guest is Stuart Hameroff, who along with Roger Penrose, has a theory of consciousness. What's particularly interesting is that Roger Penrose is a rigorous physicist bordering on mathematician, which means even more rigor, and generally speaking, those people tend to stay away from theories of consciousness that aren't simply emergent from material complexity. However, Hameroff and Penrose have a theory that combines general relativity with quantum theory, and it's in fact in this unification that produces consciousness within what are called microtubules, though it doesn't necessarily need to be within there. This is a technical talk, and we didn't even get to half the questions. There's quite a

bit of jargon, and that's because I believe that one needs to speak with a certain level of domain specific language if one is going to make progress, otherwise we stay at the Zhejun level. If you're merely listening to this rather than watching, such as on Spotify or iTunes or you're away from the monitor, there are concomitant visuals in the YouTube video. For those unacquainted, the point of this channel is to interview those who have contributions to a theory of everything, and then for you, and us, to collectively, via Discord, via the subreddit, come to a greater understanding of the laws that govern us, and God, and free will, and so on. There is a clips channel called ToeClippings with shorter, shareable segments from these

larger interviews. I welcome people to submit theories to me and to each other, but it's quickly becoming overwhelming, so at some point I will host informal chats with audience members on their theories of everything on the Toe Clippings channel. Since this main channel is heavily dense with information and plenty of preparation plus editing, it would be great to keep it that way. If you'd like to see more conversations such as this, then please consider donating at patreon.com slash kurtjimungle, or if you're simply interested in the general mission. Once 50 patrons is reached, we'll host a friendly, constructive conversation, rather than a critical one, with Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, and Jonathan Vervaeke. Enjoy. So Stuart, how was your day?

Hoffman and Jonathan Vervaeke. Enjoy. So Stuart, how was your day? Hi Kurt, it's great. I'm in California with my wife and we're kind of taking it easy today, so I'm happy to talk with you and catch up. Did you perform any daily ritual, any meditation, any special diet? Today, no. Usual. Any special diet? Today, no. Usual. Well, something I noticed about you was you're extremely quick-minded, astute, and lucid. And then I looked up your age, and you're past 70. I hope I'm not spoiling anything.

But I'm curious, how is it that you're able to stay so quick-witted and articulate? Well, I'm still working as an anesthesiologist. I'm on vacation at the moment. But I stay active. I have keen intellectual interests, as you know, and love life and savor every moment and just keep going. Were you always like that? Probably, yeah. probably yeah do you pray do you believe in god uh i do i in my own way i uh my beliefs are kind of personal and in tune with my own personal beliefs but i was raised in a religious family and got uh you know uh got that from them and uh i'm very grateful to my parents and my family for my upbringing including including my religious. I kind of rebelled against organized religion, but believe in something that organizes the universe, some kind of probably conscious function that organizes the universe. I find that most people who study consciousness have a dislike for institutionalized religion.

Yeah. But they like spirituality in some way, shape, or form. Yes. Right. So why don't you give the audience a Cliff Notes version of your theory? Okay. Well, I got interested in the problem of consciousness when I was in undergrad. I took a philosophy of mind class.

I was a chemistry, physics, math major, pre-med. It was also the late 60s, and we did things then that people did then. And there was a lot of political turmoil, social unrest, as you might imagine. And I got really interested in this philosophy of mind class, but went to medical school. And in medical school, none of the particular specialties, And in medical school, none of the particular specialties, I like the brain-mind problem, but neurology, psychiatry, neurosurgery didn't appeal to me in terms of lifestyle and stuff to do. I stumbled into anesthesiology, but while I was still in medical school, I did a research elective, thinking I might like academics, and was in a cancer lab studying cell division, how cells divide, mitosis. And, you know, the chromosomes, the genes are pulled apart by these structures called mitotic spindles made of microtubules,

and that perfectly separates the chromosomes and genetic material. And everybody else in the lab, I'm pretty sure, got into the genes and went on into genetic engineering and all that. But for some reason, I got fixated on the structures that pulled apart the chromosomes. And if they didn't do this delicate dance perfectly, the genetic material would not be perfectly divided and you'd get abnormal mitosis, you get maldevelopment, you get cancer and so forth. So I got interested in the structures that did the mechanical movement.

And at that time in the early 70s, it was appreciated that they are also in neurons, and neurons were full of them. And their structure was revealed, and they had a lattice structure. And that looked to me something like a computer matrix, because I was trying to figure out how computers work. Computers were new to me anyway back then in the early 70s. So I was interested in consciousness. I looked inside neurons and there was all these structures that looked like little computers. So I got the idea that these microtubules, as they were called, might be processing information and subserving consciousness at a level below neurons. Because as you know, almost everybody else thinks that the brain is a bunch of, is a level below neurons. Because as you know, almost everybody else thinks that the brain is a bunch of, is a computer of neurons. Each neuron acting as a simple on-off switch, yes or no, a bit, a one or a zero. And if you get enough complex computation among neurons,

you get consciousness emerging in some way. But yet there were single cell organisms that do very clever things. They can swim around, find food, find a mate, have sex, learn, and so forth. And they were a single cell. So if a single cell paramecium can do that, for example, I thought it's kind of an insult to a neuron to say it's just a one or a zero, depending on whether it fires or not. And so I got interested in these microtubules inside neurons. and so I started I got interested in these microtubules inside neurons so a year a year later a couple years later when I was looking for a specialty to do in medicine I thought about

doing pure research and decided against it but I stumbled into anesthesiology because the the guy who would become my my future chairman a guy named Burnell Brown a really brilliant and charismatic character became a good friend of mine and my mentor said if you want to figure out consciousness future chairman, a guy named Bernal Brown, a really brilliant and charismatic character, became a good friend of mine. And my mentor said, if you want to figure out consciousness, figure out how anesthesia works. And two, here's a paper on showing that anesthesia acts by depolymerizing microtubules that you're so fond of. What does depolymerizing mean? It means they fall apart. They disassemble. So microtubules are lattice polymers of individual proteins called tubulin. Each tubulin is just one protein, like a peanut-shaped protein.

But by entropy, this is really weird how entropy drives something so elaborately self-organized. They self-assemble into these hollow tubes and grow like girders or scaffolding. I was watching this talk by Anirban, I believe. Anirban Bhanupati, yes. They self-assemble into these hollow tubes and grow like girders or scaffolding. I was watching this talk by Anirban, I believe. Anirban Bandipati, yes. Right, right, right. And they self-assemble and they grow cells and they make neuronal as much anesthesia to cause them to disassemble, to depolymerize, to go from these elaborate polymer structures into the individual proteins, enough anesthesia will do that. Well, that's about five times the anesthesia you need to cause unconsciousness.

So fortunately, we don't cause our microtubules to fall apart. We just affect them in some more subtle way, fortunately. Although too much anesthesia can do that. So anyway, Brunel, my future chairman, said you can figure out consciousness. It has something to do with microtubules. It's a lot of fun, and it's pretty good money. So that was a long time ago. And I went into anesthesia and here I am 46 years later, still doing it clinically and still enjoying it. And the research has given me an opportunity to kind of go where I want to go.

Then you started collaborating with Penrose. And I'm curious about the practical aspects of that. We can talk about it later, but I'm super curious to know what is it like to collaborate with Penrose? How do you do it? Do you use a whiteboard? What's an example of a problem that you've tackled together recently? But we'll talk about this. So you encountered Penrose. I should say before I get to Roger, I should say that I spent about 20 years working on microtubules as classical information processing devices, going around to artificial intelligence meetings, neural net meetings, neuroscience meetings, saying, hey, to understand the brain, you can't just think of the neuron as a one or a zero. You got to go into the deeper

level and get into all this additional information. So, for example, the AI singularity people were saying, well, you have 10 to the 11th neurons are switching at about a thousand per hertz, about a hundred or a thousand synapses, a hundred hertz, give you about 10 to the 16th operations per second. And Kurtzweil in the singularity were saying, well, we get to 10 to the 16th, we'll have brain equivalence and consciousness. if you have the microtubule subunits, about a billion of them per neuron, switching at 10 megahertz, you get 10 to the 16th operations per second per every neuron. So the goalpost for AI was I was pushing it way down the field. And they didn't like that. You know, they said, go away.

You bother us. You know, what do you know? Because they wanted the singularity to happen in their lifetime? Exactly. Give them another couple billion, and they'll have a brain equivalence in another few years. So I thought that was BS. And I thought their approach to the brain was an insult to the brain, an insult to neurons. And I was going around doing my thing, being the best. And then one day,

somebody asked me a very good question. He said, let's say you're right, wise guy, wise ass, and all this is going on. How does that explain consciousness? How does that explain, you know, love, joy, feelings, pinkness, envy, taste, you know, what later became known as the heart problem, according to David Chalmers. And I was a bit stunned. I had to admit they were right. I really didn't know. And I had enjoyed being a pest, but I didn't really have a solution other than we had to look deeper. And the same person suggested I read this book by Roger Penrose called The Emperor's New Mind. And I had vaguely heard of Penrose, but I didn't really know his work. This was, well, he wrote the book in 89, and I think I read it in 91 or so.

And it was quite a tour de force, as you may know. It covered, the main point, it started off through Gödel's theorem arguing that consciousness requires something other than computation. Other than what we think of as classical computation? Or just other than computation? Even quantum computation, that there had to be something else. Because Gödel's theorem, to prove a theorem in mathematics, you have to be outside the computational system. So we extrapolate that to say that for understanding, for us to know something, to know anything, we need something outside of the computational system of the brain. Basically, the neurons fire and not fire.

And I didn't follow all, it got into the weeds in terms of philosophy and mathematics, that kind of lost me. But intuitively, it was, I felt he was onto something. And he was at least questioning and had the same gut feelings that I did, that there was something more to it than that. And, but his answer, you know, what that something was, what the missing ingredient was, got into quantum physics and a self collapse of the wave function and his own theory of the measurement problem. And in quantum mechanics, as you may know, you can have superpositions of multiple coexisting possibilities. Things can be in two states or places at the same time. And yet when you measure or observe them, they become one or the other.

time. And yet when you measure or observe them, they become one or the other. So the very active measurement, or some people thought the very active conscious observation seemed to cause collapse of the wave function. And the other idea is that each possibility coexists and continues and forms its own universe, or the decoherence does it or the bone theory or this or that. And they all have their flaws and they all have their appeals. But Rogers was that, well, the first thing he did that was really kind of mind blowing and still is after all these years is that he explains superposition, which nobody else has even attempted to do as far as I can tell. So the question is, how can something be in two places at the same time? How can it be here and here, the same thing in two different places? And he saw that by resorting to general relativity, by saying that, as you know, for very large objects like the sun, there's curvature of

spacetime. This goes back to Einstein's general relativity. And so Einstein had predicted that a star behind the sun could be visible in an eclipse because the spacetime curvature would bend the light around the spacetime curvature and we would see it, even though we knew it was behind the star. Eddington went to the top of a mountain during an eclipse and proved Einstein right, that there was these big curvature in space-time, and we could see these stars behind the sun in an eclipse. So basically, Einstein equated mass with curvature in space-time geometry for large things. Roger applied that to small things. Instead of a small thing, like a quantum particle, a proton, an electron, or something at the quantum level has a very tiny curvature. And so if it's over here, there's a curvature going this way. If it's over here, there's a curvature going this way. So it being in two places at once was actually two separate curvatures, a separation in space-time. So the fundamental level of the universe that he called space-time geometry, and which he cleverly portrayed as these two-dimensional sheets, could separate.

