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Stuart Hameroff on Penrose, Self-Similar Consciousness, and Time Travelling Free Will (technical)
March 4, 2021
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
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Today's guest is George 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 Zhejiang 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 Toe Clippings 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 Kurt Jaimungal. 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 Vervecky. 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. Well, something I noticed about you was you're extremely quick-minded, astute, and lucid. And then I looked up your age and your 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. Do you pray? Do you believe in God?
I do in my own way. My beliefs are kind of personal and in tune with my own personal beliefs, but I was raised in a religious family and got that from them and I'm very grateful to my parents and my family for my upbringing, 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 sixties 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 mind class but went to medical school 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 I 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 to the 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 seventies 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 seventies so we had the 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 computer of neurons each neuron acting as a simple on-off switch yes or no a bit one or 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 started, I got interested in these microtubules inside neurons. So
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 guy who would become my 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 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. Right, I was watching this talk by Anurban, I believe. Anurban Bandipaya, yes. Right, right, right. And they self-assemble and they grow cells and they make neuronal connections and they do everything in terms of cell movement, cell organization.
So if you give enough anesthesia, and it turns out it takes about five times 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 them
So anyway, Brunel, my future chairman,
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 again, all this additional information. So for example, the, you know, AI singularity people were saying, well, you have 10 to the 11th neurons are switching at about a thousand per Hertz. See about a hundred or a thousand synapses, a hundred Hertz give you about
10 to the 16th operations per second. And Kurtz and the Singularity were saying, well, when we get to 10 to the 16th, we'll have brain equivalence and consciousness. But I said, well, no, 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 for every neuron. So the goalpost for AI was I was pushing it way down the field.
And they didn't like that. They said, go away, you bother us. 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 a pest. 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, tastes, you know, what later became known as the hard problem by 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 was it started off with 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? We think 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 extrapolated 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 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 uh 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, as you may know, you can have super positions 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. 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 space-time curvature would bend the light around the space-time curvature and we would see it even though we knew it was behind the star. And in 1919, 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 and said 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 is these two-dimensional sheets.
could separate. And you could imagine that if they continue to separate, each would have its own universe and you'd have multiple worlds. But he said these separations were unstable. And after time T would would self collapse to one or the other. And and T was 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 caused 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 event.
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 to just because he's more 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 that's kind of a whole sideline. But, but, you know, I was able to grok 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 the by this threshold, but that neurons firing or firing were were too big. So he already knew that neurons were too big, but he didn't have a candidate
for 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 Froelich, Herbert Froelich in the 60s and 70s, who claimed that there was quantum coherence in geometric biological lattices that were in a geometric constraint and geometric lattice geometry
pump 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 I met with Frohlich and he liked the idea of microtubules being these Frohlich oscillators, Frohlich coherent devices. Is he still alive?
No, he died in 1991. He died a long time ago, actually. 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.
Now, but he died in, I think it was 91. But I had something called frolic resonances, right? Frolic resonant, frolic coherence. They just came out actually in Phys Rev A, my wife just gave me the reference, a new paper by a guy, Aristide Delgariou at University of Central Florida about frolic coherence. And it's a brand new treatment and it's very pro-frolic. And actually I know Aristide, actually we're working together on another project.
So yeah, Frola 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, uh, and that I, by the way, was going to be in England for meeting a couple of months hence and be happy to discuss it with them. And I was thrilled and delighted to get a, uh, a letter, the old fashioned kind in the mail. Happy to meet you. Uh, come meet me at the, uh, uh, mathematical Institute at Oxford and such and such a day and time. And so I did. And, uh, he actually, uh, I think he met me at the train station and 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 written about microtubules and several articles and we went through all the illustrations. What sorts of questions did he ask you? He said the first thing he asked me was are these things real or biological or computer simulations?
I said, oh, they're definitely real. They're in all living cells, make up mitosis. And I showed him lots of pictures. And so he was particularly interested 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 a geometrist.
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 in the A lattice, the Fibonacci geometry was intrinsic to the lattice. And he said, if A lattice could be a quantum device just because of the Jan Teller effect and so forth.
And I also was looking deeper inside each tubulin to the pi resonance aromatic amino acids, because I knew that's where anesthetics act and so forth. So anyway, he liked the idea. And although I didn't think at the time, going back to the meeting in Oxford, I didn't know 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. 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, well, 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 Midnight Sun, which was Dan Dennett was there and Petra Storog and a few other people and Roger and his wife Vanessa and we were there for about five days and you know the meetings were during the day but with 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, you know, 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 I got to know him a little bit. And
At that meeting, I invited him to a conference that I was, or I was organizing 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, uh, 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, the science of con or he's called then toward a 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 was 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. Uh, 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, uh, Al Kasnyak, my, my furniture, psychology and Al Scott for mathematics to organize.
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. 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 literally read their talks, their papers, with no slides. And that's what philosophers did back then. Some of them still do, but they've come a long way. And after the first two talks, everybody in the audiences
They're going to sleep. The philosophers dug it, 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 poster. And his abstract was about the hard problem versus the easy problems and problems. I said, OK, what the heck? So 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 at 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, why we have qualia. So he just went off on the hard problem.
Was that the first time he introduced it publicly? Yes. Yes. And so 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 heart problem, the heart 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 from that talk on. And we became good friends afterwards. And he, Dave and
I tagged along to the Grand Canyon with Roger and a bunch of other people and 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, it was hierarchical and it was at a molecular level, but it didn't, it didn't utilize the quantum. I knew about frolic, but I didn't really
And I said, yeah, and that gives you a unified 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 actually a couple of 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 sabbatical where Roger and Vanessa also hung out because, strange story, their dentist was there from years ago. They used to go there to see their dentist and hang out and
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 began to develop a theory and he would give me kind of an assignment and you know I felt like a student which I was really in terms of physics and math and I'd you know stay up late and
What was an example of one of those exercises? Was it related to t equals h bar over e and calculating? Well, 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, OK, 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.
Regarding these oscillations, is it just that the neurons are firing at the same time, 40,000 times a second?
say that, but neurons, if you take one neuron, it's integrate and fire. It's the basic Hodgkin-Huxley neuron. So you have the dendrites and soma that receive inputs from the synapses. And the story goes that strictly by membrane potentials, 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'd be a firing, and the axon would depolarize, 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 and the soma, from the integration phase, from the integrate and fire,
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, Krzysztof Koch and Crick and Koch, Francis Crick and Krzysztof Koch back then in 90 actually came out with the idea that 40 Hertz was the neural correlate of consciousness.
But there were also committed to the idea that spikes, firings were the currency of consciousness. So when it was realized that it was the firings that EEG came from the local 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 thinking, well, we had to maintain the quantum coherent 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 quantum state. We thought, well, you could do it, you know, make nature figure it out and so forth.
But it was really, you don't need that, it turns out. To make a 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 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 a protein, it's got all these atoms and rings and electrons and protons and this and that.
But all the mass is in the nuclei, you know, the electrons. So basically the electrons have all the cool electron dipole oscillations and quantum stuff, that 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
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% 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 flex was about 10%. So we calculated the, the E sub G, uh, of a protein separated from itself by 10% of its diameter. And he said, okay, you do it that way. And he gave me this, this form at least formulas, basically algebra.
which I was able to do. And he said, 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 it, 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. All those nuclei within the protein, 110,000 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 I spent some time doing the calculations and came up with the result that separation of the level of the atomic nuclei was the dominant effect, gave you the highest energy and would occur before the others. So we knew how to calculate for the superposition and then you just multiply that by the number of nuclei and we get 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 yeah, there's phosphorus, there's oxygen, there's other stuff. But but basically, we use we calculate 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 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 that's what's going to, you know, rule 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. How many tubulins, how many microtubules would you need to have a superposition? So what would the e sub g 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 neurons worth. 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 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 you say that there are 10 to the 10th, there's about 10 to the ninth to 10 to the eighth tubulins per neuron,
And if you have the T not be 25 milliseconds, but be say, 10 megahertz, a tenth 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 oscillating for these quantum events to be happening 10 million times a second, you need about 10 to the minus fifth
of the total tubulence in the brain, which was billions and well, I forget millions and millions of neurons have to go back and look it up. But it's, it's a much more reasonable number than, than just 20. If I understand what you're saying is that we need, you know, how some people say we only use 1% of the brain. That's probably true actually for consciousness, but it's not the same 1%.
Yes, yes, yes. 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 spikes, the firings are coordinated and that's not conscious. So that's a pathology. That's when all the neurons are fine. It's unclear what's actually happening on the integration side. But that's not really the same thing. But basically we did make a relationship between the fraction of the brain, the number of tubulins involved,
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. Has a baseline or when they meditate? Has a baseline and when they meditate, both. And this was done in Richard Davidson's lab, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago.
As an aside, what does he use to qualify them as the best meditators? 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 Anil Seth, I'm sure you've heard of him. Yes, I know Anil. 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 I Don't know. I'm not sure I believe it. I don't know. 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 intensity of experience is related to the frequency of the events that you're having so if you're if you're excited and
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 the study of Robin Carhartt Harris from 2012.
And, uh, he presented that at the Tucson conference and, uh, amazing study. Um, what they did was they, they put people in an MRI scanner. They also do EEG. Uh, so it works for EEG and for MRI, but in the, 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 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 look 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 flat line EEG. And it was 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, silent. You don't need energy for the membranes. You don't have to... Well, you need... Hear that sound?
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Let me back up. What the brain needs energy for is to maintain memory potentials. The quantum microtubule stuff is very low energy. You don't need much energy. So 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, just laying there in your own mind,
Your membranes can be quiet. Consciousness has gone to a deeper level into the quantum state. So you don't require energy for membrane potentials for firing. And 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 deep into a quantum consciousness state. So that was my explanation for why people who are tripping have low
their brains appear to be
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If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. OK, so let me make a layman rudimentary analogy.
Let's imagine that what the EEG is measuring is the rate at which or the speed at which you're moving about or a group of people are moving about in a room, let's say this, and they measure it at like five kilometers per hour. They're walking. 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 as 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 Moitre 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, uh, that could be conscious or not conscious driving, for example, walking. Sometimes you're walking and, or I'm walking and my mind's wandering. I'm somewhere else. Uh, I'm technically paying attention, but, uh, to the sidewalk and whatnot, but I'm not that conscious of it. Then all of a sudden something happens. I see somebody or horn honks and then my consciousness returns to my cognition. So cognition can be either conscious or non-conscious.
