Is consciousness to be found in quantum processes in microtubules?

I doubt that will ever happen and if it did the conversation wouldn’t be very interesting. I don’t believe most scientists could even come to terms with translating all the scientific processes into a format that is reasonable to express in regular human language.

That is pretty much all I know on the subject. The only reason why I remember that is because it is actually really close to my theory on how the spark of the Big Bang occurred to discover a theory of everything. Instead of consciousness arising, energy is created. That is why it stood out in my mind. It worked as a mnemonic device to remember it.

I really found it shocking that the same idea on how energy could arise from nothing, in someone else’s mind could create self awareness itself. It makes me wonder about the possibility of the two being related.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I believe that is what Roger Penrose is proposing. I'll let him explain in person.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Functionalism holds the view that even a clockwork mechanism could instantiate intelligence and its sub-category of cognition, albeit the apparatus would be huge and absurdly slow.

The mix-up one can run into here is that 90% of people interpret "consciousness" as signifying cognition (identification and understanding of received information, which has dependency on a memory system or retention of data). Which is fine when one is not referring to the hard-problem, but otherwise -- without being more specific, it's almost a guarantee that one party will be headed north while the other is veering off west.

Cognition is really just a specialized function of intelligence, and the latter (in a basic context sans subtle bells and whistles) can be wholly accounted for by the interacting components of a complex system, as the best AI and robotics already demonstrate (short of the millions of years of environmental adaptations and refinements that brains accordingly enjoy).

The manifestations of consciousness (images, sounds, odors, tactile sensations, thoughts, etc) surely correlate to neural patterns, too, but there is no mature science for predicting them in a strict and universally reliable way. Because there is no physics (apart from fringe speculations and hypotheses) that attributes a capacity for manifestation to matter to begin with.

Minus a deep, underlying theory that elaborates on what the sophisticated presentations of the brain would incrementally arise from (just as biological cells and tissues do not float on their own, but depend on the particles and fields of physics), what's left is the equivalent of asserting magical conjuring takes place via electrochemical processes performing the correct algorithmic dance or spell. Plus the embarrassment that the "brutely emergent novelty" conjured only receives private verification, is not even detectable by outside observers slash instruments.

Thomas Henry Huxley: "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." --Lessons in Elementary Physiology ​

A reminder here that 90% of people [a purely figurative expression for denoting the majority] will interpret him as referring to cognition and its resultant amenability over later decades to a mechanistic account; and not the experiences / manifestations of consciousness. If one does not narrow down to something more specific than "consciousness", the listeners/readers will inevitably wander all over the place with respect to what one means.
_

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Figuratively, it's kind of like a water valve in a pipeline offering resistance to the "flow" depending on how open or closed it is. But an ordinary resistor is stuck on one setting.

Passive electronic components like resistors, capacitors, inductors, sensors are an essential part of a device. But their importance is constrained to what they do -- each has a single "superpower" (so to speak), though it might have different modes of expression.

A potentiometer can vary its resistance (measured in ohms), which an ordinary resistor cannot, but both are confined to that general ability or function.

Large electrolytic capacitors can be used in an AC to DC power supply (transformer, rectifier, etc) to reduce the low "hum" that would otherwise be heard from speakers connected to an amplifier using the former. But smaller capacitors can also be used to block out the low frequencies of an audio signal going to a tweeter. Different purposes exploiting the same limited "superpower" (measured in farads, usually microfarads). There are variable capacitors, too.
_

 

I totally agree with that observation. That is why I mention that I am collecting data on the "hard facts", stuff that we know and can measure, in the hope that some model may "emerge" that points to a common denominator in all those microtubule functions that are engaged in consciousness. If there is a correlation somewhere, we must know where to begin to look.

However, one must admit that the microtubules has an enormous range of data processing functions that far exceeds the function of your everyday variable potentiometer. Moreover, the network consists of billions of interconnected microtubules, which according to Hameroff and Penrose may be acting in concert. Hence my mention of "quorum sensing", where bacterial virulence is triggered by "sufficient" density of individuals.

Personally, I suspect that "consciousness" is an emergent expression of a super-sensory network that "orchestrates" pertinent information into a single experience of what Hameroff calls a "Bing", the resolution of an objective reduction that is experienced as an instant of consciousness.
I have been intrigued by ORCH OR, because it suggests a whole new perspective that might solve the dualistic interpretation.

Yes, but we are looking at these limited functionalities from an anthropomorphic perspective and at macro scales which I understand restricts their functionality to purely

Microtubules function at quantum scales and who knows if there are any restrictions at all. If we have confidence in the concept of "superposition" at that level, perhaps there are no restrictions other than "decoherence", which is apparent when part of the brain is under anesthesia.

