Part 1: Sir Roger Penrose & Stuart Hameroff: What is Consciousness? (#247)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Science, Physics, Natural Sciences

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A conversation with Nobel Prize Winner and renowned mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Dr. Stuart Hameroff about consciousness and quantum mechanics. 00:00 Intro 01:00 Happy Birthday to Sir Roger! 05:00 Updates to The Emperor's New Mind 07:00 What about Schrödinger’s Cat? Part 2: https://youtu.be/OoDi856wLPM Sir Roger Penrose and Dr. Stuart Hameroff have tackled one of the most vexing problems in science -- how does consciousness work? Their theories of consciousness were selected by the Templeton Foundation for study. We will discuss Is the brain a sophisticated computer or an intuitive thinking device? Following on from their conference in Tucson which pitted Integrated Information Theory (IIT) against Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR), Sir Roger Penrose OM and Stuart Hameroff discuss the current state of theories that might explain human consciousness and objections to them from FQXI and others. Sir Roger Penrose describe examples of ‘non-computability’ in human consciousness, thoughts and actions such as the way we evaluate particular chess positions which cast doubt on ‘Turing’ computation as a complete explanation of brain function. As a source of non-computability, Roger discuss his ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) self-collapse of the quantum wavefunction which is a potential resolution for the ‘measurement problem’ in quantum mechanics, and a mechanism for non-computable physics. Dr. Stuart Hameroff reviews neuronal and biophysical aspects of Orch OR, in which ‘orchestrated’ quantum vibrations occur among entangled brain microtubules and evolve toward Orch OR threshold and consciousness. The nature, feasibility, decoherence times and evidence for quantum vibrations in microtubules, their role and correlation with consciousness, effects upon them of anesthetic gases and psychedelic drug molecules will be discussed, along with Orch OR criticisms and predictions of microtubule quantum vibrations as therapeutic targets for mental and cognitive disorders. Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join Shortform through my link Shortform.com/impossible and you’ll receive 5 days of unlimited access and an additional 20% discounted annual subscription! Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast! On Apple devices, click here, scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here on @audible_com it’s here and other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Please join my mailing list; click here https://briankeating.com/list for your chance to win real space dust!! A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello Quantum Brains. You are in for a real treat with this special two-part episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with your fearful host.
0:15.4	Dr. Brian Keating, it is I who is still emerging from Pandemic Podcasting featuring one of my first
0:21.5	most eminent guests who came on way back in early 2020 and that is or 2019 maybe even
0:27.0	And that is Sir Roger Penrose I've had him on many times and this time we had him on to talk about a controversy or as he would say
0:35.1	controversy regarding some claimed evidence against his model of
0:42.1	gravitational collapse of the wave
0:43.9	function that implies the conscious experience that we experience in our
0:48.5	brains, courtesy of little devices engineered by Mother Nature or God, if you will, called microtubules.
0:55.0	So it's a very complex theory. It's called the orchestrated objective reality reduction,
1:00.0	a lot of honors, a lot of oars. And it's been trans fixing many people for decades, and now there's evidence
1:06.3	against this from an experiment, but we talked about that with famed theoretical physicists
1:11.3	or Roger Penrose.
1:13.0	And his colleague in all things consciousness related,
1:16.2	at least in the squishy wet computer that sits on our shoulders,
1:18.8	and that's Dr. Stuart Hammeroff,
1:20.4	who's an anesthesiologist, but a very interesting scientist as well.
1:24.0	And Stewart has been doing experiments on living tissue for many many years
1:31.0	since he wrote to Sir Roger after reading the Emperor's new mind which I read as a
1:35.0	15 year old.
1:36.0	I didn't say I understood it but I read it at least and I was tickled pink when he
1:39.1	endorsed my first book losing the Nobel Prize before he would go on to win the Nobel Prize as you'll find
1:44.2	out.
	...

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