So we're thinking that the way we're expressing now is that consciousness is supervening on cognition and kind of takes over cognition and 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 never... I've heard the term supervenience. It's a term in philosophy. But I always thought it applied to consciousness, supervening and 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
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's point about 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 consciousness, to look for the shadow consciousness casts on cognition, deviation from computable behavior in 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-like. And we do see that type of behavior under anesthesia without consciousness. So that's a way of looking at consciousness 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, penethol was used for that, or brevetol, back in the old days, and it
just supposedly just the right amount you could you could kind of inhibit what is normally inhibitory and kind of just disinhibit the subject and get the truth out of it. I was never real impressed with that and as an anesthesiologist I wasn't that interested in it because you know well we don't use pentothal anymore but provofol
and it's true in light 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 you know but as fast as possible and 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 their level and then they're they're unconscious so
But you mentioned psychedelics before and another experiment I would do is I would predict, well, we predict and have evidence that anesthesia slows and dampens these oscillations and that psychedelics would increase the frequency. And 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. You're 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, I'll stand by that. But we're writing a chapter now for a book by Shan Gao called Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness. And Dave Chalmers has an article and a lot of people have articles.
And 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-cover effect. And, uh, 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, roles and roles 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 over committed. 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 and didn't even have a manuscript. But in the meantime, Pat Churchlin, 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? That was later. That was another bogus attack. I'll come to him. This is Pat Churchlin and a grad student, Rick Rush. She
materialists, reductionists, computationalists. And they spent the first part of their article, uh, attacking the, uh, the griddles theorem and non-computability in the second half attacking microtubules. And, uh, so, and they're really snotty about it. And, uh, the, the title of their article, you know, Roger's famous for a lot of things, including Penrose tilings of tiling a plane with geometry. And so the title of their article was, uh, Penrose's toylings.
or gaps in Penrose's toylings, that there were gaps, because there are no gaps in his toylings, but there were gaps in his toylings in terms of his ideas. And the first gaps were about the Girdles 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, for example, that the Penrose-Hameroff hypothesis was no better supported than one in a gazillion
caterpillar with hookah hypotheses. A reference to Alice in Wonderland that this is a quite literally a pipe dream. They're basically saying we're BSing everybody. That's basically what they were saying and we're full of it. So that was pretty snotty. But it was sufficiently snotty to provoke Roger into
into responding fully. And the publisher of the journal said, you can reply on the next issue, but I'll need a manuscript in two weeks. And so I said, oh my gosh, it's been a year we don't have a manuscript. How can we possibly do this two weeks? Well, we got on the phone and Roger said, I'll tell you what, I can answer all the girdle serum stuff.
You answer all the microtubule stuff with the two parts together. We're at 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, 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 when you take, because it deep polymerizes the microtubules and that paralyzes the immune cells from migrating into the joint. So microtubules are deep polymerized.
Right, but it doesn't 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.
So I answered that, and there's some other stuff, and Roger answered Girdle's theory, put an abstract together, and we wrote this paper, Gaps, what Gaps? Response to Gresham. That was our first paper in 95. And 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 half a dozen papers over 20 years, but they've all been good. Now going to this backward time 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, Libet did these experiments in, well, he did two sets of experiments. The first set of experiments that Roger wrote about in his book, The Embers in Your 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 Libet work with him. And so he had a patients that he did a neurosurgery on while awake. So he would drill a hole and numb it up with local anesthetic. And once you get into the brain, you can operate on the brain. It doesn't hurt, but you make you numb up the hole and you can access the brain. And for example, for the, the, 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, 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, it would be a delay because it had to get to the brain. If you stimulate the finger, there is a delay, but it's only 30 milliseconds evoke 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 evoke potential. But if it continues for 500 milliseconds, you do feel it at 30 milliseconds. What's this evoke potential?
Okay, so if you stimulate the finger, the signal, you get a spike, that's the evoke potential. If you stimulate it here, you don't get the evoke 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 evoke potential, 30 milliseconds. So somehow at 30 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 they send 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 arm? Yes. Yes. 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 rapids, the same thing. I actually wrote a chapter about it. I can send it to you about about all this. Well, 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 at 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 that consciousness is epiphenomenal and illusory. That's what Dennett says. That's what all the big name philosophers say, unless they have some way to wheeze a lot of it. But if you have backward time, it means that 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 the damn thing about the brain. He admits it. He doesn't know a neuron from a hole in the ground. And so he knows computers and that's how computers work. And unfortunately, that's true about a lot of people.
So, uh, we, we actually, uh, my colleague, Tom Beaver is putting a course to get work, putting a course together on conscious studies. And, and Tom asked Dan, Dan Dennis, whom he knows from years ago, if he would, and he just blew him off. So he's not interested. And, uh, you know, they have their position and 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? It could be minor. It could be metaphysical.
I'm not sure I agree, but I would say that I'm not saying I disagree necessarily, but 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 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 paper, for example. I'll give you an example. We were 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 a way 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. Something other than the membrane potential, than the inputs, there's something other than the measurable inputs that are triggering the firing, which controls behavior.
and they that's 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 and 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, you say, no, non-computability has to do something deep in quantum physics. And I was saying, yes, I know. But it has to come into the brain somewhere. And so that's where I thought it was coming in. So he's come around to that now. And we're going to include that in our paper.
Basically, you can measure non-computability in neurons as a deviation from Hodgkin-Huxley behavior, which is also what I was saying before, deviation from cognitive autopilot function.
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. I'm trying to put his non-computability into the brain, specifically at the end of integration and pyramidal neurons,
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 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, but 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
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 as a whole. Great. I'm basically taking quotes from your article. So here's one. OK. 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? 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 near absolute zero temperature to avoid any thermal oscillations. So in biology, we think that inside the tubulins, in the high resonance groups, you have a
Yeah, that's one you'll have to explain to 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 carbon. 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 there's a dipole in this one.
When you say oscillation in the dipole, you mean oscillation in the charge so that it's more positive on one side than the negative and it switches or what? Hear that sound?
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of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com
Charge is neutral, but the dipole means you're pushing 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. 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 there's space, they can oscillate. And that's basically full of coherence. So they're in a nonpolar 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 Feynman are generally credited with inventing the concept of quantum computers. And Benioff was Roger New and actually spoke at our 2003 Quantum Mind Conference. He 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 phase you get inputs so you get output input then quantum again process collapse so you have the alternating phases of quantum and classical quantum classical and during the classical you'd have interaction with the both output and input.
Now when we said that for 40Hz, I would change it now to say the same thing happens at say 10MHz because we think the orca war events are happening much faster. So after each event, you're in the classical phase, you 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 non-polar, right. There's no charge. So let's explain those terms. Hydrophobic, why is that important, and then non-polar. 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 charged surfaces like receptors on the surfaces of neurons and so forth. If, however, you're giving a drug like an anesthetic, which is non-polar, 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, membranes,
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 to 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 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 I don't know much about the B lattice and then there's apparently another layer I just saw
Anirvan, 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? So microtubules are hollow tubes. So you have an outside, this charge is coming out, and it's basically water around it. Then you have the wall of the microtubule, which is about four nanometers thick.
be very long but format and then you have the inner core which is 15 nanometers of again water or ordered water then you have the other wall so you have a hollow water well the water in the water and i is also ions in the interior of the microtubule may be completely ordered because you have charges coming out from the from the inside part of the tubulin and then more ordered water more ordered water and the water may become part of the quantum state
In fact, I coauthored a paper in 1994-95 about quantum states in the water. And that may be true, but we think it's originating in the nonpolar region inside the wall of the microtubule, where it's sheltered from the water either on the outside of the microtubule or the inside of the microtubule.
When someone has Alzheimer's, it affects 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 we've been studying my 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 have to reach the stability of Tau. Well, it's the stability of the microtubules. I think that Tau is a microtubule associated protein. Everybody gets worked up about Tau. They can measure Tau in spinal fluid. They can do this, but they're not thinking about what the Tau does when it's not messed up, when it's doing its, you know, when it's functioning properly. And what it is is a microtubule associated protein
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, Anurban Bandipade, 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, published in 2013, 2014, and then more recently. And basically, he uses... Yeah, there you go. That image has gotten around a lot. And basically... 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 what we can do that after. I have it memorized, actually. On the left, you have three levels of scale, and then you use different types of nanopros, scanning tunneling microscopes, atomic force, electrodes, this and that. And so you're putting electrodes on a microtubule. Now normally microtubule, all proteins are insulators. They don't conduct very well.
what honor bond 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. And he found at certain frequencies that you would get conductance at certain critical frequencies, microtubules would conduct would be, would, 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. 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, keep water out of this. Water is the 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 at certain frequencies, the microtubule is conductant.
So what is the significance of this? It's interesting geometrically, visually, but what is... Well, he called it ballistic conductance. He couldn't prove quantum because there's a classical interface between electrode and the surface of the microtubule. But within the pi resonance, it was probably something like superconductivity or some kind of quantum state.
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, 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 model know whether 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 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. We want to know how it works on anybody, much less, you know, the Dalai Lama or something like that. What are frolic resonances? Frolic coherences are frolic resonant, frolic coherences. What I talked about before, we have these nonpolar dipoles that oscillate
And they couple to the mechanical vibration. Also, the key here is that everybody says the brain is too warm, wet and noisy for 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 with mechanical vibrational resonances, the heat is going to pump it. So it's going to have these oscillations that are coherent. So you couple the quantum coherent and mechanical coherent. 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. Glial cells have a lot of microtubules. All cells have, even plant cells have microtubules. The, the pyramidal cells. 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 an amoeba or any cell. 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're going to, 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,
going here. And 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 Roger and I think is 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 resonant frequencies, and that's going to give rise to beat frequencies. So going back to what I said before about, you know, eventually, 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 that EEG may be kind of a snapshot at a very slow frequency of what's happening
I see at the bottom of this there are
This is just for the people who are watching. Yeah. So what are these frequencies indicating? Is it that same Anubhan? Yeah. Yeah. That goes along with that. 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 Roger's mechanism. And right now, quantum computers are built at near absolute zero, and they collapse because somebody makes a measurement, which introduces randomness. So as 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, I said, well, are you sure your quantum computer is not conscious? You know, it's having the Rogers objective reduction.
And he said, Oh my God, I hope not, because that would have created a public relations issue. So that's 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 graphene or fullerenes that's much more biological and did it at warm temperature and pumped it 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.
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 correcting and topological qubits seem to be resistant to them. Right.
And I have 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. But what happened was, this goes back to the late 90s, Roger invited me to the
to the Royal Society meeting on quantum information, which was right when all the entanglement stuff was coming out. Really exciting time. We had all these super smart young physicists talking about entanglement over hundreds of miles and this and that. And, you know, I mean, the aspect experiment proving entanglement didn't happen until 86. So 10 or 12 years later, you know, a lot had happened and they were talking about this technology. And we had a talk by John Preskill of Caltech,
And he showed a lattice for 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 would correct what was happening on the vertical. And I kind of woke up from dozing because they had lost me.
a hexagonal lattice, like thinking of microtubule. And 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, would it be interesting if the Fibonacci pathways were some kind of topological qubit? But for him, topology means like the coffee cup has a topology because of this. And it has a whole other 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 the helical pathway, it's much more stable from a quantum standpoint.
