Fall Asleep Counting Quantum Sheep
Roger Penrose’s research on protein tubulars may have solved the oldest mystery of all. Why we’re here and what “here” really means.
“When one considers pioneering capitalism in the context of the Copenhagen interpretation, the “unknowability” is transformed into an asset from entropy. Don’t be afraid of the dark. Have a wonderful day.” — The secret of consciousness.
In 2020, Penrose was awarded one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity. At some point the caliber of the person justifies a closer look at something which at first seems uninteresting. If a noted scientist does something significant enough isn’t it selfish of us to completely ignore their pet projects? Seems like a small price, to endure some more radical explorations by a brilliant person, in exchange for countless beneficial contributions.
According to the Copenhagen interpretation, physical systems generally do not have definite properties prior to being measured, and quantum mechanics can only predict the probability distribution of a given measurement’s possible results. The act of measurement affects the system, causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement. This feature is known as wave function collapse.
The anthropic principle begins where the uncertainty principle ends. Consciousness does not drive will. Will seeks production. Consciousness is just a utility of convenience to optimize returns. Where it fails sleep reins, and where it succeeds our dreams become reality.
Regardless of the true nature of reality we are most immediately bound within a complex reflection of information through which we sail the endless seas of possibility. Consciousness may just be the Universe’s least costly means of denoising quantum expressions.
Watch Sir Penrose discuss his ideas with Lex Fridman on April 4, 2020.
We could be pluralized dream elements of one massive unconscious quantum being, appearing in fractalized multitude through a sort of grand cosmic trick of perspective. (If you can get through these first paragraphs you might make it all the way. Thanks for reading my weird thoughts!)
I mean massive in the literary sense not mass; otherwise I’d use the word massless cause the quantum doesn’t weigh anything. Ha ha …snort…snark…snicker….that’d be ridiculous.
Awareness, understanding, intelligence. — Penrose
Surely consciousness is a power on scope with gravity and the like in magnitude. Its potential only grows.
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.” — Bill Hicks [The only modification I’d make to this is that I think we may be one UNCONSCIOUS quantum being.]
In 1996 Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff penned what I think may become the most important scientific theory of my generation and remains the most specific and plausible model for consciousness yet proposed. It was titled Orchestrated Objective Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules: The “Orch OR” Model for Consciousness. It posits that consciousness is an effect of quantum coherence facilitated by physical structures in the brain. Its implications for the meaning of life, thought, and the nature of reality are profound.
We know definitively as of July, 2020 that “Quantum fluctuations can jiggle objects on the human scale” so it seems the distance between consciousness and quantum reality may be narrowing...
Aspects of quantum theory (e.g. quantum coherence) and of a newly proposed physical phenomenon of quantum wave function “self-collapse”(objective reduction: OR — Penrose, 1994) are essential for consciousness, and occur in cytoskeletal microtubules and other structures within each of the brain’s neurons.
Read the full paper here. I hope you love math like I do! and watch Joe Rogan’s JRE podcast where Sir Roger discusses his theory of consciousness.
For 20+ years this theory has been dismissed politely as probably wrong, often called a crackpot theory taken seriously only on the merits of the authors. Of which Sir Roger Penrose in particular is considered not just a genuine genius, but one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. Possibly the most famous theoretical physicist alive today with the passing of Stephen Hawking on March 14th, 2018. Perhaps it’s better described as incomplete… what is the difference between the A lattice and B lattice?
In 2014 quantum vibrations where detected in microtubulars within neurons as predicted appearing to corroborate the possibilities claimed by Penrose and his team at the Penrose Institute. With this break-through has come renewed interest in the field of consciousness study and in the original 1996 theory.
It suggests that EEG rhythms (brain waves) also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations, and that from a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions. — Source
It seems quantum coherence and self-collapse may be the first substantial examples of forward progress in arguably the most difficult of scientific pursuits. A plausible and now possibly measurable explanation of mind itself. A state of being one might almost call a soul, independent of the physical geometry of our living form. No this isn’t magic and it isn’t religion. This is, believe it or not, backed by math and measurement.
While on the face of it the general scientific consensus resists its implication it can’t be ignored entirely. The evidence is building… that we may be immortal… in a sense and have always been and will always be… something… somewhere… for some reason. Explore the original theory, compare it to the 20+ years of research since and then consider its implications with an open mind.
The particular characteristics of microtubules suitable for quantum effects include their crystal-like lattice structure, hollow inner core, organization of cell function and capacity for information processing. We envisage that conformational states of microtubule subunits (tubulins) are coupled to internal quantum events, and cooperatively interact (compute) with other tubulins.
Protogenesis n. The origination of living from not-living matter; abiogenesis.
Is consciousness a product of capitalization driven by the primordial force “will” which is entropy’s “equal and opposite” reaction?
What is life really? A quantum engine forging… what exactly? What is time and space if we exist between all time and space? An opportunity. What’s possible with it and where does it lead us? What problem is it trying to solve? Boredom? By understanding a little more about how consciousness functions maybe we can extract hints of its purpose. Find practical applications like treating mental illness.
If we exist in an infinite reality beneath/within/around the physical world we’re accustomed to then it’s not life alone which is the engine of progress but reality in concert, we’re the fuel feeding the capacity to produce new ideas. We’re composing reality as we go along.
If unconsciousness is a quantum singularity then consciousness is a quantum plurality. Therefore coherence, requiring orchestration, demands plurality and thus consciousness. Unconscious is incoherent and a singularity because two incoherences is indistinguishable from one. It also explains why only in the waking state does one generate the quantum capital, though in the transition of in to out, just as you can be confused upon first waking you can be dreaming when first sleeping.
