SH:
Yes. Something from consciousness contributes to intelligence. I
agree. Now in Chalmers' strict definition of zombies, it's
someone that's indistinguishable. But I think in fact, that might
be impossible. I think in principle it's possible, but I agree with
you. In almost all likelihood, consciousness would enhance
intelligence. It would do things like you say: creativity, feedback.
Absolutely. It's exactly what Roger Penrose described as
non-computable. Something unpredictable. So if two primitive
organisms are in a predator versus prey relationship, and one has
non-computable processes, he's going to outfox the other one every
time, because he's not going to be predictable. Otherwise, it would
be like tic-tac-toe, and inevitable, but it's not.
BD: What are your thoughts on free will, and how do they relate to the two theories?
SH: Well the neurocomputational approach is basically this: if you measure evoked potentials that correspond to actions--in other words, you're hitting a tennis ball, and due to the evoked potential where the tennis ball is seen and the time you can hit it, you've already swung. And therefore they conclude that consciousness is epiphenomenal. That we act non-consciously on auto-pilot/zombie mode and consciousness happens after the fact. Yet we believe we act consciously. The party line is that we act unconsciously, reflexively, and have this false illusion after the fact that we had conscious control. And that's Dennett, Wegner--nearly everybody in mainstream neuroscience and philosophy says that. Therefore consciousness is epiphenomenal, we're merely conscious automata, as Huxley said, but also illusion. Because, then if you add Dennett's idea of multiple drafts in which what we call consciousness is merely stored memory, consciousness is illusion. So it may or may not bear any relation to what actually happened in terms of sensory processing. But you can't have free will in that scenario, because consciousness happens too late. So we're epiphenomenal. So neurocomputation: no, no free will.
Now, if you look at the work of Ben Libet, he did these amazing experiments in the ˜70s which seemed to show that conscious experiences is referred backward in time, about half a second in the brain. And I won't go into the experiments. You can read about it on my website in a paper called "Consciousness, Neurobiology, and Quantum Mechanics: A Case for a Connection. There's a section there on time and Libet and so forth. And Roger Penrose first picked up on this when he wrote that in quantum mechanics, what appears to be from our perspective backward time effects can happen. It might be more correct to say that in a quantum physics world, there's no flow of time. It's timeless. But from our perspective it appears that something's gone backwards in time, from the near future to the present. And in fact that's a main theory of quantum entanglement, on how quantum entanglement works, to account for non-locality. But in any case, the backward time effect, as shown by Libet experimentally, and Radin and Bierman in terms of presentiment and possibly a whole lot of other data that were generally ignored, may occur routinely.
There may actually be this backward time effect going on. And if that's the case, that allows consciousness to be occurring at the time the action is taken. Which means that quantum mechanics, and I think only quantum mechanics of some sort, can allow free will to actually occur. Because it puts consciousness in the here and now--the moment at which the action is taken. Consciousness can be real and in the here-and-now, but only with quantum mechanisms in the brain.
Now there's another problem with whether, okay let's say we have real time conscious control. There is still the issue of deterministic versus non-deterministic processes. And for that, Penrose comes in with non-computability, influence from Platonic information in the universe. In a sense that's also deterministic, although changing. But from this computational system, it appears non-deterministic. Which I think is the closest you can come to free will. The experience of acting in a way that's a combination of algorithmic processes, both classical and quantum, and at the moment of conscious choice, of collapse, of consciousness, some non-computable influence from--who knows, the Platonic realm, or somewhere. So it's the experience of the combination of those things that gives the sense of free will. And I think that's pretty good. I would take that.
BD:
So do you think the scientific community is receptive to paradigm
shift?
SH: No. [Laughs] They're not. They're like politicians preserving the status quo. They're very resistant. There's something else, though, that goes back ages. And that is science versus mysticism, or science versus religion, or science versus theology--whatever you want to call it. Because when you talk about quantum modes of consciousness, you get into situations that sound a lot like spirituality, or non-locality, or some kind of cosmic wisdom even--the Penrose non-computable Platonic influence. And even the possibility of consciousness persisting outside of the body, or after death. Scientists don't like to blur that line. And the first reaction is--oh they're crazy, they're mystics, they're whackos. But we're not. At least I'm not. I've come to these conclusions by a very rational, long process. But I think all those things are plausible. I'm trying to make a plausibility argument for it, not to prove it. I don't claim to prove any particular example of paranormal or spiritual effects. But I think such things are possible, because if consciousness is quantum and non-local, then anything is possible, pretty much. Because it's non-local in both space and time.
