Your Very
Own Consciousness Can Interact With the Whole Universe, Scientists Believe
A recent experiment suggests the brain is not too warm or wet
for consciousness to exist as a quantum wave that connects with the rest of the
universe.
BY SUSAN LAHEY
PUBLISHED: OCT 18, 2023
Getty Images
When people talk about consciousness,
or the mind, it’s always a bit nebulous. Whether we create consciousness in our
brains as a function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists
independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation
for where it comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the
physics, anatomy, and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its
possible form.
In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true architecture of consciousness.
The new work builds upon a theory Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., first posited
in the 1990s: the Orchestrated
Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR). Broadly, it claims that
consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s
nerve cells.
now Your
Terms: Microtubules
These are tubes made
of protein lattices, and they form part of the cell’s cytoskeleton, which
is its structural network.
Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum
wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave,
it has properties like superposition
(the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the
potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).
Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR
theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.
Across the Universe
To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV
program Closer To Truth that it must be
scale invariant, like a fractal.
A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and
still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness
might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But
when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing
with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the
same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle
with quantum
particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe,
theoretically.
An illustration of the brain’s network of neural axons
transmitting electrical action potentials. (Getty Images)
Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory. Efforts
to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave
instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in
very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of that
environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The
brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore,
consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in
the brain, the thinking went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the
universe.
But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out, living
things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.
Know Your
Terms: Quantum biology
This is the study of
quantum processes in living organisms, like superposition and quantum
entanglement, that actually facilitate biological processes beyond the subatomic level.
Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the energy
from a photon,
or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the
formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it
can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to the reaction center,
it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an
unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the end, the
exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying. In
order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is used up,
scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to
try all possible paths simultaneously.
- Quantum Physics May Finally Explain Consciousness
- Objective Reality May Not Exist, Scientists Say
- Unraveling the Marvels of Quantum Entanglement
New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even
better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the
scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor
Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with
a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into
a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant
structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the
microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea
was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a
second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.
Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan
fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human
eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview,
Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from
the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds.
This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a
microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological
functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer
lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their
findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this
year.
Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to
exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending light
into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central Florida has
been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments,
Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of
milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to any sort of
stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into microtubules
and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for
the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says, “which is kind
of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum
superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply,
the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that
connects with the universe.
While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, it’s
significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the
boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to
explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to
identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes
many scientists very uncomfortable.
Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like.
One of these ideas comes from the study of weather.
The Architecture of Universal
Consciousness
Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who
specializes in chaos and
climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws of
physics must be fundamentally geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his explanation
of how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum
consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular
fractal geometry “state space.”
That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or
route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also
stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of
Palmer’s book, The
Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our
Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having had
the option to choose our lives, as well as our perception that there is a
consciousness outside ourselves—is the result of awareness of other
universes that share our state space. The idea starts with a special
geometry called a Strange Attractor.
You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that the flap
of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in
another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept
developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was
trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate
condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations
that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system.
For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity
level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather
systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.
He found that if initial conditions were different by even one
one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or the
temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly
different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming
loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates completely
different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot
them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric
shape known as a strange attractor.
It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any number of
directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed
on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.
Artwork of a
Lorenz attractor, named after Edward Lorenz, who developed a system of ordinary
differential equations. In particular, the Lorenz attractor is a set of chaotic
solutions of the Lorenz system which, when plotted, resemble a butterfly or
figure eight. Minute variations in the initial values of the variables would
lead to hugely divergent outcomes. For this phenomenon, of sensitivity to
initial conditions, he coined the term butterfly
effect. This effect is the underlying mechanism of deterministic chaos.
Getty Images
Palmer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one
car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we
imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re
actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who
are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track,
he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will,
and of being connected with a greater universe.
“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that
it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in
state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are
correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its
very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a
kind of holistic geometry for the
universe.”
Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us
what consciousness is, but perhaps they
tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a
structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept.
If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a
complicated state space, we can find
it. And that’s a start.
CONTRIBUTOR
Susan Lahey is a journalist and writer whose work has been
published in numerous places in the U.S. and Europe. She's covered ocean wave
energy and digital transformation; sustainable building and disaster recovery;
healthcare in Burkina Faso and antibody design in Austin; the soul of AI and
the inspiration of a Tewa sculptor working from a hogan near the foot of Taos
Mountain. She lives in Porto, Portugal with a view of the sea.
No comments:
Post a Comment