 

The reason why I believe there is a link between the quantum level and consciousness is because of dreams. I don’t know if you ever experienced Déjà Vu. I saw a documentary about lucid dreaming and decided to try it out. They recommended trying to write down or going over your dreams right when you wake up, so you could remember them. I discovered that some of the dreams I had were also instances I experienced Déjà Vu.

There appears to be some connection in time between our dreams and reality that we are not fully aware of. How else could I dream about an event that wouldn’t take place until sometime later in the future? A crazy claim, I know, but other people who experience Déjà Vu usually seem to confirm this.

I believe that the quantum connection is actually due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which says that the closer you measure the speed or position of a particle the other value becomes more uncertain. The new physics would also include the actual time it is in also becomes more uncertain the more accurately you attempt to measure it. Speed is a function of time.

Studies have shown that our brains sort out useless information when we enter a dream state. It may be that our brains are actually sorting out this quantum information by taking different degrees of measurement. We experience these differences in experiences through time as dreams. Our dreams may actually be our experiences in other universes that no longer exists. Our brains are sorting out this information, so we are only aware of the present.

Most of the work I mention came before the internet. It is unlikely that it has been put on here, but that is another experiment I heard about in the early 90’s. If you wanted to search for it, it would be papers published around that time. They never reached the conclusion that dreams come from quantum information, but it fits into the model they presented.

 

It is also possible that the brain is able to orchestrate various "expectations", which then later may be recognized as prescience.

This is explained by Anil Seth;

 

Yes, and this also coincides with research on dream states performed in the early 90’s, before the internet. It was also discovered that as a consequence of not entering an REM dream state for a period of three days will cause hallucinations in any normal healthy person.

I actually experienced this from having a medical condition known as Sleep Apnea. I ended up having my tonsils and uvula removed to cure the condition. It was similar to being on the drug called acid for an extended period of time. I took it at a rave once, and thought that was the cause of the condition. It was actually due to an anchovy food allergy.

It is actually evident of dreams sorting out what is real and what isn’t. It coincides with the idea that our dreams are sorting out different degrees of measurement on a quantum level.

 

But is detectable by the fact that we are conscious. We just cannot measure it as a brain pattern (yet).

But I do like Tegmark's analogy of H2O which has three possible new emergent states (solid, liquid, gaseous) depending on the density and distribution of the individual molecules but each state with properties that H2O molecules themselves do not have.

He claims it is the pattern arrangement that yields emergent properties and potentials that the parts (microtubules) do not possess. This is how he arrives at a new quantum substance called perceptronium.

 

If we were wired like common circuitry, scientists would have already discovered the theory of what creates consciousness a long time ago. That is why it is wrong to think about it working similarly to a common circuit.

Since we don’t have the same biology as our technology, if it did work like a circuit, it would have to be like some kind of circuit that is of a completely different animal. That is why I mentioned the story of Bell Labs. If they didn’t standardize impedance, circuits on every fundamental level would be a completely different animal.

That other animal would be having to micromanage impedance.

 

And that may be the job of microtubules with their ability to present a variable profile within a neural network.

 

EXCERPT: If you're expressing the ultimate consciousness and neuronal impulses, why does it matter that there is a quantum effect beyond the normal quantum effects we see everywhere?

Well, it has to be coherent. I mean if it's simply quantum mechanics acting incoherently, then there's no sort of global [integration?]. It has to be coherent. That's why we call it ORCH. It stands for objective reduction, that's where the quantum state collapses to one alternative or another, and the ORCH part, it says it's orchestrated. So you have to have this global control or something that the thing is organized in some global way, so the different productions of the state actually do make a big difference to what happens to the way the network of neurons acts. ​

Even speculatively making the leap that they might contend that coherence also plays a role in how scattered, primitive manifestations in the brain get united into the sophisticated experiences presented to us... As David Chalmers indicates in the quote below, H&P usually doesn't address the phenomenal aspect of consciousness, at least directly: "Hameroff and Penrose concentrate mostly on the physics of reduction and its functioning in microtubules, and leave questions about the explanation of experience to one side."

OTOH, Chalmers does mention "They suggest a kinship with Whitehead's metaphysics; the view might also fit comfortably into the Russellian framework outlined earlier". But if they rarely elaborate on that "panexperientialism" orientation in their model, then it seems this is just more correlation talk (with respect to the hard-problem). Where instead of correlating experiences to neural activity at an upper level, experiences are correlated to quantum states at a more fundamental level -- with again, little to no explanation or elucidation beyond that for the relationship.