On the extreme end of interpretation WE, in the plural sense, may not exist at all. We could be pluralized dream elements of one massive unconscious quantum being, appearing in fractalized multitude through a sort of grand cosmic trick of perspective. An inversion of the body’s illusion of singularity as it is in fact, in this world anyway, an ecosystem of independent life forms. Some of which contain tubular structures of their own. From a certain point of view it appears plurality requires consciousness to distinguish itself from the unconscious singularity. While returning to the unconscious relieves the burden of being separated from the whole if even for a moment.
We further assume that macroscopic coherent superposition of quantum-coupled tubulin conformational states occurs throughout significant brain volumes and provides the global binding essential to consciousness. We equate the emergence of the microtubule quantum coherence with pre-conscious processing which grows (for up to 500 milliseconds) until the mass-energy difference among the separated states of tubulins reaches a threshold related to quantum gravity.
We may be a scattered reflection producing meaningful relativity in causality bubbles which float through the infinite quantum expanse forever. What’s the consequence of this coherence on our typical incoherent existence? What do we earn here? Do we take something “back with us” or are we generating “valuable” quantum vibrations in every moment? In brain, adding texture to an otherwise radically averaged landscape where everything happens and therefor nothing matters. No relative value. All “choices” being random in perpetuity.
Is consciousness an instrument through which our quantum reality is elevated beyond timeless enumeration? In a landscape where all information is nullified by a spectrum of reflective activity is life the sacred geometry facilitating mind which allows coherent quantum vibration that isn’t nullified by the noise and instead becomes focused, if only for 500 milliseconds, in a structure not for our biological benefit but for something much deeper. We live in a parallel series of half second moments. Alive then dead. Off and on. Zero and one. Like a cryptic binary drawn through a quantum processor.
Superpositioned states each have their own space-time geometries. When the degree of coherent mass-energy difference leads to sufficient separation of space-time geometry, the system must choose and decay (reduce, collapse) to a single universe state. In this way, a transient superposition of slightly differing space-time geometries persists until an abrupt quantum classical reduction occurs. Unlike the random, “subjective reduction”(SR, or R) of standard quantum theory caused by observation or environmental entanglement, the OR we propose in microtubules is a self-collapse and it results in particular patterns of microtubule-tubulin conformational states that regulate neuronal activities including synaptic functions.
Even one moment, just one moment of neurological life is valuable and irreplaceable. Not because it necessarily adds anything significant to this world, but simply by processing any part, in any measurable minimum, the compounding coherence of physical reality for content in the beyond. “Afterlife”, in other words, isn’t built for humans or biology, but instead it’s what we’ve built into the “BeforeLife” simply by thinking. It appears that thought is the high order bit; not life itself per se. The specifics are consequential and never inevitable.
Capital gain, not by pumping blood through a heart or breathing air through our lungs, but instead those things are just part of the required work of keeping neurons alive and processing as long as possible. Experiencing that which is already here and then creating new experiences to produce unique vibrations impossible to imagine without the lens through which to examine it. We are conservation of energy personified. And while immortality on this plane would almost certainly undermine all our accomplishments eventually, too, a quantum immortality can stand apart. Benefiting from every moment served here or anywhere in greater or lesser measure.
Dark matter and dark energy are the yin and yang of the cosmos. Dark matter produces an attractive force (gravity), while dark energy produces a repulsive force (antigravity). What is dark energy? More is unknown than is known — we know how much there is, and we know some of its properties; other than that, dark energy is a mystery — but an important one. Roughly 70% of the Universe is made of dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 25%. — NASA
By extrapolation one might conclude that the expansion of the Universe we typically attribute to dark matter/energy may in fact be less a manufacturing process and more a capitalization process. That the introduction of new ideas makes the Universe bigger in addition to empirical expansion. Things are not so much pushed as they are grown. Significant information, quantum or otherwise, is cultivated and compounded.
Mainstream science was looking in the wrong place for consciousness assuming it to be a programmable consequence of physical interactions. It is in fact a creative process. Just as Artificial Intelligence fails to capture the true spirit of quantum thought, so too, does reductive materialism in the traditional sense fail to explain the expansion of the space in which physical realty exists as it does. Even Google’s ballyhooed quantum approximate optimization algorithm, or QAOA, has its limits.
Possibilities and probabilities for post-reduction tubulin states are influenced by factors including attachments of microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs) acting as “nodes” which tune and “orchestrate” the quantum oscillations. We thus term the self-tuning OR process in microtubules “orchestrated objective reduction”(“B>Orch OR”, and calculate an estimate for the number of tubulins (and neurons) whose coherence for relevant time periods (e.g. 500 milliseconds) will elicit Orch OR. In providing a connection among 1) pre-conscious to conscious transition, 2) fundamental space-time notions, 3) non-computability, and 4) binding of various (time scale and spatial) reductions into an instantaneous event (“conscious now”).
It could be that death is no more significant than shutting off a light bulb, and just as easily… under the right circumstances… we could turn ourselves or others back on. Death may be a condition, not a state, not a place, not a veil between realities. We are where we’ve always been, because there is no there in the absolute sense, there is no here.
Space is information, not a place, and time is even less tangible. Possibly a misinterpretation of cause and effect. There is only reality, the infinite expanse, and the bubbles of coherence we call the multi-verse which enrich the endless experience of eternity. Perhaps we’re not so much alive or dead as just aware or unaware. If so then death is the reality we never escaped and to which are always meant to “return”. Life is a dream informing it. To what end, though? Does there even have to be one?
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” — Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Life transform chaos into order and back again with quantum entanglements generated through conscious choice. Some call this meaning.
