Online research in philosophy

Today we’re talking with Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus at the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies, at the University of Arizona. Dr Hameroff is best-known for his research on 'quantum consciousness', an alternative model to the accepted view of how consciousness arises. With Sir Roger Penrose, Dr Hameroff has proposed that consciousness arises at the quantum level within structures inside neurons, known as microtubules.

_Sonoran Desert, Stuart Hameroff and Alwyn Scott awoke from their_ _siestas to take margaritas in the shade of a ramada. On a nearby_ _table, a tape recorder had accidentally been left on and the following_ _is an unedited transcript of their conversation._.

In "Brainshy: Non-neural theories of conscious experience," (this volume) Patricia Churchland considers three "non-neural" approaches to the puzzle of consciousness: 1) Chalmers' fundamental information, 2) Searle's "intrinsic" property of brain, and 3) Penrose-Hameroff quantum phenomena in microtubules. In rejecting these ideas, Churchland flies the flag of "neuralism." She claims that conscious experience will be totally and completely explained by the dynamical complexity of properties at the level of neurons and neural networks. As far as consciousness goes, neural network firing patterns (...) triggered by axon-to-dendrite synaptic chemical transmissions are the fundamental correlates of consciousness. There is no need to look elsewhere. (shrink)

Hameroff: I became interested in understanding consciousness as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 60's. In my third year of medical school at Hahnemann in Philadelphia I did a research elective in professor Ben Kahn's hematology-oncology lab. They were studying various types of malignant blood cells, and I became interested in mitosis-looking under the microscope at normal and abnormal cell division. I became fascinated by centrioles and mitotic spindles pulling apart the chromosomes, doing this little dance, (...) dividing the cytoplasm, establishing the daughter-cell architecture, and beginning differentiation. I remember wondering to myself how these centrioles and mitotic spindles "knew" where to go and what to do. What kind of intelligence was running the show at the cellular level? (shrink)

Dynamical activities within living eukaryotic cells are organized by microtubules, main structural components of the cytoskeleton and cylindrical polymers of the protein tubulin. Evidence and theoretical models suggest that states of tubulin may play the role of “bits” in classical microtubule computational automata. The advent of quantum information devices, key roles played by quantum processes in protein dynamics, and coherent ordering in the cell cytoplasm further suggest that microtubules may function as quantum computational devices, and that mesoscopic and macroscopic quantum (...) states are characteristic of living systems. In this paper new results from molecular dynamics simulation based on recently obtained atomic structure of tubulin are presented which provide support for classical and quantum modes of microtubule information processing. (shrink)

Stuart Hameroff, M.D., is a doctor of medicine, a professor of anesthesiology and psychology, as well as associate director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at University of Arizona. Through a collaboration with mathematical physicist, Prof Sir Roger Penrose, Prof Hameroff is leading the assault on mainstream thinking about the human mind and how it is that we come to be. Forget space exploration. Forget biotechnology. Forget nanobots. Forget sea monkeys. The final frontier of science is reading this article right (...) now - and there's a very good reason why physicists call it "the hard problem".. (shrink)