And you could imagine that if they continue to separate, each would have its own universe and would have multiple worlds. But he said these separations were unstable, and after a time, T would self-collapse to one or the other. And T was inversely related to the amount of separation. So a very large separation would self-collapse to one or the other. And T was inversely related to the amount of separation. So a very large separation would self-collapse quickly, and a small one would take a long time. And, and here was the kicker, and when that collapse occurred to one or the other, there was a moment of consciousness that was created or occurred or emitted, depending on

how you want to describe it. So this was the opposite of the idea that consciousness causes collapse. In Roger's view, collapse occurred spontaneously due to this property of the universe and created consciousness, caused consciousness, almost like a quantum of consciousness, a quantum. And so he turned the so-called copenhagen interpretation and consciousness causes collapse around and said collapse occurs spontaneously and causes consciousness and he did it with these clever drawings and not a whole lot you know there's plenty of math and equations that i didn't follow but i got i got to just because he's more uh creative and well he's more expressive in terms of illustrations and his clever cartoon

he's extremely visual yes yes and artistic and you know he he's also involved with mc escher and and that's kind of a whole sideline but but you know i was able to grow up what he was saying intuitively and so he was saying at the end that, well, there needed to be some kind of quantum computer in the brain that would self-collapse by this threshold, but that neurons firing or firing were too big. So he already knew that neurons were too big, but he didn't have a candidate for a quantum computer. And so reading this after spending 20 years working on microtubules at a smaller level, and I knew a little bit about quantum because there had been a guy named Frohlich, Herbert Frohlich in the 60s and 70s, who claimed that there was quantum coherence in geometric biological lattices that were in a geometric, constrained in a geometric lattice geometry, pumped by heat and in a common voltage. So the heat, which normally would destroy quantum events, was actually pumping it

more like a laser than another kind of quantum state. And so I knew a little bit about Frohlich and Frohlich, I had met with Frohlich and he liked the idea of microtubules being these Frolic oscillators, Frolic coherent devices. Is he still alive? No, he died in 1991. He died a long time ago, actually. I see. I see. We were going to have a conference for him. We had arranged a NATO advanced workshop to bring in a lot of people talking about his theory.

But unfortunately, he died a couple of months before the conference, which we had anyway. It was a great conference, but he died in, I think it was 91. But his idea- Because he had something called Frolic Resonances, right? Frolic Resonance, Frolic Coherence. They just came out actually in the FISREV-A a my wife just gave me the reference a new paper by a guy aristeed dogariu at university of central florida about frolic coherence and it's it's a brand new treatment and it's very pro pro frolic and actually i know aristeed actually we're working together on another project so yeah frolic coherence actually suffices for the kind of quantum state that Roger needed if you had the

right structure. And I thought it applied to microtubules. So anyway, I wrote to Roger after I read his book and said that I really enjoyed it and thought that microtubules, which I described in the letter, might be the quantum computer inside the brain that he needed. And that I, by the way, was going to be in England for a meeting a couple months hence, and be happy to discuss it with him. And I was thrilled and delighted to get a letter, the old fashioned kind, in the mail. And yes, yes, I'm happy to meet you. Come meet me at the mathematical Institute at Oxford and such and such a day in time. And so I did. And he actually, I think you met me at the train station. We walked over and sat in his office for several hours,

actually. And I did almost all the talking. He just asked me a few questions about microtubules and i brought a book that i had i had uh written about microtubules and several articles and uh when we went through all the illustrations what sorts of questions did he ask you he said the first day first thing he asked me was are these things real or biological or math or computer simulations i said oh they're definitely real they They're in all, they're in all living cells, make up mitosis. And I showed him lots of pictures. And, and so he was particularly interested in the, in the geometry of the A-lattice. Now, microtubules can form in two different types of lattices, the A-lattice or the B-lattice. And the A-lattice has a Fibonacci geometry. And Roger is at heart

geometrist or geometer. And Fibonacci, you have these spiral helical windings of the tubulence. And if you follow one pathway, they repeat every three tubulence, another every five, and another every eight, and then 13 and 21 the fibonacci series so the in the a lattice the the fibonacci geometry was was intrinsic to the lattice and he said if that's if a lattice could be could be a quantum device just because of the yonteller effect and and so forth and uh i also was looking deeper inside each tubulin to the pi resonance aromatic amino acids, because I if anything would come of it. Although he did mention that he was going to a conference at Cambridge with Dan Dennett and Pat Churchland, two philosophers of mind, big names, and that, you know, it was going to be about consciousness. And I thought, gee, that'd be very fun to go to, but I was going to a different conference, a Neural Net conference

somewhere else. So he thanked me, we said goodbye. And I said, well, that was cool. I got to meet Roger Penrose and I didn't think anything would come of it. And two weeks later, I was back in London, heading back to the States and had dinner with a friend. And he said, hey, guess what? My friend went to this meeting in Cambridge and Roger Penrose was talking about you and your damn microtubules. Oh, great. And I was thrilled. I was just tickled to death. So I said, wow, that's even better. And then a few months later, I got invited to a meeting that Roger had arranged to get me invited to. It was obvious in Sweden, a very limited, basically speakers only

meeting north of the Arctic Circle and in the the midnight sun which was dan dennett was there and petra storig and a few other people and um roger and his wife vanessa and we were there for five days and uh you know the meetings were during the day but with no no darkness we just stayed up and talked and went skiing at night and walked and played ping pong and did all kinds of stuff. With no darkness? Pardon me? You said with no darkness? It was above the polar circle in Sweden during the midnight sun.

It was like in July or August, way, way north. So midnight sun. And we actually went skiing at night on a place on the, I think it was the Norwegian Swedish border. And so it was a lot of fun and got to know him a little bit. And at that meeting, I invited him to a conference that I was, or I was organized the first Tucson conference, the science of consciousness in Tucson.

And it was the first interdisciplinary conference. And I invited him and bribed him with a trip to the Grand Canyon. And not that I needed to bribe him, but he was happy to go. And so he was at the first conference, which we held in 1994. He's called then Tour de Science of Consciousness. And later we changed to the Science of Consciousness. So we've been doing that every year, either in Tucson or elsewhere since 94. So he's the first one. He's been back to probably five or six of them. Was it the first one that 28 year old David Chalmers was there and you went on a hike?

Yeah. David Chalmers and his famous talk. Yes. So let me tell you, since you mentioned it, I'll tell you the story about that. So I was, I was the main organizer. I got Al Kasniak, my friend from psychology, and Al Scott from mathematics to organize it. And the internet had just happened, so we had email. But most of the correspondence was by fax and this and that. And the idea at the time was to have the first day on philosophy, the second day on neuroscience, the third day on cognitive science, the fourth day on math and physics and biology, and the fifth day on phenomenal experience, which in retrospect was a huge mistake. Because what you really want to do is integrate, you know, different approaches on a given topic. Yeah, I see. I see.

But that's the way, you know, out of naivety, we set it up. So the first morning was philosophy and the first two speakers were well-known philosophers who got up and, and literally read their talks, their papers with no slides. And that's, that's what philosophers did back then. Some of them still do, but they've come a long way. And, and, and after the first two talks, everybody in the audience is, they're going to sleep. The philosophers dug up, but everybody else was like, what the hell?

But then the third talk was Chalmers. And he was an unknown postdoc who had kind of lobbied me by email to give a plenary talk. It was either plenary or posters. And he said, I don't want to give a plenary talk. It was either plenary or posters. And he said, I don't want to give a poster. And his, his abstract was about the hard problem versus the easy problems and problems. So I said, okay, what the heck? So he, he was the unknown third speaker. And so he got up and woke everybody up out of their stupor because he gave a great talk, exciting talk. He, you know, he had hair down to his waist and strutted back and forth with an Australian accent, you know,

kind of looked like Mick Jagger prancing back and forth saying, yeah, memory, attention, all this, they're difficult, but they're relatively easy compared to why we have conscious experience while we have qualia. So he just went off on the hard problem. And was that the first time he introduced it publicly? Yes. Yes. And so after, after his talk was the coffee break and I went around like a playwright on Broadway, you know, listening in and people go, Oh, the hard problem,

the hard problem. That's why we're here. And he really galvanized the movement. So from that point on, I think there was a kind of a unified field of consciousness studies, uh, from that, that talk on, and we became good friends afterwards. And he, uh, David, uh, tagged along to the grand Canyon with Roger and a bunch of other people. And, um, you know, we've been friends ever since. How has your theory of consciousness been modified by Penrose? Well, my theory was just a more computational, some would say ad nauseum, you know, more, more computation at a deeper level. So it was hierarchical and it was at a

molecular level, but it didn't, it didn't utilize the quantum. I knew about Frohlich, but I didn't really, and I said, yeah, and that gives you a unified coherence, which consciousness had, coherence, which consciousness had, but it wasn't quantified in any way. So Roger, you know, when we, when we met and said, you know, we can kind of put this together in a theory. And he said, yeah, well, so he handed me in a quick, actually a couple, couple weeks afterwards, or maybe a month later, we met up again in Denmark, a long story, but I had a couple of weeks off and I took my son and we hung out in Denmark where I had done my, my sabbatical where Roger and Vanessa also hung out because strange story, their dentist was there from years ago. I used to go there and see their dentist and hang out in, in Denmark. And there was a conference and I got Roger invited to the conference. So we stayed at a house together on

Lake Lumbee and, and began to develop a theory theory and he would give me kind of an assignment. And, uh, I, you know, I felt like a student, which I was really in terms of the physics of math. And I, you know, stay up late and do this algebra basically, and come back with an answer. He's okay. So now we have to do this and that. What was an example of one of those exercises? Was it related to T equals H bar over E and calculating what? Yeah, it was almost all related to that. So Roger had given me that equation. Going back to when he was in Tucson for the conference, I said, well, how do we quantify that?

And he said, well, we have to put microtubules into this equation, T equals H bar over E sub G. And I said, okay, well, how do we do that? I knew that T was the time at which collapse would occur. And I thought that we would have to relate that some way to something in the brain, like 40 Hertz oscillations. Back then, gamma synchrony, 40 hertz oscillations was the big thing. So when you had coherent 40 hertz EEG, you had consciousness. And regarding these oscillations, is it just that the neurons are firing at the same time, 40,000 times a second? No, this is 40 hertz, just 40 times a second. But it's not firing. It's not firing. Actually. That's, that's one of the, uh, it's one of the problems people, uh, say that, but neurons, if you take one neuron, it's integrate and fire.

It's the basic Hodgkin Huxley neuro. So you have the dendrites and soma that receive inputs from the synapses. And, and the story goes that strictly by membrane potentials, uh, these thresholds are integrated, these potentials are integrated to a threshold at what was called the axon hillock, where the axon begins, or now it's called the axon initiation segment. And if the threshold is met, there'll be a firing, and the axon would depolarize, and you get the signal down to the next synapse, whatever that may be. And you get the signal down to the next synapse, whatever that may be.

And because it was an all or none, if it fired, it fired. That was considered the binary, the bit, the fundamental unit of firing. But actually, EEG comes mostly from local field potentials, which come from the dendrites in the soma, from the integration phase, from the integrate and fire in the Hodgkin-Huxley, not the firing. But it's more convenient for AI and for neuroscientists to consider bits, to consider firings to be the bits. It fits better with the computer analogy. And so people say that. In fact, Krick and Koch, Francis Crick and Krick and Koch back, in 90 actually came out with the idea that 40 Hertz was the, was the neural correlate of consciousness, but there were, there were also committed to the idea that spikes firings were the, were the currency of consciousness. So when it was realized that that it was that, that firings that EEG came from the local field potentials on the dendritic

side from integration, not the firings, they dropped 40 Hertz. They field potentials on the dendritic side from integration, not the firings, they dropped 40 Hertz. They said, well, it can't be. In other words, they had to choose between firings and 40 Hertz as the neural coral of consciousness. And they went with firings and spikes and dropped the 40 Hertz. I think that was a big mistake, but in any case, it was, it was 40 Hertz. But so we were, we were thinking, well, we had to maintain the quantum coherence state for 25 milliseconds to get 40 hertz, 40 times a second. And in retrospect, that was a mistake on our part because that's way too long for a quantum state. We thought, well, you could do it.

You know, nature figured it out and so forth. But it was really, you don't need that, it turns out. To make it long, well, I'll come back to that point. But going back to quantifying this by t equals h bar over e sub g, or e sub g equals h bar over t, the same thing, to relate the time to the e sub g. So what is the e sub g? So e sub g is the amount of mass in superposition, the amount of mass separated from itself. And when that meat reaches a threshold at a time T, or if you can sustain that till time T, you'll have a moment of consciousness. The amount of mass of what?

