Stuart Hameroff: Orch OR, Penrose, Fractal Consciousness

Stuart Hameroff is an American anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness and contention that consciousness originates from quantum states in neural microtubules, partnering with Roger Penrose to explicate on the physics involved.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:18 For 73, how does Hameroff stay fast and adroit?
00:02:58 On Hameroff's personal beliefs of God
00:03:44 How did Stuart come to the idea that consciousness arises in microtubules?
00:08:55 The non-computational nature of consciousness and the hard-problem
00:11:56 Gödel's theorem and quantum gravity / superposition
00:16:54 Quantum computers and Frolich resonances
00:19:25 Roger Penrose enters in the picture where / when / how?
00:23:45 David Chalmer's legendary talk was at the conference Hameroff organized
00:26:33 Penrose modified Hameroff's ideas
00:28:04 The vibrations of consciousness (Gamma)
00:32:00 Details on the calculations of the collapse time of tubulin and microtubules
00:38:07 The myth of the 1% of the brain
00:41:33 Firing rates of neurons during psychedelics and how the brain seemingly "decreases"
00:46:42 Which comes first, cognition or consciousness?
00:48:27 Anesthesia and "truth serums" (disinhibition revealing inner truths?)
00:50:04 What's it like to work with Penrose? What's an example of a problem you're working on?
00:57:00 Free-will as travelling backward in time (Libett's experiments)
01:01:36 Dennett won't comment on his theories
01:02:33 Agreements / disagreements with Penrose
01:06:16 Explaining terms: Isolated systems, phases of quantum computing, gamma synchrony
01:11:40 Explaining terms: Benzine rings, non-polar, and hydrophobic
01:13:08 Structure of the microtubules
01:17:33 Tau proteins and Alzheimer's
01:17:00 Fractals / self-similarity and its relation to consciousness
01:20:06 Quantifying consciousness with anesthesia
01:21:42 Glial cells vs neurons for consciousness / computation
01:24:08 Can quantum computers be consciousness?
01:28:55 Is periodicity required or is aperiodicity a prius?
01:29:41 IIT vs Global Neuronal vs Orch OR
01:33:57 Falsifying Hameroff's and Penrose's theory (Orch OR)
01:37:00 Koch's thought experiment on the ridiculousness of Schrödinger's cat being alive and dead
01:38:01 How do Platonic Forms come into this?
01:40:12 What Curt likes most about Orch OR
01:42:52 Experiencing "nothing"
01:43:55 Comparing Wolfram's theory
01:45:00 How does Penrose's theory solve the Hard problem of consciousness
01:47:07 Does there exist free will
01:48:15 Strong vs Weak anthropic principle and and an explanation for the ratios of nature
01:52:06 Consciousness drives the evolution of the universe
01:53:46 Vibrating the microtubules at home
01:59:07 Is the Universe conscious? Are humans so far the most conscious agents?
02:01:18 On Deepak Chopra
02:02:31 ESP and other Paranormal phenomenon in Hameroff's model
02:03:12 Audience Q: Is the depressed person more, or less, conscious?
02:05:17 Pre-cognition effects are real but don't get published
02:08:47 On Jung and Hameroff's model
02:09:24 Audience Q: Is the Sun conscious?

* * *

Subscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each.

* * *

[ejhong]

Stuart has such a great vibe about him. Great interview. Hope you can get Penrose to discuss his retroactivity soon.

[jimmynox]

Curt got everything you could out of a conversation with a genius. I'm going to watch this for months.

[michaelose]

Love Dr Hameroff’s sharp & incisive mind. I also respect his intellectual humility - where he is unclear or lacks knowledge…he says so and doesn’t try to dissemble. Excellent stuff ⭐️

[Ankonify]

I was searching Stuart Hameroff talking about Orc-or and consciousness and it turned out to be one of the best interviews I found on YouTube about it. Thanks.

[neurophilosophers]

This episode is in the top 5 experiences of my life and I’m not even finished watching it. Working with a U of M professor. Add on neuro plasticity and the nucleus accumbens to this. The interstitium. Etc a whole path through neuro epistemology. And we’re getting close to putting it all together.

[AdiMaco]

Mr. Hameroff is amazing. This is your best podcast.

[edrisi]

Stuart's explanation of Eddington's experiment made me understand, for the first time, what that experiment was trying to measure. The theory of microtubules sounded complicated but the questions you asked and the subsequent explanations made intuitive sense for me. Great interview!

[whereistomm]

i don't know who to compliment first if curt or Hameroff-Pen Rose. This is the most fascinating theory of consciousness out there and this is the best podcast on the internet along with Lex and Joe. Curt you are great at asking the questions that we wish could be asking our self and dig deep when necessary.

[davidfield]

This may very well be Hameroff's best public interview.

[johnimusic]

I find it absolutely amazing that you don't have at least 250K followers...
You will undoubtedly, but I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet.

[jimmynox]

Thank you. These people you're interviewing see the world from 10, 000 feet up, (or 23 nanometers down) and you make their brilliant insights available to all of us.

[voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang]

I did a new upload response to this livestream. Thanks for the excellent conversation with Dr. Stuart Hameroff. I first got an email reply from him over 15 years ago. My background is noncommutative music. I also discussed this with Aniriban who corroborated the ultrasound resonating at 3000 times greater amplitude conductance of the microtubules. "When a US [ultrasound] burst (2.1 MHz, 1-mm focal diameter, 0.1–1 MPa) was focused on a motor axon of the crayfish neuromuscular junction, it consistently produced a fast hyperpolarization, which was followed or superseded by subthreshold depolarizations or action potentials in a stochastic manner."

[Slaman]

Being a Stem grad from state University... I agree with a lot of what Brian has said!
I see people unhappy in the comments but the truth is science is awesome but takes real work that is not always so sensational!!
Thanks for the realistic grounded podcast!
That being said I do like science fiction podcasts from time to time😂

[workingTchr]

Absolutely the best interview/discussion I have seen with Hameroff. That was a very fast 2 hours...

[eksffa]

11:00 emperors new mind & Gödel’s theorem enters the consciousness hypothesis
13:00 RP’s theory of decoherence
17:00 Herbert Fröhlich and quantum coherence on geometric levels
19:00 meeting and working with RP
20:00 geometry factors on microtubules structure
24:30 philosophers boringness at the first conference
26:40 Penrose + Hameroff = a new theory of consciousness
28:00 Hameroff taking math and physics lessons with Penrose, reaching T=h/Eg where t = Time to OR, Eg = gravitation self-energy degree, h = reduced Planck constant
29:00 40hz (40 fireings a second), dendrites soma and HH model

31:40 What is Eg and some more in depth explanation of the sub atomic proposed model

40:10 high frequency moments of consciousness = makes the world seem in slow down mode, the external world slows down (side quote: Michael Jordan and other players in slow down)

41:40 Robin L. Carhart-Harris, LSD experiences, brain scanners, almost comatose, EEG flat, a theory to this paradox: consciousness into microtubule quantum state almost completely and no energy required to memory and cognition; things on hold on classical level and high frequency on micro level
46:00 Cognition vs Consciousness: cog can be either consciousness or non-consciousness; cog can be computable; consciousness induces deviation into cog, shadows of conciousness altering HH-model and cog
49:00 Propofol and other drugs inducting non-consciousness

50:50 working with Penrose: a chapter for a book, working with meticulous Penrose, 3 years late chapter lol: Penrose adding retro causality lol

53:00 Pat & colleague’s attack and attempt to refute even before the final publication: gaps and Godel non orthodox approach - and the responses (Gaps? What Gaps? 1995)

57:00 Retrocausality and Libet’s - 30ms delay when stimulating the finger; 500ms delay when stimulating the brain directly (because you don’t get the evoked potential) and later, stimulated information at the initial 30s: a signal going backwards in time and conforming to quantum physics

1:01:00 epiphenomenal consciousness vs backward causality
1:02:30 some minor disagreements with RP
1:06:00 non computability of HH-model allowing a person or a cat to walk in the streets
1:06:50 explaining Orch-OR isolation of interaction & Pi Resonance (Q&A)
1:13:20 Microtubules in depth: overview of it’s function in the theory
1:16:20 Alzheimer disease, tau protein on microtubules
1:18:00 Microtubules resonance and electric conductivity tests
1:20:05 testing with amnestysics
1:22:00 pyramidal neurons and computation on mixed polarity giving rise to beat frequencies and frequency ranges: more like music than computation
1:24:10 quantum computers can be conscious? Including google quantum computer “deffective” reduction
1:29:00 helical path and non compute tiling
1:33:00 comparing other theories, of emergence, integrated and computation

1:34:50 falsification of Orch-OR: testing quantum superposition on tubulin protein, Greg Scholes from photosynthesis quantum FX

1:38:10 Penrose proto-consciousness and platonic states of mind, including intuition and creativity
1:39:30 Occan Razors, minimizing theories, attacks, critics and max Tegmark
1:43:00 zero-point consciousness
1:45:00 transcendental ontological aspects of orch-or starting at material classical physics and reducing to consciousness

1:46:28 occasions of experience are very much like quantum state reductions (whitehead): moments of consciousness is not a property of matter, it’s an event; like a photon is an event; events that create a particular state of matter; decoherence upon reduction causes that event, the moment of consciousness (essa porra também impede argumento do mito do dado)

1:47:07 Free Will: governance by determinism possibility ends where Schrödinger equations stops working; volition and orchestration disturbs it (my reading and part of my own theory: metaphysics volition and conscious action of self acts as the observer interfering the system at every moment of consciousness - an inescapable consequence of the dualistic constitution of wave-particle/mass-energy causally interacting; insufficiency principle from uncertainty principle in physical realm; insufficiency principle from incompleteness in platonic realm)

1:48:20 Anthropic Principle: the weak and the strong: God’s perfection vs possible worlds (Copenhagen theory of consciousness from another possible world); Penrose’s CCC. Ion-to-ion / world-to-world evolution. Big-bang transition points and consciousness evolution. Followed by consciousness improvement parameters.
1:53:50 vibrating (literally) microtubules to cause cognitive disorders: Hameroff ultrasounded himself: improved the mood, changed MRI connectivity patterns; paper punished 2013; makes animals move the paw; Hameroff tried several other times on himself lol
1:59:40 universal frequency and vibration
2:02:50 holistic considerations
2:04:40 time-response speculation on primates; other backward-time effects by Daryl J. Bem, psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University (I know his work specially the “Feeling the Future” paper)
2:06:40 New Physics
2:08:20 Open Individualism and theory of self relating to Orch-OR; non necessity of self; again Jung (usually from agreeing with Pauli and Bohr, Penrose’s considerations tend to be tied Indic Tely to to Jung’s after the publication of _The Large, the Small and the Human Mind_) - no answer
2:09:23 conscious sun

[telekinetic]

This was extremely informative, enjoyable and enlightening. Excellent work guys. The only constructive addition may include a few more diagrams or visuals but overall I'm totally appreciative of this fluid verbal format. Great work Stuart & Curt!! These podcasts are next level.

[michaelsage]

What an amazing interview! Two of my favorite outlaws, the Pen and Hammer.

[TheZignal]

Fantastic. I really appreciate you treating these interviews like a kind of office hours! Only wish I could take part in the stimulating conversation! Thank you!

[gangsterkami]

Very interesting interview here Curt, well done. Definitely the most thorough and deep thinking interviewer ever.

[MegaDublinguy]

Every time I think I will never see a more interesting video from Curt Jaimungal he surpasses himself yet again. I'm only half way through this having binge watched some others but I have to go to bed. I'm going to set my alarm to go off an hour early so I can see the rest of this before I go to work.