Again, consciousness as intelligent processing of information (cognition) and consciousness as issues revolving around the idea of "self", are items that I believe can be satisfactorily accounted for in a classical context of interacting components and organization without needing an appeal to quantum peculiarities. (In the basic sense of what intelligence does. There may be subtle bells and whistles of animal psychological abilities versus embodied computer equivalents that could struggle to be instantiated in the latter even in the future -- I leave that as a possibility.)

David Chalmers (Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness): The difference between the two sorts of physics-based proposals is most apparent in the article by Hameroff and Penrose. Previous work had given me the impression that their aim was to explain consciousness wholly in terms of quantum action in microtubules; but this paper makes it explicit that consciousness is instead to be taken as fundamental. In essence, Hameroff and Penrose offer a psychophysical theory, postulating that certain quantum-mechanical reductions of the wave function, brought on when a certain gravitational threshold is attained, are each associated with a simple event of experience. They suggest a kinship with Whitehead's metaphysics; the view might also fit comfortably into the Russellian framework outlined earlier.

This is an intriguing and ambitious suggestion. Of course the details are a little sketchy: after their initial postulate, Hameroff and Penrose concentrate mostly on the physics of reduction and its functioning in microtubules, and leave questions about the explanation of experience to one side. Eventually it would be nice to see a proposal about the precise form of the psychophysical laws in this framework, and also to see how these billions of microscopic events of experience might somehow yield the remarkable structural properties of the single complex consciousness that we all possess. I am cautious about this sort of quantum-mechanical account myself, partly because it is not yet clear to me that quantum mechanics is essential to neural information-processing, and partly because it is not easy to see how quantum-level structure corresponds to the structure one finds in consciousness. But it is not impossible that a theory might address these problems. To know for sure, we will need a detailed explanatory bridge.​

 

Well, again, there's only private verification and accordingly dependence upon that person's verbal reports that there are manifestations/feelings. Even if a reliable (repeatable), universal brain pattern was found in connection to a specific type of verbal report, there is still no public or external detection and observation of the experience itself. IOW, a robot p-zombie scientist/doctor could alternatively just deem that the human patient was deluded or that people in general were religious-like nutjobs with respect to that pervasive belief. Which often seems what eliminativists or illusionists already advocate with respect to our phenomenal consciousness.
_

 

I believe you may have misunderstood what Penrose was talking about. He was talking about decoherence. This is a quantum effect responsible for the other universes in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. All of the top theoretical physicists in the US, expect maybe a couple, implement it as the standard theory of everything.

The idea is that the theory doesn’t have anymore room, because it is not a temporal theory of everything. The alternate universes do not allow for the universe to change states throughout time and space. It only branches out every time there is decoherence. It is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics using the Uncertainty Principle.

 

The best definition I have heard comes from Shakespeare; - I think, therefore I am.

It is a difficult statement to argue. It seems to suggest that cognition is a reflection of one’s own self.

 

Actually that was DesCartes. It also fails to explain what thinking is, apart from a kind of, well, self-identification, perhaps.

 

No, decoherence has a history before and after Hugh Everett adopted the term for many worlds (i.e., independent of that particular metaphysical context slash interpretation). And as Penrose stated, it's quantum coherence he wants or needs to achieve _X_, not decoherence and resumption of classical conditions. (Setting aside the issue of whether there's anything to his theory of consciousness.)

(1) Quantum coherence references the ability of a quantum state to maintain its entanglement and superposition in the face of interactions and the effects of thermalization.

(2) Quantum decoherence references the loss of quantum coherence, the process in which a system's behavior changes from that which can be described by quantum mechanics to that which can be described by classical mechanics.​

_

 

This is what Anil Seth calls "controlled halluciations" by a brain that is complety removed from reality and must make best guesses (controlled hallucinations) of what's "out there", based on information processed by microtubules and synapses on its way to the brain where that information is compared to stored memory and creating a coherent cognitive pattern, and only when our combined controlled hallucinations agree on what we observe do we call that reality.

We can use color blindness as an example of divergent interpretation (hallucination) of colors.

Back to basics. Consider a wave.

What is a wave?

What is a medium

Note that microtubules look a lot like slinkies

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

A: An axon terminal releases neurotransmitters through a synapse and are received by microtubules in a neuron's dendritic spine.
B: Simulated microtubule tubulins switch states.[1]

Particle-to-Particle Interaction

A Wave Transports Energy and Not Matter

https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/waves/Lesson-1/What-is-a-Wave

Now consider that each particle in the medium acts as an amplifier that increases the wave function as it travels and is propagated by individual particles. Could the final product of this data processing manifest itself as a coherent internal representation, just as a wave creates an experiential product in the medium it travels through?

