A QUANTUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

EN: And you prefer one of these alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation?

SH: Well, yes, Roger’s theory is one of the alternatives—the only one incorporating consciousness. The others include the multiple-worlds view in which each possibility in a superposition branches off to form a whole new universe. Despite the mess of an infinite number of overlapping universes, this is actually a popular view among physicists. Another view is Bohm’s interpretation that pilot waves guide quantum particles in choosing their classical states and paths. And then there’s decoherence, in which any interaction with the classical environment disrupts quantum states—quantum systems must remain isolated from the classical environment somehow. But what about quantum systems which are isolated from environment, and may grow or evolve to a larger scale?

Roger proposed that in such cases, if decoherence can be avoided long enough, the wave function eventually proceeds to a certain point at which it self-collapses, or reduces due to an intrinsic, objective threshold in the fabric of spacetime itself, what Roger called objective reduction, or OR.

To understand this, go back to the multiple-worlds view. Every superposition is considered a separation in the underlying structure of spacetime, or fabric of the universe, with each branch of the separation evolving separately—resulting in two different universes. The universe divides like a living cell into two nearly identical copies. Roger agreed that superpositions are indeed separations in the underlying spacetime fabric, or geometry of the universe. He pointed out that Einstein’s general relativity meant that matter was equivalent to curvature in spacetime, so that a particle in two places is the same as simultaneous spacetime curvatures in opposite directions—a bubble in the underlying fabric of reality. But in Roger’s view these separations, or bubbles, are unstable—even if decoherence is avoided. Rather than evolve to form a new universe, the spacetime separations eventually reach an objective threshold for self-collapse, or quantum state reduction, and choose one bit of reality or the other. And when that happens, he argued, this self-collapse—OR—resulted in a moment, a fundamental unit or quantum, of conscious awareness.

The objective threshold for Roger’s OR self-collapse and consciousness was given by a very simple equation, very similar to the equation relating wavelength and frequency in photons in the electromagnetic spectrum. The wavelength of a photon is inversely related to its frequency by a constant—the speed of light. So the shorter the wavelength of a photon, the higher will be its frequency and energy. High energy X-rays have shorter wavelength and higher frequency compared to visible photons or microwaves. For fundamental units, or quanta of consciousness, Roger used a similar equation related to quantum indeterminacy, E= h/t. E is the size of the superposition, as well as the energy and intensity of the conscious moment, and t is its wavelength, or duration. h is Planck’s constant, putting it all in the quantum realm, or more precisely on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds. So the larger the superposition E, the shorter the t, or wavelength, and the faster the system will reach OR threshold for self-collapse and a conscious moment. And the larger the E, the greater also is the intensity of the conscious experience. This gives a quantum of consciousness, or actually an entire spectrum of quanta-conscious moments.

Penrose turned the Copenhagen interpretation around. Conscious observation doesn’t cause quantum wave-function collapse, as the Copenhagen interpretation says. Rather, he suggested consciousness is the wave function collapse, or at least one particular kind of collapse. It’s a quantum collapse that gives off fundamental units of conscious awareness, just like an electron orbital shift gives off a photon of light. And like photons, quanta of consciousness come in a spectrum of different intensities, frequencies and qualities.

EN: Wow! In this interpretation of quantum physics, superpositions naturally collapse themselves? And those collapses somehow produce consciousness?

SH: Yes, if decoherence or measurement doesn’t occur first. And that’s a fairly tricky thing, otherwise we’d have consciousness all over the place. If E is very small, t will be very long. So if an electron with a very small E in superposition were isolated from environment, it would have a conscious moment only after a very long time t—something like ten million years. And it would be a very low intensity experience—rather dull. A large superposition E, if isolated, would reach threshold quickly with a high intensity experience. We think the brain has evolved to isolate large superpositions E, but otherwise it’s very difficult to isolate large superpositions. So consciousness can happen whenever E=h/t, but in the universe it is fairly rare.

So how does it happen in the brain? That was kind of my job to figure out when Roger and I began to formalize our model in the mid-90s. I showed how synaptic inputs could tune, or ‘orchestrate’ OR-mediated quantum computations in microtubules, hence our theory became known as orchestrated objective reduction, ‘Orch OR’. There was the obvious issue of decoherence in the warm brain which I suggested was avoided by coherent biochemical pumping, microtubule resonances, ordered water and actin gelation encasing microtubules. Over the years we’ve had a lot of criticism about this, but recent evidence has clearly shown quantum coherence in warm biological systems. Another biological issue was how a quantum state isolated in microtubules in one neuron could extend to those in other neurons, for which I suggested gap junctions—window-like connections between neurons. In recent years, gap junctions have been shown to mediate gamma synchrony EEG, the best measurable correlate of consciousness. We also addressed how tubulin states could be regulated by weak quantum forces, be isolated from environment yet interact with it causally, and how it all fit in modern neuroscience.