Well, of anything, but in this case of microtubules, of tubulin. And that's another good question. So if you start with that, with, with a protein, it's got all these atoms and rings and electrons and protons and this and that. So, but all the masses in the nuclei, you know, the electrons. So basically the electrons have all the, the cool electron dipole oscillations and quantum stuff that anest anesthesia comes in and blocks, and that causes loss of consciousness. But if you just look at the electrons, the mass was too low to get a significant E sub G. So you have to displace the nuclei to get sufficient E sub G.

The electrons were a thousandth the mass of a nucleus, for example. So we said, okay, we got to deal with the nuclei, but then the nuclei, or, okay, we had to deal with the superposition of a protein. So Roger gave me this assignment. He said, you can look at it three ways. You can look at the protein being separated from itself partially by, let's say, 10% of its mass.

So 10% of it- 10% is just an example right now or he, well, that's what we use the calculation. Okay. Because initially we're thinking of a conformational change, open and closed, open and closed. And what you're doing right now with your hands, that the tubulin flexing. Yes.

Okay. We thought there had to be a conformational change. It turns out you don't need that, but that was the original thought. And the difference in the flux was about 10%. So we calculated the E sub G of a protein separated from itself by 10% of its diameter. And he said, okay, you do it that way. And he gave me these formulas, basically algebra, which I was able to do.

And he said, but we also have to do it at the level of the nucleus. Take the atomic nucleus of each atom. So you have an electron out here, but the nucleus is here and the nucleus can be separated from itself by its diameter. So instead of being one sphere, it'd be two spheres, literally next to you, you have complete separation. So that gives a different type of equation than partial separation. So that was two. So it was the protein by 10% partial separation. So that gives a different, different type of equation than partial separation. So that was two. So it was the protein by 10% partial separation, the new, the, all those nuclei within

the protein, 110,000, uh, atomic weight separated by their diameter. And the third way was going even smaller to the protons and neutrons, the nucleons separated from themselves. So he gave me the equations and, and I spent some time, you know, doing the calculations and came up with the result that separation, the level of the atomic nuclei was the dominant effect, gave you the highest energy and would occur before the others. So we knew, so we knew how to calculate for the superposition. And then you just multiply that by the number of nuclei and we get the, the,

the E sub G for a tubulin protein. Yeah. When you're talking about the atomic nuclei, is that, okay, the proteins are made up of. Well, mostly carbon. We use carbon, you know, it's mostly carbon, carbon chemistry, but there's phosphorus, there's oxygen, there's other stuff. But basically we calculate it based on carbon because the vast majority of the nuclei are carbon. Why do you want the energy to be high? Because T equals H bar over E, so high E would make a lower T. And don't you want the T to last for quite some time? You do, but you got to go with, you know, with what nature gives you. And, and the, the, the, the high energy is going to be the dominant effect. It's going to happen first.

So that's going to trigger the collapse before the other effects. You know, if you avoided that, it might collapse from the separation of the whole protein or separation of nucleons, but the separation of the nuclei is going to happen first. And, and, and that's gonna, that's what's gonna, you know, rule the what's going on. So you had to deal with that. So that was the first thing we learned. So the next question was, okay, let's say that's right. Uh, how many, uh, how many, um, how many tubulins, how many microtubules, how many tubulins, how many microtubules would you need to have a superposition for T? So what would the E sub G, a number of tubulins be to have a T equal 25 milliseconds, which is what we thought we needed. And it turns out it's a pretty small number. It's only like, I forget, 20, 20 neurons worth. If all the neurons in one microtubule, if all the, if all the microtubules in one neuron

were in superposition, you would only need, and because T is a long time. So it's a trade-off. It's a long time. So you don't need very much E sub G, but you have to avoid decoherence for a long time. But we weren't considering that yet. We're putting that aside. So for 25 milliseconds, you only needed a few, like 20 neurons worth. So we thought, well, maybe only a fraction of the tubulins are involved, but that seemed kind of odd. Later, we realized, actually, and several people suggested this to us that, you know, you don't really need the quantum state to last 25 milliseconds to have 25 millisecond events in the brain. And much later, we came around to the idea that the quantum superpositions involve much more of the brain, much more tubulin for a much shorter time. So because it's inversely related. So basically, for example, if, if you say that there are

10 to the 10th, so there's about 10 to the ninth to 10 to the eighth turbulence per neuron. And if, if, if you have the, the T not be 25 milliseconds, but be say 10 megahertz, a 10th of a millionth of a second, then you need a much larger amount of tubulin, much larger number of microtubules, much larger proportion of the brain is still small. So for example, for 10 megahertz for oscillation, for these quantum events to be happening 10 million times a second,

you need about 10 to the minus fifth of the total tubulins in the brain, which was billions and, well, I forget, millions of neurons. I have to go back and look it up. But it's a much more reasonable number than just 20. If I understand what you're saying is that we need you know how some people say we only use one percent of the brain which is that's probably true actually for consciousness but it's not the same one percent yes this could be here and then it's here it actually can quite literally move around the brain right so you maybe use only one percent at one time but over your lifetime or even maybe a day you're using most of it if not all of it right and

if you were to use more that's well if you were to use 100 that's categorized as a seizure and it's not actually salutary well seizures are bad and seizures are when all the the spikes the firings are coordinated and that's not conscious so that's that's uh that's a pathology that's that's when the all the neurons are firing It's unclear what's actually happening in the integration side. Uh, but yeah, but, but that's, that's not really the same thing, but, but basically we did make a relationship between the nut, between the fraction of the brain, the number of tubulins involved, the, the, the frequency and the intensity of experience. And we based that on a couple of things extrapolated. For example, meditators, trained meditators have really high EEG compared to

normal people. And- As a baseline or when they're meditating? As a baseline and when they meditate, both. And this was done in Richard Davidson's lab, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago. And the Dalai Lama sent his best meditators over, and they studied them with EEG. And at baseline, I forgot the frequency. At baseline, they were much higher. And when they meditated, they were like off the charts. As an aside, what does he use to qualify them as the best meditators? That was whoever the doctor was.

His choice. Okay, I got it. I got it. I don't know. We'll give him that. He should know. So based on that, EEG gets higher. And there are some other inklings of that.

If you're in a car accident and the car is spinning, supposedly the external world slows down, everything slows down. And that could be because you're having more conscious moments per second than you were before the accident occurred. And great athletes like Michael Jordan said, when he's playing well, it's because the other team is in slow motion. And so... I recall you saying this. I spoke to Neil Seth. I'm sure you've heard of him. Yes, I know Neil. I asked him about this, about the time-slowing effect, and if it is indeed a real effect or if it's just your perception of time slows down. And he said what's been done is you measure people on bungee jumps, and you show them perhaps a clock, and they're not able to recall milliseconds at a higher rate than people who are not under the bungee. Yeah. You know, I know that study that's David Eagleman study. And it's, it was kind of a,

it was like, uh, I don't know. I'm not sure. I believe it. I don't think so. Just a few minor studies that haven't decisively made the case. Okay. Continue. We don't really know, but, but it seems to me that consciousness, the, the, the intensity of experience is related to the frequency of the events that you're having. So if you're excited, if you're in an altered state, if you're doing something you really love, you're having more conscious moments per second, if you can measure it. But to you, the external world slows down. And when you're on psychedelics, it seems like the brain isn't firing as much or using as many neurons.

Is that correct? That's a very good question. Yeah. So that's a study of Robin Carhart-Harris from 2012. And he presented that at the Tucson conference. And amazing study. What they did was they put people in an MRI scanner. They also did EEG. So it works for MRI. But in the MRI scanner and in the EEG,

they then gave them intravenous psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms. And then then later you know they they had them report what they were experiencing at the time they didn't ask them at the time because um and later they reported their experience and they were all basically having a psychedelic experience they're basically all tripping at the time and in the scanner they kind of i think they expected their their brains to kind of light up like pinball machines but they didn't their brains to kind of light up like pinball machines, but they didn't. Their brains looked cold and dark, like they were unconscious, almost comatose. And in EEG, they expected, I'm not sure what they expected, but what they got was almost flatline EEG. And it was paradoxical.

And those results are still being debated. What I think, and Robin didn't like this idea, and a lot of people don't, but what I thought was that under those circumstances, consciousness has gone into the microtubule quantum states almost completely, and the membranes which perform cognition are quiet are quiet silent you don't need uh you don't need uh energy um for the membranes you don't have to well you need what i'm let me back up what the brain needs energy for is to maintain uh membrane potentials the quantum the quantum microtubule stuff is very low energy you don't need much energy so um if you're tripping and you don't have to do anything cognitive you don't have to drive a car you don't have to talk to anybody you're just laying there in your own mind your membranes can

be can be can be quiet consciousness has gone to a deeper level into the quantum state so you don't require energy for membrane membrane potentials for firing. And, you know, by the same token, you wouldn't want somebody in that condition driving you home, their cognition wouldn't be very good if they're if they're deep into a quantum consciousness state. So that was my explanation for why people who are tripping have low, what their brains appear to be silent, and dormant, and their EEG is flat. It's because everything's gone to a deeper level. And if you get to that level, you find much, much faster and more active activity at the

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But what you're saying is when you're under an altered state of consciousness, it's like you're going into a deeper room, let's say the basement. And now you're moving rapidly, but the EEG is showing a small amount because it's only measuring what's in this room. Is that somewhat correct? Yeah, you kind of go into the basement, you go into the underground, where it's all quantum, and the energy is very, very low. And you've dissociated from what's happening at the membrane, you've gone deep into the, I like to call it the quantum underground, is the actual decoherence-free subspace where quantum stuff is happening in biology. But the membranes are on vacation. The membranes don't have to depolarize. You don't have to trigger firings.

You're not doing anything actively other than thinking, other than being conscious. Your body, you're not moving anything. You're not performing any cognitive functions. And by the way, I'm going to digress a little bit, but in some recent work I've been doing with Alison Watry at UCSD, who studies these cerebral organoids, we're trying to design experiments to see if cerebral organoids can be conscious. We've kind of come to the conclusion that there's cognition and there's consciousness. Cognition is, you know, stuff that we do that could be conscious or not conscious driving,

for example, walking. Sometimes you're walking and, or I'm walking, my mind's wandering, I'm somewhere else. I'm technically paying attention, but to the sidewalk and whatnot, but I'm not that conscious of it. Then all of a sudden something happens. I see somebody or a horn honks and then my consciousness returns to my cognition. So cognition can be either conscious or non-conscious. So we're thinking that we're, the way we're expressing now is that consciousness is supervening on

cognition and kind of takes over cognition and when, when it needs to. So you can be on autopilot most of the time, driving or walking or doing whatever without consciousness. And then suddenly you need it again. And it shows up and supervenes on cognition. Is this the opposite of the prevailing view, that cognition supervenes on consciousness rather than the other way around? If that's the prevailing view, yes, it would be. Is that what the prevailing view is? No, I'm asking you.

You know much more. I don't, actually. I've heard the term supervenience. It's a term in philosophy. But I always thought it applied to consciousness, supervening, kind of taking over cognition. It could go the other way around. But no, I think consciousness supervenes on cognition. And in fact, we can't measure consciousness in the brain or in organoids or in anything but what we might

be able to measure is the effect of consciousness on cognition because cognition can be computable so go back to roger roger's point about uh uh consciousness being non-computable. Well, if you had something you could observe in the brain that was computable, and then consciousness came in, you would see deviation from computable behavior in Hodgkin-Huxley neurons. And that's exactly what we're trying to do in this study we're proposing, is to look for the shadow of of consciousness to look for the shadow consciousness casts on cognition deviation from computable behavior and neurons and Hodgkin-Huxley neurons for example because of consciousness and to see if that goes away with anesthesia so anesthesia should make you more computable more automatic more autopilot. And we do see that type of behavior under anesthesia without consciousness.