 

You are absolutely right. I don’t doubt that one bit. I am starting to think that quantum mechanics is approximately Lorentz Invariant and spacetime is not. Since the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a description of probability, then the reciprocal of the function of tau would then be an approximation of the frequency an object travels in. I have never really been convinced that it has actually ever been tested out. The problem is that the Special Theory of Relativity becomes an approximation when the reciprocal is taken when considering a light clock that has a frequency in hertz. It seems that there is actually something fundamentally wrong with the way we describe mechanical objects that have a frequency of operations.

 

Well, apparently the meaning of "experiential product" there is something different than intended with respect to "phenomenal consciousness", here pertaining purely to ordinary waves traveling through an ordinary medium. Experiences of the latter kind aren't attributed to them (at least in the anti-panpsychism way that a materialistic outlook conceives matter and its activity). And while Penrose believes that the wave function of QM is real, many if not the majority still consider it an abstraction. Granted, exploring P&H's hypothesis means having to contingently cater to his realism about it, but still not regard it as established fact outside this circumstance.

Returning to that quote of Chalmers', highlighted in red in your post above and repeated in entirety again at the very bottom[1]...

I finally found a reference to Whitehead and his "occasions of experience" by one of them (Hameroff). P&H have both qualia events and aspects of cognition simultaneously falling out of their "objective wave function collapse", but everything has to be globally coordinated before that happens (thus Penrose's appeal to coherence in the video). I guess they do address the hard-problem more than I thought, but there's no clarification about how experience would result from that, just that it does.

But on the other hand, even an offshoot of Russelian monism in the context of its view has to settle for such manifestations being how matter exists independent of extrinsic relational affairs or the abstract representations outputted by humans. And similarly Penrose seems to be asserting that the intrinsic state of his "orchestrated objective reduction" occurrence includes such phenomenal properties along with a bit of conceptual apprehension validating that the experience is there and/or signifying what it means.

Probably does nothing to elevate the reputation of their claims, but at least a bit of clarity (for me) on why the umbrella concept of "consciousness" is usually referenced rather than narrowing down to experience itself...

https://experts.arizona.edu/en/publ...in-of-life-how-the-brain-evolved-to-feel-good

Sir Roger Penrose proposed mental properties including qualia accompany self-collapse of the quantum wave function by objective reduction (OR), a threshold in the structure of spacetime geometry. Such OR qualia would be occurring ubiquitously in random environments throughout the universe, but be noncognitive and merely protoconscious. The Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR theory suggests OR events in cytoskeletal microtubules within brain neurons are organized, or orchestrated by inputs, memory, and vibrational resonances, and terminate by orchestrated OR to give meaningful conscious moments.

https://galileocommission.org/wp-co...e-Life-How-the-Brain-Evolved-to-Feel-Good.pdf

In this regard, Penrose OR is aligned with the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1929, 1933) who viewed consciousness as a sequence of discrete “occasions of experience.” Abner Shimony (1993) suggested Whitehead conscious events, or ‘occasions’ were equivalent to quantum state reductions, or moments of collapse of the wave function. Generally, Whitehead occasions are “simple, dull and monotonous,” and must be “combined,” or “organized” into full, rich conscious moments. Similarly, noncognitive, protoconscious qualia occurring with each OR event must be combined, organized, or orchestrated into full rich conscious experience, as described in an iconoclastic theory, orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) ...​

- - - - footnote - - -

[1] David Chalmers: (Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness): The difference between the two sorts of physics-based proposals is most apparent in the article by Hameroff and Penrose. Previous work had given me the impression that their aim was to explain consciousness wholly in terms of quantum action in microtubules; but this paper makes it explicit that consciousness is instead to be taken as fundamental. In essence, Hameroff and Penrose offer a psychophysical theory, postulating that certain quantum-mechanical reductions of the wave function, brought on when a certain gravitational threshold is attained, are each associated with a simple event of experience. They suggest a kinship with Whitehead's metaphysics; the view might also fit comfortably into the Russellian framework outlined earlier.

This is an intriguing and ambitious suggestion. Of course the details are a little sketchy: after their initial postulate, Hameroff and Penrose concentrate mostly on the physics of reduction and its functioning in microtubules, and leave questions about the explanation of experience to one side. Eventually it would be nice to see a proposal about the precise form of the psychophysical laws in this framework, and also to see how these billions of microscopic events of experience might somehow yield the remarkable structural properties of the single complex consciousness that we all possess. I am cautious about this sort of quantum-mechanical account myself, partly because it is not yet clear to me that quantum mechanics is essential to neural information-processing, and partly because it is not easy to see how quantum-level structure corresponds to the structure one finds in consciousness. But it is not impossible that a theory might address these problems. To know for sure, we will need a detailed explanatory bridge.