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
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.
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.
It's six layers. When information comes in, it winds up in layer five. It goes to four, and then from four it goes to one, two, three, and six. One, two, three, and six converge on layer five. Layer five is the pyramidal neurons. They have these huge cone-shaped cell bodies. They call them pyramids because they look like a pyramid, but actually they're cone-shaped.
And they're enormous compared to other neurons. And they have the biggest array of mixed polarity interrupted microtubules anywhere. And their basilar dendrites are continuous. 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 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 related prefrontal cortex.
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 and consciousness, there's a $5 million study, front 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 those, 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 Christoph and Julia, well, what happens 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 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 that is phi? And they wouldn't answer that either. So I don't know, actually.
I think all those other theories can be more or less correct. They're all at the level of neurons, although IITs can happen at any level, but they really focus on neurons. They could all be happening, but still need orca war happening at a deeper level. They're all basically cognitive architectures that may or may not have anything to do with consciousness. Of course, I'm skeptical. I'm the enemy, according to them, but I think that you need to go to a deeper level into the 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 our theory is head and shoulders above any other theory in that regard, in terms of rigor or even approaching the hard 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 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. If it can't be falsified, then it's not a theory. What are some ways of falsifying it? Well, what I just said, we're in this program now. We're starting experiments very soon. So the way they showed quantum coherence
quantum effects in photosynthesis protein is take 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 two emissions from it, and if there's a quantum superposition in the protein, then you get 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 kilodown? Kilodaltons. What's that? That's a unit of some sort. An atomic mass unit is adult. Ah, okay, okay. The molecular weight is 110,000. So if you count up all the protons and neutrons, so it has, I don't know how many atoms out of that, but
The tubulin is four times the size of the protein they previously measured on, is what I'm trying to say. So 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 quantum interference at room temperature 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 then 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 few So it's found in tryptophan the amino acid. It's found in most of the psychedelics. You have this indole ring and
And it's amazing, actually, that the neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and the psychedelics all have the same pi resonance groups that are conducive to quantum effects. I don't know if you've heard of this thought. 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, where you present different images to the two eyes. So one eye is seeing one scene, one eye is seeing the other thing. The other way to think of it is the Necker cube, where you see in the foreground or the background, it shifts back and forth, or the vase and the face and that sort of thing. There's two different perceptions.
But if you 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 I would, you know, that's 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 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 our paper, Roger came up with the name of the equations that actually govern this, but I forget what they are at the moment. But you need a pretty organized or orchestrated 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 through these platonic values of 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 you know 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 by, 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. But, you know, we criticize for, you know, well, people really, Chalmers has ridiculed us 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. Dave Chambers, a good friend of mine, ridiculed us by saying, oh, they're just invoking the mythical law of minimization of mysteries. But if you believe in Occam's razor, 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
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. Most people would consciously buckle or unconsciously. I can't convey in words how difficult that is, and that I actually find commendable. Well, thank you. Thank you. Roger is just above it all, but although he's sensitive and he doesn't like being criticized, but
But I think he's operating on a higher level than the rest of us. So for him, it's just, well, they'll figure it out eventually. My perspective about being criticized and yeah, it hurts. But, you know, 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 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. 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, it's, it's, it's what I do. You know, if I were 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 and it's what I enjoy doing. And, you know, 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 all over the world, you know, before COVID and hopefully will again. And, you know, it keeps me going. Like you said, I'm pretty old, but I'm still highly motivated. And I never said you're pretty old. Well, it's true. I am pretty old, but I'm still I'm still doing anesthesia, although I'm cutting back on time. And but my research keeps me going. You know, 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. So if you meditate, it's just contentless. Whether it's contentless or not is debatable. Some people say, well, nothingness is something. But I think you could be highly conscious of just pure consciousness with feelings. I think, you know, our feelings, content,
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? Have you heard of Wolfram's computational theory?
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 as a computer is, the universe as a computer is maybe
I hear that sound.
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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 say that experience is a fundamental component of the universe.
Now, a lot of people say that, panpsychists say that, idealists say that, idealists say that that's all there is. Panpsychists 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.
doesn't even bring in matter. It's a sequence of events, of occasions of experience occurring in a wider field of experience. And it was Abner Shemini 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
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, 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. Interesting. 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, 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 governed by, if that's true, you're still governed by the deterministic Schrodinger equation up to that point.
and and you know maybe even the platonic values so you know 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 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, some 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 for the sake of flattering you, 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.
Well, you can explain it. I can't find it right now. One has the causal arrow going in the other direction. Yeah, well, basically, the anthropomorphic principle is that if you look at the 20 or so values of the parameters 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, 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
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 only because it's a selector's bias. We're asking the questions because we're in the one and only universe 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 coming from another, uh, multiple worlds. I think they were saying that. And I said, well, if that's the case, it'd be coming 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 I saw, I said, well, where do you think there was a consciousness in the previous Eon? He said, well, sure. It could have been, should have been, why not? And I then thought about a book by Lee Smolin about, called Life of the Cosmos. And he was talking about, in a black hole, evolutionary model,
Pardon me? An evolutionary model. Yeah, that what comes out on the other side is an improved version of what went in. So I said, could that apply to your, you know, big bangs and in eons so that, that 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, uh, that consciousness is actually steering the universe, um, by, by these transition points, uh, 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 know, if you want to improve consciousness, what 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
How would it get better? I'm not sure, but I think it's one possibility. What else would be the point 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.
Mm hmm. 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 for in that practice medicine over the internet. But, but, uh, when, uh, when honor bond came out with this idea that, uh, or discovered that there were these vibrations in microtubules, uh, including in megahertz, then, um,
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 are, 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, 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, that goes off surfaces. So you get an image inside the body. You can see the babies in the uterus and so forth. And so I looked up and sure enough, a guy had been putting ultrasound in the brains of animals and getting behavioral effects and, uh, you know, they could move their paw. You could get it. You can make them move their paw by paying the paw region and physiological effects. And, uh,
I wondered what would be the effect on mental states. Ultrasound had been approved for imaging the brain. So people would be getting ultrasound in the brain, but it wasn't very good compared to MRI and CT for imaging the brain. So it wasn't really useful. So I said to my anesthesia colleagues, 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, you know, I hadn't really thought about it. And, uh, 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 but it was also my idea in fact that's what 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 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 the imaging happens immediately
Okay, so they don't leave prolonged ultrasound on your brain, at least not in humans that they've tested. Well, I'm not sure anybody used it for brain imaging very much. It was approved, but then CT MRI 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 call my bluff. My friends call my bluff.
And I sit around the table and I picked it up with my right hand and 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 and I didn't feel a thing. I said, 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 and chronic pain patients in the journal brain stimulation and showed him improved mood and reduced pain and chronic pain patients with 15 seconds of ultrasound to a contralateral to the pain in a 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 did a study about a year ago 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 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 I 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 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 but then consciousness is associated with forty hertz ten 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. The question is whether it's vibrating coherently. Is everything connected? And some people would say yes, that everything's entangled. Going back to the Big Bang, everything's entangled. You're kind of asking me whether,
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 it could, it has to do with, 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 deep depth 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 plank 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
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.
I think we can be one. I think people can be entangled. I think ESP and that sort of thing, parapsychology can occur by quantum nonlocality, 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 gone on quite a limb in a lot of areas. Okay. I'll take some questions from the audience. So let's take a look here.
Is the depressed 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, uh, versus, uh, E sub gene. And, uh, so the intensity of the conscious experience would be related to the frequency of the, uh, of the number of orco or events you can have. So a plant cell might have, you know, a few per minute and we can, we might have, you know, uh, 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 Stewart 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?
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 responses to different faces. You know, the Halle Berry neuron would fire, 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 response just 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 there are 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 what's the has this been published no but there's been a lot of stuff published on backward time you know darryl bam had uh you know eight eight experiment and nine experiments eight of nine eight eight out of nine of which showed backward time effects okay do you mind repeating that person's name this way i can
I'm super, 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 and rogers work on this retroactivity now which could explain this but he's doing it as a way to get rid of the uh well for different reason because of the uh
to 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 Kohl 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 Orka R say about that said theory of self?
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, you know, and then Julian James, you know, had this idea that
100,000s of years ago, there was no one you, there was no one Kurt in your head. There was no one Stuart in my head. There was just a bunch of voices and, uh, and you know, the gods or the gremlins or whoever. And then over, over 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, 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, you know, occurring by itself. Have you researched much about Jung? Because what you described sound 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 Atmanspacher is big on Jung. But I don't really know that much about it. Okay, and lastly, Dan Arm 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, you're welcome, Curtis.
Good talking to you. Good luck to you. You asked great questions. Thanks for your audience and stay in touch.
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
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"text": " All right, hello toe listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now."
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"text": " Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business. Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you."
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"text": " Today's guest is George 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"
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"text": " 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 Zhejiang 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."
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"text": " 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 Toe Clippings with shorter, shareable segments from these larger interviews."
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"text": " 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 Kurt Jaimungal. Or if you're simply interested in the general mission,"
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"text": " Once 50 Patrons is reached, we'll host a friendly, constructive conversation, rather than a critical one, with Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, and Jonathan Vervecky. 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."
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"text": " Did you perform any daily ritual, any meditation, 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 your 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?"
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"text": " 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. Do you pray? Do you believe in God?"
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"text": " I do in my own way. My beliefs are kind of personal and in tune with my own personal beliefs, but I was raised in a religious family and got that from them and I'm very grateful to my parents and my family for my upbringing, including my religious. I kind of rebelled against organized religion, but believe in something that organizes the universe, some kind of"
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"text": " 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."
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"text": " It was also the late sixties 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 mind class but went to medical school 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"
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"text": " I stumbled into anesthesiology, but while I was still in medical school, I did a research elective thinking I might like academics. And I 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."
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"text": " And everybody else in the lab, I'm pretty sure got into the genes and went on to the 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."
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"text": " and at that time in the early seventies 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 seventies so we had the 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"
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"text": " 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 computer of neurons each neuron acting as a simple on-off switch yes or no a bit one or zero and if you get enough complex computation among neurons you get consciousness emerging in some way"
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"text": " 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 started, I got interested in these microtubules inside neurons. So"
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"text": " 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 guy who would become my 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."
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"text": " And two, here's a paper 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."
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"text": " They self-assemble into these hollow tubes and grow like girders or scaffolding. Right, I was watching this talk by Anurban, I believe. Anurban Bandipaya, yes. Right, right, right. And they self-assemble and they grow cells and they make neuronal connections and they do everything in terms of cell movement, cell organization."
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"text": " So if you give enough anesthesia, and it turns out it takes about five times 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 them"
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"text": " So anyway, Brunel, my future chairman,"
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"text": " 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."
