Quantum Consciousness and the Origin of Life

Transcript

Please introduce Stuart Hammeroff, professor at the University of Arizona, active in the center for conscious studies. So Stuart, you are on the cutting edge of quantum physics and consciousness. Yes, Greg. I think uh quantum physics is the key to consciousness. You know, going back to the Greeks, there's been this controversy between whether the brain produces consciousness or some part of consciousness is out in the universe that we access.

And quantum physics allows us to sort of bridge that gap and actually favors being able to access parts of consciousness or the essential features of consciousness which are present in the universe by working through the [Music] brain. Consciousness is the only thing that matters. If you don't have consciousness, you don't have anything really. You can use words like awareness, phenomenal experience, qua subjectivity, first person point of view. Everybody has a term for it.

I don't think it can really be described in [Music] words. I'm Stuart Hammeroff. I'm a retired anesthesiologist and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. I'm currently working as a research professor in the Arizona Astrobiology Center looking for the origin of life and consciousness. [Music] I actually got interested in consciousness in a cancer lab studying cell division, mitosis, how cells divide and the chromosomes are pulled apart by structures called mitoic spindles, which turned out to be microtubules, which I'd never heard of before.

They're basically polymers of a protein called tubulant. And they will spontaneously assemble into these beautiful cylindrical lattises. At that moment, microtubules were discovered to also be in neurons. So the brain was full of microtubules and they're uniquely arranged in in parts of the neuron the dendrites and the soma uh completely different than they are in all other [Music] biology. I went on to move to Arizona met the chair of the anesthesiology department.

He said come to your residency you can investigate how anesthesia works to selectively prevent consciousness which nobody understands. and he handed me a paper by a friend of his showing that anesthesia depolymerized microtubules, which are these structures that I had become interested in. One thing about anesthesia that's really interesting and hard to explain is that it only affects consciousness while other brain activities continue. And my work in anesthesia has shown that anesthesia works pretty much the same on all animals and even plants. So that tells me that consciousness is probably biologically the same.

An interesting question is if anesthetics can have an influence on plants like this Venus flight [Music] trap. Well, most people would say, most people in neuroscience, philosophy, psychology would say the brain is a complex computer of simple neurons. And in a computer, you have enough bits of one or zero. You hook them up by connections, put in input, and get an output. they're not realizing or don't consider that a single cell organism doesn't have any synapses.

It's not in a network. It's not in a multisellular system. It's just one cell and its microtubules act as its nervous system. And I think the microtubules act as a nervous system for all cells. So if a parramium or amoeba can be clever, I think it's it's an insult to neurons to say that they're a simple one or a zero.

And then in the 80s several uh prominent books came out like this book by Roger Penrose. The first half of the book argued against the idea that consciousness was a computation. Roger argued that this meant that things like understanding needed some something outside the computational system of the brain. And for that he brought in quantum mechanics and quantum physics. At small scales particles can be waves.

So a particle can be in two or more places at the same time. It can be here, here, here, here, like a wave or just here and here in what's called quantum superposition. But Rogers said that the separation in spaceime is unstable. And after a time given by a very simple equation the uncertainty principle it would collapse to one or the other. And when that happened and here was the kicker it would give a moment of exper of conscious experience a protoconscious experience and it's happening not only in our brains but it's happening in the environment in the table everywhere at a very microscopic level.

But one issue we have in consciousness is how do we have something of a very very tiny scale scale up to one collective conscious thought at a time as opposed to a gazillion different things going on. And I thought of it as kind of like if you go to the symphony before they start playing all the musicians are tuning their instruments. To a non-m musician like me it sounds like noise. And then they start playing bronze, Beethoven, the Beatles, whatever. And it's music.

[Music] So the difference between the protoconscious noise in the music is what the brain does to these objective reductions that are everywhere in the environment. And for that you need some kind of instrument something that can organize or orchestrate. But Roger said I don't know what it is. And I read this book and I said, "Damn, he's talking about microtubules. He needs them." And uh I wrote him a letter.

I told him about microtubial. I said, "I'm going to be in England for a meeting. I'd love to come by and talk to you about this." He said, "Please do." So I got on the train from London and went to Oxford and met him and uh we just started talking about microtubles and consciousness and developing our theory. I invited him to the first consciousness conference I was planning, the science of consciousness, which I've organized at the University of Arizona for the last 30 years. This was the first one in 1994.

