a bonobo humanity?

Microtubules – shaping the cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells, je crois

What exactly is consciousness? Are we actually agreed on what it is? Do dogs have it? Lizards? Worms? What does it mean to be unconscious? Could consciousness be quantum, and what does that even mean?

Whatever consciousness is, it must have something to do with organisation, with an emphasis on ‘organ’. Organic matter working together in an organised way, so that something can be ‘experienced’. Of course, I find myself thoroughly unequipped to answer this question, or solve this mystery, so let me have a go. It must surely be about neural connections creating a sense. So we become aware of a sound, an odour, a pain, a memory. But how can the connections between organelles, or whatever, result in all these different sensations? And I’ve just been referring to ‘consciousness of something’ – there’s a more general sense of consciousness as being alive and awake. We know of course, about the organs involved in sight, hearing, smell and touch, and much has been explored re ‘the neural correlates of consciousness’, and yet… there seems to be a gap of sorts between what we know of these organs and what we see, hear and feel. Think of sadness, anger, anxiety, anticipation, joy, confusion…

Will the science of neurology or neurophysiology provide all the answers? Can the conundrums of physics – notably the tension, if that’s the term, between quantum mechanics and gravity, be of some assistance? How could physics, or physicists, even seriously consider solutions to what is surely a biological phenomenon? Is it just arrogance? But then, what about the notorious ‘collapse of the wave function’ due to human observation or measurement? I write this after listening to the video referenced below, and I must admit to having a baffled reverence for Roger Penrose.

So consciousness is a personal, experiential thing, and has often been seen as a topic of philosophy. I did a bit of philosophy at Adelaide Uni in the 1980s and at the time they were much focused on the philosophy of mind – the mind-body problem, epiphenomenalism and the like. I suspect that, with the massive advances in neurophysiology since the turn of the century, described inter alia in Robert Sapolsky’s 2018 book Behave, there has been a big shift in focus at that university’s philosophy department – if the department has survived at all.

Anyway, Penrose, along with Stuart Hameroff, has developed a theory of consciousness known as Orch OR – Orchestrated Objective Reduction – which has been given detailed treatment in Wikipedia. It also has something to say, apparently, about the free will issue, which has long interested me. It’s not new – it was first developed in the 1990s, and it focuses on microtubules –  ‘biopolymers of tubulin that form part of the cytoskeleton to provide structure and shape to a eukaryotic cell’ (Wikipedia). Hameroff, as an anaesthesiologist, was obviously intrigued about how consciousness can be ‘switched off’ by means of anaesthetics. Now, I’m entering into complex territory here, so I suspect this will require several posts, or maybe I’ll just give up. But one thing to reflect on – is consciousness the same thing for humans as it is for cats and rats? They too can be anaesthetised and returned to consciousness with no apparent ill effects.

There is, apparently, a ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – how to connect the rich sense of our subjectivity, and all it contains, with neurons, hormones and the like, and that’s what Orch OR seeks to solve. So now for the ‘what the??!!’ stuff:

Orch OR posits that consciousness is based on non-computable quantum processing performed by qubits formed collectively on cellular microtubules, a process significantly amplified in the neurons. The qubits are based on oscillating dipoles forming superposed resonance rings in helical pathways throughout lattices of microtubules. The oscillations are either electric, due to charge separation from London forces, or magnetic, due to electron spin—and possibly also due to nuclear spins (that can remain isolated for longer periods) that occur in gigahertz, megahertz, and kilohertz frequency ranges. Orchestration refers to the hypothetical process by which connective proteins, such as microtubule-associated proteins, influence or orchestrate qubit state reduction by modifying the spacetime-separation of their superimposed states. The latter is based on Penrose’s objective-collapse theory for interpreting quantum mechanics, which postulates the existence of an objective threshold governing the collapse of quantum states, related to the difference of the spacetime curvature of these states in the universe’s fine-scale structure.(Wikipedia)

I’ve removed the few dozen links and references in this passage, which no doubt makes it more incomprehensible, but a bit less distracting! So I need to explore more about microtubules and qubits, and their connection, not to mention non-computable quantum processing. So qubits are like bits, only quantum, and more interestingly, for me at least, microtubules are  – well, to be honest, they’re so complex and interesting as to require another post to explore and make sense of, if that’s possible for poor me …

References

The Experiment That Could Explain Consciousness – youtube video, New Scientist

Robert Sapolsky, Behave, 2018

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule