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June 2, 2025 26 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to the God's Eye View Podcast, the companion podcast
for my book, God's Eye View. My name's Trevor. I'm
a clinical neuroscience researcher who studies pretty mundane biomedical things
by day in the lab and in my free time.

(00:29):
I'm fascinated by the heavy stuff. What is consciousness? Why
are we here? Where do we come from? Come on,
if you're not interested in these questions, are you even conscious?
To me? The stuff is fascinating. Don't you want to know?
And you know, the more I think about the stuff,

(00:50):
the more I wonder if maybe you can't know. But
I think we are kind of on the verge of
learning some things about consciousness. I don't always agree with
the way these theories are described. You know, there's an
effort to make this very rational and logical, and of course,

(01:14):
as a scientist, I like that, but I do wonder
if maybe we just won't really be able to wrap
our head around this stuff, which is exciting for me.
I think it's exciting that the best scientists in the
world are studying consciousness and they can't figure it out.

(01:35):
So I'm getting ahead of myself. In the book, we
talk a lot about maybe consciousness has some kind of
quantum component. And I'm not the first person to come
up with that idea, obviously, But what's exciting about it
to me is this, all of a sudden, opens the
door for some of the mystery, the exciting stuff, natural stuff,

(02:02):
you know, the idea that our bodies are animated by
some kind of soul, all of a sudden seems kind
of logical when we start talking about quantum fields and
quantum entanglement and on and on. Now it's interesting because
the real the hyper reductionist, hyperrationalist folks, they when they

(02:28):
discover the a mechanism that could explain consciousness to them,
the mystery disappears. They're like, oh, look, we figured consciousness out.
It's just a quantum vibration that occurs in your brain.
And it's not magic. After all. I don't see it
like that. That's just not how my brain works. In

(02:49):
my mind, we go, oh, these old books that explained
the spirit and the soul. They were right. They were
just using vocabulary from two thousand years ago, but they
were right. And now we've just explained the mechanism, you know.
So anyway, I want to put forward one of these

(03:12):
ideas one of these kind of new ideas, new scientific
ideas that explain consciousness. And I'm not going to get
too into it. This is it's going to take many
episodes to explain these theories. But the theory I want
to talk about today is orchestrated objective reduction. And I've
got a good friend who's really into this theory, so

(03:33):
we'll bring him on to talk about that soon. But
I just want to start with an overview. So this theory,
although it comes from the scientific community, is it's pretty fringe.
You know, neuroscientists dismiss it outright. You know, the people
in my field, the theoretical physicists, are a lot more

(03:55):
open minded. Actually, funny enough, the theory was put forward
by an anesthesiologist, which seems kind of weird, except that
anesesiologists are the only people who can turn consciousness off.
It actually makes for a really good definition of consciousness.

(04:18):
You know, what's the difference between you when you're under
anesthesia and when you're not under anesthesia. Whatever that difference
is is consciousness because you know, your brain is still
working right, it's still regulating your heart rate and your
breathing rate, and there's sensors measuring the pH of your blood,

(04:42):
and all of the unconscious processes of your brain are
still working. You're not dead, right, It's like you're just
kind of like you're asleep. So your brain is still functioning,
but we've just turned off the conscious aspect of the brain.
And I think that is the critical thing to understand about,

(05:03):
at least my definition of consciousness, and I think many
people's definition is that consciousness is just this experience that
we're bearing witness to the world. Right. It's not emotion,
it's not memory, it's not language processing or music. I mean,

(05:26):
those are all incredible aspects of the human experience, but
who is experiencing them the conscious agent. So that's what
consciousness is. It's this perception that we are a passenger
and a machine called a body, and we're looking out
at the world, and we're also looking in at our

(05:48):
inner world. That's consciousness. And so it makes sense for
an antesesiologist to be interested in this because it's their
job to turn it off and on hopefully, So it
seems like this would actually be a really easy study.
He would just say, okay, well, what's the mechanism of
action for an anesthetic that puts you unconscious. Well, it

(06:11):
turns out we don't exactly know. I mean, they all
seem to do slightly different things, and there's different proposals
about the you know, they upregulate certain ions and maybe
they influence gabba and neurotransmitters and blah blah blah blah blah.
But that doesn't feel right, does it. If there's this
whole category of medications that all do the same thing,

(06:34):
they turn consciousness off, shouldn't they have a shared mechanism?
And so Stuart hammer Off, being a smart guy, recognizes
this obvious question in his field and the broader field
of science, and he starts to explain. I don't actually
know exactly how he got to this outcome, but ultimately

(06:56):
what he put forward is that there are quantum processes
occurring within the neurons of your brain. We already know
there are electrical, chemical computational processes. That's called neuronal integration,
and that explains a lot of what the brain does.

