The Science of Consciousness: Quantum Mechanics and Spirituality | Stuart Hameroff

Stuart, in general, neuroscience would demythologize the world and really, although people would not like to say this, eliminating the possibility of religious views in totality. How does your view of consciousness at the quantum scale, how would that potentially articulate with religious or spiritual or cosmic consciousness kinds of views? I think consciousness is happening in the brain, in the microtubules, but at the level of fundamental space-time geometry. Now, when the blood stops flowing and the oxygen stops being delivered, the quantum coherence, the membrane physiology goes first and eventually the microtubule coherence is lost. The conscious information, quantum information and memory encoded in microtubules, encoded in the Planck scale geometry of the microtubules isn't necessarily lost, but can dissipate to the universe at large, become non-local, remaining in Planck scale geometry or some level of the universe, but remain entangled as a unit, as a quantum soul, if you will, by entanglement. So I think, I don't argue that this occurs. I don't have definite evidence, although there's a lot of interesting effects now at end-of-life brain activity with high coherent gamma burst and that sort of thing. Why would that be possible evidence of such an extreme position that you've just said? It would pave the way to consciousness leaving the brain and going to the universe. I think that it doesn't prove it, you're right, but I think it's feasible, it's possible that consciousness exists in Planck scale geometry in the universe at large and it's possible that it remains entangled as a quantum soul. I don't think we can rule it out until we understand consciousness in the brain. I want to understand that it is obviously a fabulous, I use that in the technical sense of the word, not the positive sense of the word, a fabulous kind of analysis, but it is one and it is worth analyzing. So you're saying that all of the memory, the personality that we have that is encoded at the Planck scale within... It's encoded in the microtubules but correlates with Planck scale geometry, really the same thing. Okay, and all of that together, it has to be the totality, not each individual, all of it together can exist as a totality and waft off in some non-local sense and be all over the universe and inhabit everything? Spatial separation in the first place may be an illusion, but yes, that's what I'm saying, that it can dissipate to the universe at large but remain entangled so it doesn't dissipate. And it can stay together who knows how long, maybe if the patient is resuscitated, go back and they say, hey, I was floating above my body or I had a near-death experience. If they die, well, maybe it can go into another zygote or embryo, microtubule somewhere else or maybe exist indefinitely. I'm not arguing that's the case, I don't have evidence. How would the different expressions of the soul or the spirit that different religions have, how could that be encoded within your physicalist mechanism? You know, Roger came up with these ideas and he avoids the issue of spirituality or religion. Maybe I'm less wise than I talk about it, but when you think about it, he has consciousness built into the fundamental level of the universe, can be non-local. He also has platonic values guiding our conscious choices and perceptions, which to me, when I read his book, The Emperor's New Mind, it sounded like divine guidance or following the way of the Tao or something like that. And so there's goodness and perhaps evil built into the universe. So I think you get a lot of aspects of spirituality in terms of non-locality, the possibility of the existence of consciousness after death, after bodily death, and influenced by platonic values embedded in the universe. To me, that's a religion right there. So how would this articulate with given religions in the world, whether it's Eastern religions or Western religions that have a god or have a cosmic consciousness? How would one articulate with the other? From my perspective, it's most compatible with Eastern beliefs. Without a particular god who looks like us, something like that. But on the other hand, it could relate to that too, just by saying that that's a coalescence of beliefs or something like that. So to me, it fits with any religion. I'm non-denominational. But you do feel that the physicalist mechanisms that you have could give legitimate underpinnings to some of the more religious views that most scientists think are pre-scientific. Yes, I think pretty much all of them, actually.