Consciousness Existed Before Life | Stuart Hameroff

So let's, let's go to the question of when did consciousness appear on earth? The earth formed four and a half billion years ago. Life appeared about three and a half billion years ago. So when did the being occur? So microtubules are important in the brain. I don't have time to go into this except to say that Alzheimer's disease is, is, is caused or is related to microtubules disintegrating and the tau protein, which, which holds them together, falling off and this leads to neurofibrillary tangles. The microtubules disassemble, you lose neurons, you lose synapses, your brain shrinks, you lose memory, you lose cognition and you're demented. And all the money and the, and the, and the research in this field has been going toward the amyloid plaques outside the neurons, which have very little correlation with the, with the loss of cognition. What we should be doing is, is resonating the microtubules and treating the microtubules to stabilize them. Just a recent study about using taxol, which stabilizes microtubules showing benefit. And I think we can use ultrasound to resonate microtubules to get it, get it together again. So beginning in the eighties, I was thinking that, that microtubules are processing information like I showed here. And this gives you a lot more information, a lot more computation, but where's consciousness? And somebody asked me this about 1991. They said, okay, wise guy, let's say you're right. There's all this information processing. How's that going to explain the color purple, the feeling of love, the feeling of the taste of garlic or hot coffee or whatever. And I didn't have an answer. I was, this was the hard problem, which hadn't been invented yet, but it was being thrown in my face before that. And I took a, I took a long look in the mirror and realized I had no idea, but fortunately the same person whom I don't remember, unfortunately, suggested I read a book called The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose because it had a mechanism for consciousness. So I read this book in about 1991 and I was blown away by it. The first part of it was about Gödel's theorem arguing for non-computability and consciousness. And the second part was about a quantum mechanism, a collapse of the wave function that was a solution to the measurement problem that would also give consciousness. So this was, this was a triple play by Roger. He solved the measurement problem and he explained consciousness and everything else with one simple idea. Well, it's not that simple, but it, well, it's simple compared to a lot of things. So I decided I had to learn a little bit about quantum mechanics. It's very difficult. As Feynman said, anybody who claims to understand quantum mechanics is either lying or crazy. But here's my kind of simplistic view using the yin yang where we have two worlds, the classical world of localized particles where everything is predictable. We're kind of used to that. But at small scales, things can be in superposition of multiple possible states, non-local connected over a space and time, wave-like and small, and consciousness is on the edge between the two. It's on the boundary. It's a collapse of the wave function, depending on which way you go. And I actually got this idea from somebody told me a line in the Kabbalah, which said that described two worlds and the consciousness danced on the edge between the two worlds. So I think that's more or less related, could be related to the quantum in the classical world. Okay, let's deal with one issue, superposition. A particle can exist as a wave of possibilities as you see in the background of this cesium atom is a wave, it's in multiple places. And here's a cesium atom in one place, and it can be seen as a particle. So either as a wave or a particle, but the very act of measurement or of conscious observation seems to cause the wave function to collapse. So it's like this, and then you look at it or you measure it, and it goes to that. And this is called collapse of the wave function. And this is called the measurement problem of why this happens. And we still don't have the answer. First of all, how do we have superposition? How can things be in multiple states or places at the same time? It's pretty weird when you think about it. And Roger answered that by bringing in Einstein's general relativity, which equated mass, like the sun and planets, to curvature in the space-time metric, in space-time geometry. And then Eddington showed that the sun bent starlight from distant stars around the sun, and this proved Einstein's theory of general relativity. So Roger applied this to very tiny things. So like quantum particles, like a proton or an electron or an atom. So it has its own curvature. And if it's here, the curvature's there. If you move it over there, it goes there. And so oscillating back and forth, the curvature switches back and forth. Superposition is then separated curvatures. So the space-time begins to separate. But we only see one particle, or one particle. So the interpretations include consciousness causing quantum state reduction, conscious observation. This goes back to the quantum pioneers, von Neumann, Wigner, more recently Stapp, David Chalmers, Kelvin McQueen, sometimes known as the Copenhagen interpretation, where conscious observation, so here's the being in a person's brain, looking at the superposition. This one stops, and this one continues. So the wave function is collapsed, and this particle is selected by the conscious observation. I don't believe that. This is, for one thing, dualist. It puts consciousness outside science, and that doesn't really help us understand consciousness at all. Now, some people say there's no collapse, and the separations continue, and you get multiple worlds. So you've probably heard of the many-worlds interpretation, where every superposition forms its own universe, and here's the beginning of that with the separation in space-time geometry. Now, Roger said that the separations are unstable, and after a time, t, given by the uncertainty principle, h-bar over e-sub-g, where h-bar is the Planck-Dirac constant, e-sub-g is the gravitational energy of pulling a particle apart from itself, so that rather than consciousness causing collapse, it would occur spontaneously and give consciousness. So he turned that, he turned it around. He said you don't need consciousness coming in from the outside to cause collapse. The separation will reach a threshold, collapse on its own, and give rise to consciousness. So the point is that being would come right from the fundamental level of the universe. It's a fundamental process. Now this would be happening everywhere in the environment, in the air around us, in the stage, in everything, but random. So they would be proto-conscious, because they would have no memory, no context, they wouldn't be related to anything else, but they would be there, and they would be there since the early universe, proto-conscious moments. And this gives rise to