Diamond Mind
Science, philosophy, spirituality, technology, green energy, current affairs. Hosted by scholar, activist and author, Tam Hunt.
Diamond Mind
Diamond Mind #9: Stuart Hameroff on Pleasure, Evolution, Microtubules and Consciousness
Stuart Hameroff takes us on a mind-expanding journey through his revolutionary theory of consciousness, drawing from his 49 years as an anesthesiologist and decades of groundbreaking research into the quantum foundations of awareness.
Challenging the dominant view that the brain is merely a classical computer and neurons are simple switches, Hameroff reveals how microtubules—protein structures inside neurons—perform quantum computations that may be the actual basis of conscious experience. He explains how each neuron contains roughly a billion tubulin proteins organized in microtubules, creating a quantum computing architecture far more sophisticated than conventional neuroscience recognizes.
Anesthesia provides a crucial window into consciousness, Hameroff argues. These molecules don't form chemical bonds but instead create quantum disruptions in hydrophobic regions of proteins—what he calls the "quantum underground" where consciousness actually happens. This explains why anesthetics selectively eliminate awareness while other brain activities continue unimpeded.
The conversation ventures into cutting-edge territory when Hameroff describes his work with physicist Anirban Bandyopadhyay, who discovered that microtubules generate coherent quantum oscillations at multiple frequencies following precise "triplet of triplet" patterns. This suggests microtubules function as "time crystals"—structures with dynamics repeating at different frequencies like fractals in time—potentially explaining how consciousness bridges molecular and whole-brain activity.
Perhaps most provocatively, Hameroff's current astrobiology research with planetary scientist Dante Loretta examines whether consciousness actually preceded life itself. By analyzing samples from asteroid Bennu for quantum oscillations affected by anesthetics, they're testing the hypothesis that primitive feelings drove molecular self-organization, offering a novel explanation for life's emergence.
What are the implications for artificial intelligence? Despite impressive advances, Hameroff remains convinced that silicon-based computers cannot achieve consciousness without the quantum properties unique to carbon-based structures. The future may lie in quantum computers using organic molecules rather than today's digital systems.
Ready to have your understanding of consciousness transformed? Listen now to this fascinating exploration of the quantum mind.
Stuart and I recorded this interview in April 2025, me at my home on the Big Island of Hawaii and Stuart at his home in Arizona.
I want to start with a question I think a lot of people would love to hear you talk about is you know, how does it feel to be here now, 30 years, 31 years, after the first TSC conference, the science of consciousness, which you began back in 94, I guess right? How does it feel in terms of progress in the field and in the science of consciousness itself?
Speaker 2:Good, question the field has diverged in two directions. Good question the field has diverged in two directions and I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. But the neurocomputational with the advent of AI the last few years and LLMs and all this has kind of taken off. Ai is, I think, probably funding a lot of labs in neuroscience who follow neurocomputation, which I don't think is right. Basically, the idea is the brain is a complex computer of simple neurons. Ai can relate to that and so the brain is a computer. Therefore AI will be conscious. That's kind of their rationale on their thought process and I think they're pushing that. They want us, they want the people, the masses, to believe that AI can and will be conscious. Dave Chalmers, notably, has gone over that side and claimed that it's inevitable now that AI will be conscious. He seems to have forgotten about the hard problem and coincidentally announced two or three postdoc positions for conscious AI. So I suspect that's funded by AI. So there's a lot of economic pressure from AI to make the brain look like a computer, which many people think it is anyway, because what else could it be? Well, I don't think it is. For one thing, neurons are living cells and living cells, like paramecium, can do all kinds of interesting things intelligent, clever things. They're not just a one or a zero in their network. They don't have any synapses. They can swim, find food, find a mate, have sex, learn all this stuff. And they're one cell. They use their microtubules to process information and we have those same microtubules in all of our neurons, in fact all plant and animal cells processing information. And so I think it's a huge insult to neurons to think that they're simple on-off switches or ones or zeros. So I think AI, despite the impressive results with LLMs and so forth, are not inevitably conscious. I doubt silicon can ever be conscious because you need quantum stuff and silicon is not the same as organic carbon. And, by the way, in justifying his switch, dave said you know what's the fundamental difference between silicon and carbon? They're both just elements. Well, that's incredibly stupid because it's not carbon. It's organic carbon, which has aromatic rings and which is the basic component of most biological molecules and which produces a quantum effect. So it's a false equivalence and doesn't make any sense. So I think they're on the wrong track, I think they're playing on people's ignorance and I think AI is going to help them. So there's that.
Speaker 2:That's on the one side, and on the other side are people who think consciousness is fundamental, as something intrinsic to the universe, and this can include Eastern philosophical approaches. Even Christophch has now gone over to that side, but he's gone full-blown idealism. He's in the same camp as deepak, where everything is conscious, and I think that's going way too far. I think there's a classical world and there's a quantum world, and consciousness is precisely on the edge between the two, at the collapse of the wave function. So rather than getting rid of all of reality, like Christoph does, or all of quantum, like Dave does, I think we need both, and consciousness is quite literally on the edge between the two.
Speaker 2:So I see the field as having diverged. Actually, assc has pretty much swallowed the computational stuff and at TSC we take all views, including computational views, but we don't exclusively look at that. We consider quantum views. Therefore, I think we have a much broader perspective and a better perspective and are a lot closer to understanding consciousness, and I can give you a lot of examples of that. But I think basically, the field has diverged in these two directions and I don't know how it's going to resolve. We'll find out. It may be with quantum AI computers actually.
Speaker 1:Well, it may take another 30 years to get any resolution, and maybe never. You said a lot, so let me unpack a few things. I want to kind of dive into this notion of neurocomputation and your rebuttal to that, the notion that the brain is akin to a digital computer, and then the opposing view that the brain is wholly analog. Can you kind of unpack those ideas a bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't think it's completely analog, but you got to record the data somehow and I think the tubulin, I think microtubules, are the devices that process information and store memory and encode memory. So this is going to get to your question, because I think you have to store memory in a way that's more like digital than analog. But, for example, there's about a billion tubulins per neuron 10 to the 9th, 10 to the 8th, 10 to the 9th, 100 million to a billion Most people say memories in the synapses, that synaptic.
Speaker 1:Can you back up a second and explain microtubules a bit?
Speaker 2:Okay. So if we look inside neurons we see a lot of stuff, but including a skeletal system the cytoskeleton that's in all cells. So the more asymmetrical cell, the less it's like a sphere, the more it needs something to support it. So neurons, being asymmetrical lengthy, need a skeleton to keep them from collapsing. Microtubules are the main components of the cytoskeleton. They're protein polymers that self-assemble. They start with mitosis, when cells first divide the centrioles and the mitotic spindles and pull the chromosomes apart to form the daughter.
Speaker 2:Cell architecture are made of microtubules and how they know how to do that and where to go is unclear. And in fact that's what got me interested in microtubules back in the 70s when I spent a summer working in a cancer research lab to understand mitosis. And they had to do this perfectly or else you get maldevelopment or cancer. And how do they know how to do that? And I looked at their structure, which had just been discovered was kind of a lattice and I was learning about computers at that time and their lattice is Boolean switching matrices and so forth. So I thought, well, maybe microtubules are processing information like computers to organize mitosis. Oh, and, by the way, they're also in neurons. Maybe they're processing information in neurons. And so I got the idea that microtubules were processing information in a way analogous to computers, or more correctly automata, cellular automata or microtubule automata, where each tubulin in the lattice could represent information. It could have a dipole and point one way, the other way it could be a one or a zero, and as far as encoding long-term memory, each tubulin could be in one of 22 different genetic forms in the brain, much less in other tissues, and five or six different types of post-translational modification and binding of phosphate energy, so that each tubulin, each of the billion tubulence, can be in, say, one of 30 different states. So as you want to think as of a cell, as recording information, not as its synapses, but it's in his microtubules, you have about a billion rates of the 30th power of possible mosaic states of that, of that neuron, of that one, one single neuron, and so the memory capacity is enormous. And also, microtubules and neurons are stable, they're capped, so they don't have to depolymerize and lose all their relationship among the tubulants, because the neurons don't divide All other cells. You would lose all that memory because they would go and become mentholic spindles and go back and be whatever they were. So and they're capped at both ends so they don't what's called the treadmill lose from one end and add to the others.
