> They will engage skeptics in a debate on the nature of consciousness, and Bandyopadhyay and his team will couple microtubule vibrations from active neurons to play Indian musical instruments. “Consciousness depends on anharmonic vibrations of microtubules inside neurons, similar to certain kinds of Indian music, but unlike Western music, which is harmonic,” Hameroff explains.<p>Did they really posit a connection between quantum and sonic vibrations (a huge and "woo-woo-y" leap) in the context of consciousness?<p>> “The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review.<p>And they're suggesting that consciousness is intrinsic to quantum systems? I think I missed some of the connections between the two.<p>For that matter, I'm still of a position that the very idea of "consciousness" is an artifact of the brain's anthropocentric and self-image-preserving post ergo hoc systems, as opposed to anything concrete. Compare it to software: we "see" operating systems, drivers, apps, and the like, but those are all labels of our invention. It's ultimately nothing but ones and zeros.
Anytime you hear the word "consciousness" in the field of neuroscience, expect a barrage of pseudo-scientific sloppy reasoning to follow.<p>Even if there are quantum effects involved in the operation of the brain, or any other organ of the body, the idea that they are responsible for this thing called "consciousness" anymore than action potentials or chemical messengers <i>is a gigantic, unsupported assumption.</i><p>More likely the words "quantum" and "microtubule vibrations" sounds sufficiently mysterious to appeal to the casual reader's dualist bias. A proper scientific study into "X", whether X be consciousness or anything else, would begin by defining it concretely.
Penrose has for years been advocating against strong AI, instead arguing that there "magic stuff" in the brain that prevents conciousness from arising in a machine. Great mathematician, but totally off his rocker here, which is outside his field. His arguments make no sense. Someone spewing his quackery without his credentials would be laughed out of the room.
Just b/c there is quantum activity in the microtubules doesn't mean that is the seat of consciousness. When you get down to it, the whole body is a quantum system. So I really find this off base.
Currently 90% of the comments here are meaningless guesses and opinions written by people who haven't read anything and/or know nothing about the mentioned theory, the new findings or the physics involved.<p>I wish there was somebody here who have actually <i>read</i> the mentioned papers, knows something about the relevant physics, is aware of the prior criticism of Orch-OR, and can say what, if anything, the new findings mean for Orch-OR and for its critics.
I recently finished my physics PhD focused on quantum effects in photosynthesis, and I saw Hameroff and Bandyopadhyay's talks at Google's "Quantum Biology" workshop back in 2010.<p>These guys live in a bizarre alternate universe where a number of legitimate experimental results and calculations based on real physics add up to striking conclusions with no basis in reality. They are happy to combined many random factoids -- anything that vaguely supports their ideas -- and pretend that the combination is convincing evidence.<p>For example, the authors hypothesize that the spin of magnetic dipoles could be quantum bits used for information processing in microtubules. As support, they cite experimental evidence for resonances in electrical conductance in microtubules at certain RF frequencies. But coherent motion of electrons is a totally different physical phenomena than coherent spin.<p>The most amazing thing to me is that these guys do manage to operate in their own parallel academic universe, with their own journals, conferences and (most frighteningly) funding.<p>As I found out at the Google workshop (which had been basically hijacked by these guys), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has been funding this fellow Bandyopadhyay's experiments that, at the Google conference, he was touting as "experimental evidence for a topological quantum computing in the brain." An AFOSR officer I talked to was very proud about this project. In my view this is basically a criminal misuse of US taxpayer money (probably 100k/year).
Why am I not surprised that this involves microtubules? Kurzweil meets Penrose meets Indian mysticism -- it's hard to imagine a denser nexus of consciousness-related quackery.
I'm generally very skeptical of authors or papers that make claims about "quantum processes" and consciousness because they are generally written by people who know very little about neurology and even less about quantum physics. Ask them about quantum entanglement, and you'll generally get a misguided interpretation based on a decades old mistake in reasoning that has long since been corrected [1][2]. However, I decided to give this paper a try not because I expected there to be any actual content, but just to see why otherwise intelligent people would be drawn to what I consider to be obvious pseudoscience.<p>I didn't read the whole thing, but from what I know of quantum mechanics and QFT (standard undergraduate course load) I didn't see anything wildly misguided. This tells me that one of two things are true.<p>1. This paper describes a legitimate link between a non-classical process occurring in the brain that may "cause" consciousness. I do not know enough about the brain to rigorously evaluate the claims.<p>2 (more likely). Quantum physics is hard, even for scientists. Neither of the paper's author's are physicists, and neither have done any _recent_ meaningful work in any subfield of physics. I would expect that groundbreaking work in physics would require ideas beyond an undergraduate level, but I did not see any physics in the paper I didn't understand. It looks like at the very least, there is room for a false positive. What I mean by "false positive" is that sometimes not about A will cause you to reason that Q->C even when the truth is A->Q and A->C (correlation does not imply causation...). For example, it could be that the electrical signals of the brain that cause consciousnes + quantum effect, but if the same signals were running through a semiconductor we would instead see a different quantum effect (depletion zones, electron holes...). If our brains were made of 5nm CMOS transistors, a non-physicist might see quantum tunneling and conclude that it somehow caused consciousness.<p>I think the most important thing for non-physicists like me to remember about papers like this is that although sometimes scientists make important discoveries outside their fields we should allow specialists in the area to evaluate the non-physicists claims before believing them ourselves.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism</a>
[2] <a href="http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76036/how-does-qft-help-with-entanglement" rel="nofollow">http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76036/how-does-qf...</a><p><i>EDIT</i><p>Penrose did important work on the nature of black holes ~40 years ago. At one point in time he was a <i>real</i> physicist.
They mention that anaesthesia targets microtubules, hence stopping quantum process.<p>Anyone else wondering whether psychedelics enhance quantum processes (although I remember reading that LSD mechanism of action breaks links between neurons).
I read the headline. I thought "Penrose." I clicked the link. I thought "Yep".<p>In some respects, the internet never changes. If only there was quantum corroboration for objectivism.
No matter how many words people spend on writing about consciousness, not once have I ever seen anyone say anything revealing about consciousness. (And yes, I have read all the usual suspects.)