Consciousness and Computation: The Quantum Debate

Consciousness originates from quantum processes within microtubules, challenging the notion that it is purely computational.

### Exploring Consciousness: Beyond Computation and Quantum Mechanics
* 🧠 The essence of consciousness is suggested to be **non-computable** and not merely a physical process describable by **computation**.
* 📚 The author reflects on their journey of writing a book to explain their ideas about **consciousness**, inspired by discussions on the **capabilities of computers** and the **limitations they perceived in those views**.
* 🔍 The author, while initially unsure about neurophysiology, delves into the role of **microtubules in the brain** as a potential **key to understanding consciousness**, prompted by insights from **Stuart Hameroff**.
* 🔬 Microtubules are identified as **crucial structures in cells** that may **preserve quantum coherence**, potentially linking **quantum mechanics to consciousness** in a way that **traditional computations cannot**.
* ⚛ The orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR) theory posits that **consciousness arises from quantum processes within neurons**, challenging the conventional view that consciousness is a result of **computational processes**.
* 🌌 The author emphasizes that understanding consciousness requires **going beyond standard quantum mechanics**, suggesting that **gravity may play a role** in this exploration.
* 🧩 There is a recognition that current theories of consciousness are still in the **early stages** and lack a **universally accepted framework**, with ongoing experiments exploring the relationship between **microtubules and consciousness**.
* 🤔 Ultimately, the author acknowledges the **complexity of consciousness**, suggesting that understanding may require a **deeper exploration** of the interplay between **awareness, intelligence, and understanding itself**.

I'm trying to say that whatever consciousness is, it's not a computation. Yes, it's not a physical process which can be described by computation, but it nevertheless could be. So one of the interesting models that you've proposed, as the orchestrated objective reduction, yeah, that's going from there, you say so.

I say I have no idea. So I wrote this book throughout my scientific career. I thought, you know, when I'm retired I have enough time to write a sort of popular-ish book which I will explain my ideas and puzzles, but I like beautiful things about physics and mathematics, and this

puzzle about computability in consciousness and so on, and in the process of writing this book, well, I thought I'd do it when I retired. I didn't actually, I wouldn't, didn't wait that long because there was a radio discussion between Edward Fredkin and

Marvin Minsky, and they were talking about what computers could do, and they were answering and entering a big room. It imagined entering this big room with the other end of the room, two computers were talking to each other, and as you walk up

to the computers, they will have communicated to each other more ideas, concepts, things than the entire human race had ever communicated. That yes. So I thought, well, I know where you're coming from, but I just don't believe you. There's something missing, that's it's

not that. So I thought, well, I should write my book, and so I did. It was roughly the same time Stephen Hawking was writing his Brief History of Time, and, at some point, the book you're talking about was The Emperor's New Mind.

that's right and both are incredible books, the brief history of time and an emperor's new mind. Yes, I think it's interesting because he got, he told me he'd got some Carl Sagan I think to write a forward. Good gosh, what am I gonna do?

I'm not gonna get anywhere unless I get somebody, so I know Martin Gardner, so we do it, so he did and it is a very nice forward. So that's that's an incredible book and some of the same people you mentioned, Ed Fredkin, which I guess is of

expert systems fame, and Minsky, of course people know in the AI world, but they represent the artificial intelligence that do hope and dream that AI intelligences are thinking, well you know I see where they're coming from and from a scientific perspective, oh yeah you're

right, but that's not my perspective. So I thought I had to say it and as I was writing my book you see I thought, well I don't really know anything about neurophysiology, what am I doing writing this book? So I certainly read up

about neurophysiology and I'm rated nothing, I'm trying to find out how it is that nerve signals could possibly preserve quantum coherence and all I read is that the second electrical signals which go along the nerves create some effects through the brain, there's

no chance you can isolate it, so this is hopeless. So I come to the end of the book and I'm more or less give up and just think of something which I didn't believe in. This maybe this is the way around it, but no. And then you say I thought well maybe

This book will at least stimulate young people to do science or something, and I got all these letters from old people instead. He's the only people who could have had time to read my book, so I mean except for Stuart Hameroff, except for Stuart Hameroff, you don't have a rough

road to me, and he said I think you're missing something, you don't know about microtubules. Do you? He didn't put it quite like that, but that was more or less it. And he said, "This is what you really need to consider." So I thought, "Oh my god, yes."