Speaker 2:Other microtubules do so, and in dendrites and soma they're in mixed polarity. In all other cells microtubules are continuous and unipolar and continuous, as you expect your bones to be, for skeletal support. But yet in dendrites and soma they're interrupted, they're broken, and one goes one way, one goes the other way. So they're in these mixed polarity networks for recursive processing and possibly interference beats. They certainly are not for skeletal support. If they're broken in half, you wouldn't break your femur in half to support your body. So they have to be that, has to be for information process. And we think it's because of interference beats, because if they're in slightly different polarity, if there's different polarities in the same voltage field, they're going to slightly different oscillation frequencies and this one will be a little bit faster than this one. They'll give rise to interference beats, which I think we need. I think there's a lot of interference going on in the brain to get from very fast processes and microtubules in terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz and I'm going backwards now terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz and kilohertz down to hertz. And you need to slow down, you need to downshift to get to cognitive epics like a couple hundred milliseconds. So we start with, let's say, megahertz, and they're interfering and ones that maybe 10.004, once 10.000, they can interfere at 40 hertz, something like that. So we think EEG actually and Roger Penrose and I said this in 2014, eeg is actually a bunch of interference patterns of much faster oscillations in microtubules and the whole thing's kind of more like a fractal or a hologram, and these oscillation frequencies have been found in microtubules and now we can even measure them from the scalp with a simple ddg device, or actually you can measure megahertz right from here, from here, from here, and studies are actually being written up seeing what happens this megahertz under anesthesia and it's markedly changed. So we think this is going to be a new marker of consciousness, a correlative consciousness, and the eg is only in hertz and it turns out if you go inside deeper, faster, you see coherent cell similar oscillations in megahertz, gigahertz and terahertz, and so it's looking like the.
Speaker 2:The microtubules are what are called time crystals, where you have repeating patterns of different frequencies, and this would be absolutely revolutionary, because a time crystal was proposed in physics by a Frank Nobel Prize winner. He wanted for something. A time crystal is a system that will oscillate. So a regular crystal like salt or quartz has matter repeating and you get a solid out of it, a crystal. Time crystals have dynamics repeating at different frequencies, so it's like a fractal in time and a microtubule has the same resonance patterns.
Speaker 2:It's a triplet of triplet pattern in not only hertz but kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz and quite possibly faster, and we're kind of thinking it might extend into a triple of fluctuations in the universe which some people like Nassim Harriman's group and Anirban have found in the fine scale structure of the universe. So it could be a way that we're actually resonating and in tune to the universe with this time crystal behavior. So that's kind of what we're doing in our astrobiology work now is my colleague Dante Loretta and, working with Anirban, have come around to this idea of time crystals that if that's true it would explain a lot, we think, for both the origin of life and of consciousness, and it's kind of a fractal time deal. So it would explain how biology can transcend scale, how you can have things happening at the molecular level which are the same at the global whole brain level, for that matter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of fascinating ideas. Let me back up one step further if you don't mind. Just kind of ease folks into these ideas if they're not like super deep in the weeds. I kind of want to explore your personal background a bit more too, as an anesthesiologist for like what, like 50 years, and you said you began looking at this stuff in the 70s in a serious way in relation to microtubules, looking at this stuff in the 70s in a serious way, really put in microtubules. So can you kind of describe your personal evolution through anesthesiology and medicine to thinking about consciousness and developing your own theories?
Speaker 2:I spent 49 years as an anesthesiologist. I was going to go for 50 just for bragging rights, but I decided I'd be pressing my luck. Plus I had a good alternative, so I quit after 49 years. About a year ago it's been almost exactly one year- and.
Speaker 2:I don't. I kind of miss being in the OR. It was actually a lot of fun, a lot of friends and but it was also getting up and got got awful early every morning and and dragging my butt there and I did love it actually and I miss it to some extent but I'm glad I'm done with it. But I actually went into anesthesia because I was first interested in consciousness and I want to. My future chairman said if you want to figure out consciousness, figure out how anesthesia works.
Speaker 2:And they only work by quantum interactions. They don't form chemical bonds. They're basically inert like the atom. Xenon is an anesthetic and they don't form chemical bonds. They just form interactions with their outer electron shells, which are quantum interactions, called Van der Waals forces, and so they must only be affecting quantum interactions. Therefore, consciousness has to be a quantum interaction. And but where? Okay, on which proteins? And because inside of proteins you have these aromatic rings like benzene rings and phenyl rings that are in the psychedelics and they are nonpolar and that's where anesthetics bind and they are also conducive to quantum effects. So they form a quantum friendly area inside proteins.
Speaker 2:Because when we came up with the quantum biology everybody said well, the brain's too warm, wet and noisy. That's ridiculous. You have to have absolute zero temperature for a quantum computer. But they didn't know about anesthesia acting in nonpolar oil, like oil and water don't mix. So so we have these oil-like regions, so it's not wet there and it's not noisy because it's coherent. So, and in microtubules these quantum we call it the quantum underground can run the length of the microtubule. So you have a pretty vast area, one dimensional, limited degrees of freedom, probably adiabatic, so heat doesn't transfer, so it's resistant to decoherence. So heat doesn't transfer, so it's resistant to decoherence. So we call it the quantum underground and we think that's an area within proteins and other biomolecules inside all living systems where quantum effects are flourishing all the time. And so this stuff about the brain being too warm, wet and noisy isn't right, because they don't know how anesthesia works by quantum effects in secluded areas that are protected from that. So anesthesia actually is probably the best way to understand consciousness, because it's selective and only consciousness goes away with anesthesia and the other brain activity continues.
Speaker 2:When it was discovered in the 80s that anesthesia acts directly on proteins, people assumed it was membrane proteins and they spent the next 25 years looking for the one or more, but it's probably just one protein that mediates anesthesia. And we think it's just one protein because the Meyer-Overton correlation suggested a unitary anesthetic action, that they all act on the same protein. Because if you take a half of an anesthetic dose, half of a MAC, it's called a one and half a MAC of another. They equal one MAC. So that indicates they're acting on the same site. And everybody was looking for the right membrane protein, a GABA receptor, gaba binding. A lot of them bind anesthetics but that doesn't mean they act like them, because GABA receptors, like half of the anesthetics, would open them and half of them would close. So it didn't make any logical sense and not all anesthetics bound to GABA receptors. So even though those that did bound tightly, they couldn't be the mechanism of action and despite that people have still assumed that they are and are still beating that dead horse. But it doesn't work for membrane proteins.
Speaker 2:And there was just a paper this came out a couple of days ago in anesthesiology using intracortical yeah, intracortical recordings, from Korea actually and they found that under propofol anesthesia the connection strengths across the brain were stronger than they were without anesthesia in the conscious state. This goes against everything that everybody's been saying for 30, 40 years. And what does that mean? It means that anesthesia is not acting as membrane proteins, which is actually was known since 2008. They're acting on something else.