So that's a way of looking at consciousness is by looking at the effect it has on cognition. As another aside, is there a way of using anesthesia to make a truth serum? You know, Pentothal was used for that, or Brevitol, back in the old days. And it just supposedly, just the right amount, you could kind of inhibit what is normally inhibitory and kind of disinhibit the subject and get the truth out of it. I was never really impressed with that. disinhibit the subject and get the truth out of it. I was never really impressed with that. And as an anesthesiologist, I wasn't that interested in it because, because, you know, well, we don't use pentothal anymore, but propofol and it's true.

And like doses, they are a little disinhibited. And you just, before they go to sleep, when they're waking up, they may say something that's personal or, know but it must be hilarious do that as fast as possible and uh so i'm not interested in using that using that but but you can disinhibit somebody at just the right dose but it's very very transitory unless you try to keep it at that level and then they're they're unconscious so, but you, you mentioned psychedelics before. And when another experiment I was to do is I would predict, well,

we, we predict and have evidence that anesthesia slows and dampens these oscillations and that psychedelics would increase the frequency. And, uh, we're going to try and look at that also increase the frequency oscillations, increase the frequency of consciousness,

which would account at least in part for the psychedelic experience. Okay. Now, as for collaborating with Penrose, do you mind giving an example of a recent one? How does it look? What sorts of problems do you work on? Let's take a recent example. Well, right now we're trying to finish a chapter for a book called Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness edited by Shan Gao. I got this one from you. That's not really our book. That's a long story. Well, you were editors.

Yeah, but that was a mistake. That's not really our book. They used our name, but we had nothing. Well, I hope it's your book because it took me quite a bit of time just to get through a bit of it. Is it any good? I've never read it. Oh, okay. It's definitely not your book. Yeah. Well, I was primarily interested in the article by you and Penrose.

Okay. And that's it. Well, I'll stand by that. But we're writing a chapter now for a book by Shan Gow called Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness. And Dave Chalmers has an article and a lot of people have articles. And, you know, I was thrilled to write another article with Roger, but he's difficult to work with because he's very meticulous. He's got like 20 things going on and everything has to be perfect.

So to make a long story short, the chapter is three years late. And the absolute drop dead deadline is Sunday, the Sunday. And my part, I keep working on, but I'm basically waiting on his part. And he's actually putting in some new stuff about retroactivity, backward time effects and non-toler effect. And so it's worth waiting for and i hope the uh uh the editor feels that way also but um uh so that and now we do it with email when we first started we did it with uh faxes and uh i still somewhere have uh rolls and rolls of fax paper with his original artworks and drawings that i'm trying to preserve and occasional phone calls. And it was slow going when I first started collaborating with Roger, his wife Vanessa said,

you know, I encourage you, but you should know, be prepared. It'll be very slow going. Everything has to be just right before he signs off on it. And he's very meticulous and he's way overcommitted. So just be patient. And I'm glad he told me that she told me that because it turned out to be true. In fact, it led to an interesting, we had been working on the original article that I mentioned earlier and calculating all this stuff for about a year.

It didn't even have a, didn't have a manuscript. But in the meantime, Pat Churchland, who had been at that conference that Roger went to back at Cambridge, and a grad student came out with kind of a preemptive attack piece in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, attempting to refute our ideas before we even published anything. Is this Tegmark? And that was later. That was another bogus attack. I'll come to him. But no, this is Pat Churchland and a grad student, Rick Rush.

And she, materialist, reductionist, computationalist. And they spent the first part of their article attacking the, the Gurgel's theorem and non-computability, and the second half attacking microtubules, and so, and they're really snotty about it, and the, the title of their article, you know, Roger's famous for a lot of things, including Penrose tilings, tiling a plane with geometry, and so the title of their article was Penrose's Toilings, or Gaps in Penrose's Toilings. That there were gaps, because there are no gaps in his toilings,

but there's gaps in his toilings in terms of his ideas. And the first gaps were about the Girdle's theorem that they attacked. The second was about microtubules. Well, let's give it to them. That's a clever title. It was a clever title and they also said said for example that uh the penrose hammer off hypothesis was no better supported than one in a gazillion caterpillar with hookah hypotheses a reference to alice in wonderland

that uh this was a quite literally a pipe dream. Pipe dream. They were basically saying we're BSing everybody. Yeah, that's basically what they were saying. And they were full of it. So that was pretty snotty. But it was sufficiently snotty to provoke Roger into responding fully. And the editor, the publisher of the journal said, you can have a,

you can reply on the next issue, but I'll need a manuscript in two weeks. And so I said, Oh my gosh, you know, it's been a year. We don't have a manuscript. How can we possibly do this in two weeks? Well, we got on the phone and Roger said, I'll tell you what I can, I can answer all the girdle serum stuff. You answer all the microtubule stuff. Put the two parts together. We'll write a common abstract. And I can do my part in two weeks.

I said, I can do my part in two weeks. So we did. And the microtubule stuff was pretty easy, actually. For example, their main point, what they thought was their killer argument, was that there's a drug called colchicine, which is used in gout. Gout is arthritis where immune cells go into joints like the big toe, the great toe, and cause tremendous inflammation, swelling, and pain. It's very painful. And yet, because it depolymerizes the microtubules, and that paralyzes the immune because it deep polymerizes the microtubules and that paralyzes

the immune cells from migrating into the joint. So the microtubules are deep polymerized and they said, see, your microtubules are deep polymerized and you don't, people with gout who take colchicine don't lose consciousness. Therefore, microtubules must be unnecessary for consciousness. Right. But it doesn't cross the blood brain. It does not. Right. Colchicine does not cross the blood brain barrier. Number two, it only affects microtubules that are constantly assembling and disassembling. And those in the brain don't.

They're quite stable, which is why you can store memory in them. And I found a paper where somebody actually injected colchicine into the brain of animals and just wiped them out. They were demolished. I answered that. There's some other stuff. Roger Anser put an abstract together. We wrote this paper, Gaps, What Gaps? Response to Aggression. That was our first paper in 95. Then next year, we had two papers in 96. And then no papers until 2014. And then we rehashed that as an updated version in 2018 and 2016. And now this paper, which we're writing now.

So maybe a half a dozen papers over 20 years. But they've all been good. Now going to this backward time right aspect i heard you mention libit's experiments and that they don't necessarily show a lack of free will but perhaps the free will propagates backward in time now can you explain that well libit did these experiments in uh well he did two sets of experiments. The first set of experiments that Roger wrote about in his book, The Embers New Mind, were sensory experiments, where he had people in neurosurgery. He worked with a neurosurgeon named Bertram Epstein,

who, by the way, was the husband of Diane, sorry, Bertram Feinstein, who was the husband of Diane Feinstein, the governor, sorry, the Senator from California. She's still around. He passed away years ago, but he was a neurosurgeon and lived at work with him. And so he had patients that he did neurosurgery on while awake. So he would drill a hole and numb it up with local anesthetic. Once you get into the brain, you can operate on the brain. It doesn't hurt, but you numb up the hole and you can access the brain

and, for example, for the finger on the opposite hand. So Libet did experiments like he would stimulate the finger and record from the brain and stimulate the brain and then see when the subject was conscious of feeling the

finger so um you would expect or i would expect not knowing anything beforehand that if you stimulate the brain you feel it immediately if you stimulate the finger which would be a delay because it had to get to the brain well if you stimulate the finger there is a delay because it had to get to the brain. Well, if you stimulate the finger, there is a delay, but it's only 30 milliseconds evoked potential. So it's pretty fast. But if you stimulate the brain directly, you need to have ongoing activity and it takes about a half a second, 500 milliseconds, because you don't get the evoked potential. But if it continues for 500 milliseconds, you do feel it at 30 milliseconds. What this evoked potential okay so if you stimulate the finger the signal you get a spike that's the evoked potential if you stimulate it here you don't get the evoked potential you just get you know ongoing activity it looks like gamma but if

you do it for half a second the patient subject has the conscious experience at the time of the evoked potential 30 milliseconds so somehow at milliseconds, the brain knows whether or not there's going to be 500 milliseconds of ongoing activity afterwards. If there is, he or she reports it at 30 milliseconds. That's interesting. Okay. If there isn't, then he or she doesn't. And so Libet concluded that there was a signal going backwards in time from the time of what he called neuronal adequacy. And that sent this information backward in time. Now, Roger wrote about this in Emperor's Neuron because that can happen in quantum physics, which is temporally non-local. Is this related to the subcutaneous rabbit?

Have you heard of that, where you come on one arm? Yes. So this is related to that yes and also the color five phenomenon where the color bounces back and forth and it goes from red to blue and you go red blue red blue and you can guess and then it goes red red and you know you're not fooled and that's because you seem to know what's going on and the cutaneous rabbits the same thing i actually wrote a wrote about it. I can send it to you about all this. I've written several actually about it. And all those can be accounted for by you somehow know what's coming.

And this is very important because if you and I are talking and you ask me a question and if someone were measuring the activity in my brain for what you said, it'll happen in, say, 300 to 500 milliseconds after they get to my ears. But I will have responded to you at 100 milliseconds. This is very, very standard neuroscience. What neuroscience says about that is that I respond non-consciously and have a false illusion of answering consciously after the fact. The consciousness is epiphenomenal. My cognitive autopilot, non-conscious self answers you. And then a little later, my conscious self says, oh, I said that, you know, I'm in control. And it means the consciousness is epiphenomenal

and illusoryory that's what dennett says that's what all you know all the big uh all the the big name philosophers say unless they have some way to to weasel out of it and but if you have backward time it means that you can have you can you can do all that and you can still respond consciously in real time has dennett ever publicly commented specifically on yours or Penrose's theories? No, and he won't. In fact, I've argued with him at several meetings, and all he does is yell at me without listening to what I'm saying. Why do you think that is? Because he doesn't know anything about the brain. He doesn't know a damn thing about the brain. He

admits it. He doesn't know a neuron from a hole in the ground. And so all these, you know, he knows computers and that's how computers work. And unfortunately, that's true about, about a lot of, a lot of people. So we, we actually, my colleague Tom Bever is putting a course to get work, putting a course together on conscious studies. And, and Tom asked Dan, Dan Dennett, whom he knows some years ago if he would and he just blew him off so he's not interested and uh you know they have their position they don't want to be bothered with the facts i've been arguing with dan for years and uh

you can't argue with the guy you know what do you disagree with penrose on could be minor could be metaphysical uh i'm not sure i agree but i i would say that i are i'm not saying i disagree necessarily but i i i tend to go further than he does in certain things like you know the spiritual implications of his whole platonic values and universal consciousness that he does he just doesn't he just won't talk about. He says, I don't find it useful to talk about. And the backward time effects, he's still a little bit reluctant to go as far as I go. But stuff about anesthesia, I think that once I've explained what I'm trying to, I kind of get ahead of myself in saying things. And then once I kind of backfill on what I was trying to say,

he tends to go, that's happened in our recent, in our recent paper, for example. I'll give you an example. We're talking about the Hodgkin-Huxley neuron and integrate and fire. And that is computable. When the threshold is met, firing happens. But if you put electrodes,

and this was done in 2006 by Nandorf et al in Germany, they put electrodes in pyramidal cells of awake cats. And what they find, so presumably they're conscious, they find that there's a tremendous variability from firing to firing. So the threshold is changing changing something other than the membrane potential than the input so something other than the measurable inputs that are triggering the firing which controls behavior and uh uh they that sounds groundbreaking because usually it's thought of as you just input a certain voltage electric field and then it will fire correct the synaptic inputs come in they change the voltage

on the membrane of the dendrites in the soma. And when that accumulated integrated membrane potential gets to the exon initiation segment, it's compared to a threshold. And if the threshold is met, firing occurs. That's the standard Hodgkin-Huxley neuron. But in a neuron, in an awake animal, that firing threshold is highly variable. There's some other factor. And so I started calling that a non-computable factor. And Roger didn't understand what I was trying. He said, no, non-computability has to do something deep in quantum physics. And I was saying, yes, I know. And, but it has to come into the brain somewhere. And so that's where I thought it was coming in. So he's come, he's come around to that now, and we're going to include that in our,

our paper. So basically you can measure non-computability in neurons. And that's the D as a, as a deviation from Hodgkin Huxley behavior. And, which is also what I was saying before, deviation from cognitive autopilot function. Because the Hodgkin-Huxley behavior would be fine for walking down the street doing things that don't require non-computable consciousness or intuition, insight, platonic values, that sort of thing. So I think he's coming out he's he's seeing

i'm trying to put his non-computability into the brain specifically at the end of integration and pyramidal neurons we're at the end of this orchestrated period and reduction and that can change the firing depending on your conscious thoughts so rather than responding reflexively to something or somebody you think about it or or you have a conscious thought or intuition or feeling, well, I just have a feeling I better do something different. You know, I don't want to do that. I'm not sure why. So it's intuition, it's insight, it's creativity, which I think comes out of this non-computability. And I think it manifests in terms of altering the firing capability of these neurons.