But what about consciousness? What do I mean by that? Well, I'm not going to attempt to define it because I think it would be a mistake to try and define it. If you go into the microtubules and into the quantum world, then you get non-locality. There is something outside the computational laws of physics. People say, well, you got to define consciousness, but we also have to define life. I'm also interested in life and evolution.

And I've come to the conclusion that life, even very simple life, needs consciousness. Otherwise, why have all this purposeful behavior? What's what's the point? And I wrote a paper about it. And about two years ago, I got an email from uh Dante Loretta, who had been in charge of a NASA program called Osiris Rex. Status check. Go Atlas.

Go Centaur. Go. Osiris Rex. 10 seconds. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 and liftoff of Osiris Rex.

Osiris Rex is a mission in NASA's New Frontiers program where we built a spacecraft to rendevu with a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu, survey it in great detail, collect a sample from its surface, and bring it back to the Earth for scientific analysis. Orex has descended below the 5 m mark. The hazard map is go for tag. And we have touchdown. [Applause] And on September 24th of 2023, that capsule landed in the Utah desert.

And I could finally start to think about the amazing science that we were going to get in addressing some of the deepest questions that we ask ourselves. Where did we come from? And I went back to our original proposal and I read the line that said, "Analysis of this material will provide unprecedented knowledge about the origin of life." And I thought, how am I going to do that? So I went to work. I started reading through the scientific literature and I came across a paper called the quantum origin of life. And I looked at the author and it was somebody named Stuart Hammeroff. And I got online and I researched him and I was like, he's at the University of Arizona.

He's literally right across the street from my office. I emailed him right away. I said, we need to talk. And we set up our first meeting. [Music] Hey, Dante.

Hey, Stuart. How you doing? Come on in. We got some exciting new results from the Osiris Rex samples. What I came to realize is he's talking about life using quantum information to give it an evolutionary advantage. And if that's the case, could that be the secret to the origin of life? first biomolecules arose out of the den of the chemical background because they were able to process quantum information going up and around and you get these little cores inside the serpentine the clay minerals.

When we look at the samples from the asteroid what jumps out is when you hit them with an ultraviolet light they are fluorescent. They're capturing those photons and they're releasing it back as visible light. That right there is a quantum process. looks like a galaxy full of stars. We've got all the nucleases.

All the letters of the genetic code are in this asteroid sample. We have an enormous number of amino acids, including the ones that are central to the quantum information in these microtubial proteins, the aromatic amino acids. And there's three of them. Fennel alanine, tyrosine, and the one everybody's familiar with, tryptophan. And it seems like tryptophan is the the secret ingredient there.

It's the most complex amino acid. It has a double ring. It can enter into multiple quantum states and it has a very familiar structure. It's at the center of all the major psychedelic compounds. They all have that indole ring which is central to the tryptophan amino acid.

And I was like, okay, well that's a clue. So the red in that map is just telling you the distribution of carbon. And so what I started to talk about with Stuart is maybe life and consciousness might be two sides of the same coin. Right. Exactly.

That's why these molecules might start to self-organize. Now all of a sudden they have agency. You think we could test the consciousness first theory? Yeah, we could then see if they uh the fluoresence is inhibited by anesthesia proportional to anesthetic potency. One of the things that uh Dante's really excited about are nanog globules. So in the samples he sees these globules that are encrusted and hollow inside and they're fluorescent which means they have aromatic rings inside.

I mean, you can tell it's highly concentrated in carbon. Just they're these little spheres of organic material. And when we look at them in cross-section, we can see they look very much like a cell membrane. Sometimes they have fluid inside of them. Sometimes they have fibers of minerals.

And they look for all the world like what we think a basic proto cell would be. So here you have a critical step in the origin of life, encapsulation. What really struck me about this one is it looks like it's going through cell division. If we could link it to quantum information, collapse of a wave function, and maybe even the origin of consciousness, that would be an amazing discovery, which is actually a pretty viable idea because it makes more sense about life. I [Music] agree, thinking about consciousness and working in this area.

It has enriched my life tremendously. I can't I can't imagine a more interesting and important topic. In our view, if you have consciousness by this very simple process happening in space-time geometry everywhere, then consciousness is part of the fabric of reality. This would say that every living thing has some sense of consciousness, a sense of self, a sense of agency. And for me that just rings true.

And we're part of it. We're part of nature. I think all living things uh have microtubules. They're all resonating and have coherent entanglement. And we're probably connected to them in some [Music] way.

So I think we're we're we're resonating and in tune with the universe. [Music]