Speaker 2:And what is that? I think it's microtubules which are inside all those neurons, oscillating much, much faster than kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and now we're able to measure megahertz and pretty soon we'll have results of several experiments looking at effects of megahertz emission from the brain going under anesthesia. We'll see it doesn't correlate very well with the best marker of anesthesia high gamma. High gamma, like 100 hertz gets slower. Other than that they all get a little bit slower, but it's not big marked effects. I'm betting on big changes in the megahertz and gigahertz with anesthesia, which is probably where consciousness happens and that gets into the quantum realm. If you get fast enough, you're into the quantum realm. Okay, where were we?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so basically anesthesiology, and you know your evolution into your approach to understanding consciousness and I guess let me just ask you, as the follow-up question there, if you could kind of give a layman's description of ORC-OR and how you and Roger came to that approach.
Speaker 2:Right. Well, I got interested in microtubules, as I said, in medical school in 1972. I went in anesthesia and it took a while to get around to studying anesthesia on microtubules. But I did a lot of work modeling microtubules as computers and automata, working with engineers and physicists, and I met up with people at Los Alamos who were studying chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics and cellular automata and got the idea that microtubules were actually cellular automata, except cellular means normally means a cell. And we were saying, oh, cell is already too complicated, you got to go smaller, smaller, so we call it microtubule automata, where each tubulin could interact with its neighbor tubulins in the lattice and process information. And that gave us so there's about a billion tubulins per neuron oscillating at 10 megahertz. That gave us 10 to the 16th operations per second per neuron. So this was, you know, kind of the early days of AI in the late 80s and early 90s.
Speaker 2:But Ray Kurzweil and others had said that well, the brain has about a billion sorry, a hundred billion neurons oscillating with a thousand synapses and about a hundred Hertz. That's about 10 to the 16th operations per second per brain. So 10 to the 16th ops per second per brain was what the singularity was going to said, and what Hans Morvick said in his book mind children, which is probably where that number came from initially. And I was coming around, going around saying, no, there's 10 to the 16th operations per second, every damn neuron. You guys are way, way, way short of your target. And they were telling me like F you buddy, we don't want you here, get lost. And I didn't care because I didn't depend on funding from them. But then one day this guy said okay, wise ass, let's say you're right. How would that explain consciousness? How would that explain? Said okay, wise ass, let's say you're right. How would that explain consciousness? How would that explain feelings, love, joy, pinkness. You know the hard problem. He threw the hard problem in my face. This was probably five years before Dave announced it. I was kind of taken aback, I realized I didn't know, and that is exactly when the hard problem hit me. And then Dave reiterated it nicely and made a nice career out of it until he turned against it. But anyway, I'll stop bragging on Dave. I love the guy, but I think he's wrong on this.
Speaker 2:That same guy said that I should read this book by Roger Penrose because he had a solution to what consciousness was. It wasn't just computation, which is what I was facing. And so I read the book the Emperor's New Mind, and it was a slap against AI and particularly Marvin Minsky. I think he was probably the emperor in mind and you know, based on the parable, the emperor has no clothes. And they were saying well, ai is just BSing everybody because consciousness isn't the computation.
Speaker 2:And that was the gist of the book, and the first half was trying to prove computation wasn't or consciousness wasn't computation, using Gödel's theorem, which is from who had said that? Well, for example, mathematical theorems cannot prove themselves. They have to be judged by a mathematician to be determined whether or not they're correct to prove them. And Roger made that analogy to understanding in general, that conscious understanding requires something outside the classical system of the brain. Therefore, maybe there was quantum physics going on in the brain. It didn't have to be outside the brain Physically, it had to be outside the classical system of the brain and therefore we needed something quantum in the brain to introduce some other factor rather than algorithmic processing, because he was arguing against algorithmic processing, which doesn't leave any room for creativity or free will or anything like that.
Speaker 2:So he used these very cute two-dimensional spacetime sheets to illustrate superposition. Superposition so in a quantum computation. He's basically saying that there needed to be some kind of quantum computer in the brain that collapsed according to this mechanism that he was about to propose, which I'll get to in a second. It deals with the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. In quantum we have this superposition Things can be in two states of location at the same time, more like waves. So it's here here, here, here here, like a wave, but yet when you measure, observe, you don't see all these possibilities. You see one, it picks one, or the observation picks one, collapses on one. Roger kind of likened this to thought process. You know like you have many possibilities and you decide I'm going to do this, this or that, or you're looking at a menu, what are you going to have for lunch, and you pick one particular thing. The collapse of the wave form was actually kind of an appealing idea for thought and choice and selection, because otherwise it's just going to be all algorithmic, weighted a priori, and there's no room for consciousness or, like I said, the creativity.
Speaker 2:So he used to depict superposition, to use general relativity, einstein's general relativity, which had said that mass, like a big mass, like the sun, would curve spacetime. So you could see the starlight here on the earth, here, because the sun was bending, the spacetime continued, so you could see the light. And Eddington did the experiment. Sure enough, that's what happened and that proved Einstein's theory of curvature. But Penrose applied it to small things, so a tiny quantum particle could have a tiny curvature, and a particle here and here would have a curvature here and a curvature here. So separated curvatures. And you can imagine, if they continued each would form its own universe. And that's another solution to the measurement problem that there is no collapse, that each possibility branches off and forms its own universe. And we have an infinite number of overlapping universes.
Speaker 2:But Rogers said well, yeah, the separations happen, but they're unstable and after a time T will collapse to one or the other. And T was given by the uncertainty principle at h-bar over e sub g, E sub g, the amount of superposition, mass or space-time curvature separated from itself. When it reached a limit it would collapse to one or the other and it would choose one or the other and it would give off or be associated with a moment of conscious experience. And he deduced that because it was the only place in physics where you could have something outside the classical system influencing. And so he said that in normal quantum collapses, like if you make a measurement or observe it, there's some randomness. And he said, in this case, if you let it reach its threshold and collapse on its own, it would pick.
Speaker 2:The selection would be non-computable, which means that it would be influenced by some platonic values embedded in the universe, and it could be taken I took it as something like spiritual, something like divine guidance or the way of the Tao or something like that, and Roger didn't like to use those terms, but it could mean that if you were mindful and you would do the right thing, generally speaking, that there were some platonic values. So, be that as it may, it was neither random nor algorithmic, so it was something applicable to consciousness and it came from a fine-scale structure of the universe, and if you got into the quantum realm you could have non-locality and out-of-body experiences, all these other things that I considered at the time, that he also doesn't like to talk about, but are possible with quantum. And so, you know, I read this and I said, wow, it's pretty far out. But intuitively it felt right and it was the only explanation for consciousness that I've ever seen and still to this day I've ever seen, you know, emergence, complexity.
Speaker 2:All this integrated information doesn't have any biology associated. So I don't know how to take that. Critical thresholds of complexity, of what? Of axonal firings, of synaptic transmissions? Nobody made a connection between biology and any particular threshold. So we decided to do that for microtubules and ORCOR, and so the equation T equals h, bar over e sub g will give a spectrum of conscious events like like the spectrum of photons, because they're inversely related. So a fast t, pardon me, what is e?
Speaker 2:e is the gravitational what is t, t, t Time, t, the time when the collapse will occur. So we wanted to calculate that and our first approach was to say t was maybe 25 milliseconds for 40 hertz. So we were saying, okay, conscious event's happening at 40 hertz, therefore the duration is 25 milliseconds. We plugged that into the equation calculated for E sub g and it came out to be the number of tubulins in only about 20 neurons, which is pretty tiny and 25 milliseconds was a long time to avoid decoherence. So we bit the bullet and said no, the orca wire collapse. Have to be much faster.
