Stuart Hameroff - What are Altered States of Consciousness?

[phulbig]

The brilliance of this theory is the separation of consciousness from cognition.

[aphysique]

Dr Hameroff has helped me appreciate & luv Microtubules!! Such great insight & teachings of Consciousness & where & how it is perceived!!

[ianbrown]

Hameroff has a habit of simply reciting facts instead of explaining them, and it makes his point suffer somewhat. I do believe him, and I think his (and Penrose's) theory is incredibly pursuasive, but you have to get past Hameroff's explanations to get there. I feel that if only he could be as conversational and laconic as Penrose, he'd get more popular penetration of his ideas. But I do think they're potentially on to something.

[mhrodey]

Physics and just about every other field working on consciousness is currently in a phase of, "We have no idea, let's throw things at the wall and see what sticks." That being said, Hameroff's collaborator IS Roger Penrose. People slag off Penrose, but the better calculation might be to lower Penrose a bit and raise Hameroff the same amount or more.

[marilynb]

Amazing Video... would love to chat with you about those micro tubuals and what they Really are 🐉🌠😁

[williamkennedy]

I have achieved, advanced state of altered con

[rikkerthindriks]

In the LSD study of Carhart-Harris et al. the brain is not flatlined at all and the functional MRI shows stronger connectivity throughout the brain. So Stuart's description of the results is inaccurate. But it doesn't matter what the observations are, because he will always find a way to interpret them as evidence for his quantum hypothesis.

[AcidRain]

I could have misconceptions about the state of science and technology in the 70's, but how the heck could they have studied this stuff in that kind of detail back then? Electron ("quantum") resonance energy/frequency? What Stuart is describing seems awfully precise.

Well, I just found that a primitive scanning electron has been around since the 50's, so I guess it's not beyond the realm of feasibility.

[naimulhaq]

Susskind brilliantly exposes the mystery of consciousness and cognition, with his little story he told before his lectures, about a lion chasing a lion and an antelope, displaying knowledge of sines and cosines and theory of least action. How conscious is the lion and what is the level of its cognition.

[joselinema]

How can we be sure that this not just created by our brains?.

[paleomountainman]

Do you think the movement of electrons through the micro tubeuels effect conscioness?

[RickDelmonico]

What is truth?
Any attempt to explain the idea of truth, will result in an explanation that requires an explanation. This continues to infinity as a logical monster. Truth has a static quality and perfect symmetry, it looks the same from every angle, at every scale. In a dynamical system, truthfulness will fluctuate. Variation is dynamic, being neither perfectly symmetrical nor purely random. In the hierarchy of information, truth has the most potential and chaos has the most variation. The connection that completes the circuit would look something like deception if you are moving towards chaos and love if you are moving towards truth.
Our connection to this circuit is through appreciation of beauty and desire, the polarity or direction depends on how you understand or trust the information. Love is the purest connection moving to the highest energy state and deception pulls you into the darkness.

[SumisusanAhhA]

I still don't get the link between higher frequency equating to higher consciousness. I've taken many psychoactive drugs. They're fun and alter perception. But that's it. I've listened to this anesthesiologist many times over the last decade. Always wanting to believe what he's saying. But saying drugs make your brain vibrate faster, and that makes you more conscious, even nonlocally conscious? Umm...huh?

[cajones]

Are the dreams we remember the ones where the info has collapsed ?

[amirhesamnoroozi]

Don't blame me but my gut feeling is that his theory is another case for pseudoscience. BTW I like him personally.

[ThisIsEddieBear]

This was a less bitey interview to the one that took place a year later. Yikes.

[malchicken]

If higher frequencies of waves means higher consciousness, then does a microwave electromagnetic wave, shot out by electron valence shell energy, have lower consciousness than an X-ray electromagnetic wave, also shot out by electron energy jumps? Maybe it has to do with the way one can be more 'non-local' than the other, though, if their both in their electromagnetic field 'photon' quanta/particle form or even in wave form, their both traveling at the same speed of light (because that's just what photons of the EM field do in a vacuum), then that doesn't make sense. I guess then blue stars have a higher conscious than our dull yellow star because of its higher light frequency. Pfft.

[_neins]

basically every sentence of his including the word "quantum" is utter nonsense. He sounds like a mediocre science fiction writer who saw a 15 minute video on quantum physics once.

[stoictraveler]

Quantum superposition that has not collapsed...yet experienced...
Huh...

[fins]

Well it sounds like mumbo jumbo but who knows?