Now I will say that we might be able to actually measure or detect consciousness with a technology called a photon echo, which is used to detect quantum coherence in systems--in biological systems--and that's what's been showing this warm quantum coherence in the last few years in photosynthesis, for example. But it's also been applied to the human retina in a conscious person. It's actually used to image the retina rod and cone cells. And it gives this quantum signal. We actually put in a grant for this a few years ago, and they said it was impossible, it couldn't happen. And then somebody just started using the exact same technique to image rods and cones in the retina, and they found it. So I think this could be developed as a kind of measure of consciousness. So everything I'm saying is potentially testable.
BD: Is this dogmatic resistance in the institution of science a problem, and is there anything we can do about it?
SH: Just keep grinding away at ˜em. To some extent they'll come around. And if you can't beat ˜em, join ˜em. So for example, I'm going to speak at the Singularity Summit. And I've been anathema to AI, because I've been saying since the 1980s that the information computational capability in one neuron at the microtubule level is as great as they say the entire brain is. In other words, they say 10 to the eleventh neurons switching about 10 to the three per second, and 10 to the three synapses gives about 10 to the 16th or 10 to the 17th bits per second in the brain. Now if you look at microtubules, 10 to the 7th to 10 to the 8th tubulin sub-units per neuron, switching at the nanosecond--or actually probably megahertz--you get about 10 to the 15th, almost that much, in one neuron at the microtubule level. So that pushes their goal post for brain equivalence way, way down stream. So they don't like that. But they're also going nanotech and biomolecular, and that's where I've been all along. Quantum effects are inevitable. So anyway, we'll see how that goes.
BD: It seems like in the West, much more so than in the East, there seems to be a division between spirituality and rational investigation. So on the one hand, we have the scientific community, which wants to look at things rationally, think critically, analyze things, but they don't want to deal with questions of spirituality. And on the other hand, we have a spiritual discourse, but with a few notable exceptions, it doesn't seem too critical.
SH: It's a dualism. It's a basic dualism. And it's one of many dualisms that may be illusory. That's exactly the topic of our conference Science and Non-Duality in October out in San Francisco. So that's exactly what it's all about. Mind and matter, quantum/classical, good and evil even. Non-duality comes from a kind of Eastern, Vedantic tradition, where they want to get underneath everything to the ground of being. And I think the ground of being that they're describing is spacetime symmetry, at the quantum level--well, below the quantum level. The Planck-scale, actually. Quantum gravity, essentially. It's infinitesimally tiny, but it's also everywhere. And it's granular--there's information there. And it may be fractal and holographic, which means that the forces can reach across to the biological level, acting collectively, and exert significant force to leverage proteins to cause conformational switches and therefore govern biological activity. That's basically what Orch OR is, really, on the biological end. So we can bridge the gap through some clever evolutionary engineering and microtubules. And that's exactly what we do, I believe.
BD: The only other contemporary scientist I know of to take the avant-garde position in terms of researching consciousness scientifically from within the scientific community--other than you and Penrose--would be Rupert Sheldrake and his research on the feeling of being stared at, etc.
SH: Rupert's an experimentalist. We had him at the Tucson conference. And he postulates some kind of morphic resonance, some kind of field, but he doesn't go into the physics of it. So he's done a lot of experimental work showing non-locality. But I don't see that as a theory of consciousness in terms of the brain. It's more just experimentally derived results which can be explained by quantum non-locality. But anyway, he's a good guy.
BD: So I guess you might take an agnostic position as to whether his work and your own might dovetail--are there connections between the two?
SH: Yeah, absolutely. This is exactly what I was saying before. I think there's a lot of paranormal--so called para-psychological results--including Rupert's results, including all kinds of effects that have been reported. And I think some of it at least is true. And cannot be accounted for by classical physics. But quantum physics can explain it through entanglement. I think virtually any effect--the sense of being stared at, the dog knowing when the owner's coming home--it's all just entanglement between conscious minds. Now as a matter of fact, you know that J. B. Rhine was at the founding of parapsychology in this country? He was at Duke. So anyway, I'm going back east, and to make a long story short, they invited me to give a talk. So first I'm going to talk about consciousness, and then they're going to have case studies of paranormal effects, and then I'm going to try to explain them from a quantum physics aspect with some skeptics trying to shoot me down. So that should be fun.
