Why consciousness must be quantum mechanical | Stuart Hameroff | Full interview

Transcript

life developed as a vehicle for [Music] Consciousness Hammer off welcome to H like in Festival thank you Ricky it's great to be here I've had a wonderful time retired anesthesiologist and Consciousness researcher um what makes your theory of Consciousness uh the best one around it's the only one that works really uh most of the theories are based on the brain is a complex computer of simple neurons what I call cartoon neurons because they only look at the membrane the membrane activity and the synapses and it's algorithmic and it's at one frequency like between zero and 40 Herz roughly whereas if you go inside the neuron you see these microtubules that process information at multiple frequencies for example not only Hertz but also uh kilohertz 1,00 Hertz megahertz a million gigahertz a billion and terahertz trillion and even faster and every three orders of magnitude we see resonance patterns that are very self-similar so it's like a a fractal or actually a Time crystal is what my colleague HonorBound calls them who discovered all this so we have all this information processing going on at a deeper level uh and other theorist treat neurons as simple onoff switches which is an insult to neurons because cells like parium can swim around find food mates have sex they're one they're one cell so so to characterize a neuron as a bit a one or a zero is a tremendous insult to neurons so it's more than a computer a very good computer or is consciousness non-computational uh I think Consciousness itself is non-computable that was uh one of the contributions of Roger Penrose so I spent 20 years studying microtubules and and modeling them as information processing devices like computers molecular automat we call them and this increased the information capacity inside the neuron tremendously so the singularity folks and others were looking at brain equivalence as 100 billion neurons uh oscillating uh at 100 Hertz a th000 synapses about 10 to the 16th operations per second for the entire brain so they were saying well when we have a computer that can do 10 the 16th Ops per second we'll have brain equivalence and Consciousness and I was going around being a pain in their rear end saying no no no there's all this information processing inside so there's actually 10 to the6th operations per second per neuron at the microt tuia level and so you have to multiply that times 10 to 11 so you're way way underestimating the brain capacity and therefore your target is way way further down Downstream and they didn't like that at all because uh they wanted to have a brain equivalence then but then one day somebody said okay uh let's say you're right and there's all this information processing how would that explain Consciousness you know feelings love joy the color pink uh all that and uh I was kind of stunned and realized that I was a reductionist uh and uh fortunately that person suggested I read Roger penrose's book The Emperor's New mind where he argued that Consciousness is non-computable that there was something uh Beyond computation that non-algorithmic because if it's algorithmic there's no free will there's no creativity we're just going to do based on uh what happened before and uh very boring and very limited and he said no at the time uh it involves the quantum collapse of the wave function due to quantum gravity connected to the fundamental level of the universe space-time geometry and when that happens it introduces another factor that is kind of like platonic values embedded in the universe and that's what gives you Consciousness so it's non-computable it's also much denser information so um I I love the book I didn't understand the quantum very much but I I decided I need it to find out and uh but Roger didn't have a mechanism uh a structure he had the mechanism he did not have the structure uh and he needed a something on the quantum level much smaller than neurons so I wrote to him and suggested microtubules which he had never heard of I had written a book about it about them and and many papers and I sent him some information and uh said I was going to be in England for a conference and would be happy to come to Oxford and explain them and he um he said great he wrote back an oldfashioned mail postal mail and um so I went and visited him in Oxford and uh it was was it was a tremendous uh uh day for me and he most I did most of the talking he asked me about micr tues and I just went on and on and on he mentioned he was going to a conference in Cambridge with um the well-known philosophers Dan Dennett and Pat churchin about about Consciousness and uh I said well I'd love to go to that but I got to go to this other meeting so he said thank you very much we shook hands said goodbye and I'm I was pretty happy I'd gotten to meet Roger Penrose and I thought that would be the end of it but um two weeks later I was back in London on my way home and I had dinner with a friend he said hey I went to this conference in Cambridge and Roger penel was talking about you your stupid micral and I said wow and that was a thrill and uh soon after I got invited to a meeting in Sweden that he was involved with and we uh we met we started discuss how we could apply his objective reduction that was the name of his collapse to the microtubules and that was the beginning of our Theory so the objective reduction uh is the superposition uh collapse but from the subject side no no no so uh a lot of people so this is the measurement problem in quantum mechanics you have superp position but we don't see superp positions we we see everything in definite States so how do the multiple possibilities reduce or collapse to definite States and that's still not really well known there was a theory uh and still is that an external Observer conscious observer looks at the superposition that causes the collapse but that puts Consciousness outside of science it's not an explanation for Science and it doesn't really explain what superposition is Roger explains superposition how something can be in multiple States at the same time uh as using Einstein's general relativity Einstein said that large objects like the sun uh bent SpaceTime are equivalent to curvatures in SpaceTime and that could bend light from a distant star and that was proven by Edington and who won the Nobel Prize Einstein already had his and uh Roger applied this curvature to tiny particles like Quantum particles so he said a a particle here would be a tiny curvature this direction if it's over here it' be the other way and and superposition would be curvatures and opposite directions which is basically a separation in space-time geometry and if they were to continue you might imagine that each would form its own Universe which is another theory of collapse called many worlds where each possibility goes on to form its own universe but he said the separations were unstable and after a Time T would reduce to one or the other and that was due to Intrinsic properties SpaceTime geometry and the selection of this one or that one would be neither random nor algorithmic but includes some non-computable factor that was based on platonic values embedded in in space-time geometry so something in the universe was influencing these decisions uh if if you made them consciously if they were conscious and so the platonic form is consciousness the platonic form is an influence uh you could look at it that way but I look at it as an influence uh that's going to decide what what you're going to have what you're going to do how you going to do a b or c and uh you're in superp position or what you're going to order on a menu or what you're going to do with in your life or any decision really and the decision comes down to all the possibilities collapsing to one and that could be influenced by platonic value so ideally it would be you do the right thing you do some good follow the way of the Dow Divine guidance you could look at it like that but basically it's an influence that that points you in One Direction rather than the other okay and and I've seen that you described yourself as a Quantum Buddhist and you just mentioned the da so I'm wondering and but you mentioned also kind of a desire to remain scientific and so I'm wondering about this kind of spirituality this kind of uh I mean it sounds close to idealism um but uh mixed with the kind of scientific Bedrock as well how do those two kind of interplay for you uh yeah well I I think uh I think uh you know certain spiritual uh uh things are going to be shown to be true uh it's just that without an explanation they're not considered science so if we had an explanation they could be so uh Consciousness itself was you know when I got into this business uh 30 o over 30 years ago uh Consciousness uh it was it was taboo really and uh we you know I thought it should be in mainstream uh science and as an anesthesiologist I was studying how anesthesia takes away Consciousness and I still think that's the best way to understand the scientific basis of Consciousness by figuring fig out how anesthesia works and it's it it's amazing that um anesthesia works on all animals and even plants and uh suggesting that they all have some some Consciousness and they all act in the same way be we know that because uh if you you can uh correlate their potency in putting any animal uh or human to sleep with their solubility and a particular solubility parameter which is uh in in in the brain in uh what called non-polar region so everybody says the brain is too warm wet and noisy which would prevent uh uh Quantum events because they have to in the laboratory they're made it done at Absolute Zero temperature to avoid decoherence um and the brain is 70% water the body is 70% water but uh within that other 30% are things like proteins and microtubules within which are uh aromatic Rings like Benzene or indol rings and uh these are found in in neurotrans psychoactive neurotransmitters and psychedelics for example and aromatic amino acids so there's this environment within the protein buried inside there's no water oil and water don't mix and these are oil like molecules so it's not wet uh it is warm but it's not noisy because the microtubules are oscillating coherently at multiple frequencies they're kind of like a Time Crystal so that gets around the problem of U of decoherence and allows for uh for Consciousness we think and also Al even non-locality because if you go uh if you're if the collapses occur at a faster frequency you're going to be uh smaller than than matter in some cases and and faster and so Consciousness could exist independently of biology actually and I think uh that goes along with rogers's idea that these protoc conscious events are occurring Here There and Everywhere in in in the table in the air um and these events are protoc conscious because the any qualia or any experience would be random disconnected no memory no context no meaning so they come and they go uh metaphorically they're kind of like the uh the uh sounds of uh uh musicians tuning their instruments before a symphony and it's kind of noise you hear all the sounds and then they start to play and it's music so that's the difference between protoc conscious noise in the environment and the kind of Consciousness we have what do you mean by protoc conscious sorry protoc conscious would be what happens when collapses a in the random environment in the air in the table and so forth and uh there would be some qua some some aspect of experience uh much like pan psychist say that everything has some component of of uh experience but uh pan psychist uh attach these qualia to a to an atom or to matter in some way and uh that's a problem because uh Consciousness is dynamic I think it's a sequence of events but Roger put it in the collapse process which is an event and then you have a sequence of these events to give you a a stream of Consciousness a chain of events but but it's they're not protoc conscious anymore because they're orchestrated and they have information and context and meaning and memory it's kind of like music as opposed to a random noise so there's a string of uh events which leads to Consciousness yes and in a human body these events are kind of orchestrated uh into a coherent structure but these events happening randomly every they can happen randomly everywhere but in the brain in the microtubules at least in the layer five paramal cells where I think Consciousness mostly comes from uh they're highly orchestrated and organized to give a meaningful uh context and uh memories also stored in microtubules it looks like so uh uh you can have the kind of Consciousness we have as a sequence of events which appears continuous much like a movie or video appears continuous even though it's actually sequence of frames I'm wondering so how how do you prove this Theory and uh and it seems like uh anesthesia is a method to cut out Consciousness and then you can test physically whether the Consciousness is present but Consciousness obviously is famously unobservable and people do have the experience of being conscious even under anesthetic um so I guess wait a second hang on does that not happen that happens rarely uh it uh it's usually pilot error or uh not not excusable necessarily but uh no that's a problem that's very rare it can happen and uh uh so I in my view uh we you're right we can't measure Consciousness but we can measure what goes away when you anesthetize something so we're looking now at signs of Consciousness in in simple molecules from extraterrestrial sources because we think life and Consciousness came from uh space from these molecules that are made by stars that are AR the same aromatic Rings the same organic chemistry that's in our brains um are are produced by by stars and they're they're almost everywhere in the universe uh the Interstellar dust is full of these aromatic Rings uh we can tell by the fluorescence and uh and in uh in meteorites that have crashed on Earth and in probes that go to asteroids and including the on sent by my colleague Dante Loretta at the University of Arizona to the asteroid benu has brought back uh uh material that have organic molecules poly aromatic Rings which are very very interesting and they also have my cells which could have been the origin of life on Earth so U these aromatics I think are the key to life they're key key to or Consciousness uh and and their basis of organic chemistry when I wanted to go to medical school in undergraduate everybody said if you want to get to Med med school you got to Ace organic chemistry it's all about life and uh and I took that as a challenge and uh I did pretty well in it but but it's a difficult topic but it has to do with the uh the pi the pi resonance electron orbitals of these molecules that interact and and support quantum effects so it's basically a Quantum medium buried within our proteins okay so yeah so you measuring what goes away when someone's under atic you're not measuring the Consciousness itself because it's impossible to measure kind of positively um but yeah as as you are mentioning you wrote an article the II recently called Consciousness came before life um about this asteroid and so is the idea that Consciousness is fundamental and is kind of um offering a driving force which kind of creates life creates human life um sounds a bit like schopenhauer actually uh he has kind of a will uh which is a Consciousness or I would read it as that way and that kind of um is a fundamental driving force is it something like that can you go into and and the asteroid as well very fascinated by the extral asteroid thank you so yeah so uh it's always puzzle me why Evolution why uh biology evolved and all this uh behavior from simple organisms actually molecular complexes and simple organisms uh to survive when there's no motivation for them to survive there's no motivation uh to do anything really um to survive or avoid being eaten or find a mate or do anything if there's no feelings uh everything uh we do is based on feelings uh could be hedonistic altruistic spiritual uh good you know um but so why would these organisms for millions and billions of years before uh genes or brains even and even then that doesn't really help uh why would they do all this Behavior to survive and evolve and change to to optim what are they optimizing and so it occurred to me when I when I uh began to appreciate Roger's idea that these o moments the protoc conscious moments that I described are actually occurring actually occurring at that time of the origin of Life uh roughly 350 uh mil uh