So we had a reasonable story for how OR events—Orch OR—could happen in microtubules throughout wide regions of the brain. And when these collapses happen again and again, you get a series of conscious moments that is your experience of a stream of consciousness. So consciousness consists of a series of discrete events, yet is experienced as continuous. This is kind of like a movie appearing to be continuous yet being composed of individual frames, only with a movie you have an outside observer. In Orch OR, the frame itself has the observer built into it. The conscious moment and the quantum wave-function self-collapse are one and the same—a ripple in the fundamental level of the universe.

What is fundamental spacetime geometry? If we were to shrink smaller and smaller, much smaller than atoms, the medium of spacetime would appear smooth and featureless until we eventually reached the incredibly tiny Planck scale—the basement level of the universe—where patterns and webs of information exist. What it might look like is approached theoretically through geometry arising from string theory, twistors, spin networks or quantum gravity. Roger is one of the world’s experts in these areas, and he suggested that information embedded at this level, and repeating holographically, contained mathematical truth, as well as perhaps other Platonic values. Roger suggested that pure form and truth arise from information intrinsically encoded in the universe. This led to his noncomputability.

When superpositions decohere, or are measured as in standard quantum physics, the quantum possibilities collapse or choose a definite state randomly—like flipping a coin. But when decoherence and measurement are avoided and OR conscious threshold is reached, Penrose suggested that the choices of definite states—the conscious choices we make, or perceptions we experience—are not chosen randomly from among possibilities, but are influenced, or guided, by Platonic information embedded in spacetime geometry. He called this influence noncomputable because the Platonic influences were outside the system, built into the universe. Consciousness does sometimes involve choices or perceptions which appear to be noncomputable, e.g., intuition, instinct, divine guidance, enlightenment, or “following the way of the Tao.”  

EN: So according to Penrose, gravitational effects at the quantum level are causing wave functions to collapse automatically, emitting little bursts of consciousness that somehow result in our own continuous, moment-to-moment experience of being conscious, aware, and alive?

SH: That’s right. I don’t know how familiar you are with the early-twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, but his thinking was very much along these lines as well. He said that consciousness was a sequence of what he called “occasions of experience occurring in a wider field of proto-conscious experience.” In his view, the universe isn’t made of things or particles. It’s a process. It’s made up of events. In the early nineties, physicist Abner Shimony pointed out that Whitehead’s occasions of experience are very much like quantum wave-function collapses, or quantum state reductions, so our view seems pretty consistent with Whitehead’s. But what about his “wider field of proto-conscious experience”?

When Roger and I first came out with our theory, we didn’t directly address the hard problem—why we have conscious experience. But when the Journal of Consciousness Studies did a special “hard problem” issue in 1996, we took a stab at it. And we basically followed  Whitehead, saying that the “wider field of proto-conscious experience” was the fabric of the universe at the Planck scale—quantum gravity, or fundamental spacetime geometry—and that OR events were “occasions,” or ripples, occurring in that wider field. Fundamental properties of matter such as spin, mass, and charge are irreducible components of the universe that are somehow embedded in this Planck-scale geometry. So Roger and I proposed that the primary components of consciousness, of awareness, or at least their precursors—are also fundamental, irreducible, and built into the basic structure of the universe. After all, why should precursors to matter be present at that level but not the precursors to mind?

EN: Good question. You’re saying it’s possible that at least some basic level of consciousness may be as fundamental to the universe as the laws of physics?

SH: Yes. The laws of physics must include consciousness, or its precursors. I wouldn’t say the universe is conscious, just like I wouldn’t say the universe is entirely yellow, or purple, or wet or whatever. But under the right conditions, any of these can be true for small regions of the universe. The un-collapsed, still-superpositioned precursors of consciousness are somewhat like dreams. When OR occurs, the universe—at least a tiny portion of it—wakes up.

 

GAMMA FREQUENCY & ALTERED STATES

EN: We began by talking about microtubules, so please tie these together for me. How do these quantum wave-function collapses relate to what is happening with the microtubules in the brain?