Okay. I'm going to take a look at some of the questions that we have here. Actually, for now, you know, this podcast or this series has a tendency to get somewhat technical. So I thought, how about this time, instead of leaving it unexplained, how about I, or you, try to explain some of these abstruse and seemingly inscrutable terminologies, and then perhaps someone can understand a full quote, and maybe by understanding the parts they can understand it as a whole. Wait, I'm basically taking quotes from your article. So here's one.

Okay, how would microtubule quantum computations, which are isolated from the environment, still interact with that environment for input and output? One possibility is that ORC-OR suggests that perhaps phases of isolated quantum computing alternate with phases of classical environmental interaction, e.g. at gamma synchrony. Isolated from the environment. Do you mind explaining that concept for people? isolated from the environment? Do you mind explaining that concept for people? Well, for quantum devices and technology have to be isolated from interaction with the environment which is thought to be random and noisy and to do that they do things at absolute near absolute zero temperature to avoid any thermal oscillations. So in biology we think that inside the tubulins, in the pi resonance groups, you have a… Yeah, that's one you'll have to explain too, pi resonance.

So why don't we go to that first? All right, so let me back up. So the basic molecule in living systems is the organic ring, the benzene ring or the phenyl ring. So you have six carbons in a hexagon. And each carbon has, in pure benzene, each carbon has one hydrogen. And that leaves two more bonds. So one bond goes to three more bonds per carbon. One each goes to the two neighboring carbons, and you have an extra bond.

So you have three extra electrons in a carbon ring. So what do they do? They form these delocalized clouds above and below the carbon ring. And this is a quantum area. It's non-polar, so there's no charge, but it's neutral because the positive charge is in the nuclei. So you have this electron cloud above and below, and it's a quantum entity. It takes up space, small space, volume. And if you put two of these together, the electron cloud in one, the electronegativity, will repel the electrons over here. So you get a dipole, and you get an induced dipole. And there's a dipole in this one, and you get an induced dipole.

And there's a dipole in this one, and there's a dipole in this one. And this one induces this one, and then this one induces back. So you get an oscillation of these dipoles. When you say oscillation in the dipole, you mean oscillation in the charge so that it's more positive on one side than negative and it switches, or what? The net charge is neutral. But the dipole means you're pushing in in each cloud the electrons tend to migrate to one side or the other depending on what's near them so if there's another cloud near them they're both neutral the electrons in one are going to repel

the other one so they tend to do this they tend to oscillate and that's just two of them now one of them doesn't do that and i should also say that if you get a bunch of benzene and put them together, if they're not spaced properly, they're flammable. That's gasoline. But if you put them so they're spaced in a geometric array, for example, in a planar sheet, that's graphene. And graphene has a lot of quantum properties. But if you put them in a lattice where they're spaced, they can oscillate. And that's basically Frohlich coherence. So they're in a non-polar region, they're isolated from the environment. But the question was, okay, let's say you have that in this isolated environment, how do you communicate input and output with the outside world? And that's a very good question. And our answer to that came from a science fiction book by a guy named Paul Benioff,

who was one of the inventors of quantum computers. Deutsch, Benioff, and I forget who, Feynman, are generally credited with, you know, inventing the concept of quantum computers. And Benioff was, Roger knew, and actually spoke at our 2003 Quantum Mind Conference, had written a sci-fi book, and he talked about it in his talk. And he had a quantum computer robot, and it went through phases of quantum and then collapsed to the answer, and that would communicate with the environment. And during that you get inputs so you get output input then quantum again process collapse so the alternating phases of quantum and classical

quantum classical and during the classical uh you'd have interaction with the both uh output and input now when we said that for 40 hertz uh i would change it now to say the same thing happens at say 10 megahertz because we think the orca war events are happening much faster so uh after each event uh you're in the classical phase you you uh express the outputs and that can trigger the neuron to fire or do whatever and receive inputs then you go back into the quantum phase so you're alternating between quantum and classical phases roughly 10 million times a second. Okay. There's a hydrophobic property of the benzene rings, I believe. Hydrophobic, nonpolar, right? There's no charge. So let's explain those terms. Hydrophobic,

why is that important? And then nonpolar. They're pretty much the same thing, actually. Hydrophobic means water aversive. So no water. Water is polar. So basically think of the brain or the body as a bunch of different solubility compartments. If you're an anesthesiologist or a pharmacologist or giving drugs to a patient, you'd need to know where in the body the drug is going to go. And if it's polar, if it's charged, then it's going to be very soluble in water and blood and tend to go to charge surfaces like receptors on the surfaces of neurons and so forth. If, however, you're giving a drug like an anesthetic, which is nonpolar, which is lipid-like, oral-like, it doesn't like to be in water. It's

very insoluble. So it traverses the blood quickly and goes to fat, membranesanes and proteins that have these non-polar regions inside of them. And that's where it goes to very quickly, and that's where it acts. And in the non-polar regions is where the quantum stuff can happen without being exposed to at least the polar charges. So you've reduced the degrees of freedom and created what is called in the quantum computing business a decoherence-free subspace temporarily where you can do quantum stuff without getting messed up by the environment, by the classical environment. Okay, forgive me if I'm misunderstanding this, but there's a – the microtubule has three layers if I remember correctly. There's a water tube inside and then there's the tubulin on the outside. I've only read about the A lattice, so I don't know much about the B lattice.

And then there's apparently another layer. I just saw anirban, right? Okay, anirban. Give a talk on this, but I don't know much about what's going on in the outer layer. So is quantum computation happening on the layer with the tubulin, or is it inside where the water is? Okay, so when you say inside so microtubules are hollow tubes so you have an outside which is there's charges coming out and it's basically water around it then you have the wall of the microtubule which is about

uh four nanometers thick can be very long but four and then you have the inner core which is 15 nanometers of again water ordered water then you have the inner core which is 15 nanometers of again water ordered water then you have the other wall so you have a hollow water well the water in the water and i there's also ions uh in in the interior of the microtubule may be completely ordered because you have charges coming out from the in uh from the inside part of the tubulin and then more ordered water more ordered water and the the from the inside part of the tubulin and then more ordered water more ordered water and the the water may become part of the quantum state in that uh that's okay that's another another uh can of worms story yeah yeah in fact uh i co-authored a paper in 94 95

about the uh about quantum states in the water, but in, and that may be true, but, but we think it's originating in the nonpolar inside nonpolar regions inside the wall of the microtubule where it's sheltered from the water, either on the outside of the microtubule on the inside of the microtubule in the nonpolar regions,

which is exactly where anesthetics go. And so we've coined this term, the quantum underground, where anesthesia goes, the anesthetic nonpolar molecules go and reside to block consciousness and essentially affect very little else. The brain is still active under anesthesia and all that's gone really is consciousness. When someone has Alzheimer's, it affects the tau proteins, correct? Tau proteins are microtubule associated proteins. And the tau proteins, correct? Tau proteins are microtubule associated proteins. And the tau proteins, basically, microtubules disassemble and become unstable. I think that's a big problem

with Alzheimer's disease. And the tau binding at specific places on the microtubules can encode memory. And when the microtubules disassemble, whether the tau falls off first, and then that destabilizes the microtubules, or the microtubules destabilize, then the tau falls off, you lose the microtubules, you lose synapses, because the microtubules make synapses, you lose the tau memory function on the microtubules. So it's all bad. And I've been wanting to do a study using ultrasound into the brain, which we think can repolymerize microtubules. And we've been studying ultrasound in the brain for a while and showing that it can enhance mood and is safe. And we're gearing up to do a study on Alzheimer's and dementia. Can you use this to form a treatment for Alzheimer's? That is, let's say you hope so to the stability of tau. Well, it's the stability of the microtubules. I

think that tau is a microtubule associated protein, right? Everybody gets worked up about tau. They can measure town spinal fluid. They can do this, but they're not, they're not thinking about what the tau does when it's not messed up when it's doing its, you know, it's functioning properly. And what it is, is a microtubule associated protein and sits on microtubule lattices at specific locations, which seems to code for delivery of synaptic cargo to synapses. So it actually plays a role that's lost in Alzheimer's. Okay. You mentioned that there's some self-similar property of conductance at the different levels of scales. Now, sorry, I just copied this down. I don't know if this is an exact quote. What does that mean, that there's self-similar properties of conductance at different levels?

So Anirban Bandipati, whom you mentioned several times, who's a good friend of mine, has done amazing work on microtubules over the years, going back from 2009. He published in 2013, 2014, and then more recently. And basically, he used... Yeah, there you go. That image has gotten around a lot. Just for the audience, in case they can't see, this is one of the slides. I was going to ask you to explain at some point, but we can do that after. It's three low. I haven't memorized actually on the left, you have three levels of scale and then, uh, you use different types of, uh, uh, nanopros scanning, tunneling, microscopes, atomic force, electrodes, this and that. And, uh, so you're putting electrodes on a microtubule now normally microtubule all proteins are are insulators they don't conduct very well what anirban did was he he put electrodes and then he swept and then he stimulated with

alternating current and he swept the current from zero up to i forget how high terabyte hertz oh okay you're right all right and he found at certain frequencies that you would get to, I forget how high, terahertz. Oh, okay. Terahertz. You're right. And he found at certain frequencies that you would get conductance. At certain critical frequencies, microtubules would conduct, would have the resonances or conductances in a triplet of triplet patterns. And these triplet of triplet patterns repeated about every not quite every three orders of magnitude ah i see what you're saying i see what you're saying okay and so what is the significance of it resonating what does that mean when it resonates so you're sending it an ac current

yeah okay now is that much like when you put water in the microwave and the water heats up now i keep water out of this uh water water is enemy here. There may be, because it's polar. These electrodes are attached directly to the microtubule. So I think the conductance is happening through the pi resonance inside the wall of the microtubule in this helical pathway. He's measuring conductance. I see. Yeah. And the, the, and the, at certain frequencies, the microtubules conducted, conducted, highly conducted. So what is the significance of this? It's interesting geometrically, visually, but what is, well, it's a, it's a, it's, he called it ballistic conductance. He couldn't prove quantum because there's a classical interface

between the electrode and the surface of the microtubule but within the you know within the the pi resonance it was probably something like superconductivity or some kind of quantum state frolic resonance something like that so it's a quantum state at critical resonant frequencies that have something to do with the vibrational frequencies of the microtubules is there a way to use anesthesia to test the consciousness of someone? So for example, you mentioned there are these Buddhist monks who claim to have a higher level of consciousness.

So can you take someone who has a lower level of consciousness, give them a certain amount of anesthesia, see how much does it take to put them asleep and then see if you need more to put someone who claims to be higher in consciousness i don't know whether it's because i'm not sure there'd be an effect actually i don't think you know i don't think a uh a well i don't know whether a a meditator or a genius or some extraordinary person requires any more anesthesia than anybody else i don't know that it could be but that would seem seem to be, you know, trying to split hairs at a level where, you know, I'm more interested in knowing how anesthesia works on anybody or an animal or an organoid or a mouse or any human.