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"text": " 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"
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"text": " 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 again, all this additional information. So for example, the, you know, AI singularity people were saying, well, you have 10 to the 11th neurons are switching at about a thousand per Hertz. See about a hundred or a thousand synapses, a hundred Hertz give you about"
},
{
"end_time": 744.821,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 716.698,
"text": " 10 to the 16th operations per second. And Kurtz and the Singularity were saying, well, when we get to 10 to the 16th, we'll have brain equivalence and consciousness. But I said, well, no, 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 for every neuron. So the goalpost for AI was I was pushing it way down the field."
},
{
"end_time": 775.384,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 745.486,
"text": " And they didn't like that. They said, go away, you bother us. 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 a pest. And then one day somebody asked me a very good question. He said,"
},
{
"end_time": 793.336,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 775.862,
"text": " 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, tastes, you know, what later became known as the hard problem by according to David Chalmers."
},
{
"end_time": 823.336,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 793.916,
"text": " 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"
},
{
"end_time": 838.643,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 823.797,
"text": " The main point was it started off with through Gödel's theorem arguing that consciousness requires something other than computation."
},
{
"end_time": 870.913,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 843.319,
"text": " Other than what we think of as classical computation or just other than computation? We think quantum computation, that there had to be something else."
},
{
"end_time": 896.664,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 871.288,
"text": " Because Gödel's theorem, to prove a theorem in mathematics, you have to be outside the computational system. So we extrapolated 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."
},
{
"end_time": 927.039,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 897.244,
"text": " and I didn't 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 uh 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"
},
{
"end_time": 954.753,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 927.5,
"text": " And in quantum mechanics, as you, as you may know, you can have super positions 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. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 983.985,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 955.384,
"text": " 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 1004.718,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 984.428,
"text": " 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"
},
{
"end_time": 1033.626,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1005.111,
"text": " could be visible in an eclipse because the space-time curvature would bend the light around the space-time curvature and we would see it even though we knew it was behind the star. And in 1919, 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."
},
{
"end_time": 1063.302,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1034.206,
"text": " Roger applied that to small things and said 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 is these two-dimensional sheets."
},
{
"end_time": 1092.892,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1063.643,
"text": " could separate. And you could imagine that if they continue to separate, each would have its own universe and you'd have multiple worlds. But he said these separations were unstable. And after time T would would self collapse to one or the other. And and T was 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,"
},
{
"end_time": 1117.108,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1093.302,
"text": " 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 caused 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 event."
},
{
"end_time": 1144.292,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1117.892,
"text": " 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 to just because he's more creative and well, he's more expressive in terms of illustrations and his clever cartoon. He's extremely visual."
},
{
"end_time": 1173.592,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1144.821,
"text": " Yes, yes, and artistic. And, you know, he, he's also involved with MC Escher. And that's kind of a whole sideline. But, but, you know, I was able to grok 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 the by this threshold, but that neurons firing or firing were were too big. So he already knew that neurons were too big, but he didn't have a candidate"
},
{
"end_time": 1200.572,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1174.053,
"text": " for 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 Froelich, Herbert Froelich in the 60s and 70s, who claimed that there was quantum coherence in geometric biological lattices that were in a geometric constraint and geometric lattice geometry"
},
{
"end_time": 1226.237,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1201.288,
"text": " pump 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 I met with Frohlich and he liked the idea of microtubules being these Frohlich oscillators, Frohlich coherent devices. Is he still alive?"
},
{
"end_time": 1244.889,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1226.732,
"text": " No, he died in 1991. He died a long time ago, actually. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 1274.923,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1245.964,
"text": " Now, but he died in, I think it was 91. But I had something called frolic resonances, right? Frolic resonant, frolic coherence. They just came out actually in Phys Rev A, my wife just gave me the reference, a new paper by a guy, Aristide Delgariou at University of Central Florida about frolic coherence. And it's a brand new treatment and it's very pro-frolic. And actually I know Aristide, actually we're working together on another project."
},
{
"end_time": 1303.899,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1275.247,
"text": " So yeah, Frola 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."
},
{
"end_time": 1332.278,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1304.548,
"text": " And, uh, and that I, by the way, was going to be in England for meeting a couple of months hence and be happy to discuss it with them. And I was thrilled and delighted to get a, uh, a letter, the old fashioned kind in the mail. Happy to meet you. Uh, come meet me at the, uh, uh, mathematical Institute at Oxford and such and such a day and time. And so I did. And, uh, he actually, uh, I think he met me at the train station and we walked over."
},
{
"end_time": 1359.036,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1332.671,
"text": " 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 written about microtubules and several articles and we went through all the illustrations. What sorts of questions did he ask you? He said the first thing he asked me was are these things real or biological or computer simulations?"
},
{
"end_time": 1386.118,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1359.497,
"text": " I said, oh, they're definitely real. They're in all living cells, make up mitosis. And I showed him lots of pictures. And so he was particularly interested 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 a geometrist."
},
{
"end_time": 1416.032,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1386.544,
"text": " 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 in the A lattice, the Fibonacci geometry was intrinsic to the lattice. And he said, if A lattice could be a quantum device just because of the Jan Teller effect and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 1443.626,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1416.715,
"text": " And I also was looking deeper inside each tubulin to the pi resonance aromatic amino acids, because I knew that's where anesthetics act and so forth. So anyway, he liked the idea. And although I didn't think at the time, going back to the meeting in Oxford, I didn't know if anything would come of it. Although he did mention that he was going to a conference at Cambridge"
},
{
"end_time": 1472.534,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1443.968,
"text": " 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. 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 1499.053,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1472.824,
"text": " 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, well, 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."
},
{
"end_time": 1525.435,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1499.735,
"text": " and in the Midnight Sun, which was Dan Dennett was there and Petra Storog and a few other people and Roger and his wife Vanessa and we were there for about five days and you know the meetings were during the day but with 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 1548.729,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1525.52,
"text": " It was above the polar circle in Sweden during the midnight sun. It was like in July or August, way, way north. So, you know, 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 I got to know him a little bit. And"
},
{
"end_time": 1575.026,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1549.07,
"text": " At that meeting, I invited him to a conference that I was, or I was organizing 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, uh, 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, the science of con or he's called then toward a science of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 1605.657,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1576.084,
"text": " 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 was 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. Uh, 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, uh, Al Kasnyak, my, my furniture, psychology and Al Scott for mathematics to organize."
},
{
"end_time": 1635.196,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1605.998,
"text": " 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. I see, I see."
},
{
"end_time": 1660.964,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1635.623,
"text": " 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 literally read their talks, their papers, with no slides. And that's what philosophers did back then. Some of them still do, but they've come a long way. And after the first two talks, everybody in the audiences"
},
{
"end_time": 1691.391,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1662.312,
"text": " They're going to sleep. The philosophers dug it, 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 poster. And his abstract was about the hard problem versus the easy problems and problems. I said, OK, what the heck? So he was the unknown third speaker."
},
{
"end_time": 1719.599,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1691.664,
"text": " 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 at 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, why we have qualia. So he just went off on the hard problem."
},
{
"end_time": 1747.159,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1720.077,
"text": " Was that the first time he introduced it publicly? Yes. Yes. And so 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 heart problem, the heart 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 from that talk on. And we became good friends afterwards. And he, Dave and"
},
{
"end_time": 1773.985,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1747.654,
"text": " I tagged along to the Grand Canyon with Roger and a bunch of other people and 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, it was hierarchical and it was at a molecular level, but it didn't, it didn't utilize the quantum. I knew about frolic, but I didn't really"
},
{
"end_time": 1792.176,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1774.36,
"text": " And I said, yeah, and that gives you a unified 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,"
},
{
"end_time": 1814.343,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1792.363,
"text": " So he handed me actually a couple of 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 sabbatical where Roger and Vanessa also hung out because, strange story, their dentist was there from years ago. They used to go there to see their dentist and hang out and"
},
{
"end_time": 1832.125,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1814.684,
"text": " 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 began to develop a theory and he would give me kind of an assignment and you know I felt like a student which I was really in terms of physics and math and I'd you know stay up late and"
},
{
"end_time": 1862.398,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1832.995,
"text": " What was an example of one of those exercises? Was it related to t equals h bar over e and calculating? Well, 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"
},
{
"end_time": 1883.558,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1862.961,
"text": " microtubules into this equation, t equals h bar over e sub g. And I said, OK, 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."
},
{
"end_time": 1902.159,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1883.951,
"text": " Regarding these oscillations, is it just that the neurons are firing at the same time, 40,000 times a second?"
},
{
"end_time": 1929.923,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1902.637,
"text": " say that, but neurons, if you take one neuron, it's integrate and fire. It's the basic Hodgkin-Huxley neuron. So you have the dendrites and soma that receive inputs from the synapses. And the story goes that strictly by membrane potentials, 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."
},
{
"end_time": 1958.08,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1930.265,
"text": " And if the threshold is met, there'd be a firing, and the axon would depolarize, 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 and the soma, from the integration phase, from the integrate and fire,"
},
{
"end_time": 1984.189,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1958.558,
"text": " 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, Krzysztof Koch and Crick and Koch, Francis Crick and Krzysztof Koch back then in 90 actually came out with the idea that 40 Hertz was the neural correlate of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 2007.346,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1984.718,
"text": " But there were also committed to the idea that spikes, firings were the currency of consciousness. So when it was realized that it was the firings that EEG came from the local 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"
},
{
"end_time": 2034.804,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2007.944,
"text": " 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 thinking, well, we had to maintain the quantum coherent 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 quantum state. We thought, well, you could do it, you know, make nature figure it out and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 2061.169,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2035.162,
"text": " But it was really, you don't need that, it turns out. To make a 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."
},
{
"end_time": 2088.797,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2061.613,
"text": " The amount of mass separated from itself. And when that 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 a protein, it's got all these atoms and rings and electrons and protons and this and that."
},
{
"end_time": 2118.166,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2089.377,
"text": " But all the mass is in the nuclei, you know, the electrons. So basically the electrons have all the cool electron dipole oscillations and quantum stuff, that 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"
},
{
"end_time": 2145.657,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2118.592,
"text": " 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% is just an example right now, or he, well, that's what we use the calculation. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 2174.872,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2145.828,
"text": " 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 flex was about 10%. So we calculated the, the E sub G, uh, of a protein separated from itself by 10% of its diameter. And he said, okay, you do it that way. And he gave me this, this form at least formulas, basically algebra."
},
{
"end_time": 2196.954,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2175.23,
"text": " which I was able to do. And he said, 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 it, you have complete separation."
},
{
"end_time": 2222.193,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2197.363,
"text": " So that gives a different type of equation than partial separation. So that was two. So it was the protein by 10% partial separation. All those nuclei within the protein, 110,000 atomic weight separated by their diameter. And the third way was going even smaller to the protons and neutrons, the nucleons separated from themselves."