million years ago and U and they could have been the spark of life and uh so I wrote an article in 2017 uh called the quantum origin of Life how the brain evolved to feel good and I I kind of recreated the primordial soup with these poly aromatic ring uh with aromatic rings and that they would get together and there would be sufficient uh number of them to reach the threshold for Roger's objective reduction and they would start to have these o moments they would be basically protoc conscious initially but some would be pleasurable and those would be uh optimized by the system the molecules would arrange themselves this is what I suggested to optimize pleasure and if it happened they would want to have it happen again if something was displeasures simple molecular complexes developed to access and optimize uh pleasure and avoid pleasure and everything went from there and here we are I mean it's a fascinating um switch in causation that you've done because lots of people are trying to find the function of Consciousness in evolution but you're it sounds well it sounds like you're suggesting that uh evolution is a function that Consciousness is using to get pleasure that's a fascinating kind of switch um I think uh in in some way uh Consciousness is you uh life developed as a vehicle for Consciousness and here we are you know yeah and uh Roger penrose's objective reduction as well again another fascinating causal switch of um so it's not Consciousness that collapses the wave function but the wave function is causing Consciousness it sounds like flip exactly turns it around it's not that like you said Consciousness doesn't cause collapse collapse causes Consciousness or collapse is consciousness yeah it could be an identity Theory I was uh uh David chamers kind of tried to trick me and said well are you saying that Consciousness causes collapse or conscious is collapsed and uh I didn't recognize the trick at first and I realized that what he was saying is if you say a conscious collapse you could say well that's trivial because or sorry if it causes Consciousness uh well breathing causes Consciousness you need breathing you need a lot of you know metabolic stuff um so that wouldn't be that that useful uh so I bit the bullet and said okay Consciousness or collapse is consciousness and uh so it's an identity Theory yeah I mean it's not a bad bullet to bite I don't think I don't think you lose very much in that right right I'm wearing a limb already um yeah I mean what would you say to people that um argue ask for kind of proof um you know how can you prove these Quantum uh interactions are causing Consciousness H how is this not just more algorithms more language more Theory uh which is kind of trying to get at something which is so fundamental it's almost prior to Theory we're kind of human beings on a planet talking about uh something so fundamental to us how how can we get behind Consciousness to study it and have an accurate theory of it do you think I think anesthesia is the best way when we started this uh people said this is impossible the brain's too warm wet and noisy and so forth and I explained why that may not be the case to the non-polar uh areas that Anese anesthesia acts in and so uh we were in the Templeton uh uh program for uh adversarial collaborations of a theories a number of theories of Consciousness and they a bunch of money in into it and they picked five theories to test one of which was ours and we tried to come uh we we met with the proponents of IIT integrated information Theory uh Julio ton and Kristoff culen tried to come up with a common experiment which if it went one way would disprove one Theory and if went the other way would disprove the other and we couldn't come to a common uh experiment um I didn't think I still don't think their theory is testable and um anyway uh Templeton gave us money just to do our EXP experiment which we did and it worked uh basically we predicted we would be able to show Quantum effects and microtubules at ambient temperature which was a big a big step because that hadn't although it had been shown in photosynthesis but we want to show it in micral and it would go away with anesthesia and so we did a uh experiments on microtubules with tryptophan fluorescence lifetimes and uh and show that we get those at at ambient temperature and we added two different anesthetics one gas and one a soluble agent and both of them inhibited the U uh the quantum effect so that's the first step and we've had other exper other evidence for anesthesia acting on microtubules and my colleague honor ban bipad in in Japan has shown coherent resonances every three orders of magnitude which uh uh eventually get to be get to Quantum if you go fast enough a recent study another study came out ultraviolet light and super radiance from bab uh that came out recently yeah that's tremendous that's uh that's uh exactly what we want it's similar to the study that I just described and in fact uh if uh super Radiance is this Quantum state that persists and uh in and in a in a network of tryptophans which happen to be a geometric array and microtubules so they were really studying microtubules and centrioles which are made of microtubules and uh they they they showed uh both theoretic IC Al and experimentally this uh the super radiant uh super Radiance in microtubules at ambient temperature and the next step would be to show that it goes away with anesthesia okay um psychedelics are a personal fascination of mine I've written a lot about kind of the philosophy of them and