And we still don't know that. I mean, that's a very good question you asked, but it's kind of like, we're not there yet to you. And we want to know how it works on anybody, much less, you know, the Dalai Lama or something like like that what are frolic resonances frolic coherences are fully resonant frolic coherences what i've talked about before where you have these non-polar dipoles that oscillate and they couple to the mechanical uh vibration also the key here is that everybody says the brain is too warm wet wet and noisy for quantum effects. So warm means it's too hot and noisy also means it's too hot. But if you have a geometrical lattice with mechanical vibrational resonances, the heat's going to pump it.

So it's going to have these oscillations that are coherent. So you couple the quantum coherence and the mechanical coherence. That's why you're saying it was like a laser yes exactly okay is computation happening at the level of glial cells or is it just the pyramidal neurons good question uh glial cells have a lot of microtubules all cells have even plant cells have microtubules um the the pyramidal cells uh so what's different about microtubules in in neurons in general is that okay let me back up you know take any cell at all and uh uh an amoeba or or any cell you get the microtubules are going to radiate out from the central part of the cell like spokes of

a wheel they're going to be continuous because you want their structural support. And they have the same polarity. They have a plus end and a minus end. So they're all unipolar and radial. That's for pyramidal, right? Yeah. So pyramidal, they're interrupted in a mixed polarity. So you have one going here, one going here.

they're interrupted in a mixed polarity. So you have one going here, one going, going here. And, and if, if you, if you wanted them there for structural support, like the skeleton of your body, you wouldn't have them broken and interrupted. Okay. And why would you have them mixed polarity up and down? And that's been a big mystery. And what we, what Roger and I think is that, that if you have two microtubules in mixed polarity next to each other and they're in a common voltage they're going to have slightly

different frequency resonant frequencies and that's going to give rise to beat frequencies so going back to what i said before about you know eventually when i and and what you said about repeating at different frequency ranges we want to get the cell similar patterns from the terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz, kilohertz, and hertz, which is EEG. So the EEG may be kind of a snapshot at a very slow frequency of what's happening at kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and terahertz. So it's all kind of more like music than computation is another way of putting it when you have resonances and and harmonics and interference beats like in music i see at the

bottom of this there are this is just for the people who are watching all over yeah so what are these frequencies indicating is it that same anirban yeah yeah that goes along with the range yeah yeah and then i try to put it in a schematic to show what's happening in each level Is it that same Anirban? Yeah, yeah. That goes along with the range. Yeah, yeah. And then I try to put it in a schematic to show what's happening at each level. Does this mean that potentially quantum computers can be conscious? They would have to collapse by Rogers mechanism. And right, quantum computers are built near absolute zero, and they collapse because somebody makes a measurement, which introduces randomness.

So is it presently constituted? No. However, my friend Hart McNevin, who is the head of Google's quantum AI, Roger and I visited there a year or so ago, and we were talking about this, and they had discovered some anomalies in their quantum computing when it seemed to be collapsing prematurely. And Hartman told me that. I said, well, are you sure your quantum computer

is not conscious? It's having Roger Rogers objective reduction. And he said, oh, my God, I hope not. Because that would have created a public relations issue. So one of his people gave a seminar and showed, you know, tons and tons of equations that I didn't understand and concluded that, no, it wasn't objective reduction and their quantum computer wasn't conscious. I'm not sure I understood, but they at least, they at least thought about it. However, I think it is possible to have a conscious quantum computer if you built it

out of something like a graphene or fullerenes that's, that's much more biological and did it at warm temperature and pumped it to get, to get coherence, which would be basically building something like a microtubule in an artificial sense. It's not something I want to do because I'm not technological, but I think that is possible. That may be the future of consciousness in vitro. If you want to have a conscious computer, that'd be the way to do it. In the brain, I believe it's topological qubits the topological yeah so in the um in the uh uh in the a-ladder of these patterns we're cutting off just one second do you mind repeating that because as far as i know i don't think google is pursuing topological qubits but i know Microsoft is. So if anyone has a chance of producing a conscious computer, it would be them. But I'm not sure if topological qubits are required or if it's just because of the brain needing some error correcting and topological qubits seem to be careful here because Roger, this is where another, where Roger and I don't agree. And I'm not sure it's because I'm not explaining what I think properly or he's smarter than me and knows I'm wrong before I even get there.

the late 90s roger invited me to the uh to the royal society meeting on uh on quantum information which was right when all the entanglement stuff was coming out really exciting time we had all these uh super smart young physicists talking about entanglement over hundreds of miles and this and that and uh you know i mean the aspect experiment proving entanglement didn't happen until 86 so 10 10 or 12 years later you know a lot had happened and they were talking about this technology and we had a talk by uh uh john preskill of caltech and he showed a uh a lattice of for a quantum computer which was orthogonal where he had the quantum computations running in one direction kind of up and down and he had the quantum error correction running sideways so they were intersecting and the quantum error correction running sideways so they were

intersecting and the quantum error correction would would correct the what was happening on on the vertical and uh i kind of woke up from from dozing because i they had lost me a hexagonal lattice like thinking of microtubule well sure why not where you have it going this way so on the coffee break i was talking with roger about it and he said wouldn't it be interesting if the fibonacci pathways were some kind of topological qubit and uh but for him topology means like you know the the the coffee cup uh has a topology because of this. And it has a whole nother meaning that I wasn't catching on to. So I don't want to talk about, so now I just call them helical geometric pathways.

But I think they could be topological in a sense. And if you had them in a right, because in a microtubule, if you have a helical pathway, it's much more stable from a quantum standpoint. Because if, for example, one individual tubulin gets out of whack, it's going to be pulled back into quantum coherence by the others. So I think these helical geometric pathways, whether you call them topological or not, might be a way to go for quantum computing. In some kind of material, it doesn't need to be absolutely cold. Is there something specific about the lattice that's conducive to quantum computing or consciousness? Because I know that Penrose has done some work on the tilings, which are aperiodic, which are not tilings. Well,

they're not periodic tilings. I don't know about the relationship between periodic and aperiodic. I don't know if Penrose was using those tilings to demonstrate that, well, we can do something that's non-computational and that was it, or if it has some other implication for consciousness. Good question. I'm not sure, actually. I've kind of asked him that myself, and I get the feeling I'm not even close to being able to figure out what he's saying on that. So I can't really answer that.

But the helical pathways, I think, are very useful because they avoid decoherence and help us in other ways. Why is it that IIT says that consciousness occurs at the back of the brain, but then the global neuronal workspace theory says that it occurs at the front? And where does your theory say it takes place? In pyramidal cells. So the cortex has six layers the cortex covers well you know the whole not the cerebellum but everything else is on top and it's six layers and uh so when uh information comes in it goes to layer uh five well it winds up in layer five goes to four and then from four goes one two three and six and one two three and six converge on layer five and layer five is the pyramidal

pyramidal neurons they had these huge cone-shaped cell bodies they call them pyramids because they look pyramid but actually they're they're cone-shaped and they're enormous compared to other neurons and they uh they have uh the biggest array of mixed polarity interrupted microtubules anywhere and their basilar dendrites are continuous in this so they form one continuous sheet over the whole cortex and their outputs elicit behavior and their apical dendrites give rise to EEG. So I think consciousness can happen in, I think it could happen in anything really, but it may be proto-conscious if it doesn't have information. But the most likely place in the brain would be among the pyramidal neurons of layer five throughout the whole cortex with lateral connections and i think consciousness can actually move around within it

so if you're having an auditory sensation it's an auditory cortex visual it's in the visual cortex and other other areas that are related prefrontal cortex i mean um with with uh, the whole brain there are three, you know, it goes in three ways from thalamus to primary cortex, primary cortex to the front of the brain, front of the brain elsewhere. And it's that third wave elsewhere that seems to correlate with consciousness because that's the only way that's affected by anesthesia. Now, how that, how that fits with GNW and IIT and higher order theory and recursive processing, all the other theories, I'm not sure. And I know that in the Templeton program on accelerating research consciousness, there's a $5 million study, front of the brain versus back of the brain, IIT versus global neuronal workspace.

of the brain versus back of the brain, IIT versus global neuronal workspace. And I'm not sure what that's going to prove, actually, because I think under different circumstances, consciousness can be anywhere in the brain. But we'll find out. We're part of that program, too. But we're much more focused on looking at effects of anesthesia on quantum vibrations and microtubules. And if we don't see that, we'll be falsified. So we're putting their money where our mouth is. I'm not sure if this other study will prove anything, but we'll see. I've talked and read a lot about IIT, and the more I hear about this, I don't really understand it. I know it's some measure of integration, but they say that it can happen at any level. So I asked Christophe and Julia, well, what happens if,

if you measure microtubules in, if you measure phi in microtubules, they said, yeah, it could be extremely high there. So I said, well, how do you measure it? And they would, they, they couldn't say how you'd measure it. And I said, what if we get these quantum vibrations in microtubules, could you apply and see if they, that is phi is phi? And they wouldn't answer that either. So I don't know, actually. And I think all those other theories can be more or less correct. They're all at the level of neurons, although IATs, that can happen at any level, but they really focus on neurons. They could all be happening, but still need ORCAca war happening at a deeper level so they're all basically uh our cognitive architectures that may or may not have anything to do with consciousness of course i'm you know i'm skeptical i'm the enemy according to them

and uh but i think that you need to go to a deeper level into the quantum quantum realm do you feel like anyone else has a scientific theory that confronts the hard problem or even something that's posed as rigorous even something slightly rigorous that could be philosophical i think uh i think our theory is head and shoulders above any other theory in that regard in terms of rigor even approaching the heart problem i mean everybody else basically says it's an emergent phenomenon at a critical level of something, complexity, some nonlinear function that has not yet been defined. Maybe it's phi, but what is phi? We don't really know. So I'm pretty dubious about that. I think, you know, we're way farther out on a limb. We're much easier to falsify than any other theory. And that's both good and bad. It's

bad because we could be falsified, but it's good that we have a specific theory. You know, if it can't be falsified, then it's not a theory. What are some ways of falsifying it? Well, the, what I just said, we're, we're in this program now, we're starting experiments very soon. So the way they showed, the way they showed quantum coherence, quantum effects in photosynthesis protein is take a this protein and do what's called 2d electron spectroscopy where you put i think three laser beams in and get two laser beams out and if there's a or two emission two uh emissions from it and if there's a quantum superposition in the protein then you get a soft tooth interference a set of interference peaks coming out. And

that is indicative that there's a quantum superposition in the protein. So that was done with an FMO protein of about 25 kilodaltons. And we'll be trying it at tubulin, which is 110 kilodaltons, 110,000. What's a kilodon? Kilodalton. What's that? That's a unit of some sort. I mean, a atomic mass unit is adult ah okay okay well it is 110 the molecular

the molecular weight is a atomic weight is 110 000 so uh if you count up all the uh protons and neutrons so it has i don't know how many atoms out of that but um uh that's uh uh if the tubulin is four times the size of the protein they previously measured on, is what I'm trying to say. So it's, it's a, it's a step up. And the guy doing it is Greg Scholes, who did some of the original work in the photosynthesis protein. He's an expert in this. So he thinks he can do it. And there's some tricks involved. And if we see that, if we see that quantum interference at room temperature in a, in a tubulin protein, we'll then attempt to anesthetize it and see if it goes away proportional to the potency of the anesthetic.