},
{
"end_time": 2251.715,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2222.602,
"text": " So he gave me the equations and I spent some time doing the calculations and came up with the result that separation of the level of the atomic nuclei was the dominant effect, gave you the highest energy and would occur before the others. So we knew how to calculate for the superposition and then you just multiply that by the number of nuclei and we get the E sub G for a tubulin protein."
},
{
"end_time": 2280.742,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2251.988,
"text": " 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 yeah, there's phosphorus, there's oxygen, there's other stuff. But but basically, we use we calculate 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 2307.739,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2281.254,
"text": " You do, but you got to go with, you know, with what nature gives you. And 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 that's what's going to, you know, rule what's going on. So you had to deal with that. So that was the first thing we learned."
},
{
"end_time": 2331.34,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2308.217,
"text": " So the next question was, okay, let's say that's right. How many tubulins, how many microtubules would you need to have a superposition? So what would the e sub g number of tubulins be to have a t equal 25 milliseconds, which is what we thought we needed?"
},
{
"end_time": 2358.899,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2331.715,
"text": " And it turns out it's a pretty small number. It's only like, I forget, 20 neurons worth. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 2387.602,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2359.241,
"text": " 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 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"
},
{
"end_time": 2412.295,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2388.08,
"text": " 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 you say that there are 10 to the 10th, there's about 10 to the ninth to 10 to the eighth tubulins per neuron,"
},
{
"end_time": 2442.688,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2412.841,
"text": " And if you have the T not be 25 milliseconds, but be say, 10 megahertz, a tenth 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 oscillating for these quantum events to be happening 10 million times a second, you need about 10 to the minus fifth"
},
{
"end_time": 2468.285,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2443.183,
"text": " of the total tubulence in the brain, which was billions and well, I forget millions and millions of neurons have to go back and look it up. But it's, it's a much more reasonable number than, than just 20. If I understand what you're saying is that we need, you know, how some people say we only use 1% of the brain. That's probably true actually for consciousness, but it's not the same 1%."
},
{
"end_time": 2489.019,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2468.729,
"text": " Yes, yes, yes. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 2515.708,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2489.104,
"text": " Well, seizures are bad and seizures are when all the spikes, the firings are coordinated and that's not conscious. So that's a pathology. That's when all the neurons are fine. It's unclear what's actually happening on the integration side. But that's not really the same thing. But basically we did make a relationship between the fraction of the brain, the number of tubulins involved,"
},
{
"end_time": 2543.148,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2516.459,
"text": " 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. Has a baseline or when they meditate? Has a baseline and when they meditate, both. And this was done in Richard Davidson's lab, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago."
},
{
"end_time": 2565.486,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2543.404,
"text": " As an aside, what does he use to qualify them as the best meditators? I don't know."
},
{
"end_time": 2596.323,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2566.374,
"text": " 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"
},
{
"end_time": 2617.295,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2596.852,
"text": " I recall you saying this, I spoke to Anil Seth, I'm sure you've heard of him. Yes, I know Anil. 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"
},
{
"end_time": 2646.698,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2617.671,
"text": " 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 I Don't know. I'm not sure I believe it. I don't know. 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 intensity of experience is related to the frequency of the events that you're having so if you're if you're excited and"
},
{
"end_time": 2674.394,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2647.073,
"text": " 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 the study of Robin Carhartt Harris from 2012."
},
{
"end_time": 2698.848,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2675.077,
"text": " And, uh, he presented that at the Tucson conference and, uh, amazing study. Um, what they did was they, they put people in an MRI scanner. They also do EEG. Uh, so it works for EEG and for MRI, but in the, in the MRI scanner and in the EEG, they then gave them intravenous psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms."
},
{
"end_time": 2725.401,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2699.445,
"text": " And 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 look cold and dark, like they were unconscious, almost comatose."
},
{
"end_time": 2755.486,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2725.947,
"text": " And in EEG they expected, I'm not sure what they expected, but what they got was almost flat line EEG. And it was 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"
},
{
"end_time": 2773.729,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2755.998,
"text": " Almost completely. And the membranes which perform cognition are quiet, silent. You don't need energy for the membranes. You don't have to... Well, you need... Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2800.862,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2774.735,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
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"end_time": 2826.903,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2800.862,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
{
"end_time": 2852.705,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2826.903,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
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"end_time": 2882.176,
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"text": " Let me back up. What the brain needs energy for is to maintain memory potentials. The quantum microtubule stuff is very low energy. You don't need much energy. So 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, just laying there in your own mind,"
},
{
"end_time": 2910.043,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2882.637,
"text": " Your membranes can be quiet. Consciousness has gone to a deeper level into the quantum state. So you don't require energy for membrane potentials for firing. And 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 deep into a quantum consciousness state. So that was my explanation for why people who are tripping have low"
},
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"end_time": 2926.408,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2910.401,
"text": " their brains appear to be"
},
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"end_time": 2944.974,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2927.193,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 2973.456,
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"start_time": 2944.974,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
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"end_time": 2989.821,
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"start_time": 2973.456,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 3011.101,
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"start_time": 2989.821,
"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. OK, so let me make a layman rudimentary analogy."
},
{
"end_time": 3038.797,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3012.142,
"text": " Let's imagine that what the EEG is measuring is the rate at which or the speed at which you're moving about or a group of people are moving about in a room, let's say this, and they measure it at like five kilometers per hour. They're walking. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 3062.449,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3039.002,
"text": " 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 as 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."
},
{
"end_time": 3092.705,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3062.841,
"text": " 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 Moitre 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."
},
{
"end_time": 3120.708,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3093.08,
"text": " Cognition is, you know, stuff that we do, uh, that could be conscious or not conscious driving, for example, walking. Sometimes you're walking and, or I'm walking and my mind's wandering. I'm somewhere else. Uh, I'm technically paying attention, but, uh, to the sidewalk and whatnot, but I'm not that conscious of it. Then all of a sudden something happens. I see somebody or horn honks and then my consciousness returns to my cognition. So cognition can be either conscious or non-conscious."
},
{
"end_time": 3146.135,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3121.032,
"text": " So we're thinking that the way we're expressing now is that consciousness is supervening on cognition and kind of takes over cognition and 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 3174.77,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3147.142,
"text": " 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 never... I've heard the term supervenience. It's a term in philosophy. But I always thought it applied to consciousness, supervening and 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"
},
{
"end_time": 3203.302,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3175.213,
"text": " 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's point about 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."
},
{
"end_time": 3226.886,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3203.558,
"text": " And that's exactly what we're trying to do in this study we're proposing, is to look for the shadow of consciousness, to look for the shadow consciousness casts on cognition, deviation from computable behavior in 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"
},
{
"end_time": 3255.213,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3227.278,
"text": " more automatic, more autopilot-like. And we do see that type of behavior under anesthesia without consciousness. So that's a way of looking at consciousness 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, penethol was used for that, or brevetol, back in the old days, and it"
},
{
"end_time": 3280.299,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3256.22,
"text": " just supposedly just the right amount you could you could kind of inhibit what is normally inhibitory and kind of just disinhibit the subject and get the truth out of it. I was never real impressed with that and as an anesthesiologist I wasn't that interested in it because you know well we don't use pentothal anymore but provofol"
},
{
"end_time": 3309.189,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3280.606,
"text": " and it's true in light 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 you know but as fast as possible and 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 their level and then they're they're unconscious so"
},
{
"end_time": 3335.367,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3310.009,
"text": " But you mentioned psychedelics before and another experiment I would do is I would predict, well, we predict and have evidence that anesthesia slows and dampens these oscillations and that psychedelics would increase the frequency. And 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."
},
{
"end_time": 3366.135,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3337.295,
"text": " 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. You're editors. Yeah, but that was a mistake. That's not really our book. They used our name, but we had nothing"
},
{
"end_time": 3393.797,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3366.408,
"text": " 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, I'll stand by that. But we're writing a chapter now for a book by Shan Gao called Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness. And Dave Chalmers has an article and a lot of people have articles."
},
{
"end_time": 3422.722,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3394.343,
"text": " And 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"
},
{
"end_time": 3451.254,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3423.012,
"text": " he's actually putting in some new stuff about retroactivity, backward time effects, and non-cover effect. And, uh, 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, roles and roles of fax paper with his original artworks and drawings that I'm trying to preserve."
},
{
"end_time": 3478.029,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3451.732,
"text": " 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 over committed. So just be patient. And I'm glad he told me that she told me that because it turned out to be true."
},
{
"end_time": 3497.261,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3479.36,
"text": " 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 and didn't even have a manuscript. But in the meantime, Pat Churchlin, who had been at that conference that Roger went to,"
},
{
"end_time": 3525.077,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3498.012,
"text": " 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? That was later. That was another bogus attack. I'll come to him. This is Pat Churchlin and a grad student, Rick Rush. She"
},
{
"end_time": 3553.609,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3525.52,
"text": " materialists, reductionists, computationalists. And they spent the first part of their article, uh, attacking the, uh, the griddles theorem and non-computability in the second half attacking microtubules. And, uh, so, and they're really snotty about it. And, uh, the, the title of their article, you know, Roger's famous for a lot of things, including Penrose tilings of tiling a plane with geometry. And so the title of their article was, uh, Penrose's toylings."
},
{
"end_time": 3582.978,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3554.087,
"text": " or gaps in Penrose's toylings, that there were gaps, because there are no gaps in his toylings, but there were gaps in his toylings in terms of his ideas. And the first gaps were about the Girdles 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, for example, that the Penrose-Hameroff hypothesis was no better supported than one in a gazillion"
},
{
"end_time": 3606.817,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3583.404,
"text": " caterpillar with hookah hypotheses. A reference to Alice in Wonderland that this is a quite literally a pipe dream. They're basically saying we're BSing everybody. That's basically what they were saying and we're full of it. So that was pretty snotty. But it was sufficiently snotty to provoke Roger into"
},
{
"end_time": 3629.514,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3607.142,
"text": " into responding fully. And the publisher of the journal said, you can reply on the next issue, but I'll need a manuscript in two weeks. And so I said, oh my gosh, it's been a year we don't have a manuscript. How can we possibly do this two weeks? Well, we got on the phone and Roger said, I'll tell you what, I can answer all the girdle serum stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 3654.94,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3629.906,
"text": " You answer all the microtubule stuff with the two parts together. We're at 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, 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."
},
{
"end_time": 3679.224,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3655.299,
"text": " 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 when you take, because it deep polymerizes the microtubules and that paralyzes the immune cells from migrating into the joint. So microtubules are deep polymerized."
},
{
"end_time": 3695.111,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3679.531,
"text": " Right, but it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier."
