Experimental Support for Penrose' View of Consciousness

 

Roger Penrose, a great astrophysicist, did some moonlighting in the worlds of neurology and neuropsychology in the late 1980s, and he developed a theory a quantum theory of consciousness. The idea behind it was (and is, in later more-developed forms) that microtubules, particularly those in neurons, are small enough so that quantum effects become pertinent in understanding their operations.

Penrose contended that quantum physics allows for deterministic but non-algorithmic processes, and that these may be harnessed by the operations of the brain, resulting in consciousness. To put the idea crudely, using an old image, the microtubule is the closed box inside which a “cat” is both dead and alive.

To refine that a bit: Penrose tells us that there must be a border zone where quantum effects still exist but are becoming of less salience as scales increase toward those of the world of Newtonian physics, the world of what Bertrand Russell once called "medium sized dry goods." The size of a microtubule, a protein in cylindrical form within a cell, is right for postulating that events there, especially in the neurons, are within the border zone. 

Penrose believes that there are important limits to the development of artificial intelligence that derive from this fact. Digital computers are algorithmic, and each bit is either “on” or “off.” There is no superposition of on with off such as can happen in a quantum world. Thus digital computers can never become intelligent in the way in which humans are.

Although Penrose has continued to elaborate these theories over recent decades, the predominant response of mainstream neurology has been disapproval.

Yet an experimental team led by Jack Tuszynski at the University of Alberta in Canada has just found that anesthetic drugs allow microtubules to re-emit trapped light in a much shorter time than originally thought. Specifically, they emit light more quickly than light emitted by non-anesthesized microtubules. This is potentially important.

If consciousness is an active process working through the microtubules, then the removal of consciousness from the picture, which is of course the whole point of anaesthesia, may change the energy dynamics there. Was the light “trapped” because of the same quantum effects that show up as consciousness and intelligence? Is the trap released as the anaesthesia takes over? It is intriguing thought, and will surely be the subject of follow-up research.