you're mentioning um on this asteroids the Psychedelic um Rings please explain it to me because I'm very interesting okay well first of all I think uh if if you go back to the quantum vibrations and microtubules at uh kilohertz meah gz terahz uh anesthesia it seems slows everything down and so uh we helped to uh We've shown that to some extent we wanted to look at that more uh psychedelics I would predict would push it faster so it would push the system that is all the all the microtubules in the brain or at least the ones relevant to Consciousness uh uh to go more uh faster and more into the quantum realm so you get uh you get uh nonlocality uh you get deep in connections and you get all the things that are part of the Psychedelic experience yeah I yeah non-locality uh is an interesting one interconnectedness uh loss of self so you're saying the phenomenology of The Psychotic experience is explained um by the kind of quantum collapses in the brain and the the speeding up uh I think if you have qu let's say you go from megahertz to gigahertz that's a thousand times faster just because uh there's a psychedelic on board and then you're going to be be having a thousand times more uh events per second than you would without them and they would be uh more Quantum and therefore non-local so everything would be connected without throughout the brain and maybe even outside the brain with other with other entities that you can entangle with so that's what I think psychedelics do and your uh your point was that um the psychedelics are all aromatic Rings uh complex aromatic rings so the six ring and then the five ring which gives you an ring so serotonin is like that and most of the psychedelics have the the six and the five and uh which is also found in in tryptophan and uh the polyaromatic hydrocarbons that are floating around in space are basically the same sort of thing they're ring complexes you know four or five rings uh might have a five and several sixes and very very similar to the structure of LSD MDMA DMT and so forth they all have polyaromatic rings if you don't mind me asking this question have you done those uh substances and how has that kind of informed your thinking here when I was younger I you know I went to went to college in the 60s Vietnam psychedelics so yes uh you know then I had a long career in medicine where I kind of could didn't really want to do that uh I'm now retired I haven't resumed I might I could in the future you know but uh I think for me it was it was very educational uh it was more than educational but it was it it really made me think and I I think I had a lot of uh perceptions and appreciations that I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't and uh now of course psychedelics are be uh are in mainstream medicine um treating depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome and all kinds of things and we run uh ketamine I was recently working in uh the hospital like about a month ago and my colleagues are are running ketamine drips on these depressed PE people and uh it seems to work uh I'm wondering about your kind of own personal Consciousness and how your theories um have kind of changed your life and your personal Consciousness and your own kind of ideas about your mortality or things like that how how is it kind of um change the way you see the world as far as mortality I don't worry about dying I really don't um I uh one of one of the possibilities here well let me go back so in around 2000 uh um p LEL and Peter fenick in the UK uh discovered these near-death experiences not a body experiences and characterized them and uh the BBC did a show about them and they asked them well how do you explain this and they said we can't ask Penrose and Hammer off because they this crazy idea so Roger didn't want to touch it so uh BBC came to me and I said well what I would say is that uh it could be that when the blood stops flowing and the uh the quantum information in the microtubules uh kind of dissipates to the Universe At Large SpaceTime geometry which is where it is anyway normally between the years but uh it could be it become totally non-local but would stay entangled as kind of a Quantum Soul rather than just dissipate so it would stay together and it could be that Consciousness exists uh after life and that the near-death experience um uh if the patient is revive they go it goes back inside but if it it doesn't we don't know so it's a possibility for after I don't claim any evidence for that I let other people worry about that but what I think is that until we know that Consciousness in the brain is a purely classical event uh we cannot exclude non-locality and Consciousness outside the brain that's fascinating because it kind of um it explains the maintainance of individuality but also a uh the Transcendence as well and it explains the kind of non-local connection between the two which remains and then you can die go up and then come back down um kind of a near death and not a body experience right and the the the unity or the uh inside the brain due to entanglement and and binding I think is also very important but it can also be non-local outside the brain in certain conditions okay H yeah I mean again just shophow came into my mind he has a a quote um it's something like when we die um we we don't go to sleep everything else wakes up um or rather it never slept is what he says um which I think is a a beautiful quote um St Hammer off pleasure to meet you and thank you for coming to the festival thank you very much I enjoyed [Music]