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36 thoughts on “Stuart Hameroff 2021 – Quantum biology and consciousness”

  3. Hameroff always says that AI scientists assume that "consciousness arrives at a certain amount of complexity" but I have never heard any serious AI scientist actually say that. I've heard some hard materialists make light of consciousness but as deep learning language models continue to grow, I think we might actually have a bad definition of consciousness or conscious experience to begin with and might be missing the point. I tend to have the feeling that the Eastern religions are closer to the truth. If consciousness is a quantum effect that likely means that it permeates throughout all matter. Point being, if that's the case, then why can't Artificial Intelligence be conscious if the basis of all reality is consciousness itself? Bing

  5. Could the faster than 3rd wave response have something to do with the subconscious? What if the subconscious is the primary operating layer, and conscious processing is the primary experience/perceiving, even directing layer. Say an autonomous vehicle, the car will make decisions before the driver is even aware, because the car is programmed to operate with an objective and sensing things the driver isn't, or sensing things faster. But ultimately the conscious driver is in control. I think the conscious mind instructs/can instruct the subconscious to fulfill an objective, and the subconscious operates in ways that the conscious mind cannot, sensing, understanding, calculating, reacting. Imagine if we had to consciously process everything we were exposed to or everything we did. Impossible. When you set an outcome it instructs the subconscious to fulfill it, to realize it. It makes the background but vitally important decisions that you are not aware of. I'm sure that looking at this from an outside perspective it would appear as the brain operating outside of free will, but it's free will that has instructed this process.

  7. An extension of your music metaphor: in Jazz there exists "Call and response" which might aptly fit in further explaining your conductor(less) music analogy. Consciousness may stimulate patterns in a 'call' and be followed by memory functions responding by recalling previous stored models based on similarity to the current model. Consciousness could then 'call' for more similar events until it reaches a choice. In music, each call and response is moderated by a number of bars or measures. This part of the analogy would explain sub frequency and super frequency effects. Further analogies follow by adding in key changes, major and minor and chord progressions that would allow for anticipatory explanations why we can hit a ball in 100ms with a system that takes 500ms to respond. The system has matched the current model to a previous model and it plays without any conscious interaction. This is generally true in music, consciousness merely directs the unconscious to play sequences of actions based on the best fit of the current model.

  9. Love to see people here allegedly arguing back to Dr. Hammeroff with fancy wording. Great lecture, always keen to know more about this work. Thanks for posting it, I've enjoyed it very much.

  10. Wonderful, but you must stop believing in consciousness as vitalistic (gods are all dead now) and think about the obvious consequences of your excellent work upon 'socialised realism' (with realism comprehended a la Adorno's negative dialectic 🥰

  13. I dont understand 75% of this theory of hard problem of consciousness but its the most fascinating subject matter i discovered for myself. I have a feeling the OR theory will be validated to be 100% correct.

  16. IF consciousness is non-local, then how do we explain anaesthesia? when i have anaesthesia and the liquid enters my vein, the light switch goes off…or does it? is my consciousness suspended? has it vanished? is it lingering in the atmosphere somehow? i am confused by anaesthesia. i personally believe (and hope) consciousness extends beyond the body (which Hammeroff says there is a science to back this theory), BUT then why do I come round from anaesthesia with no awareness of what happened to me?

  18. Imagine being me and your large intestin explodes " happened when I was 23 and 64" and there was no anesthesia
    I went through hell as it was. but death would have been to only way out with out anesthesia and pain killer's.

  19. It's not just jamming it is a liquid crystal reacting to incoming information through a mechanical matrix that all is working with memory subtracts and adds depending on phase relationships.
    God would be in the dimension where conscienceness originated.

  20. So as usual scientist and science has
    Screwed us sure the information is fantastic but with the powers that run the world. This information is probably already in the hands of the cia who are
    Financed by the deep dark government.
    And governments job is to government the mind. Need I say more. One thing
    To point out is if you can make someone
    Feel better you can also do the opposite.

  21. If the same particle is 2 places at he same time because of curvature, how do we account for the observed particle location vs the real particle location as shown by Eddington's experiment and the observed vs real location of the stars behind the sun?

  22. Love to see Hameroff is back in action. In his absence I've been persuaded that free will is an illusion. However I'll always listen closely to what Stuart has to say, Orch-OR is the most compelling scientific argument to the contrary.

  24. Good to see a scientist dare to go outside the parameters set by the academic hierarchy. And not only but also produce an actual theory, still waiting to be falsified, so more progress can be made.