BD: What are your thoughts on free will, and how do they relate to the two theories?
SH: Well the neurocomputational approach is basically this: if you measure evoked potentials that correspond to actions--in other words, you're hitting a tennis ball, and due to the evoked potential where the tennis ball is seen and the time you can hit it, you've already swung. And therefore they conclude that consciousness is epiphenomenal. That we act non-consciously on auto-pilot/zombie mode and consciousness happens after the fact. Yet we believe we act consciously. The party line is that we act unconsciously, reflexively, and have this false illusion after the fact that we had conscious control. And that's Dennett, Wegner--nearly everybody in mainstream neuroscience and philosophy says that. Therefore consciousness is epiphenomenal, we're merely conscious automata, as Huxley said, but also illusion. Because, then if you add Dennett's idea of multiple drafts in which what we call consciousness is merely stored memory, consciousness is illusion. So it may or may not bear any relation to what actually happened in terms of sensory processing. But you can't have free will in that scenario, because consciousness happens too late. So we're epiphenomenal. So neurocomputation: no, no free will.
Now, if you look at the work of Ben Libet, he did these amazing experiments in the ˜70s which seemed to show that conscious experiences is referred backward in time, about half a second in the brain. And I won't go into the experiments. You can read about it on my website in a paper called "Consciousness, Neurobiology, and Quantum Mechanics: A Case for a Connection. There's a section there on time and Libet and so forth. And Roger Penrose first picked up on this when he wrote that in quantum mechanics, what appears to be from our perspective backward time effects can happen. It might be more correct to say that in a quantum physics world, there's no flow of time. It's timeless. But from our perspective it appears that something's gone backwards in time, from the near future to the present. And in fact that's a main theory of quantum entanglement, on how quantum entanglement works, to account for non-locality. But in any case, the backward time effect, as shown by Libet experimentally, and Radin and Bierman in terms of presentiment and possibly a whole lot of other data that were generally ignored, may occur routinely.
There may actually be this backward time effect going on. And if that's the case, that allows consciousness to be occurring at the time the action is taken. Which means that quantum mechanics, and I think only quantum mechanics of some sort, can allow free will to actually occur. Because it puts consciousness in the here and now--the moment at which the action is taken. Consciousness can be real and in the here-and-now, but only with quantum mechanisms in the brain.
Now there's another problem with whether, okay let's say we have real time conscious control. There is still the issue of deterministic versus non-deterministic processes. And for that, Penrose comes in with non-computability, influence from Platonic information in the universe. In a sense that's also deterministic, although changing. But from this computational system, it appears non-deterministic. Which I think is the closest you can come to free will. The experience of acting in a way that's a combination of algorithmic processes, both classical and quantum, and at the moment of conscious choice, of collapse, of consciousness, some non-computable influence from--who knows, the Platonic realm, or somewhere. So it's the experience of the combination of those things that gives the sense of free will. And I think that's pretty good. I would take that.
SH: No. [Laughs] They're not. They're like politicians preserving the status quo. They're very resistant. There's something else, though, that goes back ages. And that is science versus mysticism, or science versus religion, or science versus theology--whatever you want to call it. Because when you talk about quantum modes of consciousness, you get into situations that sound a lot like spirituality, or non-locality, or some kind of cosmic wisdom even--the Penrose non-computable Platonic influence. And even the possibility of consciousness persisting outside of the body, or after death. Scientists don't like to blur that line. And the first reaction is--oh they're crazy, they're mystics, they're whackos. But we're not. At least I'm not. I've come to these conclusions by a very rational, long process. But I think all those things are plausible. I'm trying to make a plausibility argument for it, not to prove it. I don't claim to prove any particular example of paranormal or spiritual effects. But I think such things are possible, because if consciousness is quantum and non-local, then anything is possible, pretty much. Because it's non-local in both space and time.