},
{
"end_time": 3715.094,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3695.503,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 3737.022,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3715.811,
"text": " So I answered that, and there's some other stuff, and Roger answered Girdle's theory, put an abstract together, and we wrote this paper, Gaps, what Gaps? Response to Gresham. That was our first paper in 95. And then next year, we had two papers in 96, and then no papers until 2014."
},
{
"end_time": 3765.896,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3737.381,
"text": " And then we rehashed that as an updated version in 2018 and 2016. And now this paper, which we're writing now. So maybe half a dozen papers over 20 years, but they've all been good. Now going to this backward time 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 3796.101,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3766.817,
"text": " Well, Libet did these experiments in, well, he did two sets of experiments. The first set of experiments that Roger wrote about in his book, The Embers in Your 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."
},
{
"end_time": 3820.879,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3796.613,
"text": " She's still around. He passed away years ago, but he was a neurosurgeon and Libet work with him. And so he had a patients that he did a neurosurgery on while awake. So he would drill a hole and numb it up with local anesthetic. And once you get into the brain, you can operate on the brain. It doesn't hurt, but you make you numb up the hole and you can access the brain. And for example, for the, the, for the finger on the opposite hand,"
},
{
"end_time": 3845.964,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3821.391,
"text": " 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, you would expect, or I would expect, not knowing anything beforehand, that if you stimulate the brain you feel it immediately,"
},
{
"end_time": 3871.613,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3846.544,
"text": " If you stimulate the finger, it would be a delay because it had to get to the brain. If you stimulate the finger, there is a delay, but it's only 30 milliseconds evoke 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 evoke potential. But if it continues for 500 milliseconds, you do feel it at 30 milliseconds. What's this evoke potential?"
},
{
"end_time": 3900.964,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3872.261,
"text": " Okay, so if you stimulate the finger, the signal, you get a spike, that's the evoke potential. If you stimulate it here, you don't get the evoke 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 evoke potential, 30 milliseconds. So somehow at 30 milliseconds, the brain knows whether or not there's going to be 500 milliseconds of ongoing activity afterwards. If there is,"
},
{
"end_time": 3928.695,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3901.22,
"text": " 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 they send 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 3959.189,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3929.804,
"text": " Have you heard of that where you come on arm? Yes. Yes. 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 rapids, the same thing. I actually wrote a chapter about it. I can send it to you about about all this. Well, I've written several actually about it and all those"
},
{
"end_time": 3983.951,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3959.65,
"text": " 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 at say 300 to 500 milliseconds after they get to my ears. But I will have responded to you at 100 milliseconds."
},
{
"end_time": 4007.807,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3984.531,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 4034.07,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4008.404,
"text": " And it means that consciousness is epiphenomenal and illusory. That's what Dennett says. That's what all the big name philosophers say, unless they have some way to wheeze a lot of it. But if you have backward time, it means that 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 4060.589,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4035.555,
"text": " 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 the damn thing about the brain. He admits it. He doesn't know a neuron from a hole in the ground. And so he knows computers and that's how computers work. And unfortunately, that's true about a lot of people."
},
{
"end_time": 4091.271,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4061.305,
"text": " So, uh, we, we actually, uh, my colleague, Tom Beaver is putting a course to get work, putting a course together on conscious studies. And, and Tom asked Dan, Dan Dennis, whom he knows from years ago, if he would, and he just blew him off. So he's not interested. And, uh, you know, they have their position and 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? It could be minor. It could be metaphysical."
},
{
"end_time": 4121.578,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4092.466,
"text": " I'm not sure I agree, but I would say that I'm not saying I disagree necessarily, but 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 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"
},
{
"end_time": 4150.077,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4123.78,
"text": " 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 paper, for example. I'll give you an example. We were talking about the Hodgkin-Huxley neuron and integrate and fire. And that is computable. When the threshold is met, firing happens."
},
{
"end_time": 4179.787,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4150.486,
"text": " But if you put electrodes, and this was done in 2006 by Nandorf et al. in Germany, they put electrodes in pyramidal cells of a way 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. Something other than the membrane potential, than the inputs, there's something other than the measurable inputs that are triggering the firing, which controls behavior."
},
{
"end_time": 4208.2,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4180.213,
"text": " and they that's 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 and 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"
},
{
"end_time": 4239.206,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4209.241,
"text": " 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, you say, no, non-computability has to do something deep in quantum physics. And I was saying, yes, I know. But it has to come into the brain somewhere. And so that's where I thought it was coming in. So he's come around to that now. And we're going to include that in our paper."
},
{
"end_time": 4258.558,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4239.718,
"text": " Basically, you can measure non-computability in neurons as a deviation from Hodgkin-Huxley behavior, which is also what I was saying before, deviation from cognitive autopilot function."
},
{
"end_time": 4279.94,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4258.746,
"text": " 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. I'm trying to put his non-computability into the brain, specifically at the end of integration and pyramidal neurons,"
},
{
"end_time": 4308.712,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4280.401,
"text": " 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 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, but 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"
},
{
"end_time": 4337.398,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4309.258,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 4367.108,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4337.756,
"text": " and maybe by understanding the parts they can understand as a whole. Great. I'm basically taking quotes from your article. So here's one. OK. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 4396.561,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4367.654,
"text": " 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 near absolute zero temperature to avoid any thermal oscillations. So in biology, we think that inside the tubulins, in the high resonance groups, you have a"
},
{
"end_time": 4418.08,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4397.09,
"text": " Yeah, that's one you'll have to explain to 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."
},
{
"end_time": 4444.377,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4418.746,
"text": " And that leaves two more bonds. So one bond goes to three more bonds per carbon. One each goes to the two neighboring carbon. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 4473.507,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4444.821,
"text": " 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 there's a dipole in this one."
},
{
"end_time": 4490.162,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4473.814,
"text": " When you say oscillation in the dipole, you mean oscillation in the charge so that it's more positive on one side than the negative and it switches or what? Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 4517.125,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4491.032,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 4566.613,
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"start_time": 4543.268,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
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{
"end_time": 4589.258,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4566.613,
"text": " Charge is neutral, but the dipole means you're pushing in each cloud the electrons tend to migrate to one side or the other."
},
{
"end_time": 4616.476,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4589.48,
"text": " 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. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 4640.469,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4616.817,
"text": " But if you put them in a lattice where there's space, they can oscillate. And that's basically full of coherence. So they're in a nonpolar 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"
},
{
"end_time": 4669.07,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4641.015,
"text": " from a science fiction book by a guy named Paul Benioff, who was one of the inventors of quantum computers. Deutsch, Benioff, and Feynman are generally credited with inventing the concept of quantum computers. And Benioff was Roger New and actually spoke at our 2003 Quantum Mind Conference. He had written a sci-fi book and he talked about it in his talk"
},
{
"end_time": 4696.664,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4669.599,
"text": " 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 phase you get inputs so you get output input then quantum again process collapse so you have the alternating phases of quantum and classical quantum classical and during the classical you'd have interaction with the both output and input."
},
{
"end_time": 4722.5,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4697.09,
"text": " Now when we said that for 40Hz, I would change it now to say the same thing happens at say 10MHz because we think the orca war events are happening much faster. So after each event, you're in the classical phase, you 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."
},
{
"end_time": 4751.288,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4722.705,
"text": " roughly 10 million times a second. Okay, there's a hydrophobic property of the benzene rings, I believe. Hydrophobic non-polar, right. There's no charge. So let's explain those terms. Hydrophobic, why is that important, and then non-polar. 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,"
},
{
"end_time": 4780.555,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4751.732,
"text": " 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 charged surfaces like receptors on the surfaces of neurons and so forth. If, however, you're giving a drug like an anesthetic, which is non-polar, 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, membranes,"
},
{
"end_time": 4807.056,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4780.862,
"text": " 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 to polar charges. So you've reduced the degrees of freedom and created what is called in the quantum computing business, a decoherence-free subspace."
},
{
"end_time": 4830.162,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4807.449,
"text": " Temporarily where you can do quantum stuff without 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 I don't know much about the B lattice and then there's apparently another layer I just saw"
},
{
"end_time": 4857.517,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4831.067,
"text": " Anirvan, 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? So microtubules are hollow tubes. So you have an outside, this charge is coming out, and it's basically water around it. Then you have the wall of the microtubule, which is about four nanometers thick."
},
{
"end_time": 4887.841,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4858.012,
"text": " be very long but format and then you have the inner core which is 15 nanometers of again water or ordered water then you have the other wall so you have a hollow water well the water in the water and i is also ions in the interior of the microtubule may be completely ordered because you have charges coming out from the from the inside part of the tubulin and then more ordered water more ordered water and the water may become part of the quantum state"
},
{
"end_time": 4917.671,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4888.353,
"text": " In fact, I coauthored a paper in 1994-95 about quantum states in the water. And that may be true, but we think it's originating in the nonpolar region inside the wall of the microtubule, where it's sheltered from the water either on the outside of the microtubule or the inside of the microtubule."
},
{
"end_time": 4946.425,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4918.387,
"text": " When someone has Alzheimer's, it affects the tau proteins, correct? Tau proteins are microtubule-associated proteins, and the tau proteins"
},
{
"end_time": 4974.838,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4947.142,
"text": " 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,"
},
{
"end_time": 5000.794,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4975.077,
"text": " 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 we've been studying my 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"
},
{
"end_time": 5027.637,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5001.425,
"text": " Use this to form a treatment for Alzheimer's. That is, let's say you have to reach the stability of Tau. Well, it's the stability of the microtubules. I think that Tau is a microtubule associated protein. Everybody gets worked up about Tau. They can measure Tau in spinal fluid. They can do this, but they're not thinking about what the Tau does when it's not messed up, when it's doing its, you know, when it's functioning properly. And what it is is a microtubule associated protein"
},
{
"end_time": 5051.032,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5027.637,
"text": " Okay, you mentioned that there's some self-similar property of conductance at the different levels of scales. Now, sorry."
},
{
"end_time": 5081.254,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5051.715,
"text": " 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, Anurban Bandipade, 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, published in 2013, 2014, and then more recently. And basically, he uses... Yeah, there you go. That image has gotten around a lot. And basically... Just for the audience, in case they can't see,"
},
{
"end_time": 5109.053,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5081.664,
"text": " This is one of the slides. I was going to ask you to explain at some point what we can do that after. I have it memorized, actually. On the left, you have three levels of scale, and then you use different types of nanopros, scanning tunneling microscopes, atomic force, electrodes, this and that. And so you're putting electrodes on a microtubule. Now normally microtubule, all proteins are insulators. They don't conduct very well."
},
{
"end_time": 5138.387,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5109.48,
"text": " what honor bond 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. And he found at certain frequencies that you would get conductance at certain critical frequencies, microtubules would conduct would be, would, would have the resonances or conductances in a triplet of triplet patterns."