SH: Well, the best measurable correlate of consciousness is a type of EEG—that is, electroencephalography, or brain-wave measurement—called gamma synchrony at around forty times per second, discovered in the 1980s in Germany by Wolf Singer. Typically with EEG you get a mess of squiggly lines, but if you break them down into frequency ranges you get various types of waves—delta, theta, alpha, and beta. These indicate electrical waves in the brain ranging from zero up to about thirty hertz, or thirty waves per second. But Singer discovered a higher, perfectly coherent frequency that came to be known as gamma synchrony, which ranged from thirty to ninety hertz, or even higher, though forty hertz is typical. Gamma synchrony is the best marker we have for consciousness in the brain. This suggests that conscious moments, or Whitehead “occasions,” occur roughly forty times per second.

EN: You’re saying that by monitoring someone’s brain with an EEG, researchers have been able to isolate a certain frequency of activity that only correlates with conscious experiences?

SH: There has to be a critical amount of it, but yes. And it can occur in different parts of the brain, kind of moving around. For example, if somebody smells a rose, they have this gamma synchrony in the olfactory cortex, the part of the brain dealing with smell. If you’re having visual consciousness, you’re going to have gamma synchrony in visual cortex, and in frontal cortex. For sexual pleasure, there is gamma synchrony in a part of the brain called nucleus accumbens, and so on. Gamma synchrony goes away with general anesthesia while other brain neuronal activities continue.

So Roger and I proposed that gamma synchrony correlates with OR quantum-state self-collapses happening roughly forty times per second among coherent, organized networks of the brain’s microtubules. Using E=h/t, we set time t as twenty-five milliseconds, the time duration for forty events per second, and calculated E in terms of superpositioned microtubule subunits. We came up with roughly nanograms of superpositioned tubulins, occupying roughly one hundred thousand neurons worth of microtubules, a number which matched other estimates for consciousness coming from conventional approaches.

Now, I should note that the frequency of conscious events can vary. In heightened or altered states, we seem to be having more conscious moments per second, which would mean that our perception of the outside world would be slower. For example, in a car accident when the car is spinning, people often report that time seems to slow down and the outside world appears to be moving half as fast as it usually does. This could be because their rate of gamma synchrony is changing from around forty hertz to eighty hertz. And similarly, someone once asked the great basketball player Michael Jordan in his prime how he was able to outperform the other team so well. He said when he’s playing well, it’s like the other team is in slow motion. So maybe Michael Jordan was experiencing sixty, seventy, or eighty conscious moments per second and the opponents were only experiencing something like forty.

We also see it in meditation. Buddhist texts describe flickering in pure awareness which have actually been counted—something like six and a half million in a day, which comes out to be in the gamma synchrony range. A few years ago, the Dalai Lama sent some monks to a lab in Wisconsin. They found that while meditating, the monks had the highest gamma synchrony ever recorded. They were actually operating at about eighty to one-hundred hertz, with control subjects at forty. And even at baseline, before they would meditate, the monks showed an unusually high rate of gamma synchrony. Years of meditating had changed their brains so that they were just normally in this higher-frequency gamma range. That suggests they’re having a richer and more intense conscious experience more frequently than the average person. You could perhaps also say they were having higher energy, frequency and intensity OR conscious moments, or quanta. They go deeper into the quantum world.

 

THE SPIRITUALITY OF SPACETIME GEOMETRY

EN: Okay, I have a question about this. If consciousness is arising as a certain frequency of quantum collapses in the brain, then your model could still be considered materialistic, right? Consciousness is still ultimately a byproduct of brain activity, just pushed down to the level of what you’re calling quantum spacetime?

SH: Hang on a second! Material means “matter.” Matter derives from something more fundamental, which is quantum spacetime geometry, twenty-five orders of magnitude smaller than atoms. So this goes way below the scale of matter. Matter is … immaterial.

EN: Can you elaborate?

SH: Basically, if you think of mind and matter and the relation between them, there are a number of different philosophies to choose from. First you have dualism, where mind and matter don’t relate; there’s a brick wall between them. Next, you have ordinary materialism, the conventional view that says that matter creates mind. Then you have idealism and various mystical approaches, which say that mind creates matter. And there’s panpsychism in which mind and matter are the same. But in my opinion, none of these work. They all have problems. So the final choice, I think, is what’s called neutral monism, which has been put forth by such figures as Bertrand Russell, William James, and Baruch Spinoza in Western philosophy, and various nondual positions in Eastern philosophy. Neutral monism says that there’s one common underlying entity that gives rise to, on the one hand, matter, and on the other hand, mind. In our model, that underlying entity that gives rise to both matter and mind is quantum spacetime geometry. If you have a superposition which decoheres, you get matter. If you have a superposition which avoids decoherence and evolves to reach threshold for a conscious event/quantum, you get both matter and mind. In the Vedic traditions, you could call spacetime geometry Brahman, the underlying ground of being. You can call it whatever you like—spirit, the cosmos, quantum gravity—whatever it is that gives rise to both mind and matter and underlies all of reality.