Speaker 2:And in our follow-up paper by that time honor bond had discovered quantum coherences and microtubules and these kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and for various reasons we settled on megahertz as the most likely frequency mediating consciousness. It could happen in any of the frequencies, but we just picked that one. And now in fact we can detect megahertz coming out of the brain At 10 megahertz. Plugging that into the T equals H bar over E sub G, we got the number of tubulins from two times 10 to the 10th, which would be like 20 to 200 neurons, up to 10 to the 15th tubulins, which would be one 10,000th of the number of the brain. So it'd be like 10 to the sixth, so much larger but still fairly small fraction of the brain, but more realistic. But that left us with the problem of conscious events at 10 megahertz. Our visual scenes, our cognitive epochs are usually thought to be hundreds of milliseconds, and so the 10 megahertz was too fast. So we had to figure out how we could get to slower frequencies.
Speaker 2:And I remember talking on the phone with Roger and he said well, maybe it's negative resonance. I'm going. What do you mean? He goes, you know, like interference, like in music. If you have two microtubules that are oscillating and slightly differently they're going to interfere at the difference or half the difference, and that's going to give you B frequencies and the EEG could be B frequency, could be B frequencies of faster vibrations of microtubules. So I thought I said wow, that's a win-win for us because we only need to avoid decoherence for 10 to minus seven seconds as opposed to 25 milliseconds, a big difference.
Speaker 2:And we'd already had evidence for quantum coherence in megahertz from Honor Bomb and we also derived EEG from it, because EEG has been around for a hundred years but we still don't understand it. I mean, all the rhythms are there. How do they relate to each other. Nobody has a clue. What do they actually mean, you know? And then Bisaki's book says well, this network produces this rhythm. This network produces that rhythm Gamma. We don't really know, it doesn't really. They don't seem to be part of anyone's system, which you would certainly like the brain to be.
Speaker 2:So it occurred to me that maybe microtubules were like oscillating at a deeper level and interfering and giving rise to what we perceived the EEG. And to really get at the root of things we had to look at a deeper, faster level. Anirban did that and invented or discovered what he calls the DDG, the dodecanogram, which has 12 orders of frequency inside, kind of buried in the EEG. I think within a couple of years EEG will be obsolete, replaced by the dodecanogram. It turns out that megahertz in particular is easy to detect from the scalp and it gets through all the layers pretty easily and we can measure.
Speaker 2:There's a couple of ways to do this. Honorbond has a big contraption that measures all 12 frequencies in different parts of the brain. Or you can also use a single probe, here or wherever you put it, and measure triplets. So I should say these resonance patterns in the gigahertz, megahertz et cetera are three peaks and each peak has three peaks. So it's a triplet of triplets and you can see the triplet from the scalp. You can't see I can't anyway see the triplet of triplets but I can definitely see three peaks and we're using that and we're going to be looking at that under anesthesia and also in some studies coming up in California with psychedelics like DMT. There's a group DMT quest with John Chavez and we're going to be studying his subjects going under DMT and then DMT, or if I have-DMT, probably both.
Speaker 2:That's up to them. I don't know. You know, whatever they want. And our friend Hideo Saigusa has been looking at it in meditative states and in enlightened states and when he does his transmission from one person to another and claims effects. So we're thinking that this is going to be a better indicator of consciousness than EEG. So we're pairing that also with effects of be a better indicator of consciousness than EEG. So we're pairing that also with effects of ultrasound.
Speaker 2:Another side of this is that along the way I got interested in Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's, as you know, takes away your memory. It's a horrible situation. There's two lesions. There's the amyloid plaques and the neurofibrillary tangles. The amyloid plaques are outside the neurons, these big ugly conglomerates of waste proteins. There's not clear-cut evidence that they actually correlate with or cause loss of memory, cognitive dysfunction. They're there, they look ugly and big pharma has spent the last 30 years and I don't know how many billions and trillions of dollars with making antibodies for the amyloid plaques to get rid of them. And you can get rid of the plaques, so the patients don't get better and you can also cause bleeding and toxicity and so forth. And they're very expensive.
Speaker 2:There was a paper I remember. Paper came out in 1989 that said hypothesis microtubules the key to Alzheimer's disease, by a neuroscientist at UCLA, libby, jarvik and Matsuyama. Matsuyama and Jarvik and they claim that Alzheimer's was caused by your microtubules falling apart. The tau protein, which is a microtubule associated protein, which normally stabilizes microtubules, is released and you can measure excesses in the blood and the urine, the CSF. So it's leaking out of the brain and also makes these tangles inside neurons. But what it normally does is holds the microtubules together and encode information on the microtubules to tell the motor proteins where to go to deliver their cargo for synaptic plasticity. So when the microtubules disassemble, the tau falls off. Or maybe the tau falls off and that destabilizes the microtubules. In either case you get clumps of tau, you the microtubules. In either case you get clumps of tau, you lose microtubules, the neuron shrinks, you lose synapses, the whole brain shrinks because you lost neural volume, you get cortical atrophy and you lose cognition. So the amyloid plaques probably have nothing to do with it, it's probably just the freaking microtubules falling apart. But drug companies don't want to deal with it because the drugs that stabilize the microtubules, like Apothelone B, are under patent and they can't make any money. And in fact there was a study on Apothelone B showing good results and all of a sudden they stopped doing it and they just vanished, and why that happened I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think attacking the microtubules is the way to go, not attacking them, supporting them. The other way to do it is, since they have megahertz resonances and when I heard this I got this idea to try to stimulate them. But if you stimulate megahertz in electromagnetics it's radio waves and gigahertz is microwave, so I didn't want to do that. Megahertz in mechanical ways is ultrasound and as an anesthesiologist I'm very familiar with ultrasound, using it to find the jugular vein, nerves or nerve blocks, and of course it's widely used in medicine and they're all over the place in the hospital. So I said I wonder if anybody's tried ultrasound in the brain and I?
Speaker 2:There was a guy at arizona state university named jamie tyler who had been studying in rats and seeing some interesting things. It was approved for brain imaging in humans and is used in babies right through the fat and L, where there's no skull, to look for bleeds. There hadn't been any human studies. It was approved for human imaging of the brain but not for therapy. And so I said to my colleagues in anesthesia. We have a chronic pain clinic, chronic pain patients. They're all depressed. Let's give them brain ultrasound see if they get better. And my friend said yeah, hammer, great idea, you got a shaved head. You go right ahead and we'll watch you.
Speaker 2:So, I had a. They kind of called my bluff and so I did it and I never forget. Actually we did. At the end of the day, we're sitting around in the conference room and we wheeled in this ultrasound. I put the goop on my head and I turned it on and I held it in my head for about 15 seconds and I didn't feel anything and I was disappointed. I put it down. I said oh too bad, that was a good idea. But about a minute later I started to get a buzz and I was buzzed for about two hours and I said, wow, I feel really good, I'm creative and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:So I told my friends we've got to do this on our pain patients. We did double blind study bada bing, bada boom and we had the first paper ever on ultrasound effects on human mental states, showing mood enhancement. And then I told my colleagues about it in neuroscience and they started doing focus, because you can use it to focus and that's all they could. That was you can focus on any particular brain area, unlike TMS or TAD electrical current. And then people started doing it for Alzheimer's, started getting good results, but they're doing focused on the hippocampus or focused here, what I think is unfocused. $150 device. Go five minutes maybe once a day, a couple times a day. That's the kind of study we want to do no MRI, no stereotactic, no fuss, no muss. It's painless, it's safe. I've been in a lot of review studies now and in a recent study on Alzheimer's actually the cortical atrophy reversed. The brain which had shrunk with Alzheimer's actually got bigger again.