},
{
"end_time": 5157.534,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5138.729,
"text": " And these triplet of triplet patterns repeated about every, not quite every three orders of magnitude. 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 5188.217,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5159.991,
"text": " Now, keep water out of this. Water is the 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 at certain frequencies, the microtubule is conductant."
},
{
"end_time": 5211.732,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5188.712,
"text": " So what is the significance of this? It's interesting geometrically, visually, but what is... Well, he called it ballistic conductance. He couldn't prove quantum because there's a classical interface between electrode and the surface of the microtubule. But within the pi resonance, it was probably something like superconductivity or some kind of quantum state."
},
{
"end_time": 5240.964,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5212.329,
"text": " 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 5266.323,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5241.34,
"text": " And then see if you need more to put someone who claims to be higher in consciousness, 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 model know whether 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 to be, you know, trying to split hairs at a level where"
},
{
"end_time": 5294.053,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5266.8,
"text": " 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. We want to know how it works on anybody, much less, you know, the Dalai Lama or something like that. What are frolic resonances? Frolic coherences are frolic resonant, frolic coherences. What I talked about before, we have these nonpolar dipoles that oscillate"
},
{
"end_time": 5323.609,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5294.497,
"text": " And they couple to the mechanical vibration. Also, the key here is that everybody says the brain is too warm, wet and noisy for 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 with mechanical vibrational resonances, the heat is going to pump it. So it's going to have these oscillations that are coherent. So you couple the quantum coherent and mechanical coherent. That's why you're saying it was like a laser."
},
{
"end_time": 5352.875,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5324.002,
"text": " Yes, exactly. Okay. Is computation happening at the level of glial cells or is it just the pyramidal neurons? Good question. Glial cells have a lot of microtubules. All cells have, even plant cells have microtubules. The, the pyramidal cells. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 5381.561,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5353.695,
"text": " and an amoeba or any cell. 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're going to, 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,"
},
{
"end_time": 5407.21,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5381.988,
"text": " going here. And 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 Roger and I think is that if you have two microtubules in mixed polarity next to each other and they're in a common voltage,"
},
{
"end_time": 5434.462,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5407.483,
"text": " They're going to have slightly different resonant frequencies, and that's going to give rise to beat frequencies. So going back to what I said before about, you know, eventually, 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 that EEG may be kind of a snapshot at a very slow frequency of what's happening"
},
{
"end_time": 5451.544,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5435.094,
"text": " I see at the bottom of this there are"
},
{
"end_time": 5476.425,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5453.729,
"text": " This is just for the people who are watching. Yeah. So what are these frequencies indicating? Is it that same Anubhan? Yeah. Yeah. That goes along with that. 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 5505.845,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5477.671,
"text": " They would have to collapse by Roger's mechanism. And right now, quantum computers are built at near absolute zero, and they collapse because somebody makes a measurement, which introduces randomness. So as 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."
},
{
"end_time": 5525.503,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5506.288,
"text": " 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, I said, well, are you sure your quantum computer is not conscious? You know, it's having the Rogers objective reduction."
},
{
"end_time": 5553.319,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5525.947,
"text": " And he said, Oh my God, I hope not, because that would have created a public relations issue. So that's 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"
},
{
"end_time": 5582.892,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5553.66,
"text": " If you built it out of something like graphene or fullerenes that's much more biological and did it at warm temperature and pumped it 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."
},
{
"end_time": 5595.077,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5583.831,
"text": " In the brain, I believe it's topological qubits."
},
{
"end_time": 5617.79,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5596.254,
"text": " 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 correcting and topological qubits seem to be resistant to them. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 5640.503,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5618.507,
"text": " And I have 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. But what happened was, this goes back to the late 90s, Roger invited me to the"
},
{
"end_time": 5669.019,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5641.374,
"text": " to the Royal Society meeting on quantum information, which was right when all the entanglement stuff was coming out. Really exciting time. We had all these super smart young physicists talking about entanglement over hundreds of miles and this and that. And, you know, I mean, the aspect experiment proving entanglement didn't happen until 86. So 10 or 12 years later, you know, a lot had happened and they were talking about this technology. And we had a talk by John Preskill of Caltech,"
},
{
"end_time": 5697.892,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5669.326,
"text": " And he showed a lattice for 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 would correct what was happening on the vertical. And I kind of woke up from dozing because they had lost me."
},
{
"end_time": 5725.981,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5698.558,
"text": " a hexagonal lattice, like thinking of microtubule. And 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, would it be interesting if the Fibonacci pathways were some kind of topological qubit? But for him, topology means like the coffee cup has a topology because of this. And it has a whole other meaning that I wasn't"
},
{
"end_time": 5743.183,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5726.664,
"text": " 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 the helical pathway, it's much more stable from a quantum standpoint."
},
{
"end_time": 5772.295,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5743.49,
"text": " 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"
},
{
"end_time": 5800.828,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5774.019,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 5830.981,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5801.732,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 5858.78,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5831.732,
"text": " It's six layers. When information comes in, it winds up in layer five. It goes to four, and then from four it goes to one, two, three, and six. One, two, three, and six converge on layer five. Layer five is the pyramidal neurons. They have these huge cone-shaped cell bodies. They call them pyramids because they look like a pyramid, but actually they're cone-shaped."
},
{
"end_time": 5887.21,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5859.462,
"text": " And they're enormous compared to other neurons. And they have the biggest array of mixed polarity interrupted microtubules anywhere. And their basilar dendrites are continuous. So they form one continuous sheet over the whole cortex. And their outputs elicit behavior, and their apical dendrites give rise to EEG."
},
{
"end_time": 5906.493,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5887.654,
"text": " So I think consciousness can 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."
},
{
"end_time": 5923.063,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5906.903,
"text": " 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 related prefrontal cortex."
},
{
"end_time": 5948.387,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5923.677,
"text": " 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,"
},
{
"end_time": 5976.084,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5949.002,
"text": " I'm not sure. And I know that in the Templeton program on accelerating research and consciousness, there's a $5 million study, front 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"
},
{
"end_time": 6004.138,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5977.108,
"text": " 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 those, I don't really understand it. I know it's some measure of integration."
},
{
"end_time": 6030.026,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6004.48,
"text": " But they say that it can happen at any level. So I asked Christoph and Julia, well, what happens 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 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 that is phi? And they wouldn't answer that either. So I don't know, actually."
},
{
"end_time": 6060.196,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6030.196,
"text": " I think all those other theories can be more or less correct. They're all at the level of neurons, although IITs can happen at any level, but they really focus on neurons. They could all be happening, but still need orca war happening at a deeper level. They're all basically cognitive architectures that may or may not have anything to do with consciousness. Of course, I'm skeptical. I'm the enemy, according to them, but I think that you need to go to a deeper level into the quantum realm."
},
{
"end_time": 6089.377,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6060.674,
"text": " 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 our theory is head and shoulders above any other theory in that regard, in terms of rigor or even approaching the hard 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."
},
{
"end_time": 6119.735,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6089.872,
"text": " So I'm pretty dubious about that. I think 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. If it can't be falsified, then it's not a theory. What are some ways of falsifying it? Well, what I just said, we're in this program now. We're starting experiments very soon. So the way they showed quantum coherence"
},
{
"end_time": 6148.285,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6120.009,
"text": " quantum effects in photosynthesis protein is take 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 two emissions from it, and if there's a quantum superposition in the protein, then you get a set of interference peaks coming out. And that is indicative that there's a quantum superposition in the protein."
},
{
"end_time": 6178.37,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6148.422,
"text": " 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 kilodown? Kilodaltons. What's that? That's a unit of some sort. An atomic mass unit is adult. Ah, okay, okay. The molecular weight is 110,000. So if you count up all the protons and neutrons, so it has, I don't know how many atoms out of that, but"
},
{
"end_time": 6207.858,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6178.797,
"text": " The tubulin is four times the size of the protein they previously measured on, is what I'm trying to say. So 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 quantum interference at room temperature in a tubulin protein, we'll then attempt to anesthetize it and see if it goes away."
},
{
"end_time": 6233.507,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6208.285,
"text": " 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 then 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 few So it's found in tryptophan the amino acid. It's found in most of the psychedelics. You have this indole ring and"
},
{
"end_time": 6261.869,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6233.916,
"text": " And it's amazing, actually, that the neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and the psychedelics all have the same pi resonance groups that are conducive to quantum effects. I don't know if you've heard of this thought. 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 6286.613,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6262.415,
"text": " Yeah, well, actually, it was done by Nikos Logothetis, where you present different images to the two eyes. So one eye is seeing one scene, one eye is seeing the other thing. The other way to think of it is the Necker cube, where you see in the foreground or the background, it shifts back and forth, or the vase and the face and that sort of thing. There's two different perceptions."
},
{
"end_time": 6306.34,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6287.073,
"text": " But if you 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 I would, you know, that's that'd be our explanation and my explanation for that."
},
{
"end_time": 6335.896,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6306.476,
"text": " 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 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."
},
{
"end_time": 6364.804,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6336.374,
"text": " which are kind of preferred states 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. But you need a pretty organized or orchestrated 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 through these platonic values of preferred states. And therefore, if you're mindful,"
},
{
"end_time": 6392.125,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6365.503,
"text": " 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 you know 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"
},
{
"end_time": 6418.985,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6392.961,
"text": " And by the way, let me just say, we're criticized by, 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. But, you know, we criticize for, you know, well, people really, Chalmers has ridiculed us 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"
},
{
"end_time": 6447.602,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6419.838,
"text": " The minimization of mysteries is a good thing. Dave Chambers, a good friend of mine, ridiculed us by saying, oh, they're just invoking the mythical law of minimization of mysteries. But if you believe in Occam's razor, 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"
},
{
"end_time": 6477.637,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6448.046,
"text": " 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"
},
{
"end_time": 6502.005,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6479.292,
"text": " That's not easy. Most people would consciously buckle or unconsciously. I can't convey in words how difficult that is, and that I actually find commendable. Well, thank you. Thank you. Roger is just above it all, but although he's sensitive and he doesn't like being criticized, but"
},
{
"end_time": 6527.227,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6502.261,
"text": " But I think he's operating on a higher level than the rest of us. So for him, it's just, well, they'll figure it out eventually. My perspective about being criticized and yeah, it hurts. But, you know, 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."
},
{
"end_time": 6546.305,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6527.773,
"text": " 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. I hate to say it's a hobby because that sounds demeaning because it's very important to me. Why is it so important?"
},
{
"end_time": 6569.189,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6547.654,
"text": " It's the most interesting question in the world. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's what I do. You know, if I were 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 and it's what I enjoy doing. And, you know, it's fun. And it's gotten me to see the world. I met people like Roger and you and"
},
{
"end_time": 6595.145,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6569.77,
"text": " countless other people and been all over the world, you know, before COVID and hopefully will again. And, you know, it keeps me going. Like you said, I'm pretty old, but I'm still highly motivated. And I never said you're pretty old. Well, it's true. I am pretty old, but I'm still I'm still doing anesthesia, although I'm cutting back on time. And but my research keeps me going. You know, it's what I love to do, among other things."