That's a much more promising structure. So I mean, fundamentally you were searching for the source of a non-computable source of consciousness within the human brain. Yeah, in the biology. And so what are, Mark, if I may ask, what are microtubules? Well, you see, I

I was ignorant in what address I never came across them, and in in the books I looked at, perhaps I only read rather superficially, which is true. But I didn't know about microtubules. Stuart, I think one of the things here

was impressed him about when you see pictures of mitosis, that's a cell dividing, and you see all the chromosomes and the chromosomes get their gate or gate line, and then they get pulled apart. And so that as the cell divides, half the chromosomes go

you know, how their web is divided into the two paths and they go two different ways. And what is it that's pulling them apart? Well, those are these little things called microtubules. And so he starts to get interested in them, and he formed the

You know, he was his day job or night job of where he would call it is to put people to sleep, except he doesn't like calling it to sleep because it's different from general anesthetics in a reversible way, so you want to make sure that they don't

experience the pain that would otherwise be something that they feel and consciousness is turned off for a while and then can be turned back on again. So it's crucial that you can turn it off and turn it on, and what do you do when you're doing that, what do general

anesthetic gases do? And see, he formed the view that it's the microtubules that they affect. And the details of why he formed that view, is not what the, that isn't clear to me, but there, but there's an interesting story he keeps talking

about. But I've found this very exciting because I thought these structures, these little tubes, which inhabit pretty well ourselves, it's not just neurons apart from red blood cell, red blood cells, they inhabit pretty well all the other cells in the body, but they're not

all the same kind. You'll get different kinds of microtubules, and the ones that excited me the most, and this is maybe still not totally clear, but they're the ones that excited me most were the ones that, the only ones that I knew about at

the time, because they were there very, very symmetrical structures, and I had reason to believe that these very symmetrical structures would be much better at preserving a quantum state, quantum coherence, preserving the thing without, you just need to, because to preserve certain degrees of freedom

without them leaking into the environment. Once they leak into the environment, your loss, so you ought to preserve these quantum states at a level which the state reduction process comes in. And that's where I think the NAM computability comes in, and it's the measurement process in quantum mechanics.

what's going on, so something about the measurement process, what's going on, something about the structure of the microtubules. Yeah, your intuition says maybe there's something here, maybe this kind of structure allows for the, the mystery, the, there was a better chance.

yes, it just struck me that partly it was the symmetry, because there is a feature of symmetry, you can produce perfect, preserve quantum coherence much better with symmetrical structures. They said there is a good reason for that, and that impressed me a lot. I didn't know the

difference between the A lattice and B lattice at that time, which could be important now. That could, in medicine this year, which isn't talked about much, but that's some, in some sense, details. We're good to take a step back just to say these people are not familiar, so

this, this, this was called the orchestrated objective reduction idea, or ORKOR, which is a biological philosophy of mind. The postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons, so that has to do with your search for where, where is it coming from? So that's counter to the

notion that consciousness might arise from the computation performed by the synapses. Yes, the key point, he sometimes, people say it's because it's quantum mechanical. It's not just that, see, it's, it's more outrageous than that. You see, this is one reason I think we're so far

off from it because we don't even know the physics right you see it's not just quantum mechanics people say oh we know quantum systems and biological structures know we'll use starting to see that some basic biological systems do depend on quantum I mean look you

the first place all of chemistry is quantum mechanics people got used to that so they don't count that so I said let's not come on Hank chemistry we sort of got the hang of that I think but you have quantum effects which are not just chemical in

photosynthesis and this is one of the striking things in the last several years that photosynthesis seems to be a basically quantum process which is not simply create chemical it's using quantum mechanics in a very basic way so you can start saying oh well with

photosynthesis is based on quantum mechanics why not behave you have neurons and things like that maybe there's something which is a bit like photosynthesis in that respect but what I'm saying is even more outrageous than that because those things are talking about conventional quantum

mechanics now my argument says that conventional quantum mechanics if you're just following the Schrodinger equation that's still computable so you've got to go beyond that so you've got to go to where quantum mechanics goes wrong in a certain sense you have to be a little

bit careful about that because the way people do quantum mechanics is a sort of mixture of two different processes one of them is the Schrodinger equation which is an equation my Schrodinger wrote down and it tells you how the system the state of a system evolves it

evolves according to this equation completely deterministic, but it involves into ridiculous situations. And this was much frightening. It was very much pointing out with his cat. He said, "You follow my equation, that's Schrodinger's equation, and you could say that you have two cats: a cat that was just

dead and alive at the same time. That would be the evolution of the Schrodinger equation would lead to a state which is the cat being dead and alive at the same time. And he's more or less saying, "This is an absurdity." People would say, "Oh, well." Schrodinger said, "You

couldn't have a cat that's deadly." It's not that you see, he was saying, "This is an absurdity. There's something missing, that the reduction of the state, or the collapse of the wavefunction, or whatever it is, it's something which has to be

understood. It's not following the Schrodinger equation. It's not the way we conventionally do quantum mechanics. There's something more than that." And it's easy to quote authority here, because Einstein, at least three of the greatest physicists of the 20th century who