EN: So you’re saying that based on your model, reality could be seen as being fundamentally spiritual?

SH: First let me say that Roger doesn’t relate his work to spirituality. But I personally have nothing to lose, so I figure, why not? I recently wrote a blog about this topic after speaking at an atheist conference, which I called “Being the Skunk at an Atheist Convention.” Richard Dawkins, Patricia Churchland and other atheists were there bashing religion. I said I didn’t hold with any organized religion, but that based on what we know of quantum physics and consciousness, we have to take seriously the scientific possibility of spirituality. Needless to say, they didn’t like that very much. In defining spirituality I mentioned three things. The first was an interconnection among living beings, and the universe as a whole, and I said that this could be possible through quantum entanglement, the intimate connection between quantum particles seemingly beyond the limitations of space and time. The second was some kind of divine guidance or cosmic wisdom influencing our choices due to Platonic values embedded in fundamental spacetime geometry. And finally, there was the possibility of consciousness persisting outside of the body, or after death.

About ten years ago, several studies about near-death and out-of-body experiences came out of Europe. Both involved several hundred patients who had cardiac arrests, and they found around seventeen percent of the patients had these near-death or out-of-body experiences. Then the BBC did a show about it called “The Day I Died,” in which they asked the researchers who did the studies if they could explain these experiences scientifically. And they replied, “We have no idea. Why don’t you ask Penrose and Hameroff ?” Anyway, Roger declined comment, but I said, well, under normal conditions, consciousness is happening at the level of spacetime geometry in and around the microtubules in the brain. However, when the blood and oxygen stop flowing and quantum coherence in brain microtubules stops, then the Planck scale quantum information isn’t destroyed. It continues to exist at the Planck scale, and can leak out or dissipate but remain entangled as a certain pattern, at least temporarily. So if the patient is revived, the quantum pattern gets drawn back into the microtubules inside the brain, and the patient reports having had a near-death or out-of-body experience. If the patient actually dies, then it’s conceivable that the quantum information can remain entangled in some sort of afterlife state. And perhaps the information can get pulled back into a new creature, a zygote or embryo, in which case you’d have something like reincarnation.

Now, I’m not offering any proof that this happens. I’m just providing a plausibility argument. I’m saying here’s how it could happen based on the Orch OR model.

EN: Let’s see if I’ve got the gist of your theory straight. Essentially, you’re saying that at least some basic degree of consciousness is woven into the fabric of spacetime itself, and it’s the coherent quantum activity among the microtubules in our brain that allows us to amplify or strengthen the basic universal consciousness that’s already there?

SH: Yes. Or simply to gain access to it, connect to it, become one with it. Quantum processes in brain microtubules make this connection in a way that also involves cognition, computation, and intelligence.

Most people think that consciousness emerged over eons as a byproduct of random mutations and the inherent complexity of natural selection, but I look at it the other way around. I think the fundamental field of proto-conscious experience has been embedded all along—since the big bang—in the Planck scale, and that biology evolved and adapted in order to access and connect to it. When someone meditates or becomes enlightened, they’re moving more deeply into that quantum realm. If you meditate and attain what people call nothingness, it isn’t actually nothingness. I think it’s spacetime geometry with its Platonic wisdom. You move more deeply into the basic fabric of the universe and actually become more consciously a part of it.

In fact, the Kabbalah says that we have this world of wisdom and light and then we have the world of aggravation and strife, and that consciousness dances on the edge between the two worlds. I think that’s very close to what’s happening, with the classical world being filled with aggravation and strife, and quantum spacetime geometry being filled with wisdom and light. OR is a process literally “on the edge” between quantum and classical worlds, converting quantum possibilities to classical reality. Spiritual practices allow you to dive deep and become immersed in the quantum Platonic world of spacetime geometry. You could call it God if you wanted to.

I should add that our theory has many, many critics. One argument against us has been that the brain is too warm for quantum effects, and that decoherence would prevent superpositions from reaching threshold for consciousness. But evidence in the past few years has shown that quantum coherence and superposition play major roles in living systems at warm temperatures, for example photosynthesis in plants. If plants can avoid decoherence, the brain is likely to have evolved a similar capability. So I’m betting on our side. If the quantum consciousness hypothesis is proven, it will give credence to the spiritual dimension of life. It will undermine materialism and atheism. I think it will rightfully justify faith and hope.