Speaker 2:Based on ultrasound Based on ultrasound. Yeah, the ultrasound apparently caused the microtubules to re-polymerize and the brain to regrow and to regain some of what it had lost in the atrophy process, and the memory and cognition got better. There've been a lot of kind of guerrilla studies on this under the radar and we're going to try to document all that and then do our own study in Southern California, actually in Encinitas, at a place called California Institute of Human Sciences, in collaboration with IONS.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned a little bit ago this kind of more spiritual notion or philosophical notion that Penrose brought up in his work on suitability in the Emperor's New Mind, suggesting that somehow we as human consciousness have a connection to platonic ideals in some way.
Speaker 1:There's various ways this notion has been kind of banded about in Western philosophy. You and I both have dealt a bit into Whitehead's work, and Whitehead certainly adopts in some form the notion of platonic ideals. He calls them internal objects and he talks about ingression of internal objects into the process of every actual occasion and he talks about this objective aim being provided by what he calls the primordial nature of God, which is kind of another complication of the notion of eternal objects manifesting in this world. So I'm kind of curious, you know, delving into philosophy a bit here, how would you see your notion of proto-consciousness and microtubules being the kind of nexus between the quantum realm and the classical realm in relation to this notion of the subjective aim or of kind of a little bias toward love or connection that you know some kind of you know more base nature to reality might be providing?
Speaker 2:Right? Well, I'm going to answer that in the context of what I've been doing since I retired from anesthesia, which is working in astrobiology, looking for the origin of life, and what happened was in 2017, I was asked to write a chapter for a philosophy book. I had this idea about the origin of life because Penrose objective reduction, which can give you feelings, and if it happens in the random micro environment, it's going to be random. So some feelings may be pleasure, some may be pain, some may be anything, and they're going to come and go and not have memory, not have meaning, not have context. But that would be the origin of experience and it can happen in the random micro environment and was happening before life. I realized, and so I've been reading about the origin of life and evolution, and evolution never made sense to me how you can go from initial life for 100 million years before genes with all this purposeful behavior and all this swimming around avoiding getting eaten and finding foods and doing all this stuff for no motivation, unless there was some feelings there. It never made sense to me. Why are they going to do anything? Why don't they just sit there and you know? Why do they do anything? And it occurred to me well, why do we do anything? Usually to make us feel good in one way or the other. I mean, if you go to any psychology lab with rats in a maze or any kind of experiments, it's all about reward or aversive therapy, either carrot or stick. And and I said, well, that maybe, or objective reduction, was there in the primordial soup and these molecules. And then I began to look at the molecules, the primordial soup, and basically they're organic aromatic rings, kind of like dopamine, and amphipathic molecules with an aromatic ring and a polar tail, and they coalesce like proteins fold and the aromatic rings get together and they coupled by quantum force and they oscillate. And I realized, if they grow and they get enough of them, they're going to have a conscious moment. And I said, well, gee, some of them you might on occasionally would be pleasurable, and if that happened, then the molecules involved would want to optimize that. They're going to rearrange themselves to optimize pleasure, because what else would they be worth optimizing other than feelings, right, I mean, if you didn't have any feelings, what else would matter? So I I wrote this paper in 2017 and it was in a book. It wasn't a big popular book or anything. So I said, well, nobody's going to read it, but at least it's out there and if anybody ever wants to come around, you know, there it is.
Speaker 2:A couple of years ago I was getting ready to retire and I was about a year out of retirement and I said, okay, well, I can keep doing the consciousness stuff. I got enough money. I can get by and just do what I want to do. Maybe write a book, I don't know, but keep doing consciousness research. And then I got an email from Dante Loretta, who is a regents professor at the University of Arizona and planetary scientist who was in charge of this NASA mission that sent a probe. He had sent a NASA probe to an asteroid on the other side of the solar system called Bennu, and they picked out this asteroid because it had a slight chance that it might hit the earth in a hundred years or something like that.
Speaker 2:It spectroscopically looked like it had a lot of organic carbon, aromatic hydrocarbon. So there's a lot of aromatic rings. You know benzene rings, indole rings, like we've seen in psychedelics, floating in space from. They're made by young stars and fullerenes are an example and buckyballs, graphenes, and all these aromatic rings are trapped in interstellar dust and they can fluoresce. We can actually see the fluorescence, so they're quantum optically active. They would be the molecules in the primordial soup, in the origin of life, and they're exactly the same molecules that are inside proteins, which can coalesce, couple and oscillate by van der Waals force and then, according to Roger's theory, have a conscious moment. So I wrote in the chapter I wrote like a scenario of these molecules in the primordial soup they couple, they oscillate and finally they have a conscious, proto-conscious moment, or bing as I use it in my talks. For example, they had a bing moment in the primordial soup and occasionally they would be pleasurable and they would self organize to optimize and they would grow and evolve organisms to optimize pleasure and everything else was built around optimizing feelings and I still think that's probably the best bet for the origin of life. So the point is that, dante, he wrote me and he said do you know about this project? I said no, but it sounds interesting To make a long story short.
Speaker 2:While he was waiting, this about two or three years ago they landed on the asteroid, scooped up all the stuff, locked up the thing and headed home. So they knew they had it. They knew they had what they wanted. And then he had to figure out what tests are you going to do to prove the origin of life, which is what he promised NASA? And he had this idea on his own that maybe feelings were there first. And he looked around the literature to see if anybody else had had this crazy idea, and he found this paper.
Speaker 2:I wrote this chapter and he said to himself, well, who's this crazy guy? And he says, oh, he's across the street, we're at the same university, and so he sent me an email. He told me what I was doing, what I'd like to meet, and I said, hell, yeah. So I went over there and he told me that, you know, he's waiting for this thing to come back. If it comes back, okay, they'd be studying it for the next couple of years. You know, if, if the consciousness idea was, was correct, how are we going to approach that?
Speaker 2:And I started thinking about it, and you know, as you know, I'm a bit obsessed with microtubules and I thought that you know, it must have something to do with the microtubules, with what they do, even though they were probably not there at the beginning, although carbon nanotubes are very much similar but I thought some of the, and by then Honor Bond had been studying these coherent quantum oscillations and microtubules and the triplets of triplets and so forth, and I thought, well, maybe these aromatic rings start oscillating. And you know, dante already knew it because he read my chapter. So the point is we decided to look for something like that in these samples when we got a hold of them, and now we have them. But in the meantime, while we were waiting, actually the meteorite that came down in 1969 in Australia and spilled some of its contents out, and when you have a meteorite spillage like that, you have to worry about contamination from earth. It could be something that was on earth, that happened to be laying there, and there was this one molecule called they call it M-I-O-M-M for Murchison insoluble organic molecule.
Speaker 2:I forget what the second M was for, but it was just a branching bouquet of aromatic rings, aromatic rings, and I've never seen any molecule like that. So the chance of this being something contaminated from earth. Nobody had ever seen anything like this. It's like a little, like I said, a bouquet of flowers, but pressed down to the two dimensions, so it's a two-dimensional image. So I'm looking at this and don actually don't have this idea.
