Stuart Hameroff, MD

Overview

The nature of consciousness remains deeply mysterious and profoundly important, with existential, medical and spiritual implications. We know what it is like to be conscious – to have awareness, a conscious ‘mind’ – but who, or what, are ‘we’ who know such things? How is the subjective nature of phenomenal experience – our ‘inner life’ – to be explained in scientific terms? What consciousness actually is, and how it comes about, remain unknown.

The general assumption in modern science and philosophy is that consciousness emerges from complex computation among simple brain neurons, computation whose currency is usually seen as axonal firings (‘spikes’) and synaptic transmissions. These occur at the neuronal surface membrane level, and spikes are often equated with information ‘bits’ in digital computing. But this approach fails to account for phenomenal conscious experience, and relegates consciousness to epiphenomenal illusion, occurring too late for real-time conscious control of our seemingly conscious actions.

Rather than a computer of neurons, an alternative possibility is that the brain is a multi-scale hierarchy, with self-similar information patterns resonating, interfering and undergoing quantum state reductions across multiple fractal-like levels of scale, resulting in consciousness being more like music than computation.

When did consciousness arise? The brain-as-computer view presumes consciousness ‘emerged’ during biological evolution, perhaps fairly recently. On the other hand, spiritual and contemplative traditions, and scientists and philosophers embracing panpsychism — and the ‘Orch OR’ theory — may consider consciousness to be intrinsic, somehow ‘woven into the fabric of the universe’, having existed all along in the fine-scale structure of reality and fundamental spacetime geometry, and somehow accessible to conscious organisms. In the panpsychist / Orch OR views, conscious precursors and Platonic forms preceded life, possibly prompting its origin and driving its evolution.

Read how the Orch OR theory developed →