(07:17):
You're never going to hear me argue that the brain
is not computational. But what Suart Hammerhoff is suggesting is
there's another layer. There's a layer above the raw computation
that explains the observation this agent that watches what happens

(07:37):
in your internal and external world, and he thinks it's
quantum in nature. And there's a lot of reasons why
he thinks that, but beyond that, he's actually studied it,
and so have others. He's put forward this idea orchestrated
objective reduction that says microtubules within neurons somehow, and this

(07:57):
is where we need to get a molecular biologist to
give us some input. But somehow quantum computation is occurring
within the microtubules, and that's a loaded hypothesis. It's almost
too far. He's almost going too far. You know, we
don't necessarily know that it's computationally based, but it's a

(08:19):
reasonable hypothesis to say that there's some kind of quantum
effect going on. Whether that's entanglement, which could explain, you know,
sort of a transduction idea that our you know, maybe
our soul is beamed into our body and our brain
as sort of like an antenna for our spirit. That

(08:40):
could potentially be explained by entanglement, or maybe it is
a quantum computation, which even though computation is considered more
of a mundane explanation for human experience. It's still fascinating
that we would have evolved quantum computers in our head.
Doesn't feel random anyway, I'm getting off drack. Let me uh,

(09:01):
let me, let me gather my thoughts here. Oh okay.
So they've done experiments and they have shown that microtubules
have a propensity for capturing light. You know, if you
if you shine a coherent laser to microtubule, it captures photons.
And well, that's fascinating because photons are capable of entanglement,

(09:25):
so that's great for this idea of the brain being
a receiver. But also when you apply an anesthetic to
the photons, they aren't as good at capturing photons. So boom,
what an interesting mechanism for consciousness. And they've done this
experiment with controls. It's it's a specific effect of anesthetics

(09:52):
to make your microtubules and your neurons not as good
at capturing photons. I mean, it's amazing, it's an amazing finding.
It's so cool. I'm not sure why this isn't talked
about more, but anyway, so microtubules have always been considered
to be pretty boring structures. They're considered to be part
of your cell skeleton. And you know, motor proteins kind

(10:17):
of use microtubules like railroad tracks to move organelles around
and move vesicles around, and they are able to assemble
and disassemble rapidly to cause the cell to split in half.
So they kind of seem like an odd structure for
the basis of consciousness, but hey, who are we to

(10:41):
question the design, right? So anyway, I'm gonna play a
short clip about this idea from PBS.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Hey everyone, we have some fun new merch at the merch.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Oh, we don't want to plug his merch. Let's pass
the merch. Maybe we should plug his merch.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
Will let you know more at the end of the episode.
Noval Laureate Roger Penrose is widely held to be one
of the most brilliant living physicists for his wide ranging
work on black holes to cosmology, and then there's his
idea about how consciousness is caused by quantum processes. Most
scientists have dismissed this as a cute eccentricity. A guy

(11:23):
like Roger gets to have at least one crazy theory
without being demoted from the super smarty pants club. The
most common argument for this dismissal is that quantum effects
can't survive long enough in an environment as warm and
chaotic as the brain. Well, a new study has revealed
that Penrose's prime candidate molecule for this quantum activity does
indeed exhibit large scale quantum activity. So was Penrose right?

(11:49):
After all? You a quantum entity?

Speaker 1 (11:52):
All right? So well that's interesting. Penrose amazing physicists. He's
kind of been like, people are kind of humoring this
idea of Penrose's, this quantum consciousness idea, because he is
a Nobel Prize winner and he's incredible, and you know,
this does seem a little weird, but people are giving

(12:13):
him some slack. This is the kind of idea you
can't come up with as a new tenor track faculty member.
You need to really have established yourself to come up
with an idea like this. And so in that sense,
I think we should really encourage this, like we should
be really happy that we have scientists taking risks doing

(12:35):
interesting things. On the other hand, I think we need
to just be aware of this insistence on coming up
with scientific words for spiritual for spiritual phenomena. You know,
the question are you a quantum entity? Well, what in

(12:57):
the world would that mean. If we're saying that we've
discovered a mechanism that would allow true consciousness that is
different from the brain's native computational ability, it's something else.
It's an additional higher layer that could involve your brain