},
{
"end_time": 6625.742,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6596.664,
"text": " What does your theory have to say about zero-point consciousness or the view from nowhere? Oh, yeah. Nothingness. Yeah. So if you meditate, it's just contentless. Whether it's contentless or not is debatable. Some people say, well, nothingness is something. But I think you could be highly conscious of just pure consciousness with feelings. I think, you know, our feelings, content,"
},
{
"end_time": 6654.633,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6626.084,
"text": " 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? Have you heard of Wolfram's computational theory?"
},
{
"end_time": 6684.002,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6656.203,
"text": " 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 as a computer is, the universe as a computer is maybe"
},
{
"end_time": 6706.817,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6685.145,
"text": " I hear that sound."
},
{
"end_time": 6733.933,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6707.824,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the Internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 6762.449,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6733.933,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way,"
},
{
"end_time": 6791.357,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6762.449,
"text": " powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in."
},
{
"end_time": 6815.794,
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"start_time": 6791.544,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 6843.251,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6815.998,
"text": " 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 say that experience is a fundamental component of the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 6872.585,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6843.626,
"text": " Now, a lot of people say that, panpsychists say that, idealists say that, idealists say that that's all there is. Panpsychists 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."
},
{
"end_time": 6897.363,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6873.234,
"text": " doesn't even bring in matter. It's a sequence of events, of occasions of experience occurring in a wider field of experience. And it was Abner Shemini 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"
},
{
"end_time": 6926.067,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6897.739,
"text": " 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,"
},
{
"end_time": 6950.589,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6926.664,
"text": " Emits, I don't know if emit is the proper verb, 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. Interesting. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 6973.439,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6951.084,
"text": " 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 governed by, if that's true, you're still governed by the deterministic Schrodinger equation up to that point."
},
{
"end_time": 7003.729,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6973.916,
"text": " and and you know maybe even the platonic values so you know 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 how quantum brain biology can rescue conscious free will"
},
{
"end_time": 7032.688,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7004.411,
"text": " And I think it's got more views than any other paper I've written. It's in one of the Frontiers journals, some 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 for the sake of flattering you, 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7065.196,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7035.418,
"text": " Well, you can explain it. I can't find it right now. One has the causal arrow going in the other direction. Yeah, well, basically, the anthropomorphic principle is that if you look at the 20 or so values of the parameters 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"
},
{
"end_time": 7092.21,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7065.742,
"text": " a universe with stars, light, life and consciousness. 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"
},
{
"end_time": 7120.35,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7093.968,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7149.667,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7120.776,
"text": " by saying, well, that's only because it's a selector's bias. We're asking the questions because we're in the one and only universe 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7176.049,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7150.145,
"text": " And they were saying, well, consciousness coming from another, uh, multiple worlds. I think they were saying that. And I said, well, if that's the case, it'd be coming 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7204.991,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7176.561,
"text": " that the Big Bang was preceded by another Eon and that was preceded by another Eon and so forth. And I saw, I said, well, where do you think there was a consciousness in the previous Eon? He said, well, sure. It could have been, should have been, why not? And I then thought about a book by Lee Smolin about, called Life of the Cosmos. And he was talking about, in a black hole, evolutionary model,"
},
{
"end_time": 7233.49,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7206.34,
"text": " Pardon me? An evolutionary model. Yeah, that what comes out on the other side is an improved version of what went in. So I said, could that apply to your, you know, big bangs and in eons so that, that 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7263.148,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7233.968,
"text": " 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, uh, that consciousness is actually steering the universe, um, by, by these transition points, uh, big bang transition points and then eon to eon consciousness gets a little bit better each time."
},
{
"end_time": 7290.333,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7263.763,
"text": " 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 7320.725,
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"start_time": 7291.425,
"text": " 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 know, if you want to improve consciousness, what 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"
},
{
"end_time": 7338.251,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7321.305,
"text": " How would it get better? I'm not sure, but I think it's one possibility. What else would be the point 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7368.285,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7339.394,
"text": " Mm hmm. 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 for in that practice medicine over the internet. But, but, uh, when, uh, when honor bond came out with this idea that, uh, or discovered that there were these vibrations in microtubules, uh, including in megahertz, then, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 7397.466,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7368.882,
"text": " 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 are, I forget who used it on our embassy people, these loud pops, and apparently that was microwave."
},
{
"end_time": 7419.565,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7397.995,
"text": " 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, I looked over and there's an ultrasound machine sitting there. And I said, I wonder if anybody's put ultrasound into the brain."
},
{
"end_time": 7447.517,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7420.196,
"text": " And ultrasound's been around forever and it's mechanical vibrations, megahertz bounces off, that goes off surfaces. So you get an image inside the body. You can see the babies in the uterus and so forth. And so I looked up and sure enough, a guy had been putting ultrasound in the brains of animals and getting behavioral effects and, uh, you know, they could move their paw. You could get it. You can make them move their paw by paying the paw region and physiological effects. And, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 7476.596,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7448.319,
"text": " I wondered what would be the effect on mental states. Ultrasound had been approved for imaging the brain. So people would be getting ultrasound in the brain, but it wasn't very good compared to MRI and CT for imaging the brain. So it wasn't really useful. So I said to my anesthesia colleagues, 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7502.978,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7476.988,
"text": " 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, you know, I hadn't really thought about it. And, uh, 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7527.875,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7503.422,
"text": " and but it was also my idea in fact that's what 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 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 the imaging happens immediately"
},
{
"end_time": 7551.186,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7528.626,
"text": " Okay, so they don't leave prolonged ultrasound on your brain, at least not in humans that they've tested. Well, I'm not sure anybody used it for brain imaging very much. It was approved, but then CT MRI 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 call my bluff. My friends call my bluff."
},
{
"end_time": 7580.93,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7551.596,
"text": " And I sit around the table and I picked it up with my right hand and 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 and I didn't feel a thing. I said, 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,"
},
{
"end_time": 7611.186,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7581.715,
"text": " 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 and chronic pain patients in the journal brain stimulation and showed him improved mood and reduced pain and chronic pain patients with 15 seconds of ultrasound to a contralateral to the pain in a chronic pain patients in a double blind crossover study. You don't feel it. So it's easy to do a double blind study."
},
{
"end_time": 7640.469,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7611.664,
"text": " Now since then a number of other people did it and we did a study about a year ago 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 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"
},
{
"end_time": 7662.346,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7640.998,
"text": " 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 I 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 something like that, I damn well try it. Okay, let me get off on a hypothetical plunge here."
},
{
"end_time": 7691.63,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7662.858,
"text": " 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 but then consciousness is associated with forty hertz ten 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"
},
{
"end_time": 7721.425,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7691.749,
"text": " 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. The question is whether it's vibrating coherently. Is everything connected? And some people would say yes, that everything's entangled. Going back to the Big Bang, everything's entangled. You're kind of asking me whether,"
},
{
"end_time": 7742.568,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7721.732,
"text": " 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 it could, it has to do with, you know, platonic values and consciousness out there, but I'd rather leave it vague because otherwise it becomes religion."
},
{
"end_time": 7768.609,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7743.336,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7793.899,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7768.797,
"text": " 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 deep depth 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 plank scale and the fine scale structure of the universe, whatever that is. So I don't know, that's, that's a tough one."
},
{
"end_time": 7823.507,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7794.326,
"text": " 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"
},
{
"end_time": 7848.353,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7823.797,
"text": " He's a friend of mine."
},
{
"end_time": 7877.927,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7848.626,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7907.688,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7879.258,
"text": " I think we can be one. I think people can be entangled. I think ESP and that sort of thing, parapsychology can occur by quantum nonlocality, 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 gone on quite a limb in a lot of areas. Okay. I'll take some questions from the audience. So let's take a look here."
},
{
"end_time": 7930.452,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7908.524,
"text": " Is the depressed 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7959.735,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7933.217,
"text": " 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, uh, versus, uh, E sub gene. And, uh, so the intensity of the conscious experience would be related to the frequency of the, uh, of the number of orco or events you can have. So a plant cell might have, you know, a few per minute and we can, we might have, you know, uh, trillions per second."
},
{
"end_time": 7990.674,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7960.998,
"text": " 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 Stewart 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?"
},
{
"end_time": 8010.538,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7991.408,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 8034.07,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 8011.118,
"text": " 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 responses to different faces. You know, the Halle Berry neuron would fire, 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."
},
{
"end_time": 8060.845,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 8034.65,
"text": " And I said, are these synchronized? And he said, yes. I said, so you mean the neuron response just 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 there are 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."
},
{
"end_time": 8089.428,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8061.92,
"text": " 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 what's the has this been published no but there's been a lot of stuff published on backward time you know darryl bam had uh you know eight eight experiment and nine experiments eight of nine eight eight out of nine of which showed backward time effects okay do you mind repeating that person's name this way i can"
},
{
"end_time": 8111.271,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8089.718,
"text": " I'm super, super interested in talking to people who"
},
{
"end_time": 8140.725,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8111.783,
"text": " 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 and rogers work on this retroactivity now which could explain this but he's doing it as a way to get rid of the uh well for different reason because of the uh"
},
{
"end_time": 8169.189,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8141.118,
"text": " to 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 Kohl 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 Orka R say about that said theory of self?"
},
{
"end_time": 8198.012,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8169.514,
"text": " 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, you know, and then Julian James, you know, had this idea that"
},
{
"end_time": 8227.159,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8198.609,
"text": " 100,000s of years ago, there was no one you, there was no one Kurt in your head. There was no one Stuart in my head. There was just a bunch of voices and, uh, and you know, the gods or the gremlins or whoever. And then over, over 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,"
},
{
"end_time": 8257.329,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8227.517,
"text": " I don't worry about that too much. And I think if you have a sequence, 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, you know, occurring by itself. Have you researched much about Jung? Because what you described sound like what Jung described as the individuation process, and that is that there are different personalities, disparate, maybe disjoint, that are competing and conflicting."
},
{
"end_time": 8286.596,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8258.626,
"text": " It could be. I know a little bit about Jung, and Betsy studies Jung, and my good friend Harold Atmanspacher is big on Jung. But I don't really know that much about it. Okay, and lastly, Dan Arm says, does he think there may be any basis to the hypothesis that the Sun has consciousness? The Sun? Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 8315.742,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8287.807,
"text": " 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, you're welcome, Curtis."
},
{
"end_time": 8322.346,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8316.118,
"text": " Good talking to you. Good luck to you. You asked great questions. Thanks for your audience and stay in touch."
}
]
}No transcript available.