this hierarchy, which I showed you before, except now instead of just going to biology, we're going to go all the way to the Planck scale, maybe with these triplets of triplets. So here's Roger's space-time curvature at the fine scale. So there's evidence for quantum states in microtubules. For example, recently there's a study showing super-radiance, which is a quantum optical state where you get a photon state that persists for a long time. And this is the kind of thing that we think is necessary for consciousness, and we want to see what happens with anesthesia when we expose it. And the quantum emitter, the quantum needle is enhanced with increasing system size. So if you have more and more quantum states, you have more super-radiance, and therefore maybe more consciousness. Here's another study that we did as part of the Templeton project, where we hit a microtubule with UV light, it spreads and persists for a while, and then if you add anesthesia, it goes away, it's inhibited. And we also show that microtubules are highly efficient light harvesters, and this process is inhibited by anesthesia, so it might have something to do with consciousness. So let's go to the question of when did consciousness appear on Earth? Now we could take it to the universe, but we'll just talk about Earth. So the Earth formed four and a half billion years ago, life appeared about three and a half billion years ago, and here we are today, roughly speaking. So when did the being occur? Some people think fairly recently, like with tools and language, in the last couple hundred thousand years, Julian Jaynes for example. So this would be the most recent, I don't think that's true. It could have happened at the Cambrian Evolutionary Explosion, a brief 10 million years, about 540 million years ago, during which all the animal phyla appeared on Earth. And here we have some examples of fossils that were found in the Cambrian Shale up in Canada, and some of these critters are still around, or seem to be still around in similar form. For example, actinospherium that I learned about because anesthesia causes these axonemes to depolymerize, and the axonemes are shown here, they're double helical arrays of microtubules in cross section. So these things coming out, if you cut across them, you'd see all these microtubules in this double spiral. And the suctorian, that other creature, has a net, it actually suctions, by these microtubules cooperating and pulling apart. And here's the basic microtubule. So microtubules are prevalent in the Cambrian Evolutionary Explosion, which did accelerate evolution. And then there's the origin of the eukaryotic cell, the animal cell, which is thought to be when spirochetes invaded prokaryotes and gave rise to bing. Some people think that. And the spirochetes have flagella, which have a lot of microtubules. So we're seeing microtubules in several places in the course of evolution. And if we go back one step further to the origin of life, here we are, first life, bing. So how did that happen? How could that have happened? Well, how did it happen? Life on Earth apparently began in a primordial soup proposed in the 20s by Operin and Haldane, a simmering oily mix from which biomolecules emerged three to four billion years ago. And this was simulated in the 50s by Miller and Urey at University of Oregon. In the States, they simulated a primordial soup. They had all the nutrients, the oil, the water, sparks for lightning and so forth. And they let this run for a while, and they looked and they found amphipathic molecules, which have organic rings like I showed you before, and these polar tails. So they found this in their simulation of the primordial soup. So if we go back to the primordial soup, maybe something like this happened, that kind of like a protein forming, these aromatic rings coalesced, and they reached threshold for Roger's objective reduction at a moment of consciousness, a proto-consciousness, bing, in the primordial soup. Would have been more complex than this, but not that much. And so that would have been the first biological conscious moment. And these would be random, initially at least, but some would be positive. Some would feel good, bing. And maybe we can use a happy face there to illustrate that this could be a pleasurable feeling. And with pleasure as a feedback fitness function orienting pi resonance groups, did life then evolve to orchestrate and optimize OR-mediated pleasure? I call this the quantum pleasure principle in a paper I wrote in 2017. It's a takeoff on Freud's beyond the pleasure principle. But the point is that I think primitive pleasure or something like that in the primordial soup, some feeling, caused these organisms to optimize their arrangement so that they could access and optimize pleasure. And they could replicate and do stuff that would optimize pleasure. And that, I'm arguing, it was the trigger for life to begin. Now these aromatic rings have two basically, two stable arrangements, the T-shape and the parallel displaced. And it could be that one of them is pleasure and one of them is displeasure, something like that. It could be much more complicated or simpler. And we could have something like a qubit, a quantum bit with an unstable superposition state that could collapse to either being a pouty face or a happy face, depending on whatever. And that would give rise to feelings. And if that's the case for that simple system, if we then go to a protein like tubulin that has 86 of these aromatic rings interacting with the other 85, we get a whole bunch of possible qualia. Qualia are the fundamental units of feeling of consciousness. And I'm using emojis here as kind of a joke, but the amount of possible permutations is enormous. So Darwin is a pillar of science, but the notion that life evolved behavior to promote gene survival is an assumption. It doesn't make sense. Behavior is driven by reward, pleasure, avoiding pain. In any laboratory animal running a maze, it's always reward or aversion. So they're responding to feelings. We live our lives, I think, to optimize pleasure in various ways. It could be altruistic, could be spiritual. You know, it feels better to give than to receive. So it's not necessarily hedonistic, but it's just a pleasure in a larger sense or some other description. There were no genes in the primordial soup, and evolutionary theory ignores consciousness and feelings, probably because they didn't have a mechanism. Darwin talked a lot about consciousness and feelings, just didn't implement them in evolution. But I think if he had a mechanism, he might have. I like to think so. So did feelings spark life and drive evolution? Okay, that might have happened in the primordial soup on Earth. Could this have happened anywhere else? Well, a lot of people think that life and consciousness came from space, because everything eventually came from space, including the Earth and, you know, from explosions. With a free trial, you can enjoy the full talk and thousands more. Thank you for being part of the conversation.