(13:24):
being like a receiver of consciousness. This is a spiritual idea.
I know it's as a scientist, I know we will
do anything to avoid looking foolish enough to believe spiritual ideas.
But this is a spiritual idea, and so I just

(13:46):
encourage you know, the scientists out there, don't invent a
new spirituality for yourself because you are so repelled by
the existing religious systems in the world. It could be
that one of them is right right. It could be
that being an atheist and inventing your own spiritual system

(14:09):
is not the right way to go. I don't know.
I'm not I'm not an expert in that, you know,
matter of the soul. But I just I hope we
recognize that we're searching for answers, and that when we
find answers that so neatly fit with existing spiritual ideas,

(14:31):
we shouldn't be so gung ho to come up with
new vocabulary. Anyway, I'm rambling a bit. Let's go, let's
move on to this new study. So so I gotta
mute this place commercial. Okay. So basically the issue with
Penrose's proposal was that, Okay, you have this idea that

(14:54):
the brain is quantum in nature. Cool, whatever, It's a
weird idea, but let's take it seriously. What's you know?
Can we take it seriously? And for many reasons, the
mainstream view is that no, this isn't a serious idea.
And one of the biggest criticisms is that the brain

(15:16):
is not a conducive environment for quantum processes to occur
in if you look at the quantum computers, which who
the freak knows what those things are even good for,
to be honest, But when you look at these, you know,
multimillion dollar quantum computers in Silicon Valley, they're like chilled
down to absolute zero. They're incredibly cold. They're not this

(15:41):
s lukewarm salt water protein cholesterol mush like your brain.
It just goes against everything we know about quantum quantum processes.
So there's a new study, though it's not that new,
it's almost almost a year old at this point. There's
a new study though that kind of puts that objection
into question. Oh sorry, I forget the back.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Most pristine conditions, typically for individual or smallish collections of
subatomic particles and carefully isolated from the environment. Quantum states
decay extremely quickly unless in a vacuum and or near
absolute zero temperature, and the more particles involved in a
quantum state, the more easily the state gets destroyed. That's

(16:25):
why quantum computers are so hard to build. The inside
of the brain is far from a pristine environment. It's
warm and guy and seems thoroughly macroscopic and classical. In
order to do the sort of quantum information processing that
the Penrose Lucas argument demands, a coherent quantum state needs
to be maintained for time scales much longer and evolve

(16:47):
far more particles than should be possible in our meat computers.
When Penrose first published his idea in The Emperor's New Mind,
he had no idea how brains might do quantum processing.
But then along came Stewart Hamroov. Hamroov is an anathesiologist
with a fascination with consciousness and with a molecular structure

(17:07):
inside cells called microtubules, which is suspected may be involved.
Microtubules are these tiny tubes that play many roles in
every cell in your body. They're a major part of
the eukariate cells skeleton, the cytoskeleton, stabilizing its shape. They
act as conveyor belts moving proteins around. They even play

(17:27):
a key role pulling chromosomes apart when a cell divides.
They're constantly being assembled and disassembled and adapt to what
the cell needs in any given moment. A cell might
have billions of these microtubules. Microtubules also have an extremely
regular structure, almost crystal like. They are made of alternating

(17:49):
tubulin molecules of two different types. Those molecules have a
polarity which could point one way or the other. This
structure got Hamroof to thinking that maybe microtubules could in
some way work as molecular computers, or at least some
sort of molecular information storage. Add to this two more hints.
Microtubules are abundant and differently structured in neurons than in

(18:13):
any other cell, and also there's some evidence that anesthetics
may act by disabling microtubules, thereby disabling consciousness. So it's
not so crazy that Hamrov wanted whether these molecules might
actually have some more fundamental role in consciousness. And then
Hamrov read the Emperor's New Mind and reached out to

(18:36):
Penrose with the idea that microtubules could be a candidate
for this quantum information processor inside neurons. That was in
the early nineties. Since then, Penrose and Hamroov and others
have developed some fairly involved scenarios around how this might work.
The basic idea is that information gets stored across one
or actually really many microtubules over multiple neurons. The information,

(18:59):
in the form of quantum bits cubitts, could be stored
in a variety of ways, for example the polarization direction
of individual tubulence. So you have these quantum states that
are networks of intangled cubits and they are in superposition.
That means many possible configurations of the ones and zeros
of the cubits exist simultaneously across microtubules. And then something