And we'd like to also give it psychedelics and see if it increases. Speaking of psychedelics, you mentioned that, well, I'm not sure if it was you, but there's an indole group, and they interact with the benzene in some manner? An indole has a benzene and a five-sided ring combined it's a fuse it's fused so it's found in tryptophan the amino acid it's found in most of the psychedelics you have this indole ring and uh it's amazing actually that this the neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and the psychedelics all have these same pi resonance groups that that are conducive to quantum effects. I don't know if you've heard of this thought, and I think you have, because I

think I got it from you. There's a thought experiment by Koch called, I don't know what to call it other than binocular rivalry, and I'm not sure if it has implications for your theory, or implications for some other theory, but do you mind outlining what that is, and then what your thoughts are on it? Yeah, well actually it was done by nikos logothetis uh where you present different images to different to the two eyes uh so one eye is seeing one scene one eye seeing the other thing uh the other way to think of it is the necker cube where you see in the foreground of the background it shifts back and forth or the the the vase and the face and that sort of thing. There's two different perceptions. But if you put the two different things, you have a conscious perception of one,

and then it switches to the other, and it switches back and forth. And I would say that you have a superposition of both, and it collapses to one, and then it collapses to the other. So that'd be our explanation and my explanation for that let's get to penrose and his explanation as to how consciousness arises so there's a superposition at a quantum level and when it collapses that is a small proto-consciousness moment and somehow that consciousness moment is either influenced by or accesses platonic forms? Yes, although, yes. Well, if it's happening, if it's proto-conscious,

it's happening here, there, and everywhere, it's going to have very little effect. It's going to be, it's not going to be affected very much by these platonic forms, which are kind of preferred states in, and in our paper, Roger came up with the name of the equations that actually govern this but i forget what they are at the moment um but you need a you need a pretty organized or orchestrated uh superposition for that effect to be significant yes that's the idea that it's not random like as it would be in measurement or decoherence but there's some influence due to these platonic platonic values or preferred states.

And therefore, if you're mindful, it'd be like what we call intuition or creativity or insight or hunch or stroke of genius or the way of the Tao or divine guidance or however you want to put it. Speaking of stroke of genius, the part of your theory and Penrose's theory that I like the most is not just the ingenuity of it but the fact and so for example you fold in multiple mysteries like how does one integrate quantum theory with gravity and so on but and by the way let me just say we're criticized but i don't want to interrupt your train of thought because i want to hear what you're going to ask me yeah it's a compliment so but but you know we criticize uh for you know well people really chalmers has ridiculed us and and steven pinker said well quantum theory is one mystery consciousness maybe they're the same mystery haha well damn it maybe they are and occam's razor would suggest that the minimization of mysteries is a good thing. I mean, Dave Chalmers, a good friend

of mine ridiculed us by saying, Oh, they're just invoking the mythical minimization, law of minimization of mysteries. But if you believe in Occam's razor, Occam's razor, you know, one explanation for several mysteries is a good thing. And when I hear that, I'm reminded of a talk by Tegmark and you where you were both critiquing one another and Tegmark said, hey, maybe consciousness is explained in the same way that we thought there were different laws for billiard balls than the moon, and it turned out to be one law. Well, you can use that same logic to suggest that quantum mechanics has something to do with consciousness in the same way. Okay, anyway, what I like about your theory, yours and Penrose, is not just the fact that it's creative and inventive but there's a gallantry there's an endurance that you have to go against the prevailing norms and to

take criticism for years that you're a crackpot and so on and to me that that's not easy that's most people would consciously buckle or unconsciously. So that is some, I can't convey in words how difficult that is. And that I actually find commendable. Well, thank you. Thank you. You know, uh, Roger's just above it all. And, uh, from my, you know, but although he's, he's sensitive and he doesn't like being criticized, but, but I think he's, he's operating on a higher level than the rest of us. So for him, it's just, well, they'll, they'll figure it out eventually. My perspective about being criticized and yeah, it hurts.

But you know, I'm, I don't need grants. I don't need to go out and get grants to fund my livelihood. So I don't need to follow somebody else's idea of what's important to put food on the table. I, you know, I make my living as an anesthesiologist. I'm an academic, so I do research and so forth, but my livelihood doesn't depend. I follow my nose. I follow my intuition. It's, it's more of a, I hate to say it's a hobby because that sounds demeaning because it's very important to me. Why is it so important?

It's the most interesting question in the world. I mean, it's what I do. If my hobby were, well, I used to ski a lot. If it was skiing, what I love is you just want to go out and ski. It's what I enjoy doing. It's fun. And it's gotten me to see the world I met people like Roger and you and countless other people and been uh all over the world you know before COVID and uh hopefully will again and uh you know keeps me going like you said I'm pretty old but I'm still highly motivated and and I never said you're

pretty old I said but I well it's true I am pretty old but I'm still highly motivated. I never said you're pretty old. Well, it's true. I am pretty old. But I'm still doing anesthesia, although I'm cutting back on time. But my research keeps me going. It's what I love to do, among other things. What does your theory have to say about zero-point consciousness or the view from nowhere? Oh, yeah.

Nothingness. Yeah. point consciousness or the view from nowhere oh yeah nothingness yeah so if in med if you meditate uh it's just contentless conscious whether it's contentless or not uh is is debatable some people say well nothingness is something um but i think you can be highly conscious of just uh pure conscious consciousness with feelings i think you know feelings, content, I think it depends. It's a semantic question. So I think you can be highly conscious without any content, and sometimes that's the best type of consciousness. When you say it's the best type, do you mean that it comes with euphoria, or do you mean that somehow it's aiding your regular life when you come back to it?

Well, it could be the latter, but at the time I was just thinking it's just peaceful and euphoric and pure existence and very gratifying. Have you heard of Wolfram's computational theory? I know Wolfram. Which computational? No. His physics theory that says that perhaps at the bottom of our universe is something like hypergraphs. And there's a rule that dictates the update of the hypergraph. And then that can lead to regularities that we interpret as particles and so on. It could be. It sounds a little like Roger's idea, but he wouldn't call it computation.

I think, you know, the whole idea of the brain is computers, the universe is a computer is maybe, its brain is more like an orchestra and consciousness is more like music than a computation. Have you heard of Bernardo Kastrup's theories of consciousness? A little bit. Yeah, I know Bernardo and I've heard him speak and he's kind of an idealist and where consciousness is everything. And, you know, he has a rigorous approach to it. And I respect that. I just think that, you know, matter is also real. And we kind of oscillate between a quantum and a classical realm at a high frequency. So I don't think it's quite right to say that consciousness is all there is.

I think there's a real world out there too, a classical world. What I was wondering about your theory is how does it solve the hard problem when it seems like there's this material base and then there's a collapse and that collapses consciousness. But then I'm wondering, okay, how is the collapse consciousness? Because that's of a different ontological category. So you're starting from material and then somehow you produce consciousness, but it still seems to me to lack an explanation as to why consciousness arises. You have to,

you have to say that experience is a fundamental component of the universe. Now, a lot of people say that panpsychists panpsychists say that idealists say that idealists say that that's all there is. Panpsychists say, would say, I guess that it's a property of matter, that every atom has a property or state of qualia, of consciousness. And our approach is more of a process philosophy, more along the lines of Alfred North Whitehead, who said that consciousness is a sequence of events and doesn't even bring in matter.

You know, it's a sequence of events, of occasions of experience occurring in a wider field of experience. And it was Abner Shimony who made the observation that Whitehead's occasions of experience are very much like quantum state reductions. And Whitehead was aware of quantum and talked about it a little bit. But the idea is that consciousness is not a property of matter, but it's an event. Like a photon is an event or things are events, occurrences that happen rather than being states of matter. And what that does is the event creates a particular

state of matter so if you have a superposition of multiple possibilities and it collapses to this that's the state that's created and the transition from going from both to one emits i don't know if emit is the proper verb uh causes creates or is equivalent to a moment of conscious experience with qualia. You could say it's a quail. It's a quantum of experience. What does your theory have to say about free will? Well, first of all, you need the backward time effect to be able to act in real time. It doesn't address determinism because even if you do act in real time. It, it doesn't address determinism, because even if you do act in

real time, you still have the problem, well, maybe it was always going to be that way, because of everything else that's already happened. But when you bring in the backward time effects, I think that gives you the possibility of free will. But you're still, you're still governed by, if that's true, you're still governed by, you know, the deterministic Schrodinger equation up to that point, and maybe even the platonic values. So the best they could say is that free will is the experience of your volition being influenced by platonic values. And actually, I have a paper about that called How Quantum Brain Biology Can Rescue Conscious Free Will. But it deals with the backward time effect rather than the other the other issues but that paper is published already in 2012 uh uh how quantum brain biology

can rescue conscious free will and i think it's got more views than any other paper i've written it's in one of the frontiers journals something like 50 000 views i'll link it in the description okay now this question i'm not sure if it's better directed at penrose or to you and i'm not sure who's the obverse of the two but i'll for the sake of flattering you i'll pretend it i'll say it's you for this conversation there's a strong anthropic principle and a weak one now as far as i know actually i don't recall which is which so let me see far as i know actually i don't recall which is which so let me see well you can explain it i can't find it right now one has the causal error of going in the other direction yeah well basically

the anthropic principle is that uh uh the if you look at the 20 or so values of the parameters that govern the universe the charge of this and the the step and uh uh all the things that govern the universe, the charge of this and all the things that govern at the microscopic level. If they weren't exactly, if all 22, I think, weren't exactly what they were, what they are, we wouldn't have a universe with stars, light, life, and consciousness. So they have to be exactly how they are for us to be here. So they have to be exactly, exactly how they are for us to be here. And one view is that, you know, God did it, you know, that there's a prime mover and he created, he or she created the universe the way it is. And I think that's the strong anthropic principle.

I'm not sure. The other view is that it brings in multiple worlds and that there's an infinite number of worlds and that we happen to live in the one world, the one and only world, that has all the parameters right that can have consciousness. So that all the other worlds, they don't have. So it solves the problem of, you know, that we won the cosmic lottery by having all these numbers being exactly the way they are by saying, well, that's, that's only because it's, it's a, it's a selector's bias that, you know, we're asking the questions because we're in the one and only universe that has the, that has consciousness. But then you have all these other worlds.

What's the point? So I don't like that. And then Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen tried to say, they have kind of a Copenhagen view of consciousness causes collapse. And they were saying, well, consciousness is coming from another multiple worlds. I think they were saying that. coming from another multiple worlds i think they were saying that and i said well that's the case of becoming from a world with inferior inferior

consciousness because of the end so they they dropped that so the explanation i like is uh we actually talked about this in our in our recent papers you know roger has this whole other theory about cyclical conformal cosmology that the big bang was preceded by another eon and that was preceded by another eon and so forth and uh i saw i said well why do you think there was uh consciousness in the previous eon he said well sure and should it could have been should have been why not and uh i then thought about a book by uh lee smolin about called life of the cosmos and uh he was talking about uh in a black hole evolutionary model pardon me an evolutionary model yeah that that what comes out on the other side is an improved version of what what went in so i said could that apply to your you know big bangs and in eon so that that uh every transition from eon to

eon the parameters mutate or evolve and so what comes out on the other side is a slightly improved or maybe dramatically improved version of the parameters to support consciousness and that you know the universe is evolving eon to eon to optimize consciousness so i was a little surprised he didn't just say no and said yeah it could be so we put that in the that's in one of our recent papers suggesting that that consciousness is actually steering the universe by these transition points, big bang transition points. And then eon to eon, consciousness gets a little bit better each time. Instead of universes giving rise to one where there are great conditions for intelligent self-consciousness, that is the multiverse theory, the weak anthropic principle, you have consciousness

is driving the progression of the universe evolutionarily, as in Penrose's cyclical model. Okay, so then this to me implies that there are better laws or more adaptive physical constants. So do you or Penrose make any predictions as to what would be considered better for consciousness in terms of further tweaking these fundamental constants? I can't tell you exactly, you know, what would be, what would improve consciousness. But with all these 22 parameters, you know, there must be some combination that might optimize it in the sense that how, I don't know how, but you know, maybe the platonic values are evolving. Maybe the experience is getting more fun or feels better. I don't know, but how would you, you you know if you want to improve

consciousness well you know what would be a way to improve it outside of getting rid of people want to kill other people and that sort of thing but um you know just how would it get better i'm not sure but i think i think it's it's one possibility what else i mean what what else would be the point of of the universe evolving to improve what? In other words, I don't see consciousness as kind of an afterthought. I think of it as more primary. One point you mentioned that you can vibrate, literally vibrate the microtubules to treat cognitive disorders and that you did this to yourself at some point. Okay. What were the results of that? And can this be done at home? I got to be careful here in that practice medicine over the internet, but, but, uh, when,

uh, when Anurban came out with this idea that, uh, or discovered that there were these vibrations in microtubules, uh, including in megahertz, then, um, um, you know, so he had terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz, kilohertz. So I said, I wonder if there's a way to treat the microtubules. So terahertz is infrared and people actually do try that, but it's kind of hard to get photons into the brain. Gigahertz is microwaves. I wasn't interested in putting microwaves in my brain, although that's that, apparently that weapon that the Russians or the, I forget who used it on our embassy people, these loud pops, and apparently that was microwave.