were very fundamental in developing quantum mechanics, Einstein, one of them, Schrodinger another, Dirac another, you have to look carefully at Dirac's writing because he didn't tend to say this out loud too much because he was very cautious about what he said. You find the right place, and you see he

says, "Quantum mechanics is a provisional theory. We need something which explains the collapse of a wavefunction. We need to go beyond the theory we have now." I happen to be one of the kinds of people, there are many, there is a whole group of people, they're all considered to be a

but you know, bit Mavericks who believe that quantum mechanics needs to be modified, there's a small minority of those people, which were really a minority, who think that the way in which it's modified has to be with gravity. And there is an even smaller minority of

those people who think it's a particular way that I think it is, you see. So, so those are the quantum gravity folks for what's well, you see, quantum gravity is already not this, because when you say quantum gravity, what you really mean is quantum mechanics applied to a

gravitational theory. So you say, let's take this wonderful formalism of quantum mechanics and make gravity fit into it. So that is what quantum gravity is meant to be. Now, I'm saying you got to be more even-handed, that gravity affects the structure of quantum mechanics too. It's

not just you quantize gravity, you've got to gravity as quantum mechanics, and it's, it's a two-way thing. But then when you even get started, so that you're saying, and we have to figure out totally new ideas entirely. No, yes, it's you're stuck.

We don't have a theory, that's the trouble. So this is a big problem. If you say, okay, well, what so they're, I don't know, so we're maybe in the very early days sort of. It is in the very early days, and they but just making this point, yes, well.

You see, Stuart Hameroff tends to be open road. Says there's got to be a reduction of the state, and so, so let's use it. The trouble is Penrose doesn't say that. Penrose says, well, I think that, no, no, we have no experiments as yet which shows

that yes there are experiments which are being thought through and which I'm hoping will be performed there is an experiment which is being developed by Jeremy Stowe who is a I've known for a long time who shares his time between Leiden in the Netherlands and Santa

Barbara in the US and he's been working on an experiment which could perhaps demonstrate that quantum mechanics as we now understand it if you don't bring in the gravitational effects it has to be modified and and then there's also experiments that are underway that kind

of look at the microtubule side of things to see if there's in the biology you could see something like that could you briefly mention it because that's a really sort of one of the only experimental attempts in the very early days of even yeah about I think there's

there's a very serious area here which is what Stuart Hameroff is doing and I think it's very important one of the few places that you can really get a bit of a handle on what consciousness is is what turns it off and when you're

thinking about general anesthetics it's very specific these things turn consciousness off what the hell do they do well Stuart and a number of people who work with him and others happen to believe that the general anesthetics directly affect microtubules and there

is some evidence for this I don't know how strong it is and how watertight the cases but I think there is some evidence pointing in that kind of direction it's not just an ordinary chemical process there's something quite different about it and one of the main candidates is that

the anesthetic gases do affect directly microtubules and how strong that evidence is I wouldn't be in a position to say but I think there is fairly impressive evidence and the point is the experiments are being undertaken with yes I mean that is experimental it's a

very clear direction where you can think of experiments which could indicate whether or not it's really microtubules which the anesthetic gas is directly affecting that's really exciting one of the sad things is as far as I'm from my outside perspective it's not many people

are working on this so there's a very Michael Stewart even it feels like there's very few people are carrying the flag forward on this I think it's it's not many in the sense it's a minority but it's not zero anymore you see when I originally was

serious you know we were just just us and a few few of our friends they weren't many people think so but it's grown into into it one of the main viewpoints yeah there might be about four or five or six different views that which people hold and it's one of them

so it's considered as one of the possible lines of thinking yes you describe physics theories as falling into one of three categories the superb the useful or the tentative I like those words it's a beautiful categorization do you think we'll ever have a superb

theory of intelligence and of consciousness we might we're a long way from it I don't think we're even whether in the tentative scale I mean it's uh you don't think we've even entered the realm of tentative probably no I think yeah that's raised you know what do you

See the circle is so controversial, we don't have a clear view which is accepted by the majority. I mean, you say, yeah, people's most views are computational in one form or another, they think it's some, but it's not very clear because even the IIT people

who think of them as computational, but I've heard them saying they know consciousness is supposed to be not computation. I said, well if it's not computation, what the hell is it? What's going on? But physical processes are going on which are that

what does it mean for something to be computational then? So, is, um, well there has to be a process which is, it's very curious the way the history has developed in quantum mechanics because very early on people thought there was something new with consciousness, but it

was almost the other way around. You see, you have to say the Schrodinger equation says all these different alternatives happen all at once and then when is it that only one of them happens? Where one of the views which was quite commonly held by a few distinguished

quantum physicists, this: when a conscious being looks at the system, what becomes aware of it, and at that point, it becomes one of the other. That's a role where consciousness is somehow actively reducing the state. My view is almost the exact opposite of that. It's the state

reduces itself in some way, which some non-computational way which we don't understand. We don't have a proper theory of, and that is a building block of what consciousness is. So consciousness, it's the other way around. It depends on that choice which nature makes all the time.