  25. Someone had mentioned a response from one or the other of Bernardo Kastrup's idealist view wrt microtubules. I'd be interested if anyone has that information? Thanks.

  27. Consciousness/mind is the Power of the spirit / soul acting thru the brain. Brain is the radio, Spirit is the signal .. the song playing on the radio is our mind. Or you could think of the brain as a mirror reflecting the powers of the Spirit as well. The Quantum is the world of the Spirit acting on Creation … Our minds and the Quantum is the bridge between the material reality and the reality of the Spirit/Kingdom …. IMHOO ..

  30. Oops. Added my two cents before browsing down through more comments, and ended up adding nothing to the discussion other than a lengthy agreement with many of them.
    But as usual I'll leave it up. I wrote it, I'll stick with it. Someone may find something interesting about it, or at least find out it has some entertainment value… 🙂
    Philosophers. What a hoot.
    Ignoring the evidence of their own senses, and VERY WELL AWARE that they are *consciously* thinking through what they are going to say before they say it, and fully aware of the fact that they are ceaselessly interacting with the world in real time, regardless of FULL consciousness of that world not quite being attained, (because of the scientifically recognized millisecond lag times),

    they STILL go about saying things like "Consciousness comes too late."

    So, mister philosopher, if your consciousness came too late to the party,
    Who the hell am I conversing with???

    My personal theory about any effects a multiple millisecond 'lag time' may have, between objective event and complete consciousness OF such an event, is more than compensated for, in the main and in the vast number of occurrences, by the fact that our highest level of conscious awareness has already extrapolated the way in which things will most likely turn out, and so it has put in motion whatever appropriate response is required BEFORE we are fully conscious of the full context an event may occupy, and to what extent such an event will affect us, several milliseconds in the future.

    In short, we're capable of thinking through many things we will do before the evidence of our senses actually reaches us 'in toto'. We are constantly working through options in advance of events.
    Consciously, not instinctively or reflexively.

  32. It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

  33. Dr Hameroff as an idealist I would say you're already one too because you are saying proto-consciousness cannot be reduced and is fundamental. Pan/cosmopsychism is also idealism.

    1:12:08 this is certainly a breadcrumb for those eagerly waiting for the results of the study.

    "The experiments in our proposal address the feasibility of ‘Orch’, of functional, ‘orchestrated’ quantum coherence/superposition in brain microtubules, long considered unlikely in biological conditions. If demonstrated, relevance of quantum coherence/superposition, Orch, in microtubules to consciousness will be assessed by Orch’s sensitivity to anesthetic gases. Orch OR predicts that anesthetics will dampen quantum coherence/superposition (‘Orch’) in microtubules in proportion to the well-known potencies for each anesthetic in rendering humans and animals unresponsive and unconscious (in turn related to gas solubility in a particular non-polar, ‘quantum-friendly medium’–the ‘Meyer-Overton correlation’). A Meyer-Overton correlation between 1) potency of anesthetic action on quantum coherence/superposition in microtubules (’Orch’), and 2) in rendering animals and humans unresponsive and unconscious, would demonstrate that ‘Orch’ correlates with consciousness. However, this would not show that Orch causes, or is equivalent to consciousness."

  35. 🐟 06. CONSCIOUSNESS/AWARENESS:

    Consciousness means “that which knows” or “the state of being aware”, from the Latin prefix “con” (with), the stem “scire” (to know) and the suffix “osus” (characterized by). There is BOTH a localized knowing and a Universal Awareness, as explicated in the following paragraphs.

    Higher species of animal life have sufficient cognitive ability to KNOW themselves and their environment, at least to a measurable degree. Just where consciousness objectively begins in the animal kingdom is a matter of contention but, judging purely by ethological means, it probably starts with vertebrates (at least the higher-order birds and fishes). Those metazoans which are evolutionarily lower than vertebrates do not possess much, if any, semblance of intellect, necessary for true knowledge, but operate purely by reflexive instincts. For instance, an insect or amphibian does not consciously decide to seek food but does so according to its base instincts, directed by its idiosyncratic genetic code. Even when a cockroach flees from danger, it is not experiencing the same kind of thoughts or feelings a human or other mammal would experience.