(19:23):
happens to collapse this superposition. Some type of measurement causes
a single state to be chosen from the many, and
it's that moment of collapse that Penrose thinks is a
sort of proto conscious moment. So our conscious experience would
then be the sum of these moments happening all the
time across the brain.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
All right, I hadn't actually listened to this clip yet.
I didn't realize. I hope that wasn't too much of
a repeat. But man, isn't this fascinating? Listen? The theme
of my book really is that we in science what
we do you as we we come up with this idea,

(20:02):
we test it, we defend it, and we inevitably find
out that we were wrong. I mean not all some
things are lasting, right, but the friend, you know, the
the cutting edge stuff, you know, it's constantly revealed to
be wrong. We talked about a biogenesis last week, turning

(20:22):
into biogenesis and back to a biogenesis. And you know,
all of our theories, the ones about the things that
are just really difficult to know, like the theory is
about quantum mechanics, and the theories about evolution, and they're
constantly uh, you know, forgive the pun, but evolving. And

(20:43):
sometimes we outright reject theories that used to be consensus,
and then we come up with a new theory that
becomes consensus and then that gets rejected, where it would
be the height of hubris to assume that we know
what consciousness is. Yet that's pretty much what we do

(21:04):
in neuroscience. So I have to, like, I have to
give these guys credit Penrose and hammer Hoff, because they
are being I would say, fiercely humble in one sense,
because they're saying, maybe consciousness is something completely different, maybe
we're completely wrong. But yeah, I just I don't know

(21:30):
if I understand their conclusion ultimately, because they're saying that
there is some sort of information system, which is fascinating.
You know, there's a binary information system encoded within these microtubules,
and that this information system can change using the polarities

(21:54):
of the tubulum molecules, which is a great you know, again,
a great analogy to a compute. Sure, the way information
is encoded and binary polarities on a hard drive. I
get the quantum computer aspect, But the thing is what
is causing the wave function collapse. I don't know if

(22:16):
you caught that. He basically says that these tubulin polarities
exist in a in the photons within the rings of
the microtubul exists in a state of superposition. Of course
they do, because they're unobserved and unmeasured, and so the
question is, well, what causes the waveform collapse? And obviously

(22:39):
we don't know, but one option is that there is
an observer. Maybe that observer is our soul. Maybe that
observer is God. I mean, listen, this is wild speculation
on my part and their part. Nobody knows. But isn't

(23:02):
it exciting that some albeit heterodox, heterodoc scientific theories are
exploring this new alternative explanation of consciousness. And it's not

(23:23):
Sorry again I'm spiraling here, but I get I guess
if you guys don't know, I've been an atheist most
of my life. And the reason was is I just
I thought we disproved God, right, you know, evolution disproved
intelligent design, and neuroscience disproved the idea of a soul,

(23:49):
and you know, all these different fields they proved that
the religious ideas were wrong. But if you look at
the theories carefully, that couldn't be farther from the truth.

(24:09):
We talked last week about abiogenesis not explained by evolution.
This week we're talking about consciousness. We're now talking about
tubulin and photons existing in a state of superposition within
our neurons, and something causes waveform collapse, which causes the

(24:30):
experience of consciousness. Come on, I mean, I'm not saying
they're wrong. The point isn't whether they're right or wrong.
The point is we don't know. So why are we
so certain? Why are the reductionists and the rationalists and
the atheists so certain. Listen, you could accuse the believers

(24:58):
of the same thing, of being too certain, right, The
truth is we don't know. So no one should be
mocked or ridiculed for just making a choice to believe,
because that's essentially what the atheists are doing when they

(25:20):
make a choice to say I don't know what the
answer is. I just know it's not God. Where does
that come from? Where does that certainty come from? Anyway,
That's what I love about this stuff. It opens the door.
These new ideas open the door. And the truth is,

(25:43):
we're not much closer to understanding this stuff today as
we were one hundred years ago. People like Heisenberg and
Plank and Board, they were communicating ideas that sounded a
bit like this, Maybe we'll I'll ever know, But I
know what I believe. All right, guys, please buy the

(26:05):
book God's I View on Amazon. Just sir, just type
in God's I View. Look for a black book with
a big black hole on the cover. My name's Trevor.
Let me know what you think. Email God'siview Book at
gmail dot com. If you want to yell at me
about the book, or say something nice or ask me

(26:28):
a question, please leave me a review. Also check out
our substack, the Hemispheric press dot com substack link in
the episode description. Talk soon, everybody,
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