when the state becomes one of the other rather than the superposition of one and the other, and when that happens there is what we're saying now, an element of proto-consciousness takes place. Proto-consciousness is roughly speaking the building block out of which actual consciousness is constructed. So you have

these proto-conscious elements which are when the state decides to be one thing or the other, and that's the thing which when organized together, that's the 'oh our' part in 'orko our', but the 'ork' part, that's the 'oh our' part at least once

can see where when driving it as a theory because it's the quantum choice of going this way or that way, but the 'ork' part which is the orchestration of this is much more mysterious. And how does the brain somehow orchestrate all these individual 'our'

processes into a genuine, genuine, genuine conscious experience, and and it might be something that's beautifully simple, but we're completely in the dark about. Yeah, I think at the moment it's that's the thing you know we happily put the word 'ork' down there to say orchestrated

that's even more unclear what that really means, just like the word 'material' orchestrated, yeah, it's who knows. Yes, and we've been dancing a little bit between the word intelligence or understanding and consciousness. Do you kind of see those as sitting in the same space of mystery

as yes, you see, I tend to say you have understanding and intelligence and awareness, and somehow understanding is in the middle of it, you see. It's, I like to say, could you say of an entity that is actually intelligent if it doesn't have the quality of understanding, maybe?

I'm using terms I don't even know how to define, but who cares, really? They're somewhat poetic, so as I somehow understand them. Yes, things that they're not mathematical in nature. Yes, you see, as a mathematician, I don't know how to define any of them, but

at least I can point to the connections. So the idea is, intelligence is something which I believe needs understanding. Otherwise, you wouldn't say, for any intelligence, an understanding needs awareness. Otherwise, you wouldn't really say it's understanding. You say of an entity, they understand something, and

it's unless it's really aware of it. Then our normal usage. So there's a three-sort of awareness, understanding, and intelligence. And I just tend to concentrate on understanding because that's where I can say something. Okay, that's the kernel theorem, things like

that. But, they, what does it mean to be perceived, the color blue or something? Yes, that's a much more difficult question. I mean, this is the same if I see a color blue and you see it. If you're something with this, this condition, wants to call them, or were you

assign sound? Yeah, yeah, that's right. You get colors and sounds mixed up, and and that sort of thing. I mean, an interesting subject term here, but from the physics perspective, from the fundamentals perspective, we don't, I think we're way off, pretty much understanding what's going on there.

Consciousness is Not a Computation (Roger Penrose) | AI Podcast Clips

Lex Fridman

Consciousness is not a computation or a physical process describable by computation.

The author wrote a book to explain their ideas and puzzles about consciousness and computability.

A radio discussion between Fredkin and Minsky about computers sparked the author's book.

The author believed something was missing from the AI perspective on consciousness.

The book was written around the same time as Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time'.

The author's search for a non-computable source of consciousness led to microtubules.

The author's initial ignorance of microtubules and their role in cell division.

Hameroff's research on general anesthetics and their effect on microtubules.

Different types of microtubules and their potential for preserving quantum states.

Symmetrical structures are better at preserving quantum coherence.

Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR)

Orch OR postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons.

It's not just quantum mechanics; it's beyond conventional quantum mechanics.

Quantum effects in basic biological systems, like photosynthesis.

The need to go beyond conventional quantum mechanics (Schrödinger equation).

Quantum Mechanics and the Collapse of the Wavefunction

The Schrödinger equation's deterministic evolution leads to absurd situations (Schrödinger's cat).

The need to understand the reduction of the state or collapse of the wavefunction.

Einstein, Schrödinger, and Dirac's views on the incompleteness of quantum mechanics.

The need to modify quantum mechanics, potentially involving gravity.

Experimental Approaches and Future Directions

The lack of experiments demonstrating the need for modifications to quantum mechanics.

Jeremy Stowe's experiment to demonstrate the need for modifying quantum mechanics.

Experiments focusing on microtubules and their role in consciousness.

General anesthetics' effect on microtubules as a potential key to understanding consciousness.

The limited number of researchers working on this area.

Theories of Intelligence and Consciousness

The categorization of physics theories as superb, useful, or tentative.

The long way to a superb theory of intelligence and consciousness; not even in the tentative stage.

The controversy surrounding computational theories of consciousness.

The historical development of views on consciousness in quantum mechanics.

The state reduces itself in a non-computational way, forming a building block of consciousness.