    The brain is merely a conduit or TRANSDUCER of Universal Consciousness (i.e. Brahman), explaining why the more intelligent the animal, the more it can understand its own existence (or at least be aware of more of its environment – just see how amazingly-complex dolphin and whale behaviour can be, compared with other aquatic species), and the reason why it is asserted that a truly enlightened human must possess a far higher level of intelligence than the average person. The processing unit of a supercomputer must be far larger, more complex and more powerful than the processor in a pocket calculator. Therefore, it seems logical to conclude that the scale of discrete (localized) consciousness is dependent on the animal's brain capacity.
    See Chapter 17 to understand the distinction between enlightenment and mere awakening.

    Three STATES of awareness are experienced by humans and possibly all other species of mammals:
    the waking state (“jāgrata”, in Sanskrit), dreaming (“svapna”, in Sanskrit), and deep-sleep (“suṣupti”, in Sanskrit). Beyond these three temporal states is the fourth “state” (“turīya” or “caturīya”, in Sanskrit). That is the unconditioned, eternal “state”, which underlies the other three.

    The waking state is the LEAST real (that is to say the least permanent, or to put it another way, the farthest from the Necessary Ground of Existence, as explained towards the end of this chapter). The dream state is closer to our eternal nature, whilst dreamless deep-sleep is much more analogous to The Universal Self (“brahman”), as it is imbued with peace. Rather than being an absence of awareness, deep-sleep is an awareness of absence (that is, the absence of phenomenal, sensual experiences). So, in actual fact, the fourth state is not a state, but the Unconditioned Ground of Being, or to put it simply, YOU, the real self/Self, or Existence-Awareness-Peace (“sacchidānanda”, in Sanskrit).

    Perhaps the main purpose of dreams is so that we can understand that the waking-state is practically indistinguishable to the dream-state, and thereby come to see the ILLUSION of this ephemeral world. Both our waking-state experiences and our dream-state experiences occur solely within the mental faculties (refer to Chapter 04 for an elucidation of this phenomenon). If somebody in one of your dreams were to ask your dream-state character if the dream was real, you (playing the part of that character) would most likely say, “yes, of course this is real!” Similarly, if someone were to ask your waking-state character if this world is real, you would almost undoubtedly respond in kind.

    An apt analogy for Universal Consciousness is the manner in which electricity powers a variety of appliances and gadgets, according to the use and COMPLEXITY of the said device. Electricity powers a washing machine in a very simple manner, to drive a large spindle for laundering clothes. However, the very same electrical power may be used to operate a computer to manifest an astonishing range of outputs, such as playing audiovisual tracks, communication tasks, and performing extremely advanced mathematical computations, depending on the computer's software and hardware. The more advanced/complex the device, the more complex its manifestation of the same electricity.

    Using the aforementioned computer analogy: the brain is COMPARATIVELY equivalent to the computer hardware, deoxyribonucleic acid akin to the operating system working in conjunction with the memory, the intellect is equivalent to the processing unit, individuated consciousness is analogous to the software programme, whilst Universal Awareness is likened to the electricity which enlivens the entire computer system.
    A person who is comatosed has lost any semblance of local consciousness, yet is being kept alive by the presence of Universal Consciousness.
    The fact that many persons report out-of-body experiences, where consciousness departs from the gross body, may be evidence for the above.

    So, then, following-on from the assertion made in the third paragraph, one could complain: “That's not fair – why can only a genius be enlightened?” (as defined in Chapter 17). The answer is: first of all, as stated above, every species of animal has its own level of intelligence on a wide-ranging scale. Therefore, a pig or a dog could (if possible) ask: “That's unfair – why can only a human being be enlightened?”
    Secondly, it is INDEED a fact that life is unfair, because there is no “tit for tat” law of action and reaction, even if many supposedly-great religious preceptors have stated so. They said so because they were preaching to wicked miscreants who refused to quit their evil ways, and needed to be chastized in a forceful manner. It is not possible to speak gentle words to a rabid dog to prevent it from biting you.

    There is evidence of Consciousness being a universal field, in SAVANT SYNDROME, a condition in which someone with significant mental disabilities demonstrate certain abilities far in excess of the norm, such as superhuman rapid mathematical calculation, mind-reading, blind-seeing, or astounding musical aptitude. Such behaviour suggests that there is a universal field (possibly in holographic form) from which one can access information. Even simple artistic inspiration could be attributed to this phenomenon. The great British singer-songwriter, Sir James Paul McCartney, one day woke with the complete tune of the song, “Yesterday”, in his mind, after hearing it in a dream. American composer, Paul Simon, had a similar experience when the chorus of his sublime masterpiece, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, simply popped into his head.

    Cont…

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