Now I will say that we might be able to actually measure or detect consciousness with a technology called a photon echo, which is used to detect quantum coherence in systems--in biological systems--and that's what's been showing this warm quantum coherence in the last few years in photosynthesis, for example. But it's also been applied to the human retina in a conscious person. It's actually used to image the retina rod and cone cells. And it gives this quantum signal. We actually put in a grant for this a few years ago, and they said it was impossible, it couldn't happen. And then somebody just started using the exact same technique to image rods and cones in the retina, and they found it. So I think this could be developed as a kind of measure of consciousness. So everything I'm saying is potentially testable.
BD: Is this dogmatic resistance in the institution of science a problem, and is there anything we can do about it?
SH: Just keep grinding away at ˜em. To some extent they'll come around. And if you can't beat ˜em, join ˜em. So for example, I'm going to speak at the Singularity Summit. And I've been anathema to AI, because I've been saying since the 1980s that the information computational capability in one neuron at the microtubule level is as great as they say the entire brain is. In other words, they say 10 to the eleventh neurons switching about 10 to the three per second, and 10 to the three synapses gives about 10 to the 16th or 10 to the 17th bits per second in the brain. Now if you look at microtubules, 10 to the 7th to 10 to the 8th tubulin sub-units per neuron, switching at the nanosecond--or actually probably megahertz--you get about 10 to the 15th, almost that much, in one neuron at the microtubule level. So that pushes their goal post for brain equivalence way, way down stream. So they don't like that. But they're also going nanotech and biomolecular, and that's where I've been all along. Quantum effects are inevitable. So anyway, we'll see how that goes.
BD: It seems like in the West, much more so than in the East, there seems to be a division between spirituality and rational investigation. So on the one hand, we have the scientific community, which wants to look at things rationally, think critically, analyze things, but they don't want to deal with questions of spirituality. And on the other hand, we have a spiritual discourse, but with a few notable exceptions, it doesn't seem too critical.
SH: It's a dualism. It's a basic dualism. And it's one of many dualisms that may be illusory. That's exactly the topic of our conference Science and Non-Duality in October out in San Francisco. So that's exactly what it's all about. Mind and matter, quantum/classical, good and evil even. Non-duality comes from a kind of Eastern, Vedantic tradition, where they want to get underneath everything to the ground of being. And I think the ground of being that they're describing is spacetime symmetry, at the quantum level--well, below the quantum level. The Planck-scale, actually. Quantum gravity, essentially. It's infinitesimally tiny, but it's also everywhere. And it's granular--there's information there. And it may be fractal and holographic, which means that the forces can reach across to the biological level, acting collectively, and exert significant force to leverage proteins to cause conformational switches and therefore govern biological activity. That's basically what Orch OR is, really, on the biological end. So we can bridge the gap through some clever evolutionary engineering and microtubules. And that's exactly what we do, I believe.
BD: The only other contemporary scientist I know of to take the avant-garde position in terms of researching consciousness scientifically from within the scientific community--other than you and Penrose--would be Rupert Sheldrake and his research on the feeling of being stared at, etc.
SH: Rupert's an experimentalist. We had him at the Tucson conference. And he postulates some kind of morphic resonance, some kind of field, but he doesn't go into the physics of it. So he's done a lot of experimental work showing non-locality. But I don't see that as a theory of consciousness in terms of the brain. It's more just experimentally derived results which can be explained by quantum non-locality. But anyway, he's a good guy.
BD: So I guess you might take an agnostic position as to whether his work and your own might dovetail--are there connections between the two?
SH: Yeah, absolutely. This is exactly what I was saying before. I think there's a lot of paranormal--so called para-psychological results--including Rupert's results, including all kinds of effects that have been reported. And I think some of it at least is true. And cannot be accounted for by classical physics. But quantum physics can explain it through entanglement. I think virtually any effect--the sense of being stared at, the dog knowing when the owner's coming home--it's all just entanglement between conscious minds. Now as a matter of fact, you know that J. B. Rhine was at the founding of parapsychology in this country? He was at Duke. So anyway, I'm going back east, and to make a long story short, they invited me to give a talk. So first I'm going to talk about consciousness, and then they're going to have case studies of paranormal effects, and then I'm going to try to explain them from a quantum physics aspect with some skeptics trying to shoot me down. So that should be fun.
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