And so I wasn't interested in doing that. Megahertz in electromagnetics is radio waves. Wasn't interested in doing that. But megahertz in mechanical is ultrasound. And we use ultrasound and anesthesia all the time. And so when I read this this i looked over and there's an ultrasound machine sitting there and i said i wonder if anybody's put ultrasound into the brain and ultrasound's been around forever and it's mechanical vibrations megahertz bounces off

echoes off surfaces so you get an image inside the body you can see the babies in the uterus and so forth and so i i looked up and sure enough, a guy had been putting a ultrasound into the brains of animals and getting behavioral effects. And, uh, you know, they can move their paw. You could get it. You can make them move their paw by paying the pop paw region and physiological effects. And, uh, I wondered, uh, what would be the effect on mental states? And, uh, um, it ultrasound is approved for had been approved for imaging the brain. what would be the effect on mental states. And it, ultrasound is approved for, had been approved for imaging the brain. So people will be getting ultrasound of the brain,

but it wasn't very good compared to, you know, MRI and CT for imaging the brain. So it wasn't really useful. So I said to my anesthesia colleagues, you know, we have, we have chronic pain patients who are depressed. In addition to taking care of people in the operating room for surgery, we see chronic pain patients do nerve blocks and that sort of thing. And I'd done our work in our pain clinic a while. And I said, you know, they're all depressed. Maybe we should put ultrasound into their brain and see if they feel better. All over the brain or in a specific region? Well, I didn't, I didn't get that far. And I, that, you know, I hadn't really thought about it.

And, and my friend said, okay, you go first. You know, we don't try to anybody unless we try it on ourselves. Well, you have an easy head for it. Yeah, that's true. I do. And, uh, but it was also my idea. In fact, that's when he said, that's what my friend said. He said, you got a shaved head, your idea, you go first. And so it was the end of the day, we're sitting around a table and I said, okay, what the heck? I thought about it and I wrote, well, it's approved for ultrasound brain imaging. Can't be that bad. How many seconds, sorry to interrupt. How many seconds does it take for the imaging? Like a minute? Imaging happens immediately. Okay. So they don't leave prolonged ultrasound on your brain, at least not in humans that they've tested.

they don't leave prolonged ultrasound on your brain, at least not in humans that they've tested. Well, I, I'm not sure anybody used it for brain imaging very much. It was approved, but then CT and MRI came, came by, came around. So I don't know if it was, there wasn't any guidelines. I, you know, I knew what they used in animals and that sort of thing. Anyway, so they called my bluff. My friends call my bluff and, uh, sit around the table and i picked that with my right hand and uh you put this goo on it because it's got to have gel and being right-handed and knowing that the temporal bone is the thinnest i put it right here turn on the machine saw what sort of looked like my brain on the on the screen kept it there for about 15 seconds put it down i didn't feel a thing i said oh well Oh, well, that's disappointing. But about a minute later, I did start to feel anything, feel something. And I felt kind of a buzz.

I was like really energized and invigorated and felt really good for about an hour. And so I said, you know what, we should try this. So we did the first study in 19, in 2012, it was actually published in 2013 on chronic pain patients in the journal brain stimulation and showed improved mood and reduced pain in chronic pain patients with 15 seconds of ultrasound to uh contralateral to the pain in in pain chronic pain patients in a double-blind crossover study you don't feel it so it's easy to do a double-blind study now since then a number of other people did it and we we did a study about a year ago uh with much better studies showed improved mood and

changing mri connectivity so it actually does does change the connection patterns in the brain did you ever try it again i've tried it a couple of times, but nothing again. Not that you didn't get that one hour of buzz. Yeah, I did, but I didn't. Yeah. But have you tried it for creativity? What's that? Have you tried it to increase creativity or productivity? I don't, I don't, I don't want to mess with it. It's something at work. You know, I don't have one at home. It's not something I'm really into to try but i think if i had alzheimer's or or something like that i damn well try it okay let me get off on a hypothetical plunge here some people suggest that the universe as a whole is conscious now i assume

you suggest that to some minor degree proto-consciousness more like a cacophony than a symphony because you need to cohere it in some manner. Okay. But then consciousness is associated with 40 hertz? 10 hertz? It could be at any frequency. Okay. Well, where I was going with this was you can look at the universe as a whole through astrological data and cosmological data. And I'm wondering, is there a way of seeing if the universe is vibrating and then let's imagine it's not vibrating at some level then does that mean

that as far as we can tell we are the most conscious parts of the universe well it may be vibrating questions whether it's vibrating coherently you know or is everything connected and uh some people would say yes that everything's ent, you know, or is everything connected? And some people would say, yes, that everything's entangled, you know, going back to the big bang, everything's entangled. You're kind of asking me whether, you know, whether there's God out there in terms of this. And I think there might be, but I'm not going to, you know, I don't want to say yes or no, for sure. I think there's something like God and, and it could, it,

it has to do with uh you know platonic values and consciousness out there but i'd rather leave it vague because otherwise it becomes religion okay well then what i was wondering is let's imagine that we are the most conscious parts of the universe now i know that's extreme hubris then does that mean that we have a chance at directing the evolution toward the universe being more conscious in the next cycle? If consciousness is somehow directing the evolution of these cycles, and we happen to be the most conscious in this universe, then do we have some hand at that? This is a huge speculative jump. Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. I mean, I did speculate that, or Raj and I did speculate that,

you know, these crossovers of eon to eon, but just to get there, you know, you have to have this heat death of the universe. And, and I think we would long be long gone and it would be our consciousness somehow, you know, in the, in the Planck scale and the fine scale structure of the universe, whatever that is. So I don't know. That's, that's a tough one. What do you agree with Deepak Chopra on and what do you disagree with him on? I was watching the interview between you and him and I said this on the most recent interview

I did with Bernardo Castro that I don't disagree necessarily with Deepak. It's not like I agree or disagree because I just reserve judgment. I don't know the ideas enough. But I see him as looking for scientific credibility from people. So when you say something that is in line with what he thinks, he'll ask you to expound and then say, well, what do you say to people who disagree and say that I espouse woo-woo? Well, you're a scientist and you

believe something. So I see him as fishing for scientific credibility rather than someone who is open to different viewpoints and is challenging his own in the moment but i'm curious what you think of deepak where you agree where you disagree well he's a friend of mine uh and uh you know i've heard the criticisms and, you know, I think he's he's he can be criticized along the lines of what you what you said, but his heart's in a good place and he means well. And let's just leave it at that. He's a friend of mine. When people say that we're all one and not in just some abstract sense, but in that we share some entity. What do you make of that like consciousness is fundamental uh i think we can be one i think i think you know people can

be entangled i don't uh you know i think esp and that sort of thing parapsychology can't can't occur by quantum non-locality but does that mean we are all entangled at any one time? Not necessarily. I think potentially we can be, but again, I don't want to go too far in that direction. I've already, I've gone out on quite a limb in a lot of areas. Okay. I'll take some questions from the audience. Let's take a look here. Is the depressed person more or less conscious? person more or less conscious? Well, you could say they're less conscious, but they would require the same amount of anesthesia probably. So I'd say they're probably the same, but just on a negative pole, you know, you can have good news and bad news, but it's all news. But, but on the other hand, I do have a graph in one of my papers where we plot the number of tubulins and, you know, uh, versus, uh, E sub G and, and, uh, so the intensity of the conscious experience would be related to the frequency

of the, uh, of the number of Orca wire events you can have. So a plant cell might have a few per minute, and we might have trillions per second. So yes, there are levels of consciousness, but within humans, it's kind of hard to say. Just being depressed doesn't really necessarily make you less conscious. You certainly feel less conscious, but maybe that's the same thing. Would Stuart be interested in seeing raw neural signals in awake primates that show timing supporting his time predictions for network properties? And I just read that verbatim.

I don't quite understand what's going on. So perhaps you do. It would support what? They would support what? Okay. Would Stuart be interested in seeing raw neural signals in awake primates that show timing supporting his timing predictions for network properties? If you mean something that shows a response before the stimulus, the backward time effect, yes.

And I suspect they're all over neuroscience and they get buried because people don't want to deal with them. We had a talk at one of our conferences and somebody was showing implanted electrodes in patients and with responses to different faces, you know, the Halle Berry neuron would fire or the Bill Clinton neuron would fire. And it seemed that the firing, which he was showing on the screen, were happening slightly before the picture appeared. And I said, are these synchronized? And he said, yes. I said, so you mean the neuron responds just before the, before the picture actually appears? He goes, yes. And he said,

well, I said, well, how do you explain that? He goes, I can't. And I said, do you think they're backward time effects? He said, I don't know. He wouldn't go there. This was Christoph Koch's student at the time. And I invited him to the next year's conference to talk about that. And he showed up and he talked about something different. I said, well, why don't you talk about the backward time effect? And he said, Christoph said it would ruin my career. Really?

That would ruin his career? Has this been published? No. But there's been a lot of stuff published on Backward Time. Daryl Bem had eight experiments, and nine experiments, eight out of nine of which showed Backward Time effects. Okay, do you mind repeating that person's name? This way I can look it up. Daryl Bem, B-E-M, a psychologist, back in 2012, something like that, in a mainstream psychology journal, did nine experiments showing, and eight of them showed essentially backward time effects. super interested in talking to people who have done studies that demonstrate something that seems like ESP or near-death experiences or paranormal psi events, because unlike most of the physicists, I don't see it as contradicting physics. I see it as perhaps there's this

indicating new physics or the way that consciousness interacts with physics, which to me is part of an explanatory framework. Right. And Roger's working on this retroactivity now, which could explain this, but he's doing it as a way to get rid of the, well, for different reasons, because of his objective reduction in the tails problem and quantum collapse that I don't know that much about. But hopefully we'll hear more about that in our next paper

because he said he's working on it. Andreas Cole says, I'm so excited for this could you ask him what he thinks about open individualism and what theory of self he personally subscribes to and then what does orco are say about that said theory of self um i'm not sure what different theories of self are i have this debate with Betsy, my wife, all the time, because she and many people think you need self to have consciousness, and I don't think you need a self to have consciousness. I think you can just have experiences that over time build up memories,

and the memory is the self. So I'm not committed. and the memory is the self. So I'm not committed, you know, and then Julian James, you know, had this idea that hundreds of thousands of years ago, there was no one you, there was no one Kurt in your head,

there was no one Stuart in my head. It was just a bunch of voices and, you know, the gods or the gremlins or whoever. And then over time time it consolidated into a self so i don't think you need a self to to be conscious i think and of course if you know the whole point of meditation is to lose self so uh i i i don't worry about that too much and i think if you have a sequence uh you know over the course of a lifetime of conscious moments and memory, you're going to have a self built up, but that doesn't mean it's the self having the consciousness. Consciousness could just be occurring by itself. Have you researched much about Jung?

Because what you described sounds like what Jung described as the individuation process, and that is that there are different personalities, disparate, maybe disjoint, that are competing and conflicting? It could be. I know a little bit about Jung, and Betsy studies Jung, and my good friend Harold Ottmann-Spacher is big on Jung. But I don't really know that much about it.

Okay, and lastly, Dan Arms says, does he think there may be any basis to the hypothesis that the sun has consciousness? The sun? Yeah. The only thing I want to say about that is that Roger once said that neutron stars have giant Bose-Einstein condensates. So they could

have moments of collapse. And a neutron star might be having conscious moments. But other types of stars, I don't know. Stuart, thank you so much, man. Hey welcome good talking to you good luck to you you ask great questions thanks for your audience and uh uh stay in touch you