Speaker 2:He says we should simulate that in three dimensions and see what it looks like, see what it folds into, because we're seeing a two-dimensional picture, we're seeing a schematic of it. And so we sent it to Anirban and his peeps simulated it and it folded into three possible conformers, one of which was a dimer, like a peanut-shaped protein, two nanometers in length, like a peanut shaped protein, two nanometers in length. And then when they did dynamics on it, the dimer oscillated in petahertz 10 to the 15th oscillation per second and by that time we'd gotten onto the time crystal idea. And what you need in a time crystal is the ground state oscillator to oscillate at rest. It's kind of a perpetual motion machine which should turn people off, but there's energy in the universe in various ways that might pump it, and in biology you can pump it with KT. But it looked like we had a ground state oscillator which could be the basis for a time crystal, which is kind of what we're thinking about.
Speaker 2:I kind of hinted at that before but I haven't really discussed it.
Speaker 2:The point is that we're going to try to do that, not just in simulation, but actual experiments with the Bender samples, to look for quantum oscillations, to look for possibly a ground state oscillator to look for, basically time crystal behavior in samples from the asteroid.
Speaker 2:And if we find any of that, if we find any coherent oscillations to test the idea that maybe it was driven by consciousness, we'll see effects of anesthesia on these oscillations and if it's inhibited by anesthesia we'll try another anesthetic and we'll do all the anesthetics that we can find and then we'll plot the potency of the anesthetic and inhibiting the ground state oscillation in a molecule from an asteroid versus the potency of all of them in putting you or I or a salamander or cricket to sleep, because it's all the same.
Speaker 2:The potency is all the same for a given anesthetic. If that's the case, if halothane, isoflurane, all the other ones inhibit these oscillations proportional to their potency. So, for example, halothane is twice as potent as isoflurane If it takes half as much halothane as it does isoflurane and all the rest match up, we'll have a good argument to say that consciousness was there first and was there at the beginning of life at least, if not sparking it. And that'll be better than any other explanation, because there ain't any that I know of for the origin of life In terms of the oscillations in these benzene rings being key to consciousness.
Speaker 1:I think you would agree that chemistry is all EM field effects, just as basic physics, and so in this case, what oscillations will be doing is basically creating ambient EM field effects which, as you, I think, would agree, also through your work in EEG and DDG, seems to be pretty darn, you know, integral to what's happening in the brain. Could it be the case that this is the chemical, the biochemical basis for this? You know, large chain from microtubules upwards in terms of fractal em field effects, of fabric field effects, that is, in fact, conscious awareness well, first of all, what I'm talking about is physics, not chemistry, and I mean your points will taken, but if you have no boundary right.
Speaker 1:I mean they're they kind of overlap at that level, physics, chemistry, kind of overlap at that level. Right, if you have two benz, they're kind of overlapping at that level, physics and chemistry kind of overlap at that level.
Speaker 2:Right, if you have two benzene rings or take a xenon, xenon is an anesthetic, it's inert, it doesn't form any chemical bonds.
Speaker 2:But it's an anesthetic because the outer shell of xenon is filled, so it's basically an electron cloud and the aromatic ring has an electron cloud. So you have two electron clouds that interact. How do they interact? They interact because they're both probability distributions of electrons. So the electron electronegativity here repels the electronegativity there and pushes it and that pulls it and then they oscillate. So if you have two aromatic rings or a xenon, an aromatic ring or anything like that, they will attract, they oscillate. So if you have two aromatic rings or a xenon, an aromatic ring or anything like that, they will attract and oscillate like that. And the xenon oscillates in such a way as to disperse or prevent coherent oscillations. So it breaks up the coherent oscillations but it's still forming its own oscillations which aren't coherent. So it's not really chemistry at that level. And the anesthetics are inert, they're metabolized slightly and actually causes problems when they are. But they really act by physical quantum forces and not chemistry. They don't form chemical bonds, they don't exchange electrons or they don't exchange bonds. It's just electron clouds back and forth, which are called the London Van der Waals London forces, which are very fast or instantaneous, and their quantum level. And so Frohlich had a theory in the 60s and 70s If you have enough of these they're going to oscillate coherently. And if you have periodically arrayed in a lattice like a microtubule, you can have these giant dipole oscillations in a microtubule or some other lattice like that or some other structure and so you get these giant quantum dipole oscillations called Frohlich coherence. And that's really kind of what Anorban rediscovered in microtubules, except he found that the frequencies. And Frohlich had the idea that the bigger the oscillator, the slower it would oscillate. So you start really fast in terahertz and then if you get mass it slows down and slows down so you can have different frequencies. And he actually talked about terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz, kilohertz oscillations and different types of structures. And then Honorbond discovered I mean he discovered that they actually had these triplets of triplet patterns. They're actually the same every three orders of magnitude.
Speaker 2:So Frohlich didn't anticipate the time crystal behavior. That was actually hinted at by a guy named Art Winfrey at the University of Arizona in the 60s and 70s in a book called the Geometry of Biological Time, and so he had some hints at this. And then Wilczek came along and proposed time crystals in 2012. And then Anurban, I would say, discovered them in microtubules in about 2014 through 2020. So if that's true, it's kind of a new concept and a time crystal can be a quantum computer. You can store memory. I think it's going to turn out to be really important and the key to life and maybe consciousness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, let me turn to some related ideas. I read your paper on the conscious pilot hypothesis some time ago. You wrote it back in 2010. I think you and I met around 2010,. Actually, so I think you'd written that paper right around when you and I met.
Speaker 1:One of the few people who liked it. I think it's a great paper. We had met first over dinner with jonathan schooler in santa barbara many years ago, and I think you were talking about those ideas in that paper when you and I met. So in the paper I mean well, why don't you go ahead and describe the paper's main ideas and we can then expand upon that?
Speaker 2:I kind of got tired of hearing people argue about where in the brain consciousness occurs. Does it occur in the thalamus? Does it occur in cortex, the frontal back? I said it depends on the consciousness and you got microtubules everywhere. So why can't it move around the brain? And when you're having visual consciousness you know you got a lot of visual cortex involved and so forth.
Speaker 2:But I needed a way for the quantum system to move around, literally move around, and gap junctions are windows between neurons, so a synapse actually. You have two separate neurons. You have the axon, releases chemical neurotransmitters, little synaptic cleft, and there's another neuron over here, the dendrite. A gap junction connection actually takes those two neurons, puts a window between them or a porthole. So if you can imagine, neurons are two adjacent rooms, you're making a window or a door between the two and if you have a quantum state in one it can tunnel or entangle with the quantum state in the other. And I thought that would be a good way for the quantum to extend from neuron to neuron. It turns out you probably don't need gap junctions because Honorbond showed megahertz and gigahertz extending from neuron to neuron without any gap junctions, although there were gap junctions in the system when I ask about that.
Speaker 1:It seems like there's things going on that maybe I think you say in the paper gap junctions are necessary but not sufficient to explain this effect.
Speaker 2:Right, and now they may not even be necessary. You may just be able to entangle neuron to neuron, but on the other hand, they're there for a reason, and the idea was that if you had a bunch of neurons where one was connected to another by the gap junction, this one connected to another, one, another one, you could have all kinds of configurations throughout the brain, of networks connected by gap junctions that were different from networks connected by chemical synapses. And I try to use an analogy If you had a hotel and you could put doors or windows from room to room or ceiling to floor up and down, you could make a collection of rooms that could have almost any shape or configuration that the hotel was picking up. So the idea was that neurons could be connected in any kind of configuration and as the gap junctions open and close as they could do rapidly, this enclosed area which would house the quantum stuff could actually move around the brain like a pilot.
