The Quantum Theory of Consciousness is No More - Maybe

When I first picked up on this story about a quantum theory of consciousness and it being put in doubt by an underground experiment, the first thing that came into my strange maybe conscious mind was ‘Going Underground’.

If you are of a certain age then you might remember this hit by ‘The Jam’. Maybe it awakened your consciousness to issues of the day — 1980 was the age of Thatcher and Reagan. The aged pair whose policies finally (?) broke the Soviet Union.

Awakened consciousness or not, I was intrigued to learn that there was such an idea as a quantum theory of consciousness as I do wonder about the ‘reality’ of consciousness some nights, as I try to get to sleep.

What makes us individual?

Why am I me and not somebody else? If you really do want to know why you are you then you can always ask a philosopher, although it didn’t help me. But that’s because I’m me and not you. But come Saturday night I might be Alice (just kidding). I have no identity crisis.

Anyway, I thought I would start at the beginning while I’m still conscious, and hopefully you will stay conscious with me as I work through this and try to understand the fundamentals.

What is consciousness?

I’ll start with Wikipedia:

Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience or awareness of internal and external existence. Despite millennia of analyses, definitions, explanations and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial, being “at once the most familiar and [also the] most mysterious aspect of our lives”.

So it’s puzzling, controversial and mysterious. A bit like quantum mechanics then, so it’s no wonder someone conjoined them. Is the cat alive or dead? Is my brain alive - I'll need to open my skull and look. 50/50. Hmm.

What is the quantum theory of consciousness?

There’s an article at plato.stanford.edu which pulls together some of the ideas about it. I found it impenetrable (it doesn’t take much) and then discovered an abstract in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry. I thought that may be a better place to start given the exalted status of Indian gurus in philosophical and existential literature.

The abstract explains that there has been a shift from the concept of consciousness being a characteristic of the central nervous system [of sentient beings], and moves the focus:

With quantum theory the seat of consciousness shifts from structures of central nervous system towards each random cell and microtubules.

But it seems that the article is all about a forthcoming symposium as of March 2022 (as was), so they haven’t quite got their act together yet — and now the new research has overtaken them. They might well have to go back to the drawing board or sympose about something else. Are they conscious of this?

So, over to BigThink.com where I learned a little more about the topic:

In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer.[ed: about the mystery of consciousness]

They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics — the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around. This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.

— cristianedemoraissmith

Now that was a surprise.

The Orch OR theory

Penrose and Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory (Orch OR) idea was initially dismissed for several reasons, the principal one being that at the temperatures and physical scales of our human bodies the laws of classical physics trump those of quantum mechanics.

Then, as the years passed and our knowledge of the quantum world deepened, the theory slowly acquired some disciples and researchers.

Penrose and others extended the theory further and the current state of play is the Diósi–Penrose model.

The Diósi–Penrose model was introduced as a possible solution to the measurement problem, where the wave function collapse is related to gravity.

— Wikipedia

That helps. Not.

This is very deep physics and I find it fascinating that it is linked to something as abstract as the reality of our consciousness, but my days of working with the wave function are long passed.

Research in Utrecht

Cristiane De Morais Smith then proposed some research:

Our brains are composed of cells called neurons, and their combined activity is believed to generate consciousness. Each neuron contains microtubules, which transport substances to different parts of the cell. The Penrose-Hameroff theory of quantum consciousness argues that microtubules are structured in a fractal pattern which would enable quantum processes to occur.

In the lab De Morais Smith’s team measured quantum fractals in the lab and reported the results in Nature.

The key idea about fractals is that if you look at the human body in detail — say, the lungs, then a fractal structure is apparent. Fractals repeat, however more closely you look at them. Down to quantum level? Maybe.

And the results of the research were:

Our observations from these experiments reveal that quantum fractals actually behave in a different way to classical ones. Specifically, we found that the spread of light across a fractal is governed by different laws in the quantum case compared to the classical case. — Nature.com

And now come the doubts from under an Italian mountain

Research reported this week in Physics of Life Reviews described an experiment deep under an Italian mountain. The research team were working on gravity-related wavefunction collapse.

I’ll not go into detail as I’ve forgotten practically everything I knew about Schrödinger’s equation (and that was close to b….. all to start with but I got through the exam).

Suffice it to say that the team under Gran Sasso mountain were sceptical of the research supporting the Diósi–Penrose theory, but not entirely dismissive.

This how a story in Physics World summarised it:

The researchers add that not all is lost for Orch OR. While they reckon that the theory seems implausible if based on the simplest wavefunction collapse model, it may become more plausible if a more sophisticated model can be developed — one, for example, that conserves energy (something not true of Diósi’s current model).

And if you want to know more, the Physics World story provides a much better simplification of the wavefunction collapse research than I ever could.

Good luck with that.

Meanwhile I will just continue puzzling about why I am who I am. However it is a Friday night and I do have to avoid the whirling pit and gravitational collapse into underground unconsciousness that occasionally follows the grape and the grain mixture.

And here’s The Jam on going underground:

Or if you really want to go underground in Italy and check your consciousness...

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This story was originally published in Medium on 15 Aug 2022.