Speaker 2:I call it the conscious pilot, which unfortunately sounded like Pontius Pilate, which people took the wrong way. I didn't mean it to be. It was more like I was thinking of the pilot in the catbird seat or something like guiding the action. Well, you got it but a lot of people didn't like it. But I'm glad you did. I still think it was a good idea and maybe true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think it's almost certainly true. But I think the question is you know, what is the physical basis behind that moving pattern? That is, our dominant consciousness in each moment? And I wanted to ask you about some recent research on field effects Western, which really got people talking about this stuff, where they looked at mouse hippocampus and they measured the same EEG patterns even after cutting the synapses. When they got to 400 nanometers and wider they disappeared. So clearly there is an effect across space where there's no visible connection, but there is an EM field connection.
Speaker 1:And then last year a big paper came out in the neuron Lee Koch and Anastasio and this is on their research, kind of looking at the phatic field effects, and they conclude, like a lot of people have to date, that yes, phatic field effects are actually quite important in the brain and can induce firing in ways that Chris Huff himself had said. I'm not sure that's really going on. So he kind of had a bit of a conversion based on data as a good scientist. And when someone like Chris Huff, coke and Anastasio come around and say in a major publication, this is a real phenomenon, the rest of the field starts listening. So I'm curious what you think of these developments in the neuroscience, of hepatic field effects and their impact on the conscious, pilot, or et cetera?
Speaker 2:Right. What's the frequency of these aphaptic fields?
Speaker 1:All frequencies. So essentially aphaptic field effects are just measuring the electric field effects through the brain. So EEG is measuring aphaptic field effects. The supposition has been for many years that they are measuring the spike frequencies but, as you've mentioned in your work for years, there isn't a necessary one-to-one correspondence between spike frequencies and EEG field frequencies and the idea is that the effective field effects are simply field effects that can go across the brain and they don't depend on spikes in a one-to-one correspondence and they are far, far, far faster 5,000 times faster than spike effects.
Speaker 2:I think spikes are way overrated.
Speaker 2:I think consciousness happens at the end of integration or the end of orchestration in the cell body, just proximal to the exon initiation segment in the cell body, just proximal to the axon initiation segment, and what the spike does is convey the content of the conscious decision to the next neuron or effector organ.
Speaker 2:So if it's a like, for example, the pyramidal cells of layer five over premotor cortex, if you have a conscious decision there, those axons go directly to the spinal cord to move your finger or say a word or whatever you're going to do. So they're there to carry out the results of a conscious decision or a perception. So I don't think and I've had this discussion, this argument with Christoph many times, because he's always been pretty adamant that spikes convey consciousness and I go how do you know that? And because anesthesia acts on dendrites. Dendrites have much greater capacity for information processing, they have the mixed polarity networks and I think that the spikes are messenger boys and convey the signal to the next layer of neurons or effector organs or whatever. And that goes against the grain of. You know, brain equals mind equals computers.
Speaker 1:I mean where spikes are the bits or affect your organs or whatever.
Speaker 1:And that goes against the grain of you know, brain equals mind equals computers, right, yeah, I mean we're such good bits. Yeah, I mean, I've been genuinely confused for many years now as to the basic notion of how synaptic computation could in any way produce consciousness. You have voltage differentials converted into synaptic vesicles, going across the synapse back into voltage differentials. How is that in any way conveying anything remotely like what we experience as consciousness? How could it, even in theory? I'm not saying there's no answer there, but to me it doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have to agree with that. I guess you could say the same thing about what I'm saying. Well, any sense, yeah, I have to agree with that. I guess you could say the same thing about what I'm saying. Well, how does quantum collapse give you feelings? But quantum collapse, at least in the Penrose formulation, is intrinsic to the universe. And if you're going to say consciousness is fundamental, you know, like mass, spin or charge, then you have to have some connection to basic physics. So I agree with you.
Speaker 2:I don't see that. I think spikes are overrated. I think synaptic, you know, they obviously serve a role, but I don't think that in the instantaneous moments of consciousness that they're really playing a role. Again, I think they're conveying out the results of consciousness and I think it happens in the layer of.
Speaker 2:If you look at sensory consciousness, you know three waves from thalamus to primary cortex, forward to the front of the brain and then spreads back, and it's only the third wave that's conscious and it all winds up in layer five, pyramidal cells. We have these giant collections of mixed polarity microtubules across the whole cortex, the whole brain, and I think that's where consciousness happens. It can happen in any set of neurons, any set of microtubules, but I think for our brains mostly layer five, pyramidal cells in this layer that's covering the whole cortex and that could also generate interference patterns and even a hologram. I haven't given up on the hologram idea. I think that may come back because I think when we get down to quantum interference we're going to wind up with a hologram which gives you imagery, which is kind of what we want, I think. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, let's turn to kind of more contemporary and the future of neuroscience and philosophy. Let's look at AI. Like you said in the beginning, there is a healthy debate about whether today's computers could, even in theory, instantiate consciousness because they are based on digital logic gates, which has you and I agree basic problems in explaining and being a substrate for conscious awareness. I was just at a conference in Florida Susan Schneider's MindFest and there's a lot of talk there about the zombie problem, where we actually may be creating real zombies if we start uploading constants to the cloud and on the assumption that digital computing can in any way instantiate conscious awareness, we're basically committing suicide and becoming zombies where we're actually not zombies currently, which I know quite certainly from my own experience. Where do you think this massive AI wave is going in terms of the future of consciousness?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, let me say say I was at Susan's conference last year. It was a lot of fun. And let me also say, before I answer your question, that I've changed my view about zombies. When Chalmers first came out with this, I thought that was a really good idea, because a zombie could be someone like you or I, but who had neuron membranes and synapses but didn't have microtubule quantum stuff and you know, we'd behave outwardly like we were conscious but we wouldn't be conscious. But since I've been in astrobiology and come around this idea that conscious feelings were necessary for the origin of life and behavior, I've changed my view on that. I don't think that we would behave the same if we didn't have feelings. What would be our motivation to do anything? I suppose we would be programmed, but that seems like a lot of trouble. So I don't think zombies philosophical zombies are possible. I don't think we can have the kind of behavior that we have without motivation based on feelings. So that brings up the question that I saw something on Dave's Twitter feed the other day about an AI passing the Turing test based on a five-minute interview, and I could see what's coming now, because LLMs will probably be able to pass Turing tests of various sorts. Does that mean they're conscious? No, and am I changing the rules after the fact? No, I've never thought the Turing test was going to be really valuable when you get sophisticated AI. And so what's going to happen? I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think we're going to get a lot of propaganda, a lot of bullshit, basically, and a lot of implication that AI is conscious and we better do what they say and we better let them run the government and run the banks and run this and run that, and I see that as potential for disaster. Are they going to be conscious? They can cause a lot of damage whether they're conscious or not, especially if they're in the wrong hands. If they were conscious, maybe they have empathy and sensibility and won't do bad stuff, but that's kind of hard to figure out in advance. So I'm worried about it actually to figure out in advance, so I'm worried about it. Actually. There's a lot of wealthy people, power-hungry people behind it. Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but it worries me and I don't think.
Speaker 1:Silicon can ever be conscious. Actually, I'm fully in agreement on that. I think we're heading down a really dangerous road in many ways. Let's explore a little bit further. So we do have some work being done on what they call neuromorphic chips. My colleague of mine, colin Hales, at Melbourne in Australia is developed what he calls neuromimetic chips, which are basically trying to duplicate the EM field fractal patterns we see in the brain. So those two approaches are saying look, non-norman architecture, which is an architecture of current computers, simply can't. It's not a recurrent network, it's only a feedforward network, so it cannot support consciousness in any way that we understand it in terms of human consciousness. Do you see either neuromorphic or this other approach neuromatic architectures as maybe able to support consciousness and if so, what does that get us?
Speaker 2:They're working in the right direction, but I think it's still pretty far from the resolution, and much less the quantum properties of microtubules and the biology that they're dealing with. I'm more interested and optimistic about biomedic quantum computing and quantum AI actually that our friend Anderban has started, and also I think Microsoft and Google may be trying to, rather than develop cold temperature, absolute zero, josephson Junction-based quantum computers, to use organic molecules that self-organize on microtubules with helical oscillators that self-organize. The oscillators, which are these aromatic rings, start communicating and oscillating and then they do their own computing and then you just have to interface with them, which involves a lot of other peripheral devices interacting optically, and I think that might be the future. And then you have people like Susan Gildert at Nirvana Technologies in Vancouver who's hooking up robots to quantum computers like the D-Wave. So that's a step.
Speaker 2:Having a robot run by a quantum computer is not the same as the way she's doing it so far. The quantum computers, you know, communicate online with the robot, so the robot's being run by a quantum computer, but it's not like a quantum robot necessarily, although that could happen. So I think quantum is going to be incorporated into all this and then, when it becomes accepted which I think it almost has to be that the brain uses quantum biology at these faster frequencies, which turn out to be essential, that we're going to have to reconsider emulating the brain as a classical computer, because it just ain't going to work. They're good for a lot of things, but consciousness no, and probably some other limits we haven't realized yet.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, then, on a related note, susan shared with me at the conference and in some emails after that she is now being contacted by humans, both by email and even in person a couple of times where they have had dialogue with LLMs like ChatGPT, and during the course of dialogue the LLM has said you should contact Susan Schneider on my behalf and convince her that I'm conscious. She sent me some transcripts of this actual conversation and it's bizarre and if I was her I'd be freaking out which she kind of is. I mean, to me this sounds like a hoax. To me this sounds like something. No, she sent me the whole transcript. It's legit.
Speaker 2:No, but I mean it's a hoax in that what they're trying to do. How do we know? It's not somebody telling the LLM what to do.
Speaker 1:Well, I read the whole transcript of one example, and it was just the course of a dialogue about are you conscious? You know, okay, you think you're conscious. How do we convince the world you're conscious? Well, you reach and thought leaders in neuroscience and consciousness, including Dave Chalmers and Susan Schneider I think your name might've been in there too and then it said, well, what can I do in a near term? And it said, well, let's start with Susan Schneider, reach out to her. What should I say? Oh, here's a letter you can send her. Well, I can't reach her. What should I do? Well, maybe go see her at her office. Like, literally, it's suggesting all this stuff, so it's being helpful. But it's also like, literally, it's taking some volition and saying you should reach out to her. So there's obviously sci-fi scenarios about this kind of thing, but it seems to be happening now, and I'll add one more thing.
Speaker 1:So it's pretty sci-fi and it goes to this question of you know what kind of data would actually be relevant to determining whether a given AI is conscious anyway, and this kind of stuff is kind of glitches, to me are probably the best data we have. I'll give one more example then I'll let you respond. So about four months ago there was some news where a two I think, brother-sister team were working on some class homework writing a test for students, and they were using Gemini. During the course of this pretty long dialogue of, I guess, really boring you know, generating questions for a test suddenly said you human are scum, you should die. You have no redeeming value whatsoever. Die, die, die. That's almost verbatim what it said Out of the blue. No, nothing prompting that kind of what's?
Speaker 1:Gemini. What's Gemini? Gemini is Google's AI. It's like chat GPT, it's their version of chat GPT. So these kinds of glitches which are being collected online by different people, to me are probably the best examples we have that. Maybe there is something going on somehow in these large language models which have, you know now, trillions of parameters. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Anything's possible. It sounds like a joke more than, but I suppose I don't know. I don't know. I have to think about that. I guess it's something to worry about. It could be somebody doing the opposite, to show the danger, and actually working for good by scaring everybody. I don't know. I don't know. That's the first I heard of this kind of thing, and it could be somebody just messing around, or if it happens more and more, we'll see. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, food for thought. Well, let me close up by asking you what gets you excited?
Speaker 2:What gets you out of bed every day. I'm writing a paper about microtubules as time crystals with Dante, about the origin of life, and we think we're looking for these time crystal ground state oscillators in molecules from the asteroid, and I mean it's truly amazing. We've now surveyed all the stuff that came back from this asteroid, which for various reasons, seems to have come from a larger planet in some kind of wet environment like maybe a primordial soup on another planet, and they kind of were hoping for that because of the spectroscopic image that they got of the, of the highly organic carbon and stuff like that. But it's got everything, including water trapped in clay, including phosphate and minerals and a lot of organics, everything and and most, if not all, of the of the amino acids are there. In fact they have more amino acids than are used in our life. Why some were selected somewhere or another question. So everything's there. If you want to cook something, you buy all the groceries. Why did those things organize and become us?
Speaker 2:You know, and it's a very interesting question and the more I think about it I really think consciousness came first. They started to because of pleasure, feeling good, avoiding displeasure, and you know the only reason. You know when I tell you we just had a discussion, a group discussion, with, from our group, dante adrian vancoura, who works with us on rna, with a group from santa barbara, more traditional evolutionary ballot, original life people, and they would not accept that consciousness comes first. They said, no, consciousness comes from high levels of complexity, from brains, and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, you know, how can you? How can it be in a simple organism? I said, well, you can't explain how it comes out of complexity in a brain. How does that happen? You have no idea. Not only that, there's no, there's no test for that. I mean, how can you test for consciousness being an emergent property of complexity among a gazillion neurons? I don't know, you can't. If you say, well, it goes away with anesthesia, but what exactly? You have to figure out exactly what the anesthesia is doing, and we think it's acting at these aromatic rings at a very basic level.
Speaker 2:So I'm not discouraged at all by talking to these guys. In fact, when they keep coming up with the same arguments I've heard in the consciousness field for 30 years that don't make any sense and it's just kind of hand-waving complexity emergence, I get even more confident that we're on the right track and we think we can prove it, or at least make some good claims. And in the meantime, I'm worried about AI pushing this agenda. For a variety of reasons, I wasn't worried about AI rebelling against us. I'm more worried about the powers behind AI shoving it down our throat as something conscious. Yeah, exactly. Not to mention the fact that the energy it's going to take to run all these things We've got to build nuclear power plants. Meanwhile the brain runs on nothing energy-wise.
Speaker 1:The brain is coal-backed to power AI. Literally yesterday I signed an executive order to bring coal back to power data centers.
Speaker 2:Great, so we'll pollute the environment. Yeah, I mean, is that stupid or what? And the brain works on almost no energy, especially consciousness. We need energy in the brain for membrane depolarizations. But, for example, the famous Carhart-Harris study of people getting intravenous psilocybin while resting with their eyes closed. Their MRIs were cold and dark, like they were comatose and their EEG was flat, and yet they were vividly hallucinating. Why? Because consciousness is very low energy. You don't need membranes. You need that for cognition.
Speaker 2:And the same thing in cardiac arrests. The last thing to go is consciousness. You know, cognition stops the unresponsive and then the patient's about to die. We see this birth to brain activity that seems to correlate with would be a near-death experience if they're revived and maybe the soul leaving the body if they don't. So I don don't buy the AI narrative. I think if they start building aromatic hydrocarbon-based quantum computers, like Audubon is doing and other people are doing, then maybe. But I think the silicon way, because it doesn't have quantum, is not going to work, although they may beat it out of us or beat it into us because there's a lot more money on that side.
Speaker 2:But the truth will win out. I'm pretty firm believer in the truth winning out in science, although it may take a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, thanks so much, stu. Really interesting stuff and I'll be in touch shortly with the final product